You can imagine Jidenna’s highway system including stops in Jamaica and Trinidad, where dancehall and soca mingle with the U.S. The promise of a metaphorical highway to Africa, solidifying the connections of centuries of sprawling diaspora, is a useful framework for an album it’s the highway Drake cruised for much of More Life, as did GoldLink on Diaspora, Beyoncé on the Lion King bonus album The Gift, and Burna Boy throughout his career-spanning blend of afropop, dancehall, and hip-hop.

Jidenna’s 85 to Africa, named for the interstate highway that runs through the southeastern U.S., is an attempt to make good on that philosophy. And the continent must take money from inside and put it out.” It’s a sentiment likely familiar to the children of many African immigrants, an optimistic, globally minded philosophy with clear goals but no obvious plan of action. “So the diaspora must take money from outside and put it in. You must inflate it from outside,” he said, in what can be presumed to be an impression of his father’s Nigerian accent. On a recent episode of The Breakfast Club, Jidenna shared a physics-lesson-cum-aphorism his late father often repeated: “You can’t inflate a balloon from inside the balloon.

Jidenna the chief album art