BNXN and producer Sarz won Song of the Year at the 2026 AFRIMMA Awards for “Back Outside,” beating out Davido’s “With You” featuring Omah Lay in what DancehallMag called the biggest surprise of the night. The ceremony was held September 12 at Annette Strauss Square in Dallas, Texas, as part of a three-day festival format that ran through September 14.<\/p>\n
Davido arrived in Dallas as AFRIMMA’s leading nominee with five nods, and “With You” carried the kind of airplay weight that usually wins a Song of the Year race. It didn’t. “Back Outside” took the category over a field that also included Diamond Platnumz’s “Joy,” Moliy’s “Shake It to the Max” featuring Shenseea and Skillibeng, Black Sherif’s “So It Goes,” Ciza’s “Isaka (6AM),” Young Jonn’s “Elumelu,” DopeNation’s “Kakalika,” Marvais Djo featuring Kano Choir’s “Pile,” and DJ Kedjevara’s “Ca Fait Mal.” DancehallMag framed the win as a signal that AFRIMMA voters rewarded “a production-forward wave that is reshaping what a hit sounds like in 2026” over a more conventional star vehicle.<\/p>\n
“Back Outside” wasn’t a standalone single chasing an award. It’s the lead-adjacent track off “The Game Needs Us,” the five-song joint EP BNXN and Sarz released on May 11, 2026 through 1789\/T.Y.E.\/EMPIRE, which landed at number two on the Apple Music Nigeria Top Albums chart the day it dropped. The actual lead single, also called “Back Outside,” arrived April 20, 2026, with a video directed by Khufu Najee-Ullah. Sarz and BNXN had already built chemistry on earlier records like “Gwagwalada” and “Pidgin & English” before committing to a full joint project, and the EP arrived a few months after Sarz’s own solo debut album, “Protect Sarz at All Costs,” released in September 2025.<\/p>\n
In a NATIVE interview around the EP’s release, BNXN and Sarz described the collaboration as a deliberate stretch rather than a victory lap. BNXN said the goal was working with sounds that weren’t already at the forefront of Afropop, chasing the reaction of “Ah, what is that? Who made that?” rather than trying to please everyone on every track. He credited the partnership with pushing him into new registers, joking that without Sarz’s push he probably wouldn’t “go falsetto on everybody like that.” Both cited Tyla as a reference point for staying identifiably rooted while still sounding different from what’s already out. That framing lines up with how AFRIMMA voters read the record: not the biggest song by airplay, but the one that sounded like it was reaching for something.<\/p>\n
Losing Song of the Year didn’t mean Davido left Dallas empty-handed. His album “5ive” won Album of the Year, beating projects from Black Sherif, Omah Lay, Asake, Burna Boy and Tyla. But the marquee individual award, Artist of the Year, went to Congolese star Fally Ipupa, who also picked up the Crossing Boundaries with Music honor, denying Davido on his highest-nomination year at the ceremony. Elsewhere in the Nigerian sweep, Tems won Best Female West Africa, Ruger took Best Male West Africa, DJ Tunez won Best DJ Africa over a field that included DJ Spinall and Uncle Waffles, Phyno won Best Male Rap Act, and Mercy Chinwo took Best Gospel.<\/p>\n
A producer-artist duo beating a Davido and Omah Lay pairing for Song of the Year is the kind of result that’s easy to read as a fluke and harder to dismiss once you look at what actually won. AFRIMMA voters picked a five-track, deliberately experimental EP cut over a track built to already be a hit on arrival. For Sarz specifically, it’s a rare instance of a producer getting top billing on a Song of the Year plaque rather than a production credit buried in the liner notes, and it comes in the same year he put out his own album under his own name. For BNXN, it’s confirmation that the version of him willing to go sideways sonically, rather than chase the safest single, is the version getting rewarded right now. Whether that reshapes how labels pitch joint projects for awards season next year is the actual question worth watching.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BNXN and Sarz’s ‘Back Outside’ beat Davido’s ‘With You’ for AFRIMMA 2026 Song of the Year, the night’s biggest surprise even as Davido’s ‘5ive’ still took Album of the Year.","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"csco_display_header_overlay":false,"csco_singular_sidebar":"","csco_page_header_type":"","csco_page_load_nextpost":"","csco_post_video_location":[],"csco_post_video_location_hash":"","csco_post_video_url":"","csco_post_video_bg_start_time":0,"csco_post_video_bg_end_time":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[130,3060,41,150,36067],"class_list":["post-20212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-music-news","tag-afrobeats","tag-bnxn","tag-davido","tag-nigeria","tag-sarz","cs-entry","cs-video-wrap"],"yoast_head":"\n