If you mistook the opening moments of “IS IT LOVE,” track one on Tyla’s sophomore effort, for a Rihanna song — you wouldn’t be tripping. It’s not much of a stretch. Rihanna is plausibly the blueprint for Tyla: a pop star from the Global South who broke into the Western mainstream without entirely abandoning where she came from. But to do that, Rihanna had to compromise. Music Of The Sun was unapologetically rooted in her Barbadian identity, but it was her pivot towards Western pop that shattered the “global artist” glass ceiling above her.
Tyla’s rise, however, arrives at a very different moment. African music is no longer a niche curio, yet Western audiences continue to see it as one, inventing the catch-all label of “Afrobeats” to essentially turn a continent into a country. Tyla managed to infiltrate the mainstream without being a Good Girl Gone Bad, but that comes with its own contradiction.
She’s celebrated as a global pop star while simultaneously being positioned outside the pop canon she clearly belongs to. The mainstream just devised a new category to keep her at arm’s length from her American and European peers. This is the paradox that Tyla attempts to address on the evocatively titled A*POP (that’s “A” as in Africa).
The premise is compelling. Rather than asking African genres to assimilate into Western pop, A*POP proposes the opposite: African music already IS pop. Unfortunately, the record rarely trusts this idea. Again and again, it returns to the polished Afrobeats template that has already proved commercially successful, blunting the radicalism of its own thesis. It’s hard not to recall Lady Gaga’s similarly titled ARTPOP, that divisive 2013 album that promised to “bring art into pop.” The problem there? Gaga was already doing that anyway. Like ARTPOP before it, A*POP mistakes a slogan for a thesis, and positions this at the forefront of the music.
2024’s Tyla was a stunning debut, translating the sound of South Africa’s underground into genuinely great mainstream pop with global appeal. A*POP expands its gaze beyond South Africa’s borders, exploring the intersections between pop and the continent’s wider musical histories. “IS IT LOVE” visits Ghanaian highlife, while “DOUBLE BIND” astutely traces the intersections between Angolan Kizomba and scuzzy ’90s R&B. The album even reaches further abroad, exploring sounds from the African diaspora: Dancehall on “THAT GIRL” (this is the closest we’ll ever get to R9, apparently), and Jungle on the striking “FEEL SOMETHING.”
The album’s weakest moments are its most commercial, the songs least interested in advancing A*POP’s central argument. “SHE DID IT AGAIN”, featuring Zara Larsson, “CHANEL” and “IS IT” are razor sharp pop in theory, but they retreat towards the familiar on a record that promises to push beyond that. Their killer hooks aren’t enough to disguise how interchangeable these songs are, leaving much of A*POP muddled and lacking distinct sonic direction.
Still, some flashes of brilliance hint at the album A*POP could have been. “I DON’T CARE” is a spiritual successor to Tyla’s best song, “Bliss.” The effervescent afro-house track splices the DNA of Zakes Bantwini’s “Osama” with anything by Drake circa-2022. The fusion of Jungle percussion with 3-step rhythms on “FEEL SOMETHING” is inspired, while “KISS” fuses Amapiano with bass-heavy UK House to produce a rare dance music entry to Tyla’s catalogue.
If A*POP is ultimately about visibility, and acknowledging the African pioneers who have long existed outside the Western mainstream, then its most glorious moment arrives fairly early. “Fairytale” sees Tyla revisit Liquideep’s beloved South African deep house classic, a song that occupies an almost sacred place in the cultural memory of her generation. Revisiting a song this beloved is always risky. Too often, artists mistake nostalgia for inspiration, leaving us with less “wow” and more “WTF?”
Tyla avoids this faux pas by giving us her at her most authentic. She treats the material with reverence. Rather than overwriting the original, she invites its creators to have a conversation. Ziyon and Tyla trade verses over production that reimagines “Fairytale” into something dreamier, more ethereal – a melodic house flutter that lingers like a memory.
For many of us, that’s exactly what this song is. And yes – that iconic arpeggio remains untouched. Liquideep don’t feature on this track, they share it. It’s still very much their song, and ultimately — the beating heart of A*POP. It’s also a moment that South Africans, and South Africans only, will understand. For a global pop star releasing on a major label to a world audience – this is iconic behaviour.
It’s the boldest swing Tyla takes here, and the one moment where A*POP fully realises its own thesis. Rather than insist on it, Tyla demonstrates that African music belongs in pop by introducing a global audience to one of South Africa’s defining pop records and its creators. It’s a tribute to and celebration of African pop history, using her global platform not to centre herself but to elevate the music that shaped her.
Had the rest of the album trusted that same instinct, this chapter of Tyla’s fairytale might have had a far more satisfying ending. Because if Rihanna’s breakthrough came from assimilation, Tyla’s will come from her strength to refuse it.
