Ondo State-hailing singer Cheque’s Yazi EP announces an artist on the verge. Across the project, he stakes a claim to a bigger and better future through a slick Pidgin-Yoruba-Igbo fluency, treating success not as an aspiration but as a fait accompli. The singer’s ascent is framed as divine from the outset, a gospel choir declaring, “Everything is booming/They said what’s good, I said I’m Gucci,” on album opener “Booming”. He confesses to having the time of his life on “Up to the Sky”, an energy that spills into “I Just Wanna Know”, a Rap&B number in the image of much of Trey Songz’s best work where Cheque lets it be known that his attention is a privilege. “Zodiac”, too, is more R&B flexing (“The naira sign/The dollar sign/She wanna know my sign, that’s my zodiac”), the singer descending back to Earth on the pop-leaning “Goodbye” to lament a lost love. It’s right back to balling on “Ocean Dry”, however (“We be popping till oceans dry”), Cheque closing out the whole affair with the gleefully celebratory “Desperado”, where he forecasts the spotlight getting brighter and hotter: “Don’t be surprise when you see me comin,” he sings. “We dey ball like there’s no tomorrow.”