The Return of Nakhane

They released the genre-topping hit "We Dance Again" withBlack Coffee, which became one of the biggest songs of 2015, pushing the artist to the forefront of the South African music scene. A novel titled Piggy Boy's Blues, about boundaries, the intricacies of love, and how members of the protagonist Davide M.'s family fail at navigating them, also came that year. As if that wasn't enough, Nakhane was also filming the John Trengrove-directed feature filmInxeba, which saw them forced to leave South Africa indefinitely two years later due to mounting threats of violence from the public.

Perhaps South Africa's turmoil at that time, with rampant power cuts, nationwide student protests, and a president whose popularity was waning, pushed Nakhane to test their limits. The artist still had time to work on the follow-up to their 2013 debut, Brave Confusion, during that very period. Titled Laughing Son, it was a four-track collection loosely based on Frantz Fanon's Concerning Violence, which the artist says is their favorite work yet.

"Every time I listen to that EP, it's so free and fearless. I don't feel like there's someone here saying, 'Is this gonna get streams?' 'Does this make any sense?' It was just me frolicking around my ideas," the artist tells OkayAfrica from their base in England, where they've lived since leaving South Africa in September 2017.

Nakhane had already completed work on their sophomore full-length album, You Will Not Die when they left. It arrived in early 2018 as a divinely-timed work of art, perfect by any standards. The artist explored themes of religion and spirituality, mortality, identity, love, desire, and more. It kept them on the road for nearly two years until the lockdown happened. Nakhane was then forced to reckon with who they were besides being a performer. Loss also defined that period — first, their father passed away in 2021, and then their mother two years later.

The follow-up, Bastard Jargon, arrived during a great upheaval, personally and professionally. The artist referred to the two-and-a-half years it sat unreleased as a "difficult time."

"There was a moment where I was like, okay, maybe I'm gonna stop music now. It was a fun ride. We did something, we tried, maybe I'll just write. It was awful," the artist exclaims. To worsen things, mainstream music began borrowing the very sonic textures they had wanted to explore — sounds they'd recorded years earlier. "By the time my album came out, it felt like I was riding the wave, and it drove me insane," says Nakhane.

"I have very conflicted views on Bastard Jargon in that when I listen to it by myself, I'm very proud of my work. But then, it also precipitated the end of my relationship with the label."

The artist's saving grace arrived in two forms: they started performing again and got to compose music for film — their film,B(l)ind the Sacrifice, and an as-of-yet-unreleased Angolan movie. This opened them up to what's possible when one plays with sound, so much so that they challenge the Western notion that a song is only good if it can be played on an acoustic guitar. "Okay, let's go to Beethoven and say, you see 'Symphony No. 9,' let's just remove everything and play it with an acoustic guitar. No! The sound and the production also make up the song, and it's also as important," argues the artist. "The music is whole in the sounds. That was further highlighted for me when I started writing music for films."

Nakhane has a newfound sense of freedom and is working on new music that will arrive in two albums. They recently released "Killer '25," a remake of theAdamski and Seal original from thirty years ago. It's a song Nakhane has been performing since the beginning of the You Will Not Die tour in 2018. "For the first time, I was on a proper tour, and I had a music director, and I was so busy at the time of You Will Not Die — touring, press, etc. We decided that we'd do Killer, which was a joke in a way because I'd been reading some reviews that were saying that I reminded people of Seal, and I was wondering whether that was because I had pock marks on my cheeks and that all blacks are the same," says the artist.

Nakhane had to sift through multiple files sent by their music director to arrive at the dynamic remake we have now. It's through this process that they discovered their knack for producing.

"I wanted to co-produce every single track [on Bastard Jargon] because I realized that I had been doing that on some level, but I wasn't credited. And I think all artists do, but we're too scared to say, 'Give me my credit.' Because we're in the studio together, I'm like, what if the bass goes like that — that's production. I went into the album wanting to learn more about production. Strangely enough, I wanted to collaborate. Wu-Tang Clan's Enter the 36 Chambers influenced how I wanted the album to be mixed. I listened to the album a lot and was influenced by how hip-hop and R&B musicians have multiple producers on a track, which I'd never done before. So I was like, let's see what happens when I let people in."

They kept the entire process cohesive by sifting through whatever their collaborators had sent and deciding which elements to keep. Nakhane didn't want the strings from the original to drown out the meaning behind the lyrics. They remained faithful to the song structure in terms of tempo and bassline. The question was how they worked around those foundational elements. Nakhane had Busi Mhlongo's "Ukuthula" as a guide — the way it threatens to fall apart at any moment but is held together by Bryce Wassy's unmistakable groove. "I've always been interested in that tension of that repetition that works with texture, discord, and harmony," says Nakhane.

Growing up in the Eastern Cape town of Alice, Nakhane was never exposed to popular contemporary music. It was mostly choral music and songs from the sixties and seventies around their mother's house. They discovered current popular music at the end of high school. "I discovered a lot of music on Myspace because it allowed you to follow an artist and see who they followed. This feature helped you learn about their music tastes. It was social media, but it expanded knowledge about things," says the artist.

As much as many things are changing, some aspects remain constant, such as Nakhane's relationship with mortality. "I've been afraid of dying since I was hit by a car at 15. I've been constantly trying to keep death away. But then my mom died, and I was like, I guess we don't have any power over this. One day, you're at a coffee shop, and you're just about to get on a train, and then someone calls you and says, 'Hey, mom is dead.'"

Nakhane lost their guiding light, and very little could be done about that eventuality. What this phase of their life is allowing Nakhane to do, is to take back their power and their likeness from a world that persecutes queer bodies. Newfound independence has brought them to the things that excited them. The promo images, the video – everything is by Nakhane, henceforth.

"I needed it for me. I needed to take back my power, image, and likeness and give the world what I wanted it to see me as. Not some suits. And so I took what was a limitation, which was being an independent artist and having to work with a smaller budget, and I was like, 'This is also an opportunity for you to grow and face yourself.' 'What's the lesson here, Nakhane?' That's all I was asking myself," says the artist. "I think the lesson here, and I know it, and I can feel it in my guts, was to trust myself because I was starting to lose that."