Tems Biography 2026: From Lagos to Two Grammys at 31

Last updated: November 2, 2026  ·  By Nathan Cole

Tems is 31 years old in 2026, a two-time Grammy winner, and the quietest superstar Afrobeats has ever produced. Her full name is Temilade Openiyi, born June 11, 1995, in Lagos, Nigeria — and her rise breaks the usual pop-star pattern in almost every way. She had no viral dance, no reality-show launch, and no debut album until she had already won a Grammy and been nominated for an Oscar.

The numbers that define her are unusual for a biography. Her first Grammy came as a featured voice, on Future’s “Wait for U” in 2023. Her second came under her own name, for “Love Me JeJe” in 2025. Between those two wins she released her debut album, toured three continents, co-wrote a song for Rihanna, and started a mentorship program for African women in music. In 2026 she added a first UK No. 1 single, “Raindance” with Dave, which spent two weeks at the top of the Official Singles Chart.

This biography follows the whole arc: the Lagos childhood split between Nigeria and the UK, the economics degree and the marketing desk she walked away from, the self-produced singles nobody heard at first, the Wizkid collaboration that changed everything, and the careful, unhurried career that followed — including an honest look at what she is actually worth, where the published estimates disagree, and why.

The Short Answer: A Lagos Voice That Conquered the World Quietly

Tems, born Temilade Openiyi on June 11, 1995, in Lagos, is a Nigerian singer, songwriter, and producer whose voice — low, smoky, and instantly recognizable — carried her from self-produced singles in Lagos to two Grammy Awards and a UK No. 1 single by the age of 31. She is 31 in 2026, having turned 31 on June 11, 2026.

The short version of the career runs like this. She taught herself to produce, quit a marketing job in 2018, and released “Mr Rebel” that same year. “Try Me” broke through in Nigeria in 2019. Wizkid’s “Essence” made her a global name in 2020 and 2021. Future’s “Wait for U” gave her a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 debut and her first Grammy in 2023. She co-wrote Rihanna’s “Lift Me Up,” which earned an Oscar nomination. Her debut album, Born in the Wild, arrived in June 2024, and “Love Me JeJe” from that album won her a second Grammy in February 2025. A surprise EP, Love Is a Kingdom, followed in November 2025, and “Raindance” with Dave topped the UK chart in 2026.

What sets her apart from her Afrobeats peers is pace. Burna Boy and Davido built their careers on volume and ubiquity. Tems built hers on scarcity: two EPs in four years, one album in six, long silences between releases, and a voice so distinctive that other artists’ songs became hits partly because she was on them. The industry noticed before the public did — Drake, Future, and Rihanna all came to her, not the other way around.

Early Life: Lagos, London, and a Childhood Split in Two

Temilade Openiyi was born in Lagos to a Nigerian mother and a British-Nigerian father. When she was five years old, her father died, and the family moved to the United Kingdom. She spent part of her childhood there before the family returned to Nigeria when she was about twelve. That split — Lagos, then London, then Lagos again — is the first thing to understand about her music, which has always sounded like it belongs to two places at once: the alté and Afrobeats of Lagos, and the R&B and soul she absorbed in Britain.

She was raised largely by her mother after her parents separated, in a single-parent household that biographies consistently describe as close-knit. Music was in the house early. She sang in a church choir, learned piano as a child, and — in the detail that best predicts her later career — wrote her first song at the age of six, setting words from her mother’s poem book to a melody, while her brother played guitar beside her.

Back in Lagos, she attended Dowen College, where she stayed in the choir and kept writing. The school years matter because they explain the discipline underneath the dreamy sound: Tems was not a child star, and she was not pushed onto a stage. She was a choir singer who wrote songs in her spare time and kept the habit for a decade before anyone outside her circle heard the results.

University in South Africa and the Marketing Desk She Quit

After Dowen College, Tems went to South Africa to study economics at Monash South Africa, the Johannesburg campus affiliated with Australia’s Monash University. She completed the degree — a fact worth stating plainly, because the “dropout genius” story does not apply to her. She finished university, then took an ordinary job.

That job was in digital marketing in Lagos. She worked at it for roughly two years while making music on the side, learning production software on her own and recording in home setups. In 2018, she quit. The decision is the hinge of the whole biography: a university graduate with a steady job, in a country where steady jobs are not handed out lightly, walking away to produce her own songs with no label, no manager, and no guarantee.

