Ray & Beats: How Highlife Storytelling Built Yaw Ray's Late-Night R&B
Kumasi Singer Shaped by Daddy Lumba and Kojo Antwi Makes Six Songs for Quiet Nights
On the cover of Ray & Beats, Yaw Ray sits alone in a red-lit room. A guitar, a piano, a camera and a stack of books surround him. The Ghanaian singer released the six-track R&B EP on 29 September 2026, and that room explains a great deal about how it was made.
Yaw Ray’s Go, the opening song of the EP, sits in the playlist below, and the full run of coverage is collected on the Yaw Ray artist profile. Ray & Beats reached BlackSounds.News through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news titles. Listen from the top, then keep reading for the lineage behind it.
After Years Filed Under Afrobeats, a Kumasi Singer Makes Six Quiet R&B Songs Built on the Beat
Start with the wave he came up in. Afrobeats is the sound most people now hear first from West Africa, and Yaw Ray’s own catalogue has lived inside it. In fact, on Apple Music, every release since his 2020 single Boa Me is filed under Afrobeats. That run includes the 2023 project Delay not Denial and the single Survive, which came out three weeks before this EP.
Ray & Beats is the first of his releases filed under R&B and soul, and the change is deliberate. In his own notes on the EP, Yaw Ray says it is not the kind of project you expect to hear everywhere while Afrobeats is so dominant. That, he explains, is part of why he wanted to make it. He wanted music that does not need to compete for your attention.
Meanwhile, his roots are in Kumasi, in Ghana’s Ashanti Region. His journey began with a borrowed microphone, and he found his voice through the guitar. Beyond music, he paints, draws, designs and works as a professional photographer. His biography describes a sound that lets highlife, Afrobeats, R&B and soul meet without any one genre defining him.
A Red Room, a Guitar and a Camera Hold the Story Behind Ray & Beats and Its Late-Night Mood
The cover carries a story he wrote out himself. The guitar and piano stand for making music, and the camera stands for his love of capturing moments. Similarly, the books bring together science and music, two subjects that feed his curiosity. The red light holds the mood of the EP: love, passion, heartbreak and the late nights when thoughts get louder because everything else is quiet.
By his account, even the suit and tie mean something. They mark a grown man reflecting on love, attraction and heartbreak from a more mature place.
Likewise, the music follows that room. Yaw Ray describes the EP as his relationship with beats themselves. When he hears a good one, he wants to build something on it. He also names the saxophone, the guitar and the piano as the sounds that start him writing. As he puts it, “R&B has always meant Rhythm and Blues, but for me, this project means Ray & Beats. I’m not just singing on beats. I’m creating with them. This is the kind of music I want you to put on when it’s late, your headphones are on, and you’re just thinking about life or that one person.”
The running order starts with Go, then moves through You, No Man, Sing Along and No More before Keys. None of them reaches three minutes, and the whole EP runs to just under 16 minutes. The credits keep the circle small. Yaw Ray wrote and composed every song under his own name, Kingsley Agyapong Boateng. Joe Cliq produced, mixed and mastered the EP, and Martha Ewusie Brookman sings backing vocals.
Daddy Lumba and Kojo Antwi Carried the Highlife Love Song, and Ray & Beats Takes It Somewhere Quieter
Yaw Ray names his lineage plainly. His biography credits the storytelling and melodies of two Ghanaian legends, Daddy Lumba and Kojo Antwi. Each of them also helps explain where this EP comes from.
Daddy Lumba, born in the Ashanti Region, became one of the most celebrated voices in highlife. With Nana Acheampong, he formed the Lumba Brothers while both lived in Germany. Moreover, their Yee Ye Aka Akwantuom is counted among the best-known songs in the genre. That Germany-based scene, later called burger highlife, crossed highlife with disco and funk alongside German producers. Across more than 200 songs, Lumba wrote about love, relationships, marriage and hope. Ray & Beats works the same ground from a much quieter room.
Kojo Antwi, known in Ghana as Mr Music Man, built his career on mixing highlife with soukous, Caribbean lovers rock and African American soul and R&B. His first solo album, All I Need Is You, arrived in 1986, and he sings in Twi. That meeting of highlife and R&B is the nearest map to Yaw Ray’s own blend.
So the line runs from Lumba’s dance records and Antwi’s love songs to a Kumasi singer recording with his beats. The beat stays at the centre, as it did in burger highlife. Here, though, it carries a late-night conversation instead of a dance floor.
Who Should Press Play on Ray & Beats, From Late-Night R&B Fans to Followers of Ghanaian Highlife
This EP suits listeners who come to R&B for the late-night pocket rather than the club. It also suits anyone raised on Ghanaian highlife love songs who wants to hear that storytelling in a younger singer’s hands. If you follow independent West African music beyond the Afrobeats charts, this is a short and personal place to start.
From the BlackSounds.News curator team: “Ray & Beats saves its lead single, Keys, for the very end, after five other conversations with the beat. Putting it last tells you the EP was sequenced as one late-night listen, meant to be heard in order with the headphones on.”
Follow Yaw Ray
Follow Yaw Ray on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer and Audiomack. Stream the EP on Tidal, and find more of his music on SoundCloud, YouTube Music and his YouTube channel. Keep up with him on Instagram and visit his official website.
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