Instead, “with hours to spare” before his new single dropped (and less than two weeks after the exclusive Lyndsanity interview below, during which he spoke at length about the significance of “Pow!” and his connection to the formative grime/garage music of his youth), MNEK sprang in into action and “decided to swap out the audio, granting this an entirely original work.” However, the bold spirit and intent of “Reverse!!” remain intact.

The cheeky cover art for MNEK’s grime-influenced comeback single, “Reverse” (photo courtesy of Chaos Label)

British-Nigerian pop wunderkind MNEK (real name: Uzoechi Osisioma Emenike) is sitting backstage at West Hollywood’s 2026 Outloud Pride festival, getting ready to play his first U.S. concert since 2019. It has been even longer since the singer/rapper/songwriter/superproducer released his acclaimed debut album, Language (a top 10 album pick for in 2018), but he most certainly hasn’t been idle during that time.

On the contrary, MNEK’s career has exploded exponentially since then, as he’s worked behind the scenes with longtime collaborator Zara Larsson (co-writing every song on her recent breakthrough album Midnight Sun, and co-producing seven of its 10 tracks), FLO, Måneskin, Adam Lambert, Jade, Jax Jones, Craig David, Galantis and David Guetta, and many other pop, EDM, and R&B luminaries. He’s won multiple ASCAP Awards and garnered Grammy, BRIT, and BET nominations along the way, and he even got to guest-judge the greatest musical challenge in RuPaul’s Drag Race herstory, the U.K. series’ RuRuvision Song Contest, which would be a major career highlight for just about anyone.

But now that MNEK is finally putting himself back out there, centerstage, and gearing up to release his sophomore album, Bulldozer!!, on Sept. 18, he is admittedly feeling the pressure.

“This has been something that I’ve not done for a while,” he tells Lyndsanity, sitting at a West Hollywood Park picnic table with his highlighter-yellow buzzcut glowing in the afternoon sunlight. “This year in particular has been a lot of me being outside again. I feel like I’ve been a bit hiding and not really wanting to showcase myself, just out of fear of, I don’t know, not doing well or not being accepted. I think a lot of this album is about me breaking through that wall that I built up of fear and lack of confidence. If I fail, I fail, you know what I mean? But at the same time, I have to give it a shot.”

It’s downright shocking that an artist with such an impressive, multi-page CV would suffer from any sort of impostor syndrome or self-doubt. Years before MNEK broke out with Language at age 23, he’d already proven himself as an in-demand producer and songwriter — after being discovered via Myspace, landing his first publishing deal when he was just 14 years old, and collaborating with the likes of Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Dua Lipa, Diplo, and Julia Michaels. He even co-wrote “Hold Up” off Beyoncé’s landmark Lemonade album. His reputation is so solid by now that midway through his Lyndsanity interview, one of Outloud’s other Saturday performers, Cain Culto, excitedly approaches our table to tell him, “I love you! You’re an inspiration. I write too, and I just love your writing.”

“I feel the love in a way that I wasn’t able to receive in my twenties,” MNEK says with a grin, as Culto walks away and the interview continues. “I feel like I can receive the positive love that people give me, and see that they respect what I do, and that we can win together.” And that is what really matters to MNEK when it comes to his solo career, rather than trying to the compete with the astoronomical streaming and chart numbers of the A-listers he has worked with.

“The way I measure the success of my music has to be different. I’ve been blessed to see success in streams and global this and global that, and that’s one way of measuring success. But if I use that same metric with my own stuff, I will always be disappointed,” he reasons. “So, I have to measure my success in, OK, did people listen to it? Did people come to my show? Did people come up to me and say, ‘Thank you so much for making this album, and thank you for existing, and thank you for doing what you do’?”

When MNEK he first started putting out his own music, he “made a very conscious decision to be out,” and back in 2018 he caused a bit of a stir when he cast a male love interest in his sexy music video for “Tongue.” But the video’s largely positive response confirmed that he was on the right path. “That was the first time, I guess, that I saw lots of messages from Black gay kids saying, ‘Thank you for doing that,’ and ‘It’s helped me talk to my parents or talk to my friends about it,’ or ‘It’s been cool to see someone that I can relate to on that thing.’ And I think that I always wanted that,” he recalls. And now that he’s about to release his new single, “Reverse!!,” MNEK is pushing things even further.

