Following amapiano beats with your body is like watching a streetcorner shell game, or playing tennis with a rogue ball launcher — more surprising, sexy, and fun than standard 4/4 club bangers. South Africa’s signature groove for roughly a decade, the Soweto-bred slowed-down house music hybrid swiftly went pan-African because Afrobeat-niks, in Nigeria and elsewhere, know rhythm-magic when they hear it. With the long-awaited debut by 22-year old Johannesburg native Tyla Laura Seethal, the music is poised to globalize like never before. Bring it on.
Straight out of the gate (see her 2019 single “Getting Late”), Tyla was draping her breathily iridescent voice over amapiano’s trademark thunk-thunk log drum beats, as opposed to darting between them; she stretched her vowels and smoothed her consonants. Rihanna’s a vocal touchstone, for sure, and the overall effect often suggests an amapiano Sade, at least in vibe. Tyla’s a smooth operator.
The pillow talk is most potent when other elements help heat things up. Cue the frequent, energizing appearances by stacked vocal choirs, often echoing the choral call-and-response of old-school Afrobeat and Afropop. Tyla’s 2023 breakout, “Water” — an international hit that earned her the first-ever Best African Music Performance Grammy — demonstrates the balancing act beautifully: Tyla flexing regional slang (“haibo!” “asambe!”) between come-ons, with and without backing singers, over a groove apparently designed for gently rocking in couture without spilling your $20 cocktail on it. (The song appears twice here, in original form and a dubbier one with an uneventful Travis Scott cameo.)
“Water” was undeniable, but what’s more captivating here are the songs that feel less designer-hotel happy hour and more after-hours. “Truth or Dare” pushes the log drum beats out front, while the stacked vocal chorus achieves lift off. Ditto “No. 1,” Tyla’s team up with Afrobeat queen Tems. Other collabs are even better. On “Jump,” Tyla is suddenly spitting dancehall bars (“from Jozi to Ibiza”) and echoing log drum hits with the single-syllable chorus, alongside airhorn blasts and cameos by Gunna and Skillenbeng. “On Your Body” has her mixing it up nicely with Becky G over Latin-tinged syncopation.
Elsewhere, the record coasts safely on its vibes, lovely though they are. On “Priorities,” Tyla sings figuratively about spreading herself thin while her delivery demonstrates it over ghostly highlife guitar. It illustrates the perpetual challenge of turning dance music euphoria into pop euphoria — one plenty of young artists (see Nia Archives, Pink Pantheress, etc.) seem to be engaging with fruitfully post-pandemic, after the months we all spent lockdown-clubbing in our living rooms. Tyla’s debut, sure to be on repeat at better houseparties this year, shows she’s up to the challenge; amapiano probably couldn’t ask for a more effective ambassador.
