Ask ten Kenyans if they know Akothee. All ten will say yes.
Ask those same ten to name any of Akothee songs. Watch what happens.
A few will get Katika or Sweet Love. Someone will hum something they can’t name. Most will go quiet, pull out their phone, and say “you know, that one.” The point is this: Akothee is one of the most famous people in Kenya and one of the least-listened-to musicians in Kenya, and those two facts have coexisted comfortably for over a decade.
She is famous for her personality (the money, the men, the controversies, the outfits, the life story that reads like a telenovela). The conversation about her has always been dominated by her persona rather than her music, and Kenya cannot look away. Her Instagram, TikTok clips, and headline-making antics pull people back like a gravitational force. The music, in that context, becomes almost incidental.
That’s a mistake. She has a genuinely distinctive voice, an instinct for melody, and a body of Akothee songs that spans languages, genres, and moods in a way few Kenyan artists have attempted.
She is also inconsistent. Some Akothee songs are among the best Kenya has produced. Others are filler. The problem is that most Kenyans have never sat with the catalogue long enough to know the difference. This list is for them.
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10 Akothee — Oyoyo (feat. MC Galaxy)
Year: 2015
The most purely fun entry on this list. Oyoyo is a party track built around a Nigerian Afrobeats template. MC Galaxy provides the contemporary credibility, Akothee provides the chaos, and the combination works better than it should. It's not a great song in any traditional sense. The writing is thin. But it captures something real about who she is as a performer: loud, physical, unapologetic, impossible to ignore. As an entry point into the Akothee songs catalogue for a new listener, this is actually a reasonable place to start, before the better ones hit you.
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9 Akothee — Pretty Mama
Year: 2017
A maternal anthem with a hook built for radio. Pretty Mama is Akothee at her most commercially accessible. The melody is straightforward, the message warm and inclusive, and the production polished enough to cross over into audiences who might not otherwise have followed her. It's not the Akothee song that reveals her full range, but it's the one that shows why she has stayed relevant to a mass audience for over a decade. Broad appeal, executed cleanly.
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8 Akothee — Nakupa Moyo (feat. Bahati)
Year: 2019
The pairing should not work. Gospel pop meets Lakeshore chaos, and yet it does. Bahati's earnestness grounds the track in a sincerity that forces Akothee to meet him at a register she doesn't always inhabit. The result is one of the most unexpectedly tender Akothee songs in her catalogue. It's not trying to be edgy. It's not trying to prove anything. It just sits there and works, which for an artist who often tries too hard in both directions, is its own kind of achievement.
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7 Akothee — Abebo
Year: 2018
The track most critics underrate because it sounds chaotic on first listen. Abebo, featuring gospel artist Daddy Owen, is a celebration song built from Luo musical traditions, and the chaos is the point. The production doesn't try to sand down the roughness of traditional rhythms to make them more palatable to a mainstream audience. It leans in. As a result, it's one of the Akothee songs that feels most honest about where she comes from musically and culturally. Give it three listens. It opens up.
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6 Akothee — Yuko Moyoni
Year: 2014
One of the earliest signs that she was more than a video vixen with a record deal. Yuko Moyoni is a proper love song, slow and melodic, built around her voice rather than her persona. The production is sparse enough that there is nowhere to hide, and she doesn't need to hide. Her voice, when she lets it breathe instead of performing at it, is genuinely arresting. Yuko Moyoni remains one of the most replayed Akothee songs among listeners who discovered her catalogue in reverse, starting with the controversy and working back to this.
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5 Akothee — Mwitu Asa
Year: 2020
The most critically ambitious of all Akothee songs ever recorded. Written entirely in Kamba (a language she doesn't natively speak), Mwitu Asa was a deliberate creative statement: she could go anywhere, sing anything, and make it feel genuine. The Kamba community's response was largely positive. The production is rooted in traditional rhythms with contemporary touches, and the vocal performance is controlled in a way that suggests genuine preparation rather than studio improvisation. For a songwriter who often works intuitively, this one shows the craft.