It is also the reason her later career sounds the way it does. Because she learned to produce herself, she never needed a studio full of other people’s ideas. Her early songs are spare by design — voice forward, production minimal, nothing competing with the melody. That self-sufficiency became her signature, and it is why, years later, she could write for Rihanna and hold her own on tracks with Drake and Future without sounding like a guest in someone else’s song.

Mr Rebel and Try Me: Teaching Herself to Produce

Tems released her debut single, “Mr Rebel,” in 2018, producing it herself. It did not chart, and it did not make her famous. What it did was earn her two nominations at the Headies, Nigeria’s major music awards, and introduce a sound that was hard to place: not quite Afrobeats, not quite R&B, slower and more introspective than either. The nominations told her the industry was listening, even if the public had not caught up yet.

“Try Me” followed in 2019, and this one landed. The single became a significant hit in Nigeria, her first real breakthrough at home, and the song that turned her from a promising name into a real prospect. Listen to it now and the whole later career is audible in miniature: the low vocal register, the unhurried phrasing, the refusal to chase a hook at the expense of a mood.

The same year, she appeared on the radar of the wider industry, and in 2020 she joined Davido on the Afrobeats remix of Khalid’s “Know Your Worth.” It was a useful credit, but it was not the breakthrough. The breakthrough was already being recorded, in Lagos, by Wizkid.

Essence: The Song That Changed Everything

In October 2020, Wizkid released Made in Lagos, and its standout track was “Essence,” featuring Tems. Her contribution was not a verse bolted onto someone else’s song. It was the song’s emotional center — the part listeners hummed, quoted, and posted. Within months, “Essence” had become a global anthem, the song of the summer of 2021, and the first Nigerian song to break into the Billboard Hot 100 top 10.

The Justin Bieber remix, released in August 2021, pushed it further, to a peak of No. 9 on the Hot 100. The Grammy nomination for Best Global Music Performance followed. For Tems, the effect was immediate and strange: she was now famous worldwide for a song that was not hers, on an album that was not hers, before she had released a single album of her own.

Her own first EP had actually arrived just before the “Essence” wave. For Broken Ears, released in September 2020, was a seven-track statement of intent — introspective, self-produced in large part, and anchored by “Free Mind,” which would go on to a long chart life of its own on R&B radio. A year later, in September 2021, she signed with RCA Records (through Since ’93) and released her second EP, If Orange Was a Place. Both EPs now read as preludes: the sound was fully formed, but the audience was still arriving.

Drake, Future, and the First Grammy

If “Essence” introduced Tems to the world, the next twelve months made her indispensable to it. In September 2021, Drake featured her on “Fountains,” from his album Certified Lover Boy — a placement that put her voice in front of the largest rap audience on earth. Then, in April 2022, Future released “Wait for U,” featuring Drake and Tems. The song debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, making Tems the first African artist to have a song debut at No. 1, and only the second Nigerian artist, after Wizkid, to top the chart at all.

The Grammy followed in February 2023: Best Melodic Rap Performance for “Wait for U.” It was her first Grammy win, and it made her the first Nigerian female artist to win a Grammy. The distinction matters, and it is worth stating precisely, because later coverage sometimes blurs it: the 2023 win was for a feature, on Future’s record. Her solo Grammy would come two years later. Both count. They are not the same achievement, and the gap between them is the story of her becoming a headliner rather than a voice other stars borrowed.

By the time of the 2023 win, Tems had already collected the other industry markers: a BET Award, Soul Train Music Awards, and an NAACP Image Award. She had done it without an album, which is the strangest line on her résumé. Most artists win their first Grammy after years of albums. Tems won hers on other people’s records, then went back to Lagos and took her time making her own.

Lift Me Up: Writing for Rihanna and an Oscar Nomination

The most unlikely credit of her early career arrived in 2022, when Tems co-wrote “Lift Me Up,” Rihanna’s return-to-music single for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. The song was written as a tribute to Chadwick Boseman, and Tems’s hand in it is audible in its restraint — a ballad that refuses to swell where a lesser writer would have pushed it.

“Lift Me Up” earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song at the 2023 Oscars, alongside a Golden Globe nomination. Tems was therefore, before her debut album existed, a Grammy winner and an Oscar nominee. It is a sequence no other Nigerian artist has matched, and it explains why the album, when it finally came, arrived with expectations that would have crushed a less careful artist.

