With her first song on social media in 2019 and her first Grammy win in the best African Music Performance category four years later, Tyla has become the new face of African pop.
For many listeners, Tyla's 2023 hit song "Water" was their first taste of the sound of amapiano, which is a new musical movement that started in the towns of South Africa in the 2010s. Roughly translated from Zulu to mean "the pianos" or "piano people," amapiano is a mix-up of a few different types of music: jazz, deep house, kwaito and log drum percussives. "Amapiano is the mainstream music of South Africa's party scene," says Moma, a Sudanese-American DJ. "And it has become a lifestyle there."
Moma first heard amapiano in 2016 when he hopped in a taxi in South Africa. He tipped his driver $50 to let him download the music and took the sounds back to the US. As the music started to move around America, Tyla was perfecting her own version of it back home in South Africa.
She started singing on TikTok and dropped her first song, "Getting Late" in 2019, to show her parents that she was serious about pursuing a career in music after high school. Based on the track, they agreed to give her one year to make it happen.
It took a few months for Tyla and her team to shoot the video for "Getting Late", with no backing, no budget. But when they finally uploaded it to TikTok in early 2021, labels noticed.
In the video, Tyla's taken the building blocks of amapiano and added elements of pop made by stars like Rihanna (to whom critics and fans are now comparing her) and Justin Bieber. Her signature sound has been called "pop-iano".
After publishing "Water" in July 2023 and noticing it had become a piece of trending audio on the app, Tyla and her team created a dance challenge in August. Tyla's performance during the competition really made a____splash. "It introduced me to a wider audience than I had ever imagined," Tyla says. "It has positively changed my life."
