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Tems and Dave’s Collab on “Raindance” Conquered the UK Charts
This one was always going to be special.
Some collaborations make sense on paper. You see the names together, and you think, yes, that tracks. And then there are the ones that feel like they were written into the fabric of things long before either artist knew it was coming. In this blog you will discover how Tems and Dave’s collab is making Raindance conquer the UK charts.
When Dave dropped The Boy Who Played the Harp in October 2025, fans spotted Tems’ name on the tracklist, and the excitement was immediate. These are two of the most respected artists in their respective worlds. Dave is a South London rapper who has spent nearly a decade building a reputation for emotional precision and lyrical depth. Tems is a Lagos-born singer who, in a relatively short time, has become one of the most recognizable voices in global music. The idea of them sharing a song was compelling enough. What they actually delivered was something else entirely.
Afrobeats Global has been following this one closely from the day it dropped, and watching it climb from a fan favorite to the number one song in the UK has been one of the more satisfying stories we have covered in a while.
How These Two Artist Work Together
The first thing you notice about Raindance is that it does not feel like a Dave song with a feature added on top. It feels like something they built together from the inside out. That is harder to pull off than it sounds, and it is what separates a real collaboration from a guest appearance.
Dave comes in carefully, the way he always does. His verses move slowly from guarded to open, circling the idea of connection before fully committing to it. If you know his work, from Psychodrama through to We Are All Alone in This Together, you know he does not give his emotions away cheaply. On Raindance, he lets his guard down in a way that feels earned rather than performed. There is a line in the song about moving from barely talking to something much more honest, and that arc is exactly what his delivery traces over the course of the track.
Then Tems comes in, and the whole atmosphere shifts. Her vocal does not just add warmth to the song. It rebalances it. Where Dave is measured and introspective, she is open and grounding, singing about love as a kind of emotional shelter. Clash described her contribution as the perfect counterweight to his delivery, and that is exactly right. Together they create a slow, vulnerable exchange between two people finding rhythm under the same storm. The title Raindance captures that perfectly, even though the words never actually appear in the lyrics.
Sonically, the production sits in Afroswing territory but stripped back considerably. There are no unnecessary layers. The restraint is part of what makes it work. Pitchfork described it as a sweet, stripped-down take on an Afroswing love song, and that description is hard to improve on.
The Chart Story: Thirteen Weeks to Number One
Tems and Dave’s Raindance debuted at number five on the UK Singles Chart in October 2025, moving just under thirty-five thousand units in its first week. That is a strong debut by any measure, but what happened after that is what made the song special.
It did not spike and fade. It lived in the top fifteen for week after week, accumulating streams and sales through November and into December. Even when the annual wave of Christmas songs pushed it down to number 27, it bounced straight back. By the chart week ending 29 January 2026, Raindance had climbed all the way to number one. Thirteen weeks after release. That kind of patience from an audience is rare, and it says a great deal about how personally people were connecting with the track.
For Dave, it became his fourth UK number one single, putting him level with Dizzee Rascal for the most chart-topping singles by a UK rapper as lead artist. For Tems, it was her very first. The song also reached number ten on the Spotify Global chart, landed in the top forty in over thirteen countries, and passed one hundred million streams on Spotify, making it Tems’ thirteenth song to reach that milestone.
The UK response was not the product of a campaign. No dramatic rollout, no controversy, no viral stunt engineered for the occasion. A TikTok dance challenge in December helped sustain momentum through the Christmas slowdown, but beyond that, it was simply people returning to a song they loved and bringing other people with them. That is the best kind of chart success, and it tends to be the most durable.
If you have been keeping up with Afrobeats Global, you already know we have had our eye on Raindance since the album landed. We covered the initial trends, the Lagos music video, and the slow chart climb in real time. Moments like this are exactly what the platform exists to document.
Why Raindance Is Bigger Than a Chart Position
The numbers are impressive, but the real significance of Raindance sits underneath them. This song is a direct expression of a connection between the UK rap scene and the Afrobeats world that has been building for years and is now impossible to ignore.
Dave is British-Nigerian. He grew up in Streatham, South London, and has always carried both sides of his identity with clarity and pride. Tems is from Lagos, and over the past few years she has become one of the most important voices in the global Afrobeat conversation. When they come together on a track filmed on the beaches of Lagos, released through a British label, and climbing charts across Europe, that is not a coincidence. It is a natural meeting point of two scenes that have been influencing each other for a long time and are now fully in conversation.
Tems reaching number one in the UK in 2026 is not a small milestone. This is an African woman, working in a genre the mainstream industry spent years treating as peripheral, arriving at the top of one of the most competitive music markets in the world. It sits alongside Burna Boy’s Grammy, Wizkid’s Essence, and Tems’ own work with Future and Beyoncé as part of a larger story about what Afrobeats has become on the global stage.
For Dave, the song is proof that leaning into his Nigerian heritage is not a creative risk. It is a creative strength. In a moment when many artists are told to stay in their lane, he expanded his instead, and the audience met him there completely.
Tems and Dave’s Raindance is what a cultural moment sounds like when it does not announce itself loudly. It arrived quietly, settled into people’s lives over thirteen weeks, and by the time it reached number one, it felt less like a chart victory and more like an inevitability. That is the mark of a song that genuinely connected.
For anyone paying attention to how African music is reshaping the global sphere, this one belongs in the conversation, and there are more moments like it coming. The relationship between Lagos and London has never been closer, and the music coming out of that relationship has never been better.
Afrobeats continues to evolve, and some of the biggest sounds of 2026 are already shaping global charts. You can also explore our breakdown of the top 10 Afrobeats songs dominating charts April 2026 to see how the sound is moving right now.
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