The songwriting credit also reveals the second half of her talent. Tems is not only a voice. She is a writer and producer whose songs work for other singers, in other genres, at the highest level of the industry. That range — Afrobeats features, R&B ballads, a Marvel soundtrack — is why her career has outlasted the “Essence” moment that started it.

Born in the Wild: The Debut Album and the World Tour

Born in the Wild arrived on June 7, 2024, under RCA and Since ’93 — nearly six years after “Mr Rebel” and four years after her first EP. The album expanded her sound without abandoning it: collaborations with J. Cole and Asake sat beside solo tracks that kept the spare, voice-first production of her early work. It peaked at No. 56 on the Billboard 200 and charted across the UK, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, and critics received it as a proper debut rather than a compilation of singles — which, for an artist who had spent years as a featured voice, was the whole point.

The tour that followed ran from June to October 2024, opening in London on June 11, 2024 — her 29th birthday — and closing in North America on October 10, 2024, with dates across Europe and Australia in between. Reports from the run describe sold-out rooms and an audience that knew every word, including the deep cuts from the EPs. In the same year, Billboard’s Women in Music event gave her its Breakthrough honor, the first time an African singer had received it.

Two tracks from the album carried the year. “Love Me JeJe,” an interpolation of Seyi Sodimu’s 1997 Nigerian classic of the same name, became the album’s signature song — a deliberate nod to the music of her childhood, rebuilt in her own style. “Burning” showed the R&B side of her writing, and both songs would be heard again at the Grammys a few months later.

The Second Grammy: Love Me JeJe at the 2025 Grammys

At the 67th Grammy Awards on February 2, 2025, Tems received three nominations: Best African Music Performance for “Love Me JeJe,” Best R&B Song for “Burning,” and Best Global Music Album for Born in the Wild. She won the first, beating a field stacked with Nigerian stars — Yemi Alade, Asake and Wizkid, Burna Boy, and Chris Brown featuring Davido and Lojay. She dedicated the award to her mother, whose birthday fell on the same weekend.

The win made her a two-time Grammy winner, and it settled the question the 2023 win had left open. This one was hers: her song, from her album, in a category created for African music. She was also, by then, the most Grammy-nominated artist from the African continent, with eight nominations to her name. The two losses on the night — “Burning” to SZA’s “Saturn,” and the album prize to Matt B and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra — barely dented the story. The headline was the win, and the win was solo.

Later in 2025, she launched the Leading Vibe Initiative, a mentorship and empowerment program for African women in music and creative fields. It was the first public sign of what she wants the second half of her career to be about: not just her own records, but a structure that helps other African women avoid the years of self-teaching she went through.

Love Is a Kingdom and a UK No. 1 in 2026

Tems did not wait years between projects this time. In November 2025, she surprise-released Love Is a Kingdom, a seven-track EP that kept the momentum of the Grammy win without the weight of a second album campaign. The EP’s slow-burn single “What You Need” became a long-running presence on R&B radio, and the project as a whole confirmed that her pace had changed: the long silences were over, but the careful quality control was not.

Then came 2026. “Raindance,” her collaboration with British rapper Dave, became her first No. 1 single on the UK Official Singles Chart and spent two weeks at the top — her first chart-topper under her own name in Britain, and a milestone that put her alongside the biggest Afrobeats crossover acts in the UK market. She also appeared with Future on “Bunce Road Blues,” from J. Cole’s 2026 album The Fall-Off, reuniting the “Wait for U” combination on someone else’s record.

At 31, the shape of the career is clear. She is no longer the featured voice or the promising newcomer. She is a headliner with two Grammys, a UK No. 1, an Oscar nomination, and an album catalog that is small by design and strong track for track. What comes next — a second album, more Leading Vibe work, or another long silence — she has not announced, and her history suggests she will not be rushed into saying.

What Is Tems Worth? The M–M Range, Honestly Stated

A biography of a singer invites the net worth question, and Tems’s answer is messier than most. Celebrity Net Worth, the most-cited tracker, puts her at $10 million, and its profile is the most recently updated of the major trackers, carrying her 2025 EP and 2026 chart news. Other 2026 trackers land lower: Taculia Records and Heightopedia both give a range of $3 million to $5 million, built from streaming income, publishing royalties, touring, and endorsements, while smaller trackers say $2 million or $1 million.