“Reverse!!,” out June 19, is “a very British record” and MNEK’s “love letter” to U.K. dance music, and it samples 2004’s “Pow! (Forward)” by British MC Lethal Bizzle, “one of them records that people hold near and dear to their hearts as this pillar of grime.” While the grime and U.K. garage scenes have at times been known for deep-rooted homophobia and have “definitely had some challenging language and ideologies,” with “Reverse!!” and his other upcoming tracks, MNEK is flipping that script.

Some of the single’s bold lyrics include: “I could turn a bad boy to a bad bitch in seconds/I can make a thug really twerk/I can make a thug really switch… I can turn his duffel to a purse/He ain’t never been about the booty/But the booty go berserk.” And when MNEK performs “Reverse!!” on Outloud’s main-stage, the wall-sized video screens behind him depict tough guys posing stoically in tracksuits, parkas, and do-rags — black-and-white footage that bursts into rainbow-bright color when the chorus kicks in and the men begin twerking and gyrating all over each other.

“‘Reverse!!’ and a few other songs on Bulldozer!! touch on more grime and garage and that kind of world, and I think it’s a cool juxtaposition,” MNEK says. “You think of grime and garage as being very hyper-masc and very bro, so I wanted to add a bit of flair to it. I’m happy I just get to do my thing on it and bring people into this conversation on this album. This is a space that one would assume that I don’t belong in or I don’t exist in, but I grew up in Southeast London. I’m British-Nigerian. I grew up with grime and garage music all around me. It’s not something that I am a guest of. I grew up with Channel AKA/Channel U [a now-defunct British satellite TV channel that focused on the grime scene], and that was our community. That was us discovering underground music before there was peer-to-peer sharing and internet and pirate radio and all that stuff. So, I feel proud to get to share it with the world in this way.” (Side note: MNEK isn’t worried about his new sound being “too British,” because “we’re in a world now where music is global, so there’ll be someone who is the most Yankety Yank ever who’ll listen to it and be like, ‘Oh, this is my jam!’”)

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MNEK also grew up loving American ‘80s/‘90s R&B — like the Jam & Lewis, Rodney Jerkins, and Timbaland catalogs, and especially Mariah Carey, who still tops his wishlist of dream collaborators — and he’s grateful that his family fostered his creativity from an early age. “They’ve been a lot more supportive than I give them credit for. Music is all I ever wanted to do. It’s all I ever felt very good or skilled at. And they saw that it was something that whatever it is, if I’m able to apply myself and really give it my best, then that can’t be a bad thing,” he says. “I mean, I often make a joke about my parents, because I come from a Nigerian background and there’s a stereotype in the Nigerian community that all of us are gonna be doctors and lawyers and that’s just how it is. But upon reflection, my parents were always really supportive of me doing music. … My parents did a good job. They wanted me to win. They let me do all these things. If some old guy came to the house asking, ‘I want your kid to sign a contract,’ they were so open to it. I credit them loads.”

MNEK’s family has also been supportive of him living as an openly gay man, although he reveals that when he came out at age 19, the experience “had its challenges. … My mom has reacted well. My dad has reacted well. The thing is that it’s an ongoing thing. … There’s so many facets to this. It’s one thing coming out to [my father] one-to-one in our house, but then it’s different when I’m being open and showcasing parts of myself to the public. And so, it’s him dealing with that. It’s him reading a newspaper and me being like, ‘I want to be a Black gay role model.’ He wasn’t ready [years ago]. This is stuff that I’m aware he has to kind of grapple with, but at the same time, he is aware that I have to do this just for myself and that it’s important. He doesn’t disregard it.”

MNEK says he’s become “definitely more at peace” over the years with being a Black gay role model in the music space, although he admits he has mixed feelings about that, because his success is, sadly, still the exception to the rule. (One of the ways he has helped to expand opportunities for young, rising queer artists is his Proud Sound songwriting camp, in association with Warner Chappell and Pride in Music.)

“The idea that I’ve had impact and that I’m a rare case in a lot of ways, me being a Black, queer music person… if you ask a bunch of people to name a Black, gay, U.K. singer/songwriter/producer, I think a lot of people would pick me in some way. And that’s cool, but it’s also like not, in that I don’t think it should be that way,” MNEK muses. “I think there should be more of us who are at a certain level of success that we can all share. A lot of my peers are white, and I can be friends with everyone of course, but it’s always nice to see other people from disenfranchised groups be acknowledged and understood and see that level of success.

“I think there’s a level of responsibility that I have in a lot of ways, but also, I still want to have a good time,” he continues. “I still want to enjoy it and figure it out. I think that when I released Language, it was such a long time ago. And since then, Lil Nas X has come out and he did his thing, and there’s been a bunch of pieces of multimedia that have pushed the conversation along. This [new music] is me adding my part, at least from where I’m at right now in my life. And hopefully it does add to the conversation.”

