Catch the full interview from the 2-hour mark on Radio 2 Funky

By the time most people discovered Delroy Shewe, he had already made peace with the idea that they never would.

That's the quiet irony at the centre of one of the most honest conversations we've had at Tiripanze. The Zimbabwean artist was in the UK for Zim Link Up at New Bingley Hall in Birmingham, and on the Friday before the show he made a stop in Leicester to sit with us at Radio 2 Funky. He didn't have to. An artist at his level, with a show the next evening, choosing to add that stop says something. By the time he walked in, easy in his energy and unhurried in his thinking, it was clear this was someone who had stopped fighting against himself.

"I've claimed a lot of my peace of mind," he told us early on. "That's what I need to go where I need to go."

It lands differently when you know he named his most recent album Peace of Mind. For Delroy, it's a destination he's been working toward for a very long time.

Most people found him through Superstar, his breakout collaboration with Saintfloew that dominated local radio and announced him to a generation of listeners who didn't know they'd been missing him. But born Roy Moyo in Marondera and now based in Harare, Delroy had been in the industry since 2011. There were years of building quietly: Fona, Mazirudo, Fenze, Gum Pepe. A co-write on Tagwadama for Freeman HKD's critically acclaimed Notebook album. A consistent body of work that earned him respect.

We introduced him on air as a renaissance man, someone whose creativity doesn't stop at music but runs through everything: his fashion, his presence, the way he moves through the world. He said it was the best description he'd ever heard of himself. But he was quick to give it meaning beyond the compliment. "Creativity is supposed to preach a message, defy an odd, or devalue a norm." Not self-expression for its own sake. A purpose. And it's that sense of purpose, more than talent or timing, that kept him going through the years when the world hadn't caught up yet.

He spoke about the gap between vision and reality the way someone speaks about something they've lived rather than read. A kid at a small football club who dreams of being Messi: it's not delusion, he said, it's the vision that actually makes them Messi. "Everything I do on stage now, I used to do ten years ago in my room. It's happening now, but I manifested it long before." The conviction was always there. What took time was everything else.

By his own admission, that time nearly broke him. "When Superstar came out, I had already given up mentally. I had come to terms with the fact that I was never gonna blow." What pulled him back wasn't a strategy or a fortunate moment. It was a conversation with God. He told Him: you made me like this. I'm not going to stop. I can't be any other way. The next song he dropped, it worked.

There's almost no bitterness in how he tells that story. If anything, the long road seems to have given him something the overnight success story rarely does. Maturity. Perspective. The ability to sit in a radio studio the day before a show with nowhere better to be. We mentioned the young artists we'd been working with at 2 Funky, someone on the edge of walking away from music altogether. We didn't need to say much else. Delroy's story is the message they needed to hear.

Patience pays.

That peace has a wider dimension, and the conversation kept expanding to find it.

When we asked how his fans here compare to those back home, he wouldn't be drawn into splitting them. "Whether we are here or in Zim, we are all Zims." But he was clear that the foundation is at home. "You can't blow abroad if you don't blow at yard." The fans raising the flag back home are the ones who make everything else possible, and he's not about to forget it.

He and Saintfloew had been talking about this on the way over. The idea that exposure, as a concept, gets misunderstood. People think going abroad is about taking in what's there. Saint put it plainly: it's also about taking out. Showing people what back home is made of. That reframe matters. It's the same reason UK afrobeats never quite took off the way it could have. Without that solid home base, without that pride in what you come from, the diaspora has nothing to follow.

The question Delroy kept returning to, in different ways, was this: Zimbabwe knows who it is now. The talent is there. The music is there. So what's missing?

"We have everything we need. We just don't have the self-esteem to say this is who we are."

He pushed back on the habit of localising problems that are universal. Zim men are like this, Zim music is like this. Every culture carries the same struggles. The difference is whether you let that become a reason to shrink. Stop assimilating. Stop performing for someone else's standard. Stop thinking you need to sound a certain way or speak a certain language to be taken seriously. "Be proud of who you are, even in your imperfections."

Then he played us the music, and everything clicked into place.

Delroy brought two unreleased tracks, both first plays, both pulling in deliberately different directions.

Lonely sounds nothing like what it's about, and that's the whole point. He's been with his partner since 2014, high school sweethearts, and the relentless grind of a creative life means they barely get time together. The world doesn't always understand a creative the way someone who truly knows them does, and when you're always working, that loneliness builds quietly. But the song itself is sun-soaked and carnival-ready, a rhythmic afrobeats bounce that pulls you onto the floor before the lyrics have registered. Ibiza energy. His career has been loud and relentless on the outside, and Lonely mirrors it perfectly. Underneath all that joy, he just misses his bae.

Emerina roots itself somewhere older. The name carries history, one of those timeless Zimbabwean names tied to tradition and the sounds of jiti, the kind of name that conjures something before the music even starts. She's a muse, the one you can't quite leave behind: right person, wrong time, the quiet ache of if you were mine. He's clear the song isn't about promoting anything. It's about honesty. Acknowledging what it means to be human and to want. The sound reflects it: more traditional in its structure, unmistakably Zimbabwean, but rebuilt with a freshness that makes it feel completely alive.

After hearing both, what he'd said earlier about creating a universe where everyone can live finally made complete sense. He put it simply: the Zimbabwean in you reaches for Emerina. The baddie in you reaches for Lonely.

Both are waiting to be released. Which one drops first is up to you.

Wardy closed with one last question: what would you tell your younger self?

He didn't have to think. "My younger self was so worried about today. Sleepless nights thinking about today." He'd tell him one thing. Be patient. Don't do that to yourself.

He lived it.

That Saturday, Delroy Shewe took the stage at Zim Link Up, The New Bingley Hall, Birmingham, joining Killer T, Saintfloew, Shashl, Freeman HKD, Jnr Spragga, Hwinza, Decibel, Raymer and Likkle Art for one of the biggest nights Zimbabwean music has seen on UK soil. For anyone who heard his story the day before, it meant a little more.

Catch the full interview from the 2-hour mark on our Radio 2 Funky broadcast. Vote below — Lonely or Emerina?