We’ve said it before but it bears repeating. The globalisation of music culture, from ultra mainstream to underground, in the past decade has been a bigger revolution, affecting more people, than punk or acid house ever were. Case in point is the rise of South African dance music, in particular the slow and sensuous amapiano sound which exploded worldwide in 2020 as millions stuck inside in COVID lockdown simultaneously discovered its mood-lifting properties via online DJ sets. It got adopted by stars from Beyoncé and Drake down, created huge DJ careers, and has generated one bona fide international star in the form of Tyla Laura Seethal.
Tyla is a carefully constructed star – she’d already been working with US major labels before her big breakthrough, and her first ever public live performance was at Milan Fashion week – but even so the explosion of her 2023 song “Water” must have shocked everyone involved. Now with streams in the billions, it set her up for the big time, and three years later she's a US red carpet staple and on album number two she’s consolidating this well. This record is an excellently constructed voyage around the modern Black Atlantic with a mix of US, Nigerian and South African producers joining the dots through R&B, dancehall, Afrobeats and, of course, amapiano.
The big win, as on her eponymous debut, is that this is soundsystem music. It’s modernist, spacious, and it’s got all the strange zaps and pings and tactile percussion sounds of that era in the mid-00s when dancehall and Neptunes / Timbaland style avant-R&B collided, plus the distinctive digital “log drum” clonks and vast sub-bass that made amapiano a defining sound of this decade. The thing is, though, that though it’s a coherent album with Tyla’s voice inhabiting these spaces expertly, the current outpouring of incredible music from her homeland eclipses it. Just pick any random playlist of recent ampiano hits (and its offspring, “three step”) and you’ll hear dozens of songs with this level of sonic innovation that are bigger, lusher, more imaginative and just better songs. So while it’s great to hear a pop album that sounds like this, the real revolution is still happening elsewhere.
Listen to "Crazy of Me":
