Burna Boy & Byron Messia – Talibans II

Talibans II is a remix from Byron Messia featuring Burna Boy, released July 20, 2023 under Ztekk Records, Spaceship Entertainment and Interscope Records. It served as the second single from Burna Boy's seventh studio album I Told Them..., giving the original Talibans — Byron Messia's breakout dancehall hit from earlier that year — a second, much bigger life. Messia, born Dylan Byron in Kingston, Jamaica and raised in St. Kitts and Nevis, had already taken the original to number one on Apple Music in 13 countries before Burna Boy came on board, with the music video pulling in tens of millions of YouTube views on its own.

Burna Boy joins on the remix rather than displacing the original, opening the track before Byron Messia returns with his original verse — now extended to brag about his relationship with Jamaican singer Jada Kingdom. The video was shot beach-side in Jamaica, directed by 20kvisuals and Shane Creative, with both artists filmed relaxing at a resort rather than staging anything overly elaborate.

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Talibans II arrived in a packed year for Burna Boy. He'd just made history that same month as the first African artist to sell out a US stadium, headlining New York's Citi Field to a crowd of over 40,000 — a milestone following his 2022 sold-out Madison Square Garden show, where he became the first Nigerian artist to ever headline that venue. His sixth album, Love, Damini, had released the previous summer with features from Ed Sheeran, J Balvin and Khalid among others. Against that backdrop, hopping on a Caribbean dancehall remix wasn't a stretch for cross-genre credibility — it was simply Burna Boy continuing to show up wherever good music is happening and making it bigger without changing what made it work in the first place.

For Byron Messia, Talibans II was the moment that turned a regional viral hit into a genuinely international one, setting up the rest of his breakout year — a Chris Brown feature on Nightmares followed that November, and his Interscope deal, signed that May, confirmed major labels had taken notice well before the remix even dropped.

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