Review Summary: Haibo!
Johannesburg native Tyla is accumulating accolades at a clip that'd make even the most agile springbok blush. The rapidity of her rise resulted in a Grammy™ award before she'd even released an album.
Tyla, released one month after the win, is a showcase of precocious maturity, proving that she has already come to grips with the life-altering force of fame. Songwriting highlight "Truth or Dare" addresses this on a personal level as she levels her gaze at an ex who presumably ghosted her before she went viral ten times over, then subsequently and mysteriously decided it might be a good idea to rekindle the flame. Tyla coolly administers the venom in the chorus by daring him to forget that he used to treat her just like anyone, and asks whether it's really true that he cares about her. This cleverly constructed moment is devoid of showy histrionics or unnecessary vitriol, striking instead with the pity of somebody that's above pettiness, and so she continues dancing her own dance with the help of some playful group vocals:
Are you playing[?] / Truth or Dare[?]. Fucking lekker stuff.
Even lekkerer is the palette of sounds that bring the beef to this braai. Afropiano turns out to be a winning genremeld with its house-adjacent tempos intermingling with a range of offbeat-obsessed percussion and log drum accents. It's subtle, subdued, and smooth in a way that a lot of contemporary pop ain't. Tyla's strong and flexible voice (many punters have mentioned a certain Barbadian popstar in association) sails above the gentle timbres of the instrumentals in whatever mode is required: diva, sultress, sadlass, or perpetrator of pop and hip-hop's attention-stealing dalliance of the century thus far.
Which is all most certainly well and almost entirely good, but
Tyla's 35-minute runtime does feel a bit like a brief spin on an exercycle that refuses to leave low gear, and net dopamine levels are limited. There are some flaccid attempts to shake up the experience. "Butterflies" drops the percussion and relies on nylon guitar arpeggios to carry a fairly airy and foot-dragging affair, but its recycled use of narrative (falling for an unsuitable suitor) is far better realised on the melody-laden "Safer" four tracks earlier. “On and On” is an amiable failure in its ostensible mission to represent partying all night given that, while it's a lovely tune, it sounds a hell of a lot more like staying in with your PJs on. It does little to alleviate the easy-listening fatigue that accrues mid-album. Perhaps the most frustrating mark that's missed is saved for last though: "To Last" hints at a transition to an out-and-out dance track as Tyla recounts her first heartbreak, building synth arpeggios and snappy snare sounds signalling -
finally! - a payoff, and then the song swiftly shuts down instead. If the album prior had showcased anything resembling an emotional peak, a bait-and-switch To Be Continued ending would've had some heft. Instead, the first and only suggestion of a breakout moment simply isn't capitalised on. Kak!
A couple of clunky concepts are also given undue attention. While Tyla's sultry delivery of the breathless CPR metaphor in "Breathe Me" manages to resuscitate what could have been a flatliner, "ART" receives no such saving grace in its performance. Tyla stretches the rhyme scheme in the chorus to literally spell out the song's conceit (
I'll be your piece [yes, or peace]
/ Your A-R-T), which serves as fertile ground for a few lyrical stinkers. Here's two:
1)
Fresh out the gallery / Can you handle me? / Handle me carefully
2)
Put me on the wall / Above the stairs
Really paints a picture, doesn't it? Nevertheless, there is plenty of playlist fodder to be plucked from
Tyla's trim confines; although a friend of mine that uses peer-to-peer file sharing software informs me that many peoples' Tyla directories solely contain the track "Water" owing to a TikTok dance challenge, and oboy are the socially mediated missing out! You could drop booty to most of these tracks without much trouble, and you damn well should!
Tyla brings a fresh aesthetic into the pop sphere, and even if its self-imposed confines tame the dynamics into a bit of a flat line, Tyla's self-assured personality and a generous handful of great singles carry it a long way. If it's a sign of things to come, I'm sure that just like the capital 'S' Springboks, the wins will just keep fucking coming.
