Tyla’s A*Pop Talks a Big Game. The Reviews Say It Doesn’t Quite Deliver 

Tyla’s second album arrived this week with a mission statement built into its title. A*Pop is not being framed as an amapiano record with pop ambitions. It is being framed as proof that amapiano already is pop, full stop. 

The declaration 

The 14-track album’s marketing leaned into that argument from the start, choosing to make the case explicitly rather than let critics or algorithms sort her music into a genre box. The clearest signal of intent is the guest list. Rather than pairing with another amapiano or afrobeats name, lead single ‘She Did It Again’ puts Tyla alongside Swedish pop star Zara Larsson, a deliberate choice to stand her sound next to Europe’s pop mainstream rather than its African peers. It places Tyla in the company of artists such as Rosalía and Karol G, who have each used a big album to change how their home sound gets talked about, not just to follow up a hit. 

Ambition meets a more cautious verdict 

That is the pitch. The reviews landing this week tell a slightly different story. NME gave the album 3.5 stars, calling it safe, polished pop that could have gone further, and argued that beyond its strongest singles, A*Pop trades high energy for mood, settling into a run of slow burning love songs that rarely match the boldness of its own rollout.

The praise is real. NME singled out ‘Is It’, ‘Chanel’ and ‘She Did It Again’ as highlights, pairing hypnotic log drums with hooks sharp enough to sit next to anything on Tyla’s debut, and called the MaWhoo collaboration ‘Crazy Of Me’ warm enough to melt into. But the review’s central complaint is that too many of the broader songs about desire stay on the surface, leaving Tyla’s charisma to carry weight the writing does not always meet her halfway on. 

That is the gap worth sitting with. A*Pop wants to be remembered as a statement, the record that finally forces the industry to stop treating amapiano as a crossover trend and start treating it as pop’s centre. But a statement needs the songs to match the size of the claim, and the early critical read suggests A*Pop plays it safer than its own framing promised. Tyla is not short of moments that back the argument. She may be short of enough of them across a full 14 tracks. 

None of this settles anything yet. The real test lands the week of 8 August, when first-week streaming numbers and any Billboard 200 or Hot 100 placements show whether A*Pop’s argument travelled as far as its marketing wanted it to. Commercially, Tyla rarely misses. Whether A*Pop becomes the genre-defining moment it is billed as, or a well-made record that plays it safer than it needed to, is still an open question, and one worth returning to once the numbers are in. 

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