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4 Akothee — Give It To Me (feat. Flavour)
Year: 2013
The track that announced her continental ambitions. Featuring Flavour, one of Nigeria's biggest acts at the time, Give It To Me was the Akothee song that said: this woman is not just a Kenyan artist, she is an East African act with international reach. The production is Afrobeats-inflected without being derivative. The chemistry between the two vocalists is real. And it holds up. Play it now and it sounds less dated than most Kenyan music from the same period.
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3 Akothee — No Filter
Year: 2018
The most lyrically honest Akothee song she has released. No Filter is a semi-autobiographical track about being judged, misunderstood, and refusing to adjust for anyone. It came closest to capturing who she actually is: not the Madam Boss persona, not the controversy magnet, but the woman underneath both of those performances. The rap section is sharper than she gets credit for, and the production matches the defiance of the writing. Kenya debated the content. The music was not the problem with No Filter. The music was the point.
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2 2. Akothee — Lala Salama
Year: 2016
The most commercially complete Akothee song that doesn't have a big feature on it — and also her most personal.
Lala Salama was written as a tribute to her late grandfather, Mr. James Ogendi Kokeyo, who she described as her best friend. That context changes everything about how you hear it. The restraint in the production, the softness in her voice, the title itself (Sleep Peacefully) — none of it is a stylistic choice. It's grief, sung quietly.
For an artist who performs everything at full volume, the fact that this is where she went when someone she loved died tells you more about her than a hundred interview answers. The song topped streaming charts on Mdundo and remains one of her most revisited tracks more than a decade later. If Sweet Love is her best Akothee song with a collaborator, Lala Salama is her best Akothee song alone — and the one that shows what she's actually capable of when she stops performing and starts feeling.
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1 Akothee — Sweet Love (feat. Diamond Platnumz)
Year: 2018
The best Akothee song ever recorded, and it's not particularly close.
Sweet Love is where everything that makes Akothee interesting as an artist lands simultaneously: the voice, the production sensibility, the feature chemistry, the emotional register. Where Katika is a pop song built for radio, Sweet Love is a love song built for memory. The melody is gorgeous. Diamond Platnumz delivers one of his best Kenyan collabs here, not because he dominates the track, but because he gives her room to lead. And she leads.
Play it at a wedding. Play it at 2am when you're thinking about someone. Play it in a matatu and watch three strangers start nodding simultaneously. It works in every context. That's the test of a great song, and Sweet Love passes it.
It also proved something important about the Akothee songs catalogue: she is at her best when she slows down. The chaos is entertaining. The softness is unforgettable.
Honourable Mentions — More Akothee Songs Worth Your Ears
These didn’t make the top 10 but they belong in any serious Akothee songs conversation:
- Shengerera— one of her earliest hits, raw energy, shows where the voice came from before the polish
- Rollam — chaotic and funny, exactly the right energy at the right moment when it dropped
- Benefactor — a dedication to the foreign men in her life, controversial for its content, genuinely interesting as a piece of writing
- Nkoro Nditu — her top Spotify track currently, a Luo-language piece showing continued growth
- Siponsa (feat. Tony Nyadundo) — Apple Music’s current top Akothee song, the Benga influence is handled with more care than most contemporary Luo-pop
- Society (2024) — a social commentary track that critics largely ignored but her audience didn’t
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The Honest Critical Assessment — What the Catalogue Really Says
Akothee has three distinct modes as an artist, and the best Akothee songs come from only one of them.
Mode 1: Party chaos. High energy, provocative, loud. Produces entertaining music but rarely great music. Oyoyo lives here.
Mode 2: Commercial Afropop. This is the mode that gets continental features and radio play. Katika and Sweet Love live here. This mode has produced her two best songs.
Mode 3: Vulnerable and personal. The least commercially successful but musically the most interesting. No Filter and Mwitu Asa live here. This is the Akothee that critics should have spent more time with.
The tragedy of her catalogue is that Mode 3 is underexplored. When she goes quiet and gets specific about her life, her language, her roots, the music becomes genuinely moving. The audience has mostly rewarded Mode 1. Her best work has happened in the gaps between the crowd’s expectations.
Which Akothee song do you think is her best? Drop it in the comments and tell us if Sweet Love deserved number one.
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