“Girl, I can’t get into it. It tastes like the earth,” Tyla says in her rhythmic South African dialect. We’re on the topic of matcha, the ancient green tea powder that’s been as symbolic of 2025 as Labubus, Dubai chocolate, ChatGPT therapy and, in fact, Tyla herself. The 23-year-old singer has become a household name due to her infectious fusion of pop and homegrown South African genres like amapiano, gqom, and Bacardi, while creating viral moves we’d probably all replicate if our waists would cooperate.
Following her 2024 self-titled debut album, which accompanied her Grammy award for best African musical performance for the single “Water,” the artist returned in July 2025 to break her own streaming record when she released “Is It,” which racked up almost 1.3 million listens in the first day. The four-track WWP (which stands for “We Wanna Party”) EP has surpassed 100 million streams on Spotify, topping the UK Afrobeats chart. This year she lit up the stage at Coachella in April and at London’s All Points East in August, and now she’s preparing to tour Asia. The world waits to see what’s next. “There’s no right way to do anything creative,” she says with an ambition that shows this is just the beginning. “It’s limitless.”
Her childhood in South Africa was training for this moment, when she’s gaining global notoriety. “Yo, ever since I could walk, I loved to dance, I loved to perform,” Tyla says over Zoom from New York. Her aunt was a dancer and taught her to belly dance, and at school she would channel all the influences around her—music videos, trending dances spreading through the country—and put on a show with friends for other students. “I don’t think I’m the best dancer. It doesn’t always look like the reference, but it will be a Tyla version of it.”
South Africa also gave her built-in resilience and drive. “I feel like I’ve experienced a thousand lives. Every day we were in the grass, in the streets. We would take clothes and sell them on the road and then go buy sweets. We would scam my neighbours into giving us money so we can have money for school. Me and my cousins would always get up to mischief,” she says. She describes her parents as “protective” but rejects the idea that she could be considered “sheltered.”