Most artists release an EP and call it a launch. Mannywellz called his Small Chops, named after the Nigerian appetizer you serve before the main event, and meant it. Not as a teaser, but as a gesture of hospitality. A way of saying: come in, sit down, taste this first. The Maryland-by-way-of-Lagos singer, songwriter, and producer has spent the last several years quietly shaping a sound he's always called Soul, even when the world wanted to file him under something narrower.

The son of a Nigerian gospel musician whose church record sold over a million copies before Mannywellz had written a song of his own, he carries his lineage without performing it. Small Chops, fully self-produced and featuring Wale and Lekan, is what he's calling his last EP, a closing dish before whatever comes next.