(Description)
Break the Chains is Ugandan music icon Bebe Cool’s (Moses Ssali) first full-length studio album since Mbozi Za Malwa in 2018, making it one of the most anticipated East African releases of the year. Released on 30 May 2025 under Gagamel International Limited, the 16-track, 51-minute project marks a bold reinvention, moving beyond the reggae and dancehall sound that built his career into Afrobeats, Afrotech, and gospel-inflected territory. It features collaborations with Yemi Alade, Joshua Baraka, and DJ Edu, and within days of release every track had entered Uganda’s Apple Music Top 100. Your three productions, Wait, Lost Affection, and Hidden Agendas, anchor the album’s more romantic and reflective register.
Break the Chains, the 2025 studio album by Ugandan music icon Bebe Cool (Moses Ssali), stands as one of the most significant East African releases of the year, his first full-length project since 2018’s Mbozi Za Malwa. Released on 30 May 2025 under Gagamel International Limited, the 16-track, 51-minute album marked a deliberate evolution in Bebe Cool’s sound, moving beyond the reggae and dancehall identity that defined his early career into Afrobeats, Afrotech, and more introspective, gospel-inflected territory.
Within that expansive project, Okot Mark was entrusted with producing three of the album’s key tracks: Wait, Lost Affection, and Hidden Agendas. Where much of the album leans on high-profile guest features and big collaborative energy, these three productions carry the record’s emotional backbone, the romantic, reflective, and narrative-driven moments that give Break the Chains its range. It’s a notable placement on a project of this scale: rather than filler tracks, Wait and Lost Affection sit among the album’s most intimate, feeling-forward songs, while Hidden Agendas became one of the standout singles of the entire album, an instant fan favorite from the day of release and significant enough to earn its own full cinematic music video months later, a mark of the kind of production work that doesn’t just support a song but elevates it into a moment fans return to.
Coming off a seven-year gap, the album had to prove Bebe Cool could still move with a changing industry without losing the identity that built his career. That meant taking a genre risk by stepping into new sonic territory that could meet resistance from a home audience used to his older sound, re-establishing relevance in a scene now led by younger artists, committing to the scale of a 16-track rollout with matching video content, and telling emotionally layered stories, as with Hidden Agendas, through lyrics partly delivered in Pidgin, which meant production and visuals had to carry meaning the words alone didn’t fully reveal.
The goal was to reintroduce Bebe Cool to a new generation of listeners without losing longtime fans, prove that African artists can tell powerful stories while owning their own digital space, and build a project ambitious enough to serve as a blueprint for other East African veterans navigating the same relevance question. Balancing the album’s big collaborative anthems against its quieter, relationship-driven songs, including your three productions, gave the record its emotional range.
The album outperformed expectations on every front. All 16 tracks charted on Apple Music Uganda’s Top 100 within days, with Bebe Cool leading the chart himself. The project neared a million streams in its first month, and Bebe Cool named it his own standout release of 2025. Hidden Agendas even received a full cinematic video treatment months after launch, keeping the album’s cultural conversation alive well past its release window.