Tyla: Music’s Untouchable It-Girl

Every month, OkayAfrica spotlights an exceptional African artist making an impact on African music and culture. From rising stars who are shaping new sounds to established artists driving culture forward, this series is our stage for celebrating incredible and ingenious African artistry.

“I’ve always wanted to be a pop star,” Tyla says over the phone from Portugal, where she performed at Afro Nation. Stardom felt very hard to reach, being from where she is from.

“Now that things are changing — the world is changing — I'm seeing how our [South African] music is so popular and infectious. Me being this pop star is such an exciting thing.” 

The stakes have been high since she won a Grammy Award for the global smash, “Water,” which introduced Tyla to the world and, in many ways, threatened to eclipse her artistic potential by pigeonholing her into the strictures of amapiano, or what people chose to call ‘popiano.’

However, the music Tyla’s given us so far has demonstrated immense range: “Push 2 Start,” “Jump” and “Dynamite” are solid dancehall cuts, dipped in the Caribbean sunshine, weaving a trans-Atlantic sonic map that connects the past to the present. While songs like “Mr. Media” and “Is It,” from 2025’s four-track project, WWP, are bare-bones pop music, optimized for maximal movement. 

Just three weeks before we had the conversation that became this article, she'd dipped her feet into Afro-house territory as a surprise guest at DJ Shimza's eight-week Shimza & Co. residency at Pacha Ibiza. Hers is a blockbuster life,  lived at the velocity of the pop machine — a schedule of festival mainstages, fashion houses, and studio sessions across three continents — yet on the phone she is unhurried and present, and importantly, still the girl from Johannesburg who used to post covers online.

“We have Tyla on the line,” says the voice on the other end of the Google Chat connection during the unusually warm Johannesburg afternoon that we converse. We exchange pleasantries, and off the bat get into what seems to be a particular pastime for her, eating. Underneath all the layers is a girl who loves home and takes a bit of it everywhere she goes.

“Sometimes I struggle to find food that I actually like, so I travel with as many South African sauces, spices, and seasonings as I can,” Tyla shares. 

In South Africa, her new album, A*POP, is national news. In the week that followed, people organized listening parties in their hometowns and tagged her record label, Sony, demanding ‘tickets’ to the album listening session. 

A*POP is a cultural artifact whose outsize impact can only be quantified in years to come, and Tyla a delightful glimpse into how great life can get when alignment is your middle name. The album, her follow-up to 2024's Grammy Award-winning TYLA, has generated great fanfare at home and abroad, where she criss-crosses between London, New York, Los Angeles, and Paris. 

“I've definitely expanded through the making of this album,” she says. “I really wanted to try everything that I've always wanted to try, to play with not only writers and producers, but also my voice. Seeing what else I could do and just taking it there. With this one, I just wanted to make something that I've never done.”

The Lover Girl

Album opener "Is It Love" is where the album's emotional stakes announce themselves. There's wonder to the lyrics: "is it love if you don't cry?" is a heart-wrenching prospect — love as a feeling intrinsically tied to pain, passion as a tributary that transports hurt. It's not all doom and gloom; in fact, "learn my body inside-out" consents to being pleasured. The vocal performance deserves a standing ovation — the notes she hits and sustains at the 2:22 mark will leave hairs standing and emotions heightened.

The lover girl is a recurring motif throughout the album. "Say now, I know that you miss me, but you play it down," she sings on "Right Now," half-accusation, half-invitation. "Say Now" itself is breathy and unhurried, a friends-with-benefits arrangement rendered in whispered close harmony — desire negotiated on her terms, with plausible deniability built into every line.

“[‘Right Now’] was such an exciting song to write because everyone really brought something to it. Around that time I was just feeling [like] that, and I love how we were all able to just make such a cool, fun song,” she shares.

The songwriting process is always different. Among the credited songwriters are Bibi Bourelly (Rihanna, Selena Gomez, Usher) and P2J (Beyoncé, Stormzy, Doja Cat), who elevate the entire process. 

“It literally depends on the room, the people, on whether someone sends me something that's done and I want to work on[it]. I always move with what excites me. I only work on things that make me feel something the first time I hear it. If it doesn't, then I don't force it,” she says.

Tyla fluctuates between the gone girl and the audacious, I-can't-give-two-fucks alter ego that emerges on songs like "Chanel" — "self-made bitch, yeah, ain't upgrade me / waistline crazy, mandem chase me" — a lyric that is the sonic equivalent of throwing money in the air and not caring where it lands. Or "That Girl," where excess is the entire point: "who's that girl about to make a purchase / I'm talking diamonds, not just purses." 

These two registers — the wounded romantic and the untouchable it-girl — are not contradictions so much as the twin engines of contemporary pop stardom, and Tyla toggles between them with the ease of someone who understands that her audience is invested in the persona.

