The Cavemen’s new album Cavy in the City dropped on 31 October, and it feels like a confident return to form for the duo: Kingsley Okorie on bass and Benjamin James on drums. Known for reimagining traditional highlife with live instrumentation and rich nostalgia, the brothers once again build on what they’ve always done best.

The project opens with a warm homage to the legends: Rex Lawson, Celestine Ukwu, Osita Osadebe, and Oliver De Coque, instantly grounding it in the music’s roots. Sonically and visually, the record leans into that vintage spirit. Even the cover art, like Show Dem Camp’s Afrika Magic, nods to old Nigerian poster design with its bold, grainy, and proudly analogue look.

Compared to their last album, Love and Highlife (2024), which experimented more with contemporary sounds and collaborations, this one feels closer in spirit to their debut Roots, which is familiar and more faithful to the traditional highlife rhythms that first made fans fall in love.

Their latest album, Cavy in the City, arrives as a confident extension of what they’ve always done best: traditional highlife music reimagined through live instrumentation, arranged sounds, and nostalgia.

The Cavemen are students of sound. Their live-band approach gives the album a steady rhythm, powered by drums, deep basslines, and proper jazz-style. Here, they lean even deeper into highlife, less genre-blending, more focus. The songs blend into each other in a way that’s good enough, although there’s still a little sonic interruption here and there. Those interruptions are enough to distinguish certain tracks.

Production-wise, Cavy in the City is good. The mixing isn’t glossy or overdone; it’s a sort of warm music that fits a Sunday afternoon gathering more than a club night. The Cavemen aren’t trying to modernise highlife, either. They’re preserving it while giving it motion.

Despite the album title, Cavy in the City doesn’t build a clear concept around urban life or transition. Instead, it feels like a loose collection of moments and moods. The interludes do a lot of the heavy lifting, keeping the flow from track to track.

The standout collaborations work smoothly within that flow. Angelique Kidjo on Keep on Moving adds her signature sound, while Pa Salieu brings structure to Gatekeepers. Neither feature disrupts The Cavemen’s sound; they simply expand it.

“If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the U.S.A. will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,'” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

The threat came one day after he claimed that Christianity is facing an “existential threat” in Nigeria and accused “radical Islamists” of being responsible for “mass slaughter.”

“I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action. If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians!” said Trump.

He warned the Nigerian government to “move fast.”

The US military “may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities”, Trump added.

“I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action. If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians!”

US defence secretary Pete Hegseth responded: “Yes sir … The Department of War is preparing for action. Either the Nigerian Government protects Christians, or we will kill the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.”

Islamist extremism in Nigeria shot to international attention more than a decade ago when in 2014 militants from Boko Haram, which violently opposes Western education, kidnapped 276 mostly Christian schoolgirls from the town of Chibok.

But in recent months, senior figures within Trump’s MAGA coalition have seized on ongoing attacks against Christians by Islamist insurgents, with some claiming the targeted killings constitute a “genocide”.

Texas senator Ted Cruz, a Trump ally, claimed last month that the Nigerian government might be complicit in the violence, a suggestion it has categorically denied.

“Officials in Nigeria are ignoring and even facilitating the mass murder of Christians by Islamist jihadists,” Cruz said.

Trump on Friday claimed that Christianity was facing an “existential threat in Nigeria”, blaming “radical Islamists” for the attacks. He designated the West African state as a “country of particular concern” — a step that can precede the imposition of sanctions against a specific nation.

Trump first designated Nigeria as a country of particular concern towards the end of his first term in 2020, but the decision was reversed by the Biden administration the following year.

Nobel Prize-winning writer Wole Soyinka says the U.S. has withdrawn his visa and requested its physical cancellation in Lagos. Wole Soyinka said on Tuesday that the United States had revoked his non-immigrant visa issued last year, and that he had been informed he must reapply should he wish to visit the U.S. again.

The 91-year-old writer had torn up his U.S. green card and renounced his American residency in 2016 in protest of the election of President Donald Trump. The Nobel laureate has held regular teaching appointments at American Ivy League universities since the mid-1990s, following his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986.

“The moment they announce his victory, I will cut my green card myself and start packing up,” Soyinka had said.

On Tuesday, Soyinka presented reporters with a letter from the U.S. Consulate General in Lagos requesting that he bring in his passport for the physical cancellation of his visa.

The letter, dated 23 October, stated that “additional information became available” after the visa had been issued. The U.S. Embassy in Nigeria did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“I have no visa; I am obviously banned from the United States, and if you want to see me, you know where to find me,” Soyinka said, addressing those who might have planned to invite him to events in the U.S.

In July, the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria announced that Nigerians applying for non-immigrant visas would now receive single-entry, three-month permits, rolling back the previous policy that had allowed multiple-entry, up to 5-year visas.