Daramola’s name sits twice in the Latin Recording Academy’s 2026 Record of the Year entry for Elena Rose’s “Alma”: once as a record producer and again as a recording engineer. The Nigerian musician shares both credits with Héctor Mazzarri. That is the clearest starting point for understanding his work across African and Latin music. His contribution is recorded in the making of the master, not merely in a description of its sound.
The nomination will be decided at the Latin Grammy Awards on November 12. A nomination does not make him a winner, and the Academy’s published list does not identify which producer made each individual sound. It does establish his roles on a recording competing in the general field, where production and engineering are part of the credited work.
How a producer travels with the credit
“Alma” is an Elena Rose recording from Bendito Verano. The Academy’s final nominees document identifies Rose as artist, Daramola and Mazzarri as producers and recording engineers, and Leandro “Dro” Hidalgo as mixer and mastering engineer. The separate jobs matter. A producer shapes the recording; an engineer captures and processes it; mixing and mastering are separately credited stages. The document gives readers a firmer account of participation than a loose claim that Daramola “worked on” a nominated song.
The NATIVE’s November 8 interview with Daramola discusses his production across Nigerian and Latin music. It frames the “Alma” nomination around a career that has moved through different scenes. Roland’s October listening guide likewise identifies his work with Elena Rose and other Latin artists, while TIDAL’s account of Afrobeats in Spanish places him among producers connecting African and Latin traditions. Those reports agree on the cross-border scope, though each interview offers a different view of how he approaches the music.
This distinction has a business consequence for emerging producers. Recognition can attach to the artist name in a headline, while the production and engineering roles are preserved in release metadata and award documents. Those credits do not, by themselves, reveal ownership or payment terms. Our guide to producer credits and royalties explains why a visible credit and a royalty instruction are separate questions.
A Lagos to Caracas recording
Daramola and Venezuelan band Rawayana are named together on “Gidi 2 Caracas (La Música),” released June 18, 2026, according to Apple Music’s listing. Apple describes the release as a single and names Sony Music Entertainment US Latin as the issuing company under exclusive licence from GVDDRXM SOUND. That public listing corroborates the collaboration and release date; it does not tell us the private terms of the licence.
In The NATIVE interview, Daramola describes the song as a conversation between Nigerian and Latin sounds and says his producer album Le Di Sentido draws on collaboration across cultures. Roland’s listening guide independently discusses “Gidi 2 Caracas” as a meeting of jazz, Afrobeat rhythm and amapiano in his account of the track. These are descriptions from interviews with the maker, rather than independent measurements of a genre’s market share.
The useful craft detail is how many roles can converge on one record. Daramola is presented as an artist on the Apple listing and describes himself as a producer in the interviews. On “Alma,” the Academy gives him production and engineering credits without naming him as the recording artist. The two examples show different public configurations of the same working musician: one foregrounds his artist identity, the other places his contribution inside another singer’s master.
What the studio accounts actually show
Roland’s guide is unusually specific about his tools and choices. In its account of Boza and Elena Rose’s “orióN,” Daramola discusses using a JUNO-106 synthesizer pad to add texture beyond a basic guitar, drum and bass arrangement. In its discussion of Danny Ocean’s “Caramel,” he recalls a studio session built around a keyboard part. The examples are the producer’s recollections as reported by Roland, so they explain intent and process rather than proving that a particular machine alone made a hit.
The NATIVE interview supplies another side of the method: Daramola talks about vocal production, synthesizer arrangements and the musical traditions he heard growing up. TIDAL’s interview records his interest in the connections between African music and Afro-Latin forms. Read together, those accounts suggest a producer who treats a cross-border session as an arrangement problem: what rhythm, voice and texture can coexist, and which element should carry the song? That is an editorial reading of his descriptions, not a claim about an undisclosed session.
It is also why the “Alma” nomination is more useful as a credit story than as a prediction. The Academy’s list can confirm exactly who is nominated for the master and in which roles. It cannot tell us how the work was divided between Daramola and Mazzarri, what contracts govern it, or whether the award result will change future bookings. The recording and engineering credits already show the route by which a Nigerian producer’s work enters a major Latin music award conversation.
When the winners are announced, the outcome will be news. For now, the record of work is clear: an Academy-listed credit on “Alma,” a released artist collaboration with Rawayana, and multiple interviews in which Daramola explains the craft decisions that connect his Nigerian influences with sessions in other markets.
