Dutch producer Madism and Kenyan singer Sofiya Nzau delivered ‘Hutia‘, their afro house version of Robert Miles‘ 1995 classic ‘Children‘, out October 3, 2025, on Warner Music Central Europe. The original ‘Children‘ mixed piano lines heavy with feeling against club tempos, landing at number one in more than a dozen countries and pointing the way for dream trance’s spread through the electronic underground. Nzau caught on in 2023 with her part in Zerb‘s ‘Mwaki‘, a house track in Kikuyu—Kenya’s dominant ethnic language—that built her profile through steady online traction. She crossed into new territory by May 2024, becoming the first East African artist to log 10 million monthly listeners on Spotify, and carried that into July’s Tomorrowland, where she became the festival’s first Kenyan performer, layering her delivery over big-room drops. Madism, out of Enschede with a billion streams on the board, sharpened his name on remixes for Lewis Capaldi, James Arthur, Dermot Kennedy, and Sam Smith, the kind of work that turns singer-songwriter material into repeatable club fare.
Madism runs the piano hook from ‘Children‘ through an afro house setup, locking steady kicks to hand-played percussion that pulls from the style’s base in South African house variants. Nzau comes in on Kikuyu, mapping out the way desire hits hard and close—touch that knocks the air loose—in the line “Tondu wahutia wahutia … Ukangorokia,” timed to crest with the beat’s forward lean. The arrangement sticks to the source’s open spaces via held synth notes, but the vocal thread and groove’s lift make it lean toward systems in dim rooms over quiet listens.
Afro house took shape in the Nineties from Johannesburg scenes blending looped bass and vocal calls, a sound that lines up easy with trance’s rise-and-fall patterns, the ones that ran through Tiësto and Paul van Dyk‘s early catalogs. ‘Hutia‘ works that connection with Nzau‘s direct language giving Miles‘ outline a fixed point of view, the sort of move that keeps old electronic forms in play. Pull it up on streams—it’s built to sit in lineups that cut between decades.
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