With David, we revisit an old favorite…

[Video]
[8.33]

Will Adams: Immensely fun, from the ensemble cast of sound effects — mad scientist lightning zaps! big fat FM bass! gym class whistles — to the call-and-response hook. Like any good party, it makes you lose track of time, and you don’t even notice you’ve been grooving to the same song for six minutes.
[8]

Crystal Leww: Where Tyla felt like a showcase for amapiano’s potential to showcase something sexy, “Chale” is Sho Madjozi’s showcase for the genre to show energy. This feels faster than amapiano really is — I’m really struck by the fight atmosphere created during the chant of “You wasn’t there when we was shooting in the gyyyyyyyym!” So much more charming coming from Sho than Fucking Drake. 
[6]

Frank Kogan: Sho Madjozi and the rest of the music are lifting each other (as opposed to back on “John Cena,” when she and the beats were more in combat). The lyrics seem ambivalent about fame — an ambivalence that was all over her last video, “Toro” — but in this vid she’s totally at ease with the fans, inviting them and their selfies into the dance. The sound of gqom/amapiano is a suspense-film buildup, rising tension yet a groove you can relax in forever, “Chalé” doing it about as well as it can be done.
[9]

Nortey Dowuona: TBOY Daflame opens the song with an ominous synth riff, then punctuates it with bouncy log drums Sho rides expertly. When they take over the mix and even slide off key, Sho slips out, and as a soccer whistle enters the mix, tinny and shrill, it takes the center. The drums drop out except for the hihats, and Sho pops back up, her chorus bigger and prouder, a sharp aphorism from the Friggin Canadian suddenly alive and a gleeful taunt. “Chale” blurs until it becomes a brick, hard, solid, frozen in the mind.
[10]

Tim de Reuse: Under the horror-show drone of a single hazy supersaw, she flexes, relaxes, paces, and chants, but only just enough, lest she appear to try too hard; her own voice is a sparse, percussive element, the rest of the space filled with a meaty, developing beat. An excellent strategy to self-celebration: make the party do the work. There’s no other way you could get away with a track like this being six minutes. I could listen to a loop of that shuffling, syncopated bass-breakdown for sixteen.
[8]

Micha Cavaseno: Nearly every Sho Madjozi single feels like the synths have to be close to as playful as her own rhymes while also seeming like they’re lurking in an unwelcome manner. It’s kind of astonishing as to how many songs a person can make that sound close to tricksy without the artist coming off as anything more than bright and sunshiney. Somehow you don’t even think Tboy Daflame’s freakout breakdown of subs and whines is anything more than fun & games in spite of its industrial calamity. Can’t begin to describe how confounded that makes me, and how fun it is to be so taken aback. Maybe that’s the point!
[7]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Something I didn’t know I needed: an amapiano track that functions as a contemporary American jock jam.
[9]

Brad Shoup: I know it’s provincial, but I keep trying to figure how the WNBA can put this into a commercial while ignoring the original Kobe joke. I love how Sho’s blithe and kinetic, and how you can hear Tboy Daflame mashing the pads.
[7]

Ian Mathers: There are a lot of different little sonic flourishes I love here, but the mad scientist electricity sound might be my favourite. Then there’s the bits where it keeps sounding like a Squarepusher song is about to break out, and how good both the title refrain and the “shooting in the gym” bits are every time they come back. I was genuinely shocked to finally notice it’s over six minutes long — the whole thing practically flies by. You pull a salt and pepper diner on me with this one, and I wouldn’t notice for a good long time.
[9]

Katherine St Asaph: Infectious joy in a generous portion.
[9]

Alfred Soto: The walls of this single keep expanding with each second, and the combination of ruminative, brassy, and mysterious that I love in good Neneh Cherry and Rosalía doesn’t quit. When it yields to beeps and chirps, it reaches peak sublimity. No, I wasn’t there when she was shooting in the gyyyyyyym.
[8]

David Moore: 2023 was the year I managed to drag myself out of a nasty little pit I’d been growing uncomfortably accustomed to, and subsequently I started listening to and writing about music again. My lodestar was Sho Madjozi, an artist I had brief but serendipitous encounters with in the past through the Jukebox and then Tom Ewing’s People’s Pop Polls. On “Chale,” she augmented the deluge of amapiano that I was starting to understand at a technical level with an infectious pop call-and-response chorus, inviting the whole world to the party with a personalized golden ticket. And there was Sho Madjozi herself in the center, incandescent, always on the verge of bursting out in laughter, and you could feel yourself breaking, too, like you’re sharing an inside joke. I carried the “shooting in the gym” line like a talisman guarding me against the hundred leaden Drake songs I would encounter later, hiding like sneaky little fungus trolls in my playlists. The song came out and February, and I never stopped listening to it all year, beaming, hardly believing my luck: I was finally open to something wonderful, and this was the gift I received. 
[10]