Tayc

Marseille, a theatre training, and a move north

He was born Julien Franck Bouadjie Monono Kamgang in Marseille on 2 May 1996, to Cameroonian parents. He studied theatre and dance before relocating to Paris in 2012 to pursue music, and the stagecraft side of that training has stayed visible in how he presents himself. He has named Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, Ne-Yo and Joe among his reference points, and calls himself a very big Michael Jackson fan without much qualification.

The early catalogue arrived as mixtapes: Alchemy, ten tracks, on 30 May 2017, then H.E.L.I.O.S on 27 July 2018. He signed to H24, the label set up by Barack Adama of Sexion d'Assaut, working through Universal Music France. Nyxia followed in February 2019 and was then reissued in three volumes through to December 2019, with Tome II pushing furthest into his Cameroonian material. He headlined the Trianon in Paris on 19 October 2019, which at that point was the ceiling.

The hometown attachment has not faded. Speaking to Maritima this year, he recalled growing up convinced he would never set foot inside Marseille's Dôme, and described filling it as a performer as a consecration for a local boy — and said he wants to do it more than once.

Fleur froide, and a word he invented

Fleur froide, released on 4 December 2020, is the record that changed the scale of his career. The single "N'y pense plus" reached number 10 in France, but the one that broke out was "Le temps", released on 26 February 2021: number one in France, number seven in Wallonia, number ten in Switzerland, certified diamond as a single, and still seventh on the French year-end singles chart for 2021. The parent album was certified diamond on sales past 600,000 and was reworked the following year as Fleur froide – Second état: la cristallisation.

The label he put on the sound is afrolove, or afrolov' — R&B songwriting and vocal phrasing laid over Afrobeats and Afropop rhythm, with the subject matter almost always relationships. It gave him a lane that was neither French rap nor imported American R&B, and the French press now routinely introduces him as the figure who opened it.

The Dadju years

Between 2023 and 2025 much of his public output was shared. The EP Room 96 came in 2023, with "Room 69" reaching number four in France. Then came Héritage, the joint album with Dadju released on 16 February 2024, which went to number one in France; its single "I Love You" peaked at number two in France and number 11 in Belgium.

The live operation scaled with it. The pair sold out the Accor Arena on 15 February 2024, then added six nights at La Seine Musicale across May and June that year, and kept the Héritage touring running into 2025 across more than thirty shows. For a singer whose solo headline high-water mark had been the Trianon five years earlier, the partnership supplied arena reps.

Joÿa: six years, 69 minutes, and a number two

The second solo album was announced on 7 November 2025, in the video for "Il s'appellait Tayc", in the same moment he was confirmed as a coach on the fifteenth season of The Voice – La plus belle voix. Joÿa landed on 15 May 2026 through H24 Music and Play Two, running 69 minutes and 34 seconds, with recording dates stretching from 2020 to February 2026.

The title comes from a story he heard in Cameroon about someone who had been through the worst and had not lost their joy. He frames the record as resilience rather than celebration: joy, he told Maritima, is a treasure that has to be looked after, and every human story is made of scars. Musically it widens out from afrolove into gospel, blues, jazz and soul textures, with features from Aya Nakamura, Masego, Lara Fabian and RnBoi. The lead single "Girlfriend", out in April 2026, is built on a sample of Michael Jackson's "You Rock My World"; "Réanymé" with Anyme023 followed in June. Both singles were certified gold in France.

Reviews treated it as a refinement rather than a rupture — Street'n'Sports read it as less noise and more introspection, and as a deliberate move away from being heard only as a lover. The album peaked at number two in France, number 17 in Wallonia and number 19 in Switzerland. His coaching stint, he has said, pushed him into repertoire he would not otherwise have touched.

Saying the quiet part

On 6 October 2026, in a filmed conversation with the streamer and artist Ibepds for an Amazon Music session, he addressed the commercial result directly. Joÿa entered the French chart on roughly 9,000 copies in its first week. "When you enter at 9,000 sales on an album like Joÿa, when you've put everything into it, you're disappointed," he said, adding that he would admit he expected more, while calling 9,000 honourable in the current market.

He also widened it beyond himself, pointing out that big successes have become hard to manufacture and that even established acts are struggling. It is an unusually plain thing for a major-label artist to say five months after release, and it reframes what the 2027 touring block is for: the album charted high and sold modestly, so the room is where the money and the proof now are.

Where the touring stands

The current cycle started on the album's own terms rather than with a conventional tour. The two Paris shows at La Seine Musicale on 15 and 16 May 2026 were staged as a titled piece, JOŸA, La Naissance, running two and a half hours with an interval, priced from €39 to €89, with the second night added on demand. He also played France 2's Fête de la Musique broadcast from the Roman theatre at Orange on 20 June 2026.

Since October he has been working the Africa Tour 2026: Mauritius on 8 October, Casablanca on 10 October, Abidjan on 11 October, with a December leg routed through N'Djamena, Yaoundé, Libreville, Dakar and Cotonou and finishing in Lubumbashi on 29 December.

The European leg opens in three weeks — Oslo's Sentrum Scene on 11 November, the OVO Arena Wembley in London on 15 November, AFAS Live in Amsterdam on 22 November, then Munich's Muffathalle on 24 November, Grosse Freiheit 36 in Hamburg on 25 November, Turbinenhalle in Oberhausen on 26 November and ZOOM in Frankfurt on 28 November. The big block is 2027: a French, Belgian and Swiss run from 24 March in Lille through Strasbourg, Nantes, Bordeaux, Nice, Lyon, Marseille's Dôme, Montpellier and Toulouse, closing with three nights at the Accor Arena in Paris on 1, 2 and 3 June 2027.