The question at the centre of Songo Ananda’s new single, Why Wait?, arrived at a moment when the artist was confronting the distance between who she had been and who she was becoming. “I was holding back before I stepped into this opportunity, specifically within music,” she tells me. “And it was like, let’s rock.”
When Songo played my party, Poppers, four years ago, she cut one of the most enchanting figures to ever grace the fucked-up checkerboard floors at EVOL. It was shortly after — or maybe before, I can’t recall exactly — her debut EP Sof, a project which introduced Songo not just in sound, but as a multifaceted creative visionary. What made that set so memorable was that although I had booked her to DJ, she opened by singing one of Sof’s tracks live. Dressed in an ethereal white babydoll dress, she slinked across the club like a woodland nymph, at once transporting us into a collective fantasy of her own design. I knew then that we were witnessing something special: a bold, sometimes chaotic creative voice that refused to sit still — the sort of ambitious kick up the arse I had been waiting for Cape Town’s underground to receive for ages.
Why Wait? feels like a continuation of that moment, but with something more deliberate behind it. The first time I heard the song, I was left floored. The Songo I remember from that night was already reaching beyond the boundaries of what she was supposed to be doing. On Why Wait?, she’s evolved, beginning to understand what happens when she gives herself permission to not only follow her instincts, but refine them. She serves up one of the freshest-sounding South African pop tracks, a modern classic formula of earworm hooks and ultra-polished production.
The song arrived after she realised she had been holding herself back. At 27, Songo found herself confronting the strange feeling of beginning the career she had imagined for herself while simultaneously worrying that she had started too late. Why Wait? became the affirmation she needed to move past that hesitation. “I wanted those words to be playing in my brain. Like, why wait, actually? The time is now.”
The song is also a sonic manifestation of that shift. Songo’s music has always existed somewhere between things: her earlier work leaned into alternative pop, while her DJ practice pulled her towards drum and bass, edgy club music, and the fringes of the dance-floor. Why Wait? brings those influences together. “I wanted to make something grungy,” she explains. “But I also wanted to make it something more elevated.”
The track ties bass music, breakbeat, and alt-pop into a big, bright bubblegum bow, while left-field production choices and shimmering, cinematic synthesisers keep Why Wait? from losing its edge. “I wanted to create a song that would make it easy to go either fully pop or fully alternative, fully pop or fully rock, fully electronic music,” she says. “And I think that by using the synthesis of genre and mirroring all these different aspects, [I was] able to come to something that was very fresh.”
That sense of possibility was helped along by Songo’s first experience of properly collaborating with another producer. Working with Ross Lindsay became an intuitive exchange, bringing the vocabulary Songo had developed as a bedroom producer into the studio and allowing someone else to shape it alongside her. “It just kept on building more rapport, more trust, more keenness on each other’s ear,” she says.
More importantly, the process allowed her to let go of an idea she had previously held about how music needed to be made. “I needed to really divorce the idea that music had to be this very simple thing, and I could allow it to be more avant-garde,” she explains. “And I think by pulling together the skills of different producers and artists in the room, I was able to bring the best out of everyone sonically.”
But the most significant evolution happening around Why Wait? has little to do with genre. It is about Songo learning how to inhabit the person she has been imagining for years. “It was like this internal shift inside of myself in terms of how do I see myself in the world? What kind of thoughts do I want to share? What kind of value do I want to put in?” she says.
Songo describes this period as one of “embodiment” — of allowing the intensity, chaos, and fierceness that she once thought she had to suppress to become part of the work instead. “I thought that these were things that I’d had to cast aside in order to be accepted into the world,” she says. “But then through this experience, I’ve been able to be like — no. These are the things that make me who I am. They make me different.”
Songo has been constructing an entire world around this new chapter, drawing from mythology, symbolism and the idea of the artist as an archetype. She talks about Greek mythology, gods and goddesses, and the “fantasy” of being human, using those references to build an artist mythology that gives her space to experiment visually and sonically. “I think that often we shy away from symbolism as a thing,” she tells me. “But I’m a big fan of Greek mythology and the stories of the gods, and understanding creation and humanity.” It’s an extension of what I saw on the EVOL dancefloor: Songo doesn’t want to just make music; she wants to build a universe from it.
Why Wait? therefore feels like her first step into the next level of Songo Ananda, a second debut. She describes it as the clearest manifestation yet of the intention behind her career, and as an acknowledgement of the spiritual forces moving underneath it. “It is a healing device. It’s a healing mode. It’s a way in which we gather the human truth and gather stories and also tell history in terms of how it is we are meant to come forth and bring forth and cast our own lights in the world,” she says.
Four years ago, I watched Songo turn a nightclub into somewhere else entirely for a crowd of 300 club kids. Now, she’s building that somewhere else for herself. “I do want to be a pioneer for sound, I want to be a pioneer for the future of sound. I want to be a pioneer for music, not only in South Africa but the world,” she tells me. What she wants, ultimately, is the freedom to make something that gives another young artist permission to step fully into themselves. “I want people to know that they should choose their light first,” she says. “Don’t choose what society says you should.”
Well. Why wait, then?
Photography by Skyla Haley.
