Their parents, who spoke Hausa,[4] moved there from Belgrade to escape the Yugoslav Wars after previously relocating from Nigeria in the early 1980s.
[4] Initially, Nyajo uploaded tracks to their SoundCloud account as "sxlute"[6] and began sharing music via Bandcamp in 2012.
[5] In a 2017 interview with Austrian Music Export, they stated that although it had got them "a lot of bookings and contacts at the beginning", they thought it was "pretty shit" and had "sworn never to do anything like that again".
[3] To escape the racism they were experiencing in Austria,[5] Nyajo moved to Brighton for university later in 2014,[1] where they studied music production and sound engineering.
[15] Shield included "Run Away With You", which featured No Rome, "Feels Like My Hands Are On Fire", which was co-produced by George Daniel, and "Peach" with Sammy Virji,[14] a producer who released a remix of Piri & Tommy's "On & On".
[18] The album featured contributions from Rina Sawayama, Karma Kid, Disclosure, Sam Gellaitry, なかむらみなみ [Wikidata], Empress Of, Léa Sen, Piri, and Leilah,[19] most of whom were friends of theirs.
[5] It required that at least one act on any lineup they were performing on should be from an underrepresented group approved by them, such as female, Black, queer, or genderqueer.
[22] Explaining themselves to Billboard in July 2024, they stated the following: I was playing a show in Newcastle in the north of England, and I got there and every DJ on the lineup was white and male.