Tkay maidza
RAPPER AND SINGER TKAY MAIDZA IS FINALLY DOING EXACTLY WHAT SHE WANTS.
Tkay Maidza has been on the airwaves for a solid eight years, but in many ways, she feels like she’s reintroducing herself to the world. “It’s almost like I’m starting again,” she says of her EP trilogy Last
Year Was Weird (the final instalment is due for release in the coming months). “I felt like I was always trying to convince people of my sound, so when I saw the reception for Last Year Was Weird, Vol.2, it felt liberating. The feedback just solidified that I was doing what I was supposed to do.”
Born Takudzwa Victoria Rosa Maidza in Zimbabwe, Tkay moved to Perth with her family when she was five years old. Her parents worked in mining and shifted the family from Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, to Whyalla, South Australia, before finally settling in Adelaide so 14-year-old Tkay could pursue a budding tennis career. Music, however, won out in the end, and by the time she was 17, Tkay was Australia’s newest rapper/singer–songwriter sensation. She recorded her debut single “Brontosaurus” while in the artist development program at Adelaide’s Northern Sound System. Almost immediately, industry folks flocked to her energetic meld of hip-hop and EDM. “I had so many options and was shopping around to so many different record labels that I was like, ‘Why wouldn’t it go well?’” The following years were a whirlwind of round-the-world festival shows and high-profile collaborations. All the while, Tkay was still figuring out her sound. When her electro-pop album TKAY dropped in 2016, the 20-year-old descended into a full-blown identity crisis – she wanted to push the envelope, not get stuck making sugary dance hits. “I took a break, went home to Adelaide, and just reconnected with who I was before I started touring and stuff,” she remembers. “I did Bikram yoga four times a week until I reached the stillness I needed, could identify when I was anxious, and just felt everything going through my body.” Although she was still flying back and forth to LA to do sessions with producer Dan Farber, taking somewhat of a step back was clarifying. She hired a new management team, surrounded herself with different collaborators and began crafting a path forward. She was due to hand in another album but, feeling unready, negotiated a three-ep deal instead.
The space to experiment and refine her vision was crucial.
For 2018’s Last Year Was Weird, Vol.1 (the pre-pandemic title references her creative breakdown), Tkay felt confident enough to push her eclectic, genre-hopping vision. She revisited the soul music she grew up listening to, and found a slower, more mellow groove – evidenced on tracks like “White Rose” – while still going hard on her signature rap tracks and catchy pop melodies. When she released Last Year Was Weird, Vol.2 in 2020, her multi-faceted sound was gaining traction. “When I first started releasing music, it was always like, ‘Oh, this is great, but what is it?’” she says. “I didn’t really fit in anywhere – people were like, ‘This is a rap track,’ or ‘This is a pop track.’ My mistake was that I didn’t do anything twice, but I think I’ve found the parameters of my sound now. There’s a thread running through.” If she ever feels lost, she goes back to the moodboard she made in 2017. The document, which she reads through during our interview, contains a mish-mash of goals (work with Timbaland, get an LED castle for a live show), inspiration (photos of soothing waterfalls) and descriptions of her sonic and visual identity. “There’s a note to embrace the feeling of being a curator instead of trying to box myself in,” she says. “Like, why not just create a mood? I want to put people on a ride.”
For Tkay, powerful, high-concept videos are all part of that experience. Even when COVID restrictions threw a spanner in the works, she nabbed a green screen and filmed the ’70s-glam “Don’t Call Again” in her bedroom. Since then, she’s pulled out all the stops for songs like “Kim”, “You Sad” and “Shook”, paying tribute to the wacky, futuristic aesthetics of Missy Elliott and Lil’ Kim. “I grew up watching music videos on TV every Saturday morning,” she says, citing heavy-hitters like Rihanna, Christina Aguilera, Outkast and Busta Rhymes as her favourites. “I would hear a song and eightyear-old me could imagine this whole music video where I would fall off a cliff and start flying. I always had the imagination to put the visuals to the music.”
Funnily enough, it was tennis that put Tkay on the musical path. She played competitively for eight years before reaching breaking point. “I would tank a lot of matches,” she explains. “I didn’t realise until six months ago that it was due to anxiety; I just didn’t want to be there.” Tennis taught her independence and accountability from a young age, but it also made her long for an escape. “I liked music because I could disappear into my own world. You can control your path more because you’re not playing games with someone else – it’s just you.” Tkay’s ultimate ambition is to keep that feeling: to keep making music to please herself. “But in a way where I’m not chasing anything anymore or worrying about bills,” she says with a laugh. “In 10 years, I’ll hopefully be in a mansion in Malibu.”