‘It’s sunny, with music bumping, and everyone in ripped clothing’: how Tyla set a new pop mood
Tyla may have 4.3 million followers on Instagram (called the Tygers), but she isn’t yet used to the equivalent real-world level of fame. For instance, she was recently approached by TikTok troll Harry Daniels. “There’s this guy that finds celebrities and sings to them,” she explains. “He sang Water” – her breakthrough single – “and poured water on his head.”
She laughs down the phone from Los Angeles, where she is promoting her self-titled debut album, which is out today. At 22, Tyla has already won a Grammy for Water (it netted best African music performance, a new category), and has performed it on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show, while the song charted in more than 30 countries. This level of cut-through isn’t common for South African musicians, and Tyla knows that she is blazing a trail for the country’s music scene. “More people are starting to know about South Africa now,” she says. “They want to hear me say ‘Yoh!’ and they love the dancing.”
Water fused R&B, pop and amapiano – a South African genre forged from house, kwaito, Zulu rhythmic traditions and touches of jazz. The song’s midriff-undulating choreography inspired countless dance challenges on TikTok and launched Tyla into the pop stratosphere. When it hit the US charts (reaching No 7), she became the first South African solo musician on the Billboard Hot 100 in 55 years. “With amapiano, this is the first time we have a genre attached to South Africa that is now global,” she says. “It’s such a beautiful thing because it’s beneficial towards the creators but also the nation as a whole.”
Few other young pop stars have to think about carrying the musical flag for an entire country, but South Africa is having a moment. Though amapiano has taken a good 10 years to emerge on the world stage, stars including Drake have professed themselves fans – he has worked with amapiano producers such as Kabza De Small and Black Coffee. Tyla has found herself in the vanguard of a whole scene of young, thrilling experimental electronic musicians.
She was born Tyla Laura Seethal in Johannesburg in 2002, and grew up listening to Aaliyah, Rihanna and Adele – she loved to belt out Someone Like You. Determined to be a singer, Tyla started posting videos of herself warbling online. “I really wanted to go hard,” she says. “I would try to post wherever I could, every singing app, every competition app, every social media app.”
In the thick of this digital activity, Tyla managed to produce a debut single called Getting Late, which was released in 2019, when she was just out of high school. The song’s “popiano” energy – a term she has coined to describe her hybrid sound – earned her a global deal with Epic records. After scattered singles and collaborations, she teamed up with veteran US hitmaker Tricky Stewart (who has worked with the likes of Beyoncé and Britney Spears) and the pair came up with Water, which was released last July and reached No 4 in the UK.
“I just wanted to bring people into the Tyla world,” she says of the song’s creation. “It’s sunny, with music bumping, and everyone in ripped clothing.” Tyla advanced this mood, first with a remix of Water that featured rapper Travis Scott, and then with the followup single On and On, a warm R&B-inflected floorfiller on which she advises: “Let’s take it back in time/ Party like it’s ’95”.
Making her debut album took two years and a handful of other pop stars – it features Nigeria’s Tems, rappers Gunna and Skillibeng and singer Becky G. “I grew and learned a lot,” Tyla says, “and I feel like I’ve opened up more. All of this is very new: seeing America, seeing Europe, working with all these different people.” She sounds an uncharacteristic note of doubt. “Even if it sounds terrible, cool, at least I tried and I know now.”
Fortunately, the album is stacked with sure-fire future hits, though Tyla will have to wait a while before she takes them out on the road. She announced in early March that her forthcoming world tour dates would need to be rescheduled due to an undisclosed injury – something she won’t go into detail about, beyond saying that she’s “not ready for that type of strain on my body.” She is adamant that her performance needs to include dance – “it goes hand in hand with the music that I make, with African music. But at the same time, this injury is kind of an opportunity for me to explore and find other ways to perform.”
Despite that hurdle, Tyla seems to be enjoying her role as standard-bearer for South Africa’s new sound. “This is very much the beginning of the journey,” she says. “We are now living what we’ve been speaking about for years. I’m just excited for everything else that’s to come.”
• Tyla is out now
combustion engines.
However, the analysis (which did not carry out real-world tests) found that any extra wear is “overwhelmingly caused by large vehicles – buses, heavy goods vehicles”. Road wear from cars and motorcycles is “so low that this immaterial”, they said.
On to bridges. Colin Walker, the head of transport at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit thinktank, said in the UK there are very few roads or bridges with weight limits below 7.5 tonnes. (Anything heavier than 3.5 tonnes needs a lorry licence in the UK, for younger drivers at least.)
Engineers talk about “factors of safety” when designing structures. Take the maximum design load, and then build the structure to take much more stress so there is some breathing room. Steelwork in bridges is typically made with a factor of safety of between five and seven times expected load, giving them an ample margin for 300 extra kilograms.
National Highways, which runs the UK’s motorways and A roads, is not concerned. A spokesperson said: “Our bridges are designed to support 44tonne heavy goods vehicles, so we have no concerns over the increased weight of much lighter EV cars.”
Any caveats?
Obviously, there are limits. The increase in size could theoretically cause problems for some of the oldest car parks, according to Kelvin Reynolds, the chief technical services officer at the British Parking Association.
He said car parks built within the last decade or so would not have any problems because they were built with heavy SUVs in mind but “older car parks may present some initial risks that need to be addressed – not that can’t be addressed but that need to be addressed”.
There are options for multistorey car park owners. They could undertake works to strengthen their buildings – although this could be tricky and costly. Or they could cut the number of cars allowed on each floor. That could result in lost profits, even if for many car parks the losses would probably be minimal.
“The transition is going to be the challenge,” Reynolds said. He advised regular surveys by car park owners to make sure their buildings were up to scratch.
However, in the longer term, the assumption that electric cars will always be heavier is also open to question. Auke Hoekstra, an energy transition researcher at the Eindhoven University of Technology, estimates that batteries are cramming twice as much energy into the same weight every decade. If that continues, the weight problem will disappear before it has started.
T&E’s Mathieu said governments should incentivise smaller cars through policies such as taxes and parking charges. That would have benefits far beyond road wear: it would use fewer resources, limit carbon emissions, and make car park scrapes less likely.
“It is not inevitable that EVs are much heavier” than internal combustion engine cars, Mathieu said. “We can and should shift from [internal combustion engines] to EVs, while at the same time reversing the SUV trend.”
The verdict
Extra weight from electric cars could cause some problems at the margins, and in the short-term. However, most EV drivers are unlikely to ever experience problems directly.
Some car park owners may be affected, and if electric trucks are heavier when they become widespread that could add to road maintenance costs.
But almost all of the direct costs will be borne by infrastructure maintenance budgets. The ECIU’s Walker said concerns about extra weight for EVs were simply “massively overstated”. However, he added that carmakers do have a responsibility to produce smaller electric cars, after years of focusing on the most profitable SUVs.
The extra weight of electric cars is not likely to accelerate the destruction of roads, bridges and car parks. Weight concerns threaten to be a distraction from the ultimate prize: cutting carbon emissions to net zero.