As a teenager in Lagos, Tems was told her voice was too low. She has said she felt it was seen as “manly” and spent years trying to sing in falsetto instead. Today that low, smoky voice is the first thing anyone says about her, and it has taken her to two Grammys, an Oscar nomination and the top of the Billboard Hot 100.
Born Temilade Openiyi on 11 June 1995, she did not look like a future global star. She studied economics in South Africa, worked in digital marketing, and quit that job in 2018 to teach herself music production from YouTube tutorials. Within five years she had a feature on a Wizkid song that reached the Hot 100, a number one with Future and Drake, and a place on Rihanna’s Oscar-nominated “Lift Me Up”.
Why she matters: Tems is one of the few Nigerian artists whose international career was built from the outside in. She arrived through collaborations and songwriting before her own album, then proved she could carry a record alone. This profile follows that path, uses her own words from recent interviews, and treats her net worth as an unverified estimate.
Key facts
Full name
Temilade Openiyi
Stage name
Tems
Date of birth
11 June 1995
Age (2026)
31
Birthplace
Lagos, Nigeria
Education
Dowen College; economics degree, Monash South Africa
Occupation
Singer, songwriter, producer
Debut album
Born in the Wild (7 June 2024)
Grammys
Best Melodic Rap Performance (2023, “Wait for U”); Best African Music Performance (2025, “Love Me JeJe”)
Labels
Since ’93, RCA Records, Leading Vibe
A voice she was told to hide
Tems was born in Lagos. Her name means “the crown is mine” in Yoruba. According to W Magazine, her father is British-Nigerian and her mother Nigerian, and the family lived in the UK for a few years before her parents separated and she returned to Nigeria with her mother, at about the age of five.
She describes herself as a quiet child for whom music was comfort. Her mother played Christian music at home, and at 11 she joined her school choir, where a music teacher coached her and taught her piano. In high school she was bullied because of her voice.
For years she tried to sing higher. A music teacher she cherished encouraged her to embrace her natural tone. “I started to want that deepness,” she told W Magazine. “I wanted to lean into my weirdness.” Wikipedia also records that at 15 she stopped listening to other artists so she could find her own style, because she “wanted to learn how to attack a song from what I was feeling, not what Beyoncé would do or anyone else.”
From a marketing job to “Mr Rebel”
Tems went on to study economics at Monash South Africa. In college she could not find Nigerian producers who understood her introspective, melancholy sound, so she learned recording and production from internet tutorials and Logic software in her dorm room, W Magazine reported.
In 2018 she quit a digital marketing job to focus on music. Her first single, the self-produced “Mr Rebel”, came out on 18 July 2018, and it gained a loyal following that led to her first management contract. “Try Me” followed on 7 August 2019. She has described the jump from a 9-to-5 job to trying to sing when nobody believes in you as one of the hard parts of the story.
Her debut EP, For Broken Ears, arrived on 25 September 2020. One of its songs, “Damages”, reached number one on the Nigerian Apple Music chart.
“Essence” and the Hot 100
On 30 October 2020 Wizkid released “Essence” from Made in Lagos, with Tems on the hook. It put her on the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time. A remix with Justin Bieber on 13 August 2021 pushed the song to number nine, and the track earned a Grammy nomination for Best Global Music Performance. W Magazine noted that it also landed on Barack Obama’s 2020 playlist.
In September 2021 she featured on Drake’s “Fountains”, signed to RCA and released her EP If Orange Was a Place on 15 September.
2022: the year it all happened
On 29 April 2022, “Wait for U”, with Future and Drake, debuted at number one on the Hot 100. The song samples Tems’s own “Higher” from For Broken Ears. Wikipedia describes her as the first African female artist to top the chart.
The year kept going. She featured on Beyoncé’s Renaissance track “Move” in July, and her own “Free Mind” entered the Hot 100 the same month. In October she co-wrote Rihanna’s “Lift Me Up” for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. At the Grammys in February 2023, “Wait for U” won Best Melodic Rap Performance, which Wikipedia records as the first Grammy for a Nigerian woman.
