Tyla

Tyla Seethal grew up in Johannesburg, in a household where American R&B played alongside South African house, where Amapiano was on the rise in the streets and streaming was changing what a young person in Gauteng could hear on any given afternoon. All of that is in her music. She did not pick one of those influences and build a brand around it. She kept all of them, let them sit together, and figured out what happened when they did.

What happened was “Water.” Released in 2023, the song moved with a slowness that felt deliberate and weightless at the same time, a quality borrowed from Amapiano’s low-slung groove but filtered through a pop sensibility that made it feel globally accessible without losing anything local. It became one of those songs that seemed to be everywhere for months, in clubs, in videos, at Coachella, in the ears of people who could not have found Johannesburg on a map but knew every word of the chorus anyway.

The Grammy she won for Best African Music Performance the following year confirmed what the streaming numbers had already said. But Tyla had been making music and building an audience long before that. She released her first material in 2019, worked through collaborations and singles, and developed a sound that borrowed from Afrobeats, R&B, and what she has called “African pop” without settling fully into any of those categories. Genre was always going to be a limited frame for what she was doing.

Her self-titled debut album arrived in 2024 and showed how wide her range actually was. The production shifted across tracks from polished pop to something earthier, the vocals ranged from controlled precision to something more emotionally open, and the whole thing held together because of a consistency of feeling rather than a consistency of style. She sounds like herself even when the music around her changes shape, which is a harder thing to achieve than it looks.

Now, with her new collaboration “She Did It Again” alongside Zara Larsson, Tyla is extending the international reach she built with “Water” while staying committed to the sonic territory she has staked out. Larsson’s presence signals a mainstream European pop market, but the song’s architecture remains Tyla’s, the rhythm, the movement, the way the vocal sits against the beat. She is not adapting to someone else’s world. She is expanding her own.

What makes Tyla interesting is that she is not trying to be the South African artist who broke through internationally. She is trying to make the best music she can make, and the breaking through is a consequence of that rather than the goal. That is an uncommon posture in an industry that rewards the performance of ambition as much as its results.

She is 23. She has a Grammy, a global profile, and a sound that is still developing into something nobody can fully predict yet. Pay attention to what she does with the next album, because the choices she makes then will say a great deal about where this all leads.