Any follower of South Africa’s blooming music industry will know that gqom and amapiano are practically staple genres of our now hip hop centric scene. But word on the street is that there’s a new genre on the rise, and it’s being led by one woman in particular – Toya Delazy.
She’s best known for her pop-house hits “Love Is In The Air” and “Pump It On” (anyone who went to high school in the early 2010s will remember her mad catchy chorus lines playing at just about every social event), but more recently she’s decided to depart from her iconic pop sound to pursue what she has termed afrorave.
The main constituents of afrorave are techno and drum andbass, but speaking on the conception of her new sound, she tells me that this genre is about more than just rave music. “It’s an unapologetic African genre celebrating indigenous languages,” she says, continuing, “rave is at the core of this, but I think it’s more about that feeling of just letting go, letting the drums take you away. It’s about a spiritual heritage for me.”
We got a taste of it late last year with “Funani” – a sparse dance track overcome by minimal techno rhythms, dark basslines and an intense vocal hook. Fans were no doubt surprised by her left-turn, but it didn’t for one second pale in comparison to the pop-colourful Toya Delazy we had already come to love. In fact, it topped her old sound with strikingly bold experimentation. It was her arrival, her sound rebirth.
“I’ve always been a raver, a punk-goth girl,” she tells me, speaking on her recent sound progression. She relocated to London almost six years ago trying to crack the international market, but after realizing that it was a completely different ball game over there, she decided to re-evaluate her dance-pop persona.
“I looked at where I was in the world, as a Zulu woman,” she says, “and I thought, what do I have to share with my audience here that is unique, that’s special. My love for underground music, my stories – that’s what it was. So, I started rapping in isiZulu, and afrorave was born.”
Her new album Afrorave Vol. 1 comes out today, and if her pre-release singles “Tini” and “Resurrection” are anything to go by, this record certainly promises to excite. Both tracks are equally jarring, pulsating with feverish melodies and hard, metallic rhythms. In all honesty, this is the furthest we could be from the old Toya Delazy, but that’s exactly where she wants us.
“It took six years of hard work to finally realize who I wanted to be as an artist,” she says, adding, “I didn’t want to keep acting Toya Delazy, I wanted to be me. The pop image people had of me in their heads was too stringent. I needed to get my passion back, my creativity, and I think I finally found the freedom to do that on this record.”
I see it as a kind of return to her roots, an attempt to reacquaint listeners with their culture, and in redefining who she is as an artist, Toya Delazy has also found a space in her music to make real, positive change.
“These are songs of empowerment.” says Delazy. “They tell the stories of my people, they talk about the healing that needs to happen in our black communities, but I think most importantly, they’re incredibly vulnerable songs. Even if they may not sound that way.”
Written entirely in isiZulu, Delazy’s lyrics carry an immense social conscience that seems to be the second calling card of this genre, in addition to its overtones of restless dance, and they come to beautiful fruition on “Tini”.
The track speaks about mental health in the black community whilst sung through harmonic waves of ambient electronics, and opens up a space for important conversations to be had surrounding cultural experiences – experiences that become infinitely more relatable when sung in one’s mother tongue.
It’s something that has brought Delazy a lot closer to her listeners, and allowed her to reconnect with them in a meaningful way, admitting that “the music I was making before this album, the stuff like Due Drop, it didn’t feel like it belonged to my people, which was a very weird experience for me. I felt like a foreigner to them.”
Of course, no artform can be accessible to everyone, but Toya wants us to realize that greatness can come from home. gqom, amapiano, and now even afrorave – they don’t exist solely to be enjoyed. They exist to help listeners feel understood, to give them a place in the world where they belong, a place where they feel as though they have purpose. Writing with intuition, appreciating the power of genre – this is what it takes to make music that connects people, and Toya Delazy has done this, finding her most authentic self in the process.
Feature image courtesy of Mariannes Chua.
