The First Woman To Do It: Tems Takes Charge Of The Children Of Blood And Bone Soundtrack
A teaser trailer dropped last month for a film that will not reach cinemas until January. Ordinarily, that would be the kind of gap a Nigerian entertainment desk lets pass quietly. Except the trailer's soundtrack carries 'Me & U,' and behind the scenes of the whole score sits a name that changes the calculation: Tems.
Paramount Pictures has named the Grammy-winning Nigerian singer executive music producer and curator of the soundtrack for 'Children of Blood and Bone,' its adaptation of Tomi Adeyemi's bestselling fantasy novel. Director Gina Prince-Bythewood has called her the first woman to executive produce a film soundtrack at this scale, BellaNaija reported.
It is a different kind of credit to the ones Tems has collected until now. Features, writing credits, a Grammy — all of that lives inside individual songs. This one hands her the musical architecture of an entire studio tentpole, built around a world explicitly rooted in West African myth.
What she is actually contributing
Tems is not simply lending her name to the project. Her manager, Muyiwa Awoniyi, confirmed she has written and recorded three brand-new original songs specifically for the film, on top of curating the soundtrack's overall direction, Film Music Reporter noted. Her earlier single 'Me & U' already features in the film's official teaser, giving audiences their first sense of how her sound is meant to sit against Orïsha, the fictional world Adeyemi built her novels around.
Burna Boy joins the project as executive music consultant — a companion credit to Tems' lead role, rather than a competing one. Ayra Starr and Fireboy DML round out a soundtrack roster that reads like a cross-section of the Nigerian artists who have spent the past few years pushing Afrobeats into rooms it had never been invited into before.
Why a studio picked her for this
'Children of Blood and Bone' was always going to need a soundtrack that could hold its own against a marketing budget built for a global fantasy franchise, while staying honest to a story steeped in Yoruba-coded magic and West African cosmology. Handing that job to a Nigerian artist, rather than a Los Angeles-based composer working from research notes, is as much a creative decision as a symbolic one.
Tems has spent the past several years building exactly the kind of catalogue that argument rests on — records that move between vulnerability and scale, and a voice that has already crossed into rooms far outside Lagos or Atlanta. Curating a soundtrack is a different skill from writing one song, though: it means shaping how a dozen or more tracks by a dozen or more artists sit against each other across two hours of film, not just delivering her own verse.
Director Gina Prince-Bythewood has described Tems as the first woman to executive produce a film soundtrack of this scale.
The release still has months to run
'Children of Blood and Bone' is scheduled to open in theatres, IMAX, Dolby Cinema and other premium large-format screens on January 15, 2027 — five months from now. That gives the soundtrack rollout a long runway: expect further singles, more casting and promotional beats, and likely more names added to the credits before the film actually reaches Nigerian cinemas.
For now, what is confirmed is enough to matter on its own. A Nigerian woman sits at the centre of the music for one of next year's biggest studio fantasy releases, with Burna Boy, Ayra Starr and Fireboy DML working under her direction rather than alongside her as equals. That is not a small adjustment to how these credits usually get handed out.
A pattern bigger than one soundtrack
Film studios courting Afrobeats is not, by itself, new — soundtrack placements have been part of the genre's crossover strategy for several years now. What is new here is the seniority of the credit. Tems is not being asked to contribute a song for a scene; she is being asked to decide what the whole soundtrack sounds like, who else appears on it, and how those pieces are sequenced against Prince-Bythewood's cut of the film.
That distinction is likely to matter for how the next round of studio deals gets negotiated. An executive producer credit carries weight in rooms an artist feature never reaches — publishing splits, sync rights, creative control over how West African sound gets represented on a screen watched by audiences who have never heard of Lagos or Alté. If 'Children of Blood and Bone' performs the way Paramount is clearly hoping it will, Tems' credit becomes a reference point the next Nigerian artist's team can point to in their own negotiations.
The source material carries its own weight into this. Tomi Adeyemi's novel became a publishing phenomenon on the strength of a fantasy world built explicitly from West African mythology rather than the more familiar European folklore Hollywood usually reaches for, and its adaptation has been anticipated for years by readers who rarely see their own cultural references treated as blockbuster material rather than niche interest. A soundtrack curated by a Nigerian artist, rather than assembled by a studio music supervisor working from a mood board, is arguably the more faithful choice given what the books are actually about.
For Tems personally, the credit lands on top of an already unusual career arc — a Grammy win, feature spots on some of the past decade's biggest global records, and now a producing role that moves her from performer to decision-maker on a project with a budget and audience far larger than any single song could reach alone.
Whether the film becomes the box-office moment its marketing is clearly built for won't be clear until January. Until then, the trailer — and 'Me & U' playing under it — is the closest thing Nigerian audiences have to a preview of what Tems has actually built.