Born in the Wild and a second Grammy
Her debut album, Born in the Wild, came out on 7 June 2024 on RCA and Since ’93. It reached number 24 on the UK albums chart and number 56 on the Billboard 200. Asked by Grammy.com what the title meant, she said the “wilderness” was mostly mental and spiritual and not simply where she was born. “I was born in a survival state and raised to survive,” she said.
At the February 2025 Grammys, “Love Me JeJe” won Best African Music Performance, and the album was nominated for Best Global Music Album, with “Burning” nominated for Best R&B Song. She was reported as the first Nigerian artist to win more than one Grammy. In November 2025 she released a surprise EP, Love Is a Kingdom.
On her own terms
Tems has said she is “someone who doesn’t like attention”, and that she has had to accept being seen. Her message to other African women, as she told W Magazine, is “Let us not be chasing foreign things; let us be something to be chased.” Of her artistic independence she told Grammy.com, “Nobody outside of you can define you.”
She also invests outside music. In February 2025 she joined the ownership group of the Major League Soccer club San Diego FC, described in the press as the first African woman with part ownership of an MLS team.
Selected works
2018
“Mr Rebel”, debut single
2020
For Broken Ears (EP) and “Essence” with Wizkid
2021
If Orange Was a Place (EP); “Fountains” with Drake
2022
“Wait for U” with Future and Drake; “Free Mind”; co-writer of “Lift Me Up”
2024
Born in the Wild (debut album); “Love Me JeJe”
2025
Love Is a Kingdom (EP)
Awards and honours
2023 Grammy Award: Best Melodic Rap Performance, “Wait for U”
2025 Grammy Award: Best African Music Performance, “Love Me JeJe”
2023: nominated for the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Original Song, “Lift Me Up”
2022 Soul Train Music Award: Best New Artist
2023: TIME100 Next
Net worth
No verified net worth for Tems has been published. Online estimates vary and rarely cite a source. Her income comes from recording, songwriting royalties, touring and brand work, and Wikipedia reports more than 25 million certified units worldwide as of 2025.
Questions readers ask
How many Grammys has Tems won? Two. She won Best Melodic Rap Performance in 2023 for “Wait for U” and Best African Music Performance in 2025 for “Love Me JeJe”. She has also been nominated for others.
What is Tems’s real name? Temilade Openiyi. Her first name is said to mean “the crown is mine” in Yoruba.
Did Tems write “Lift Me Up”? She co-wrote it with Rihanna, Ryan Coogler and Ludwig Goransson for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song.
When did Tems release her debut album? Born in the Wild came out on 7 June 2024. It reached number 24 in the UK and number 56 on the Billboard 200.
What did Tems do before music? She worked in digital marketing and quit in 2018 to pursue music. She had studied economics at Monash South Africa.
Conclusion
The thing that makes Tems unusual is how late she changed her approach. For years she tried to sing in a register that was not hers. Once she stopped, the same voice that classmates mocked became the sound that ran through “Essence”, “Wait for U” and “Free Mind”.
Her route also shows what collaboration can do for an artist outside the mainstream. She reached a global audience through Wizkid, Drake, Future, Beyoncé and Rihanna before releasing a debut album, and then showed with Born in the Wild that she could hold an audience alone. The second Grammy in 2025, for a song of her own, closed that argument.
What is harder to measure is how much of it she has chosen. She has said she does not like attention, yet she now works at a scale where attention is part of the job. How she balances the two will be the main thing to watch.
References
Wikipedia, entry on Tems, with its cited press coverage
W Magazine, profile by Cassidy George (7 June 2024)
GRAMMY.com, interview by Princess Gabbara (7 June 2024)
Billboard and Official Charts Company, chart records for “Essence”, “Wait for U” and Born in the Wild
Grammy Awards and Academy Awards nomination records
The Guardian Nigeria, coverage of the 2025 Grammys
Max Adeyemi is a Lagos-based writer covering Nigerian and African entertainment, sport, business, and culture. He has spent over a decade tracking the careers, controversies, and quiet achievements of the people who move the culture. He writes all profiles on Nolly.