“First time I heard [“That Girl”], I was like, that's cool. But then I was listening to things while we were in London — we were having a little [kickback] together in the studio — and as people were vibing, they played it a bit more, and I was like, wait! We played it a few times, and I knew, now this has something in it. And then I started working on it,” she says.

The question for a pop star emerging from the Global South — with the attendant complexities that post-apartheid South Africa inherits, and the scars that it bears — was always going to be how she would infuse the country's various sounds and scenes into the global pop template. "Crazy Of Me," with MaWhoo, is commercial house music, the type she would've grown up hearing. The log drum is incidental, an attempt to update the formula. But what might go unsaid is the chant towards the end: "yebo, yebo, yebo," goes the chorus — a distinctive party chant, the kind that erupts when someone's breaking it down in the dance cipher. 

The song carries her small corner of Johannesburg and lends it extra muscle, so that by the time "I Don't Care," with Babalwa M, arrives, we've been primed for the modality with which the multicultural city operates. These two songs are preceded by "Chanel," which functions as the hinge between the album's global-facing ambitions and its home-turf allegiances: proof that she can carry the swagger of international pop while keeping the low-end warmth of the sound that raised her.

Earlier in the album, nestled between the decadent bounce of “Is It” and the slow jam that is “Double Blind,” “Fairytale” offers South African people a window into the past, a throwback to rosier times. The memory of first hearing the song is vivid for her. 

The Girl With Big Plans

“I was with my family. We were going to Durban, so we were taking that bus, the 5 AM bus from Park Station. And now I must go on this bus, with so many people. Someone has a chicken in a crate. My aunt is there; she gets in a fight with someone. And it's just a lot is happening. But at the same time I have earphones on, and I'm listening to 'Fairytale.' I can see that scene, and I can also remember the feeling I had hearing it for the first time, just playing it over and over again with my cousins, all trying to squash in, trying to lay down. That memory is a cool memory for me; it made me fall in love with the song even more,” Tyla says. 

“So I knew I wanted to do this for the longest time — like, the longest time. And for years now I've been mentioning it to my team. Then I saw something on Instagram, and I was like, oh, Liquideep are back together, what are the odds? What are the odds I'd see this right now, in South Africa, trying to finish my album? So then I was like, guys, let's find a way to get them to come through. And they came to the Cradle [of Mankind, where the album was completed, located 50 kilometers outside of Johannesburg]. We met, and he rerecorded his part, actually, and he added some new ad-libs. We made it into a duet, because I really feel like it's cute; it makes me feel like it's a wedding song. It's such a nice pop song. I was excited to do it.”

Liquideep have since spoken about that moment in an interview, with Ziyon stating, “She [talked] about how she feels the song is a classic, and how she’s grown up on the music — it was played in the house. Me, I’m there just, my head is exploding. She doesn’t know, but — I’m trying to stay present, not talk myself out of the room. I told [Ryzor, DJ/producer] I was like, there’s not gonna be any imposter syndrome in this. They’re calling us because we’re supposed to be here. Let’s stay present, as much as we can.”

The Girl With A Strong Sense of Identity

Like clockwork, whenever Tyla does an extensive press run, the conversation quickly shifts away from the music and toward her identity. This time it began with a clip from Ebro's Apple Music Radio interview; the subject was broached yet again. Graciously, and for the umpteenth time, she explained herself, emphasizing her dual identity as Coloured and Black — what is called Biko Black in South Africa, after the Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko's expanded definition of Blackness, one that sought to include Indians and Coloureds, the other groups marginalized under apartheid.

Back home, she is held, and the love is overflowing, even within the industry. Shekhinah "woke her neighbors up with it," and Zoë Modiga loved the sonic direction, declaring it  "delicious, scrumptious work." 

"There's so much I still want to do. The world is so big, and there's so much that I want to touch while I'm here. Once I have this opportunity, I'm going to do whatever. That inspires me, knowing that there's just so much left to do. It's crazy that we're still breaking records of, like, 'the first African that.' It's still fresh, and I just feel like it's going to be so much bigger as the years go by. So who knows what's going to be the next thing I do, right?" says Tyla.

As for how it'll all be remembered when it's said and done, she doesn't give it much thought. "I don't like thinking about [legacy], to be honest. I don't know what it's going to be. I will never know what that is going to be," she says.

But the young girl who tweeted, in 2021, that she wanted the biggest pop star in the world to be South African is currently living her dream.

"My goal was to be an African pop star, because I never felt like I saw that being done, the way that other pop stars have been made. That's one of the goals I've wanted for myself, because [I] never had that specific pop star to look at. My goal was to be that example."