Tyla

Edenvale to the Hot 100

Tyla Laura Seethal was born on 30 January 2002 in Edenvale, on the eastern edge of Johannesburg, into a family of mixed Zulu, Indian and Irish descent. She left Edenglen High School in 2019, having served as Head of Culture there, and spent her final school year posting original songs and covers to Instagram in the hope that somebody in the industry would notice. The manager Garth von Glehn did, and arranged her first recording sessions.

She self-released "Getting Late" after school; its video, out in January 2021, ran up millions of YouTube views and did the work a demo could not. Epic Records signed her in May 2021 through a joint venture with Fax Records, the arrangement she still records under. Two singles followed at an unhurried pace — "Overdue" in October 2021 and "To Last" in November 2022 — and neither was the one that broke her.

What "Water" changed

"Water", released in July 2023, was. It spread through TikTok and then through radio, and made her the first South African solo artist in 55 years to enter the US Billboard Hot 100. At the 66th Grammy Awards in February 2024 she won the first ever Best African Music Performance, becoming the youngest African artist to take a Grammy at all.

Her self-titled debut album arrived on 22 March 2024 and reached the top 25 in the US, the UK and across Europe. She left the 2024 BET Awards with more wins than anyone else, level with Usher and Victoria Monét, and took three prizes including Best African Act at that year's MTV Europe Music Awards. A deluxe edition in October 2024 added "Push 2 Start", a reggae-leaning amapiano track that proved more durable than most album add-ons.

The cost of that breakthrough was being filed under a single genre. Tyla has spent the two years since arguing, in interviews and in the music, that the amapiano label describes one input rather than the whole of what she does — hence "popiano", her own coinage for the blend of pop, R&B and amapiano she works in.

A*Pop, and the argument inside it

The run-up to the second album was long and single-led. The WWP EP landed on 28 July 2025 with "Bliss" and "Is It". "Chanel", released in October 2025, reached number 11 on the Billboard Global 200 and number 15 in the UK, her best showing since "Water". "She Did It Again" with Zara Larsson followed in April 2026, going to number two in Sweden, and "Is It Love" in June 2026 became her fourth number one on the US Afrobeats Songs chart. The fourth single, "That Girl" in July 2026, drew a row over apparent AI generation in its video.

A*Pop came out on 24 July 2026 through Fax and Epic. Its final stretch was written at a camp in the Cradle of Humankind outside Johannesburg, where the studios were set up outdoors in the bushveld. The record moves between African pop, amapiano, R&B, electropop and dance, with lyrics in English, Zulu and Xhosa, and features Liquideep, MaWhoo, Babalwa M and Larsson. A listening session before release barred phones altogether.

Reception was warm rather than unanimous: a Metacritic score of 79, with The Guardian crediting her with traversing genres nimbly while keeping a centre of gravity. NME was the sharpest dissenting voice, calling the album a cautious follow-up that trades the ambition of its rollout for slow-burning love songs — praising "Is It", "Chanel" and "She Did It Again" as earworms and "Kiss" as a fine piece of ama-pop, while finding that "Feel Something" never reaches the climax it sets up. Commercially it opened at number 43 on both the Billboard 200 and the UK albums chart, with higher peaks in Switzerland (19), New Zealand (21) and Australia (28).

Her own account of the album is less about crossover than about refusing it. "I've always wanted to be this pop star," she told Billboard Africa at Afro Nation in July 2026. "But I hated feeling like I had to tailor myself to pop." And: "I bring the 'A' to pop. It's African pop. African music is pop music." Speaking to OkayAfrica in Johannesburg on 28 July 2026, she framed the record as a licence to experiment — wanting to try everything she had always wanted to try, with writers, producers and her own voice.

Where she stands now

The awards have kept coming. She won Best Afrobeats at the MTV Video Music Awards in September 2025 for "Push 2 Start", her second consecutive win in that category, and at the 68th Grammy Awards in February 2026 the same song won Best African Music Performance — making her the first artist to take that award twice.

The institutional bookings have grown with them. In June 2026 she sang the South African national anthem and performed "Game Time" with Future at the FIFA World Cup opening ceremony; in July 2026 she played the WNBA All-Star Game halftime show. Behind the scenes, HYBE announced a management partnership with her Africa Creative Agency in December 2025, forming a joint company, NFO LLC, to handle her international expansion.

Her summer of 2026 was a festival summer rather than a touring one: a surprise guest spot at DJ Shimza's Pacha residency in Ibiza on 18 June, Mawazine in Rabat on 21 June, Afro Nation in Portimão on 3 July, the Auditorium Stravinski at Montreux Jazz on 8 July, Beach, Please! in Romania on 12 July, and a Today Show set in New York on album release day, 24 July.

The first global run

The A*Pop World Tour was announced on 27 July 2026: 34 dates across Europe, the UK, North America and Africa, and the first headline run of her career to take in all four. It opens at the Zénith in Paris on 12 October 2026, then Amsterdam on the 13th, with two nights at O2 Academy Brixton in London on 15 and 16 October — the second added after the first sold — followed by O2 Academy Glasgow on the 18th and the O2 Apollo in Manchester on the 19th. Brussels, Düsseldorf, Offenbach, Berlin, Stockholm and Oslo take the European leg through to Copenhagen on 1 November.

North America starts on 12 November in Wheatland, California, and runs through the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, Brooklyn Paramount, the YouTube Theater in Los Angeles and the Fontainebleau in Las Vegas. The African leg closes the tour: Lagos on 22 December, Cape Town on 4 January and Johannesburg on 9 January 2027. Pre-sale ran on 29 July via Laylo, with general sale on 31 July through her own site.

The venue choices are notable for what they are not. Her 2025 Asian tour played arenas — the Tokyo opener at Ariake Arena on 11 November 2025 grossed $1,173,026 according to Pollstar, and three reported shows from that eight-date run took $2,062,943 between them — whereas the A*Pop dates are mostly theatres, ballrooms and academies spread across many more markets. That run also showed how fragile a long international routing can be: three of its dates fell away, Bangkok to royal mourning, Jakarta to scheduling and Hong Kong without a stated reason.

What the show is

The template comes from the We Wanna Party Tour, which ran from Tokyo on 11 November 2025 to Bahrain on 14 December 2025 on a setlist of roughly two dozen songs, taking in "Water", "Chanel", "Push 2 Start", the Wizkid collaboration "Dynamite" and "Jump". Her "Chanel" choreography from those shows circulated widely online, which says something about where the weight of the performance sits: it is a dance show with a singer at the front of it, not a band showcase.

Festival sets through 2026 were compressed versions of the same thing. At Montreux on 8 July she played ten songs, opening with "Truth or Dare" and running through "She Did It Again", "Water", "Chanel", "Push 2 Start", "Is It", "Shake Ah", "Safer" and "Mr. Media" to "Is It Love". The longer Rabat set on 21 June started with "Is It" and reached back to "Getting Late" and a remixed "To Last" before ending on "Push 2 Start". Asked at Afro Nation what she liked best about playing live, she pointed not to production scale but to proximity, using the stage ramp to get in among the crowd.

As of early October 2026, no support acts had been named for any leg, either in the tour announcement or on the UK listings.