Our Rating: 10/10
From the forthcoming album It’s About Time (March 6, 2026)

There are entire stages of women’s lives that popular music still refuses to name.

Peri-menopause is one of them.

With “Young One,” Ndidi O does not just name it, she sits inside it. Quietly. Unflinchingly.

Taken from her forthcoming album It’s About Time, the single is one of the most intimate recordings of her career. Written from the perspective of a woman moving through bodily change, it reflects on youth not with nostalgia, but with clarity. The song does not romanticise the past. It examines it. It measures the distance between who we were and who we are becoming.

Vocally, Ndidi is in extraordinary form. There has always been depth in her voice, that low, textured grain that carries blues tradition in its bones. But here it feels even more distilled. Controlled. Patient. She does not oversing. She allows space for the lyric to land.

“Young One” resists melodrama. It is neither bitter nor sentimental. Instead, it honours contradiction. Youth is remembered as freedom and distraction, but also naivety. Age arrives with grief, yes, but also with strength and self-possession. The song’s quiet radicalism lies in its refusal to frame ageing as decline.

Musically, it sits at the intersection Ndidi has increasingly made her own: transatlantic blues phrasing meeting Irish folk sensibility. Recorded at Monique Studios in Cork with longtime collaborator Steve Dawson and a strong Irish backing cast, the arrangement is restrained, letting story lead texture. The emotional architecture is subtle but deliberate.

This is not a single designed for instant algorithmic lift. It asks for listening. It asks for maturity.

And culturally, it matters.

Women’s ageing is still treated as disappearance in mainstream narratives. “Young One” pushes back against that erasure. It acknowledges grief without surrendering power. It speaks directly to an experience many recognise privately but rarely hear articulated in song.

Ndidi O has built a career across continents, genres and mediums, from Juno nominations to major television syncs. Yet this track feels like a narrowing of focus rather than expansion. It is deeply personal. Rooted. Local and universal at once.

If It’s About Time continues in this vein, it may well stand as her most thematically cohesive work to date. “Young One” suggests an album concerned not with reinvention, but with reckoning. With time. With body. With belonging.

It does not ask to be admired.

It asks to be understood.