Brooke Eden performs on the Summertramp stage at Outloud 2025. (photo: Steven James)

Brooke Eden is sitting backstage at the 2025 Outloud Pride festival, looking like a rhinestone cowgirl in her turquoise chaps and bedazzled 10-gallon hat. The rising queer country star has just triumphed on the festival’s dance-centric Summertramp stage, and she’s admittedly relieved that her “Rainbow Rodeo” got the West Hollywood club crowd line-dancing in earnest.

“I had no idea what to expect. I looked at the lineup and it was literally all DJs and house music, and then me dead-set in the middle of that,” she chuckles. “I was like, ‘Is this going to work? Is this going to be OK?’ And in the beginning, I’m not going to lie, people were kind of like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ But then I feel by song two they were like, ohhhh. And by song three, they were literally putting their hands up in the air and lassoing. And I was like, ‘OK, cool. We’re at a good spot here.’”

There was a time, not long ago, when Eden never imagined pulling off a performance like this. She’d been warned by people in the Nashville that she’d be “Chely Wrighted” if she came out, and was even told, “You can either be in love or you can be a country singer — but you can’t be both.” So, she kept her relationship with her now-wife, radio promoter Hilary Hoover, secret for five years out of fear. But once Eden did come out, in 2021, both her professional and personal lives blossomed, and she realized she could in fact have it all. She soon dueted with Trisha Yearwood on “‘She’s in Love With the Girl” at the Grand Ole Opry; was named one of CMT’s Next Women of Country; was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award; and married Hoover in a ceremony officiated by Yearwood while Yearwood’s husband, Garth Brooks, serenaded the two brides as they walked down the aisle. This past November, Eden and Hoover welcomed their first child, son Beckham, through IVF, and he was at Outloud this year, cheering his mommy on.

“I think I was so nervous when I came out because I was like, ‘Will my country roots and my queerness ever be able to come together?’ And now it has come together in such a beautiful way — and in a way I never expected,” Eden marvels.

Brooke Eden wins over the Sunday afternoon crowd at Outloud 2025. (photo: Steven James)

The Summertramp stage performance was a full-circle moment, because Eden’s new singles, “Giddy Up!” and “Rainbow Rodeo,” are nods to not only her country roots but to her sexual awakening. Her parents actually met in a line-dancing bar (“Like an Urban Cowboy situation,” she laughs), and she started singing at age 5 with her drummer dad’s local country band at a line-dancing saloon in West Palm Beach called Renegades. When she grew up, Eden got a job bartending at Renegades, and she recalls, “It was during that time in my line-dancing community that I found my queerness… realizing, ‘Oh, I don’t want to be with a guy right now. I want to be with a girl right now!’ I think I knew that very young — I think I was 4 when I realized my queerness — but then I went to a Christian school, and it was very much ingrained in me that girls are with guys. But my line-dancing community never blinked twice when I started dating a girl. And then I found my queer community and I was like, ‘Wow, this kind of reminds me of my line-dancing community.’ Just that just unconditional love. There’s this deep-rooted connection between those two communities, and it’s such a cool kind of combo.”

Eden says her family actually “was not accepting in the beginning” when she came out — “I come from a Christian Baptist background, and it was very, very difficult, the moment that they saw Hilary and me together” — and she still struggles with the fact that many of her relatives are “Trumpers,” admitting, “It’s been really difficult for me.” But over time, they’ve come around, and they’re of course thrilled to be “grandparents and aunts and uncles and nanas and papas” to Beckham. “They saw me really come into my own and come into myself, and they were like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is amazing.’ And it really changed. It was really, really cool to watch my family’s process, because I’d been terrified to tell them.”

Eden has experienced a similar journey of unanticipated acceptance in her country career. “After I came out, so many people in my country-artist community came up to me and congratulated me, people I would not expect,” she says. “Like, Brittany Aldean. I know she has said things about the trans community that I am so not OK with, but when it came to me, because we know each other, she came up to me and my wife when we got engaged and was like, ‘I am so happy that my kids could grow up in a world where love is love.’ This was before she spoke out [against] trans people. And so, I was so confused when that happened, because we’d had personal conversations where that was not the conversation.

“And that’s why I think it’s so important to be telling our stories, because I think that for such a long time, queer people were silenced and we weren’t allowed to tell our stories,” Eden continues. “People don’t even think they know queer people, because they’re closeted. The moment that people hear the story behind the person and go, ‘Actually, I knew you five years ago when you were in the closet, and you are so much more of yourself now’ — well, I love that.”

