Artist: Tyla
Album: Tyla
3/5
Available on all streaming platforms
From the quaint suburb of Edenvale, a rose has risen.
A star has shot up the charts in America with a brand of poppy amapiano.
Water consumed the world and broke records daily from Tyla being the only South African artist to chart on the Billboard Hot 100 in years to daily records on Spotify and of course, it secured her a Grammy Award before her debut release.
She rode the waves of Water for a whole year, performing at Hey Neighbour and even at a New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square.
She did all this while proudly flaunting her very East Joburg accent and dancing her out in every performance.
Tyla then remixed the song with a feature from Houston’s very own Travis Scott who at first sounded to be drowning in Water but a quirky reference to +27 being our country code won the hearts of some of Tyla’s Tygers.
They have shot a video for that and launched the album with that record along with a new single called Art.
Art is when things start getting a little formulaic. The metaphor she invokes is at best pre-pubescent and something we have all heard before somewhere. The arrangement also sounds very similar to the way she structured Water.
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The same can be said for Breathe Me, another loosely crafted metaphor and a chanty refrain to ensure this will become as much of an earworm as Water and the rather enjoyable Truth or Dare.
A pattern is established at this point, these songs are well within Tyla’s pocket of efficacy. Songs in that key allow her to emit both wispy vocals along with more resounding ones. The vocals on the hook sound stacked and layered to ensure this feeling which she resorts to regularly. It is a winning recipe but they have used it a bunch of times now. Can she take her talents in a new direction, a debut album is usually the perfect place to do that but she does not.
The intro to this album was painfully short-lived.
It features another local artist the world should pay attention to, Kelvin Momo who is highly underused on this record which is all of 41 seconds. It’s incredibly short but the exact kind of thing that was missing on this album.
Dusty unpolished kwaito-esque beats. South Africans respond to and prefer amapiano with darker elements to it, sweltering log drum sequences and fat bass.
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Blending pop and elements of amapiano is not a bad idea and Tyla has always been aiming at this if you consider one of her earlier hits Getting Late alongside her then primary collaborator producer and DJ, Kooldrink who is noticeably not on this debut album. The production credits also don’t seem to have many South Africans in the mix but hey.
Popular music is good as this means artists will make money from their efforts but selling a sound out as soon as this will surely cap its rise. Once things enter the echelons of pop, the art is easily replicated, diluted, and loses its potency. This is to me is watered-down amapiano making it palatable, it sounds a bit like what Taylor Swift is doing. Tyla had a rare opportunity to really bridge the gap and show off our local sounds but instead, she has one South African feature on this album.
She did well by wrangling Nigeria’s Tems for No. 1 and the fusion involved Afrobeats along with pop and the yanos but where’s the Scorpion Kings feature? Bra, was Uncle Waffles busy? Could you not have fetched Morda and give the world a crash course on three-step?
Black Coffee is a Grammy Winner, so is Zakes Bantwni. Maybe I'm naive but a track with all three of them doesn't seem like it would fail. But no, none of that on here.
Who even asked for the Gunna feature on Jump, trap is dusted.
This doesn't quite add up: two rappers on this album and only one amapiano act.
It’s been well over a decade of trap music and as that rose in popularity rappers resorted to duplicating the sounds of people like Lil Wayne in the early 2000s resulting in Gunna, Lil Baby, Future, and Don Toliver . . . let’s be real they all have exactly the same style.
Maybe Tyla is waiting to release a deluxe version as the singer and songwriter did prep around 130 songs to arrive at these 14.
People online have for the most part been showering Tyla with love and there are moments that we can be proud of like her efforts on the banging record Jump which is strewn with references to the city of Joburg and where she came up.
I just don’t think she repped the way I would have wanted. So far, there isn’t a single video from the album that was shot in South Africa.
This music is a taste of amapiano but nowhere near as unchained as the songs we enjoy here at home. There is a reason why Water was so well received overseas but was not necessarily the biggest song in SA last year.
This pop thing is a bit too Disney, Tyla’s product looks very well-funded and polished which throws me a bit. She seems to have been positioned as an African Ariana Grande.
We have a whole generation of world-class talents here and you used one for 30 seconds. Ironically the hardest 30 seconds of the entire tape.
I expected more. It isn’t terrible but it doesn’t push the needle or envelope in terms of moving the sound of amapiano forward beyond its recognition.
I also don’t feel the entire album is a timeless offering and I am almost certain I won’t be listening to this in three years because it’s cute but it isn’t a keeper.
