“Every time I want to stop, I remember there’s someone somewhere who is silently inspired by the things I do and that motivates me to keep going.” – Victoria Ibek
If you ask emerging vocalist, songwriter and beat maker Victoria Ibek what her favorite music genre is, she’ll tell you she’s a #1 fan of pop, hip hop, dance, jazz, Latin, classical, funk… well, you get the idea. It goes back to believing that “good music is good music” and you simply know it when you hear it.
If there’s one thing to know about Victoria, it’s that she creates more than good music, whether it’s from lyrical or drum beat making or her honey sweet vocal range that’s slightly tinged in a Nigerian accent. The 24-year-old musician is inspired as much by Eartha Kitt, Aretha Franklin and Donna Summer as she is by Beyoncé, Victoria Monét, Normani and Chlöe x Halle.
When watching her YouTube Shorts channel she presents as a fearless hip hop artist with a steely gaze. Yet when you speak to her in person, she is poised, while politely explaining that she’s really an introvert who just likes to perform. She prefers wine and game nights in with friends over club nights out with a crew. Although her music implies it’s more about dance floors, relationship intelligence, and extreme confidence to express emotions from elation to anger.
The range expressed in her listening choices is reflected in Victoria’s own music. One minute she’s an R&B crooner on the track, “Dreams,” a melodic, vocally driven pop track, then the next she’s telling a romantic interest exactly where they stand on, “Wish U Were,” her current favorite song because of its sharp confidence and edge. You can imagine a producer getting a hold of “Tomorrow Night (feat. Jared Silao)” with its flirtatious lyrics (delivered by both artists) and catchy beats to master a club banger heard from Vegas clubs to Dubai yacht parties. The track, “Don’t Leave Me,” contains an upbeat, dance pop and R&B quality that transcends into a hypnotic structure. All of Victoria Ibek’s music suggests great possibility, whether her songs end up as chart-climbing pop hits or dance club sensations.
Victoria is currently living in Los Angeles after winning a full BandLab Creator Grant to pursue her music. She was born and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina then spent a few years growing up in her mother’s native Nigeria. She and her sister lived there for six years until Victoria was 16 and returned to North Carolina to complete high school. Their mother took them there to connect the girls to their roots and African family before she passed away. Victoria says that when she lived in Nigeria, she had to figure out how to make music and write songs because she didn’t grow up playing instruments. “But obviously I’m Nigerian, so the infectious rhythms are always going to be a part of me.” Her own upbeat track, “Good Vibes Only,” demonstrates that Nigerian sensibility with its celebratory vibe and get-up-and-dance rhythm, as the title implies. It feels like a throwback to her Mother’s generation or even earlier.
“My mother wanted to give us a little bit of our culture and make sure that we understood where we came from, which is why I’m also a big proponent of believing that you have to know where you’ve been to know where you’re going,” she asserts. “I spent six beautiful years there meeting people and learning about my family and I couldn’t have been happier.”
The only traditional instrument she has mastered so far is the ukulele, a small four-stringed instrument in the lute family. It has a bright cheerful sound popularized in Hawaii although it is made from a fierce Portuguese machete. Somehow it feels like a metaphor for Victoria’s own soul – cheerful on the outside yet built on strength and intent.
Perhaps in-part because both her parents passed away when she was young, outside of her passion for creating music, Victoria has a deep desire to help children. “My whole life I’ve been obsessed with helping children. My mom ran a daycare center while we were growing up and my first real job was as a Certified Nursing Assistant, working with kids with disabilities. Now that I’m an adult, I still work with kids doing music therapy. The whole reason I started playing the ukulele was because I was working at a music therapy center and they taught me how to play it for the kids. It’s important to make sure we do as much as possible to help the future because the adults you see are a result of how they were treated as kids, you know?” What she calls her “whole second life outside of music” has been dedicated to children’s care to make sure “they are good enough to help the future that we all want to see.”
As a child herself, she claims to have started making music as soon as she could talk. “I would be singing songs, not the right words, just singing as many words as I could remember in the song that I liked.” Her earliest musical memory was of Rihanna. “My sister and I had matching pink and blue radios, and we had one CD (Rihanna’s Good Girl Gone Bad). We never had another CD in my life. We would share back and forth because we’d never listen at the same time. I remember the first song that I ever learned how to sing correctly was ‘Umbrella.’ I genuinely thought I was Rihanna at the time.” The next record Victoria remembers is Beyoncé’s I Am… Sasha Fierce because everyone in her household knew the “Single Ladies” dance so she was expected to know the routine front to back. “I am a dance person. I need to be able to move. I need people to be able to move. And I feel like between the music videos of ‘Umbrella’ and ‘Single Ladies,’ I just have to dance, and people must be dancing with me. Something has to be shaking when I’m singing.”
That’s why today she finds herself making music that makes people feel something physical beyond simple emotion. “If you like music that’s loud and in your face, but is meaningful, then that’s the type of music I make. I love a good party song but if you listen to the lyrics, you’ll find out that I’m usually singing about something deeper than just having fun.”
As Victoria got older, people suggested that she join this band or this choir group, but she decided to make her own music instead. “I got into making my own music and writing my own songs. I actually had to learn software and teach myself how to make my own beats, write, produce, mix and master. So, I started BandLab in the early days around 2018. I was one of the more active creators, I would say. I just started to brand myself, connect myself, meet people here and there, and go out and perform. I did as much as I could to be in my passion project because I wasn’t one of those people who grew up being trained in music.” She currently has 15.7K followers on the music creation and collaboration platform.
Today, she sees moving to LA as her life-changing opportunity to purely focus on music. “Up until then, I had spent most of my life focused on school… getting my Bachelor of Science in Pre-med at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte because I didn’t want to study music. I wanted to make sure I had something else on the educational side. So, when I finished college, I decided that now was the time to really pursue my music. Getting the opportunity with BandLab to participate in their program really helped me get my feet wet and create music. Every week we wrote, produced, made new songs and got feedback. Everything turned around in a week. Now, a year later, I have my whole project done and everything that I’m releasing is from that. It’s been a beautiful time.”
Victoria claims that, for her, writing lyrics is purely in the moment. It truly depends on what’s going on in her life at that exact moment. “Unfortunately, I’m an empath, and I say unfortunately, because I cannot help but write exactly where I am in every day, every time I pick up the pen. If I don’t know what I’m feeling, after I write a song, I know I’m still mad at who I’m writing about or that I don’t talk to the person anymore or I’m still in love with that person. I think about it spiritually when I write lyrics and make music because I can’t help but be connected to a song in that way.”
Outside of BandLab, you can find Victoria playing live shows in Los Angeles at clubs like The Peppermint Club, The Dime and Soul of LA Lounge. “I’m doing everything an aspiring musician does – going to all the venues, trying to meet as many people as I can and network. I’m scoping the land out, figuring out where I need to be to stay elevated. I like living in LA because I like to be wherever the music is. I like to be close to where everybody is more of a community, and I didn’t find that in Charlotte. You have to go where the people are. As an aspiring artist, you must believe in yourself more than the money. So, for right now, we’re following our hearts instead of the money (laughs).”
