A Kongo dance rhythm slides between merengue, zouk and soukous on “Ayayay”, a carnival song in Haitian Creole that celebrates love and desire through movement. Built on call-and-response vocals, buoyant percussion and melodic guitar, the lyrics play with longing and togetherness: “Turn around, it’s you / There’s no cure for love without you / Scientists everywhere / They don’t understand what comes from you.” The track comes from Makaya, the seventh album by Montréal-based Haitian musician Wesli, released on 18 November 2025 via West Urban Productions.

Born Wesley Louissaint in Port-au-Prince in 1980, Wesli built his first guitar at the age of eight from an oil can and nylon fishing line. He moved to Montréal in the early 2000s and won the Juno Award for World Music Album of the Year in 2019. 

Makaya is a 24-track album named after a mountain range in southern Haiti. The word means “leaf” in Kikongo, a sacred symbol in ancestral Vodou. The album pays direct homage to the first maroons, figures of resistance who led the struggle towards Haitian independence in 1804, and draws on lineages passed down through Igbo, Congo, Alada, Nago, Yoruba and Dahomé cultures, preserved in Haitian Vodou sanctuaries known as Lakous. Across the record Wesli works with AfrotroniX, Sika Valmé, Nicolas M’tema, Tamara Suffren, BIC Tizon Dife, Ilam and Meryem Saci, moving between rara, twoubadou, afrobeat, maloya and electronic production.

“Through this album, I want to remind the Haitian people and its diaspora that our roots are a light guiding the way forward,” Wesli says. “Our culture is not a burden but a compass.”

Listen to “Ayayay” and stream Makaya via THIS LINK