The Singles Jukebox

We conclude our 2023 pop highlights reel with a true highlight for us. Stay tuned next week for our individual writers’ picks!

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Crystal Leww: Amapiano has felt like a vital part of dance music education for a while now — Ballantine’s was sponsoring Boiler Room shows in South Africa back in 2018, Major League DJz collabed with Major Lazer, Uncle Waffles is playing mega EDM clubs like Brooklyn Mirage, and you can catch regular amapiano club nights in East Asia. It might seem surprising that this house subgenre has inspired so many people to party to it, with its lower BPM and jazzy feeling, but amapiano shows are energy — all about that feeling of locking in a groove all night. Tyla’s “Water” is the genre’s first true pop moment, and it captures the je nais se quoi of the dance music subgenre incredibly well — it’s actually sexy. It feels like sweat on sweat, bodies bouncing against each other, hands gripping waists, hips swaying, a private moment in a very public place. That feeling, combined with a killer vocal hook, makes “Water” easy to like even as it approaches peak saturation.
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Leah Isobel: “Fuck me so hard I can’t walk straight”? Boring. “Fuck me so hard I literally transmute into the source of life”? Now we’re talking.
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Joshua Minsoo Kim: The most transformative quote I read this year was from Canadian filmmaker Ellie Epp: “Receiving a touch is as active as giving it — sometimes more active, more skilled and more consequential. Erotic attention isn’t an empty bowl touch is poured or pushed into; it is more like a living antenna with a million fibers actively searching the space of the touch for its shape and meaning.” “Water” puts that idea into a song. Never the amapiano purist, Tyla has taken the genre’s log drum loops and flagellating synths and placed them into the framework of Westernized R&B. And yet, this has the spirit of a longform, South African dance track because of her smooth vocals — they ensure it remains undemanding but seductive. The chorus is one of the year’s most celebratory: a group chant extolling the desire to feel desire.
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Michelle Myers: Tyla performs yearning with expert sensuality. Piano keys flutter around her like songbirds around a sad, horny Disney princess.
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David Moore: At the beginning of the year, I had a moment of clarity — Rihanna needs to make an amapiano album. Then the thought faded, because (1) that’s not really how amapiano works, the idea of having an R&B personality commanding the groove doesn’t really let you groove; (2) that’s not really how Rihanna works, it is a mistake to even think of Rihanna as a pop star in 2023; and (3) god, it could be so fucking awful, couldn’t it, GET A JOB, etc. But Tyla stepped up to the plate, subsuming amapiano elements in the service of her performance at the center of an R&B song, but keeping amapiano’s spiritual sense that every song is perpetually in media res; a song could start anywhere and go anywhere (or nowhere) and in some sense never end. Water is the perfect image, too: more fluid than the glassy surfaces of Naija pop and Afrobeats, but less opaque than amapiano’s immersive haze. The song is pitched as sexy, which it sort of is, but there’s a serenity in it, some cosmic comfort in knowing that someone’s really figured it out, that this is exactly what it’s supposed to sound like on those rare occasions you turn the radio on.
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William John: Initially, “Water” seemed innocuous compared to the frenetic, Tricky Stewart-assisted “Been Thinking“, or the colossal amapiano classic “Getting Late“; it didn’t scream “breakthrough” to me. I quickly came to understand that its popularity with butt-shaking TikTokers and the general public alike was more than warranted, the hook and irresistible drum roll burrowing its way into every one of my brain’s recesses.
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Katherine St Asaph: Most of “Water” is so perfectly crystalline and intimate, such a rarefied fount of sound, that the loud singalong chorus is like a rock in the flow of the stream, breaking the spell a little. But only a little.
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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Tyla’s voice is so diaphanous and airy, it’s a shame that the hook is drowned out by an unnecessary chorus. (Don’t get me started on the Travis Scott remix.) 
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Brad Shoup: I love the chorus as much for what it says–I’m not sure sweating has even sounded so effortless–as for its, well, choral quality. It’s like spiritual jazz nestled in lovers rock.
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Frank Falisi: There’s so much to celebrate in the slip, wash, and sway of “Water.” There’s the way it mixes the insistence of beat with melty gobs of just-kissed electric piano, something driving the body, something touching it surprised. There’s the way it waves the drone of a heartthrob at the perfect form of a pop song, wanting to please, pleasing to want. There’s so much that I’ll just say: the half-second delay in the chorus–between “make me” and then “sweat,” “holler,” “lose,” and especially “water”… it makes me feel in love, and at ease in not having love, but finding its symbols and acolytes in the changes of a song, a little wait, a little get.
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Kayla Beardslee: This is actually my least favorite of Tyla’s singles in the past year (“Been Thinking”? An incredible star-making slay. “To Last”? Gorgeous. “Girl Next Door” with Ayra Starr? Two of my favorite rising pop artists coming together for a lovely collaboration.) But “least favorite” is just a technicality in the face of strong competition, and “Water” still drips with charisma, promise, and a killer hook. I only wish I hadn’t found out that Tyla was touring with Chris Brown earlier this year.
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Ian Mathers: This is a great performance and a heck of a debut, but the thing my ear keeps focusing on and what has me nodding my head are (what a very confused “what is this called?” search informs me are) the rim clicks running throughout “Water.” Really it’s the way those dry little sounds propel and work against the grain of the rest of the song, rather than one isolated element, but that’s what I keep going back to here.
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Alfred Soto: The rim clicks act as foundation and another harmonic element next to which the clarity of Tyla’s voice can shine — and these happen before the choir. 
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Michael Hong: One of the many striking features of “Water” is how solid it feels. Tyla’s verses and its beat prove to be malleable, yet the chorus is made up of dense layers. “Make me water,” she demands, sexy, only because it’s a challenge.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: A perfect groove, but more than that, too. Tyla’s vocal sashays around the pulses of the beat, drawing up into an exquisite lift as she sings “can you blow my mind” — like many of her lines here it’s at once a question, an exhortation, and a challenge. Like, can you blow her mind? For the length of “Water,” Tyla sounds utterly implacable, a singer with such intimate knowledge of her own skills and the affordances of the beat that it reads as something supernatural. Let me live forever in the spaces of this song.
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Nortey Dowuona: The power of amapiano is that it feels light and nimble in the drum programming, gently twirling below whatever is going on the song and allowing you to melt into the mood and spin along to the rhythm. At every stage of its ride to worldwide popularity, it’s become gentler and softer, until the heavy logdrum bass hammers down, rippling the tranquility and reminding you of the tempest below. That dissonance is what makes it exciting and engaging, but the fun part of “Water” is that it keeps that tempest at bay, allowing anyone to wade into it. Tyla is a graduate of the Aaliyah/Rihanna light key school, a lilting soprano that comfortably soars into her highest range and stabilizes at her lowest, opening the first verse on a proud, firm step and settling into it. Each run into the precious prechorus is poised, capable and stunning. And whenever the familiar logdrum pattern does erupt, Tyla dances nimbly away, her voice light yet stable enough to not be overpowered, fluid and ever-changing and so fundamental it can’t be separated without killing the song altogether. Just like water.
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