Eden hasn’t had a chance to ask Brittany, wife of county star Jason Aldean, about the controversial anti-trans comments Brittany made in 2022. Brittany’s transphobic “joke” sparked a social media war between Brittany and another Outloud 2025 performer, Maren Morris, who later walked away from Nashville in her symbolically bridge-burning video for “The Tree.” But the optimistic Eden would rather build bridges than burn them, and she hopes to one day have the opportunity to speak freely and candidly with Brittany. “I haven’t felt like there’s been the right time; Jason and I are signed to the same record label, so we are at a lot of events together, but I just don’t feel like that’s the time to bring up such a serious and intricate topic. But I would love to have a conversation with her. I feel like there’s so many things that are left unsaid, and it’s very hard for me to understand how someone can feel that negatively about people that I love so much,” says Eden.

In general, Eden feels like having tough conversations — be it with members of the country community, the LGBTQ+ community, or her own family — is crucial. And she also hopes to spark such conversations just by living her truth. “I feel like I do want to be a bridge. I do want to be a place where people can come together and have real conversations. And those are the conversations that will move things forward; when it’s us yelling at each other and just screaming at each other, no one’s hearing anything,” she muses. “For me, it is of the utmost importance to not be extreme. I feel like I kind of live in this middle ground. I’ve toured with and am on the same record label as a lot of very big traditional country artists, and I feel like there has to be a bridge and communication between the two sides. The biggest problem that I have with politics right now is the extremism. It’s all this bullshit that’s being said from obviously the ‘Orange Man’ side, and there is some from the other side too. But there is a beautiful space in the middle, where we all need to have this communication.”

Now that Eden and Hoover have started their own family, it’s more important to her than ever to live a life that will make her son proud and help create a safe future for him. She describes becoming a parent — which involved both her and Hoover doing egg retrievals, signing up with three different sperm banks, and doing so much research that they “actually know more about the donor’s background than I know about [Eden’s] family tree” — as “the wildest thing ever” and a “really incredible process that makes me feels like, ‘OK, the universe is working with us.’” But Eden also confesses that it was a “really, really scary time to be having babies in Tennessee,” where she and Hoover currently reside, because of strict anti-abortion laws that would have made it impossible for Hoover, who carried Beckman to term, to undergo a medically necessary abortion if something had gone wrong with the pregnancy. Eden also recognizes the hypocrisy that so many supposedly “pro-life,” anti-abortion conservatives who want to force unwilling women to become mothers are also against IVF, a process that helps women who, on the contrary, are desperate to have children. “The politicians need to choose a side: Do we want babies, or do we not want babies? Choose a side,” she grumbles.

All of these issues have especially been weighing on Eden’s mind since Beckham was born just three days before the 2024 presidential election. “I was like, ‘We’re going to have a baby boy, and we’re going to have our first female president!’ I just knew it was going to happen,” she sighs. “I think that I was a little biased, because I got invited by Kamala Harris two years ago to the Pride celebration at her house, and she spoke just so freely about Pride. She was the first person to marry a gay couple when California legalized gay marriage. She such an ally, and she just spoke so easily about Pride and why it’s important and how Pride is actually patriotism, because Pride is saying, ‘We are equal to you.’ And that is patriotism. That is what this country was founded on. I listened to her speak for 25 minutes and I had tears rolling down my face the entire time, because it was just so genuine and authentic. Kamala really did have this joyfulness about her. And then there’s the other side, which is not that. So, I was like, of course any sane person is [going to vote for Harris]. And I thought [Beckham] was going to be born into this new era.”

Unfortunately, that did not happen, but Eden hasn’t given up hope. “My biggest accomplishment will be raising a baby who loves all people and grow him into a man who is an ally and stands up for the right things and is on the right side of history. Because I think especially at this moment in time, we need incredible men,” she declares. “This baby is being born into a world where he has ‘guncles,’ gay aunts, straight uncles, straight aunts, and two moms. And I feel like it’s just such a beautiful responsibility to get to raise a little baby boy in this world right now.”

And as an artist, Eden will continue to honor her responsibly to her chosen family as well. “I will always fight for my community,” she says. “I’ll always fight against hate. I’ll always fight for love. That is just where my heart is and where I will always be. I will never be afraid to talk about where I am in life. And I always want to be the bridge that puts people together, instead of setting that bridge on fire.”