A*POP: the argument in the title

Tyla released her second album, A*POP, on July 24. The title is not a mood, it is a claim: African pop is pop, the A belongs at the front. She has said she spent two years hearing she wasn't African enough, and that she hates being polished and hates following rules. So the record arrives carrying an argument, and fourteen songs have to hold it up.

The critics arrived to test it, and landed close together but not agreed. Scores clustered in the sevens out of ten: RIFF 8, Pitchfork 7.2, NME 7, The Quietus 6. Praise for the singles, a shared doubt underneath.

The doubt is consistent across outlets. The Quietus called it a surprisingly cautious follow-up that polishes what already worked instead of pushing it somewhere new. NME framed it as irresistible singles that fall short of the album's bold rollout, an album that works better as a delivery system for hits than as a whole. Even the admiration comes with an asterisk.

One review caught the whole tension in that phrase. And that is the real fault line, not good against bad, but whether making African music legible to the entire world elevates it or sands it down.

Here is where the argument is actually won, and it is not in the singles. The clearest proof is a track called Fairytale. Liquideep were a Johannesburg deep-house duo whose 2009 song of that name took over South African radio; they split in 2014 and reunited in September 2025 after eleven years apart. Tyla was a child when the original was inescapable, and she rebuilt it here for a global audience. The features lean the same way, amapiano's own voices placed on an album built for the world.

This is the answer to "not African enough" made structural: she took the biggest platform of her career and filled it with home. Whether or not every track pushes her sound forward, the casting is the statement, and it is one no crossover star before her has made at this scale.

When an artist carries a local sound to the centre of global pop, the price of the ticket is polish. So the question A*POP leaves is the one every African artist chasing that stage will face: is making the music legible to everyone a victory for where it came from, or the first step in forgetting it, and who gets to decide?