This article carries the honest range as $3 million to $10 million, anchored at Celebrity Net Worth’s $10 million, for three reasons. First, the $10 million figure is the only one attached to a tracker that has updated for her 2025 and 2026 work. Second, the $3 million to $5 million range comes from a reasoned, itemized breakdown rather than a bare number, so it deserves weight as the floor. Third, the $100 million figure carried by one profile site is unsourced, unexplained, and wildly out of line with every other estimate — it is recorded here so readers who find it know it was checked, and set aside.

The income streams themselves are not in dispute. Music is first: streaming royalties from a catalog that includes two of the biggest Afrobeats crossover songs ever made, plus publishing splits from her songwriting, including “Lift Me Up.” Touring is second: the Born in the Wild tour sold out rooms across three continents. Endorsements are third: brand deals including Tommy Hilfiger and Reebok, both named by profile trackers, add a steady commercial income. What is missing — and what keeps any figure an estimate — is the private half: her label terms, her feature fees, and her costs. Until those are public, a range with an anchor is the truthful answer, and a single point figure is a guess dressed as one.

Personal Life: Private by Design

Tems keeps her private life private, and this biography respects that boundary rather than filling it with gossip. No marriage has been publicly reported, and she has not confirmed a public relationship in interviews. Profile pages that claim otherwise are guessing, and this article does not repeat their guesses.

What she has said publicly is about family, not romance. She has spoken about being raised by her mother, about her mother’s influence on her music — the poem book that became her first song — and about dedicating her 2025 Grammy to her mother. Her brother, who played guitar while she sang as a child, remains part of the origin story she tells. Beyond that, the private life stays private, which is consistent with everything else about her public image: the music first, the person second, the noise nowhere.

That restraint is itself a career strategy, and it has worked. In an era when pop stars are expected to live online, Tems’s relative absence from the gossip cycle has kept the attention on the records. It is one reason her fanbase skews loyal rather than casual: people who follow her follow the music, because the music is almost all she offers them.

The Tems Firsts: A Record of Milestones

The table is the cleanest summary of why a biography of Tems reads differently from a biography of her peers. Her career is a sequence of firsts, and most of them happened before she had an album to her name. The album, when it came, did not create the career. It confirmed it.

Sources & Reporting

Biography and career: Wikipedia’s Tems entry (born June 11, 1995, Lagos; “Essence” No. 9 Hot 100; “Wait for U” debut No. 1; labels Since ’93, RCA, Leading Vibes); AllMusic’s Tems biography (Lagos birth to Nigerian mother and British father, UK childhood, choir and piano, “Mr Rebel” 2018, “Try Me” 2019, EPs 2020 and 2021, Born in the Wild 2024, Love Is a Kingdom EP 2025); Music In Africa’s Tems directory entry (first song at 6 from her mother’s poem book, brother on guitar, marketing job quit in 2018, two Headies nominations for “Mr Rebel”); The Positive Community’s profile (single-parent household, Leading Vibe Initiative 2025, Coachella 2024 “Essence” performance with Wizkid and Justin Bieber). Grammys and awards: ReportAfrique, EduTimes Africa, and Desauce on the 67th Grammys (February 2, 2025 — “Love Me JeJe” win, “Burning” and Born in the Wild nominations, dedication to her mother); Blessed Records on the two Grammy wins and the 2024 Billboard Women in Music Breakthrough honor; King By Gone on the Oscar nomination for “Lift Me Up” before the debut album. Touring and 2026 freshness: Desauce (Born in the Wild tour, London June 11, 2024 to North America October 10, 2024); Celebrity Net Worth’s Tems profile (Love Is a Kingdom seven-track EP, November 2025; “Raindance” with Dave, first UK No. 1 in 2026, two weeks at the top; “Bunce Road Blues” with Future on J. Cole’s 2026 album The Fall-Off; $10 million net worth). Net worth range: Taculia Records and Heightopedia ($3 million–$5 million, itemized from streaming, publishing, touring, endorsements); smaller 2026 trackers ($2 million, $1 million); schoolings.org ($100 million, unsourced, set aside). Reporting window: November 2, 2026. Where sources conflict, both figures are shown and the article’s anchor is stated, not hidden.

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