Rooted in South African electronic styles such as kwaito, amapiano and gqom, the music of Moonchild Sanelly also shows a rich in awareness of US and European hip hop and pop.
Initially a product of Durban’s poetry scene, Sanelly, born Sanelisiwe Twisha, spent years building a reputation there and in Johannesburg, before coming to wider attention when Beyoncé featured her on her Lion King soundtrack. She signed to the forward-thinking Transgressive label in 2020, and her second album for them, her third in total, bounces with her trademark sex-positivity and booty-shaking beats’n’bass.
There are slowies, such as “Falling” and “Mntanami”, the latter an electro-chorale mourning bad parenting, and there are straightforward catchy M.I.A.-style bangers such as the supremely more-ish “To Kill a Single Girl (Tequila)”, an ode to finding the right man and drowning confusions in booze. Most of the album is chocka with contagious femme-powered, on-the-nightclub-podium dance-offs.
The lyrics are mostly in English, but occasionally intercut with Sanelly’s native Xhosa tongue. They don’t mess about. “If I had a big, big booty/I’d fuck up the world/Oh, I do, and I already am!” she announces on the whopping ass-fest “Big Booty”, while on “Do My Dance” she lays it out for the fellas, “I don’t want no head in my house/I just want it in between my legs and between my thighs.” Singing and rapping, she sassily bridges pop and tougher Afro-tronic sounds.
“For fans of” comparatives would include Die Antwoord, Kelis’s ‘Milkshake’, Buraka Som Sistema, Beyoncé’s “Run the World (Girls)”, Santigold and early Nicki Minaj. Reading that list back, what’s not to like? Almost everything on Full Moon hits home. It’s no contemplative home listening affair, though, more one to play while driving fast, leaping around a room, or cherry-picking tracks to set a dancefloor alight. With her wild hair, outrageous costumes and free-bodied attitude, as well as these songs, it would be righteous if 2025 was Moonchild Sanelly’s year.
Below: watch the video for "To Kill a Girl (Tequila)" by Moonchild Sanelly
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