11 September 2026
When I meet Afropop and amapiano princess Zee Nxumalo, she is fresh from a ten-hour flight and sharing a meal with her team in central London. The 23-year-old Swazi-South African artist was “just a TikTok personality” a few years ago, she explains from across the table – but at this point she is nothing short of a global star still on the up, surpassing Taylor Swift’s four-year reign as most-streamed female artist on South African charts last year and overtaking New York’s Times Square with a towering billboard this summer.
Much like when she sings, Zee has a softness to her voice when she speaks; but this comes with boldness and a light that, even over the lunch table, can only be described as stage presence. Perhaps that is what catapulted her outward through the social-media matrix and then upward through the global music pecking order. “I would make jokes on TikTok,” she remembers, as her manager insists on heaping jollof rice onto a plate for me. “I would imitate, I would do covers.”
Though these days, she is anything but a cover artist: “I’m a very good freestyler,” she says. “In the studio, I have fun and I’m confident; I come up with things that I feel make sense to me.”
With her long lashes, white-blonde hair and orange Puma football jersey, Zee has the dynamism and beauty of an industry It-girl – and indeed she is among last year’s GLAMOUR Women of the Year – but she is also a sweetheart: she compliments my heels and worries that I might not like the food (I do).
From growing up in a close-knit family in Johannesburg’s Alexandra township to popping by London for the first time fresh from an Australian tour, from coveting Puma trainers as a schoolgirl to becoming one of the faces of the brand, life has metamorphosed dramatically around her in just a few years. We can see some of that coming of age in her 2024 single Ngisakuthanda and its debut short film extension – which, in a way, is about getting swept up in the fast lane.
“Almost every other guy around the world experiences what we’re portraying,” she says, on first love and its heartbreak: “The guy doesn’t have money. But, you know, young love. And then the girl matures faster than the guy; then the girl somehow discovers guys who are more mature, more smart; then they get lost in the sauce.”
Later, she comes back to this, with more exactness: “I remember going to Kenya after shooting the short film. The promoter was like, ‘Oh, so, Zee, you actually cheated on this guy. And that’s how the song came about.’ I was like, ‘Oh, yes.’”
Becoming global as someone who sings in isiZulu brings its own complexities, and for Zee, who describes herself as a storyteller, something may be lost in translation – or in the absence of it. This is where these cinematic extensions to songs come into play: the short film addition to Ngisakuthanda, for example, was intended to “make the language very clear”.
“We don’t speak the same language; people find it hard to really understand what it is that I’m trying to do,” she says. “Thank God I have my TikToks and I have a music video to somehow make up for that misinterpretation.”
But sometimes the miscommunication is near-total. “People always say, Zee, amapiano, we want to dance. Most of the time, these songs are not about dancing,” she explains, and begins singing a couple of bars of her 2025 Mali, which we’d normally hear traipsing alongside Dlala Thukzin and Sykes over a slow, weighty Afro-house groove. “That’s a sad song,” she says. “It’s not a song that has much attitude.”
Still, she is quick to clarify she doesn’t intend to “wake up and sing in English” – though later in the conversation, she mulls over experimenting with some English words. She is also quick to clarify that the language barrier has never been a failure. “Music is universal; some people don’t understand you but they love our songs, simply because you can feel music,” she says.
It’s obvious Zee’s work is personal. She is “passionate with music” and, as a freestyler, it’s fair to assume she speaks from the heart. At the same time, though, she calls herself an
“actress”: “I act through my music. Because sometimes I don’t really relate to a situation, but I’m able to tap into it.”
Her favourite song, the 2026 Guqa (My Prayer), is devotional, tender and quite literally a prayer; yet Zee was not particularly distressed when she recorded it. “I was having a good time; I had just bought a car, everything was going okay,” she says. She says she channeled the feeling of someone appealing to God: “Just unlock it; then you tap into it, that’s how I would pray.”
The song-building process also changes depending on who is in the studio. Sometimes she comes up with a melody and a producer comes up with the words; sometimes she’s there with a collaborator and they’re both freestyling. Sykes, she admits, was the most fun to work with.
“He knows how to play instruments. So, a song literally comes up by him. Like, he’s…” she begins singing a melody, perhaps one created by the self-described “Zulu Michael Jackson”. “Then it becomes an a cappella situation. […] Everyone is like, ‘Oh, isn’t that a nice song? Let’s record.’” That freestyle feeling is exactly why Zee likes recording with instrumentalists: “You don’t overthink it. You just have fun in the studio.”
I ask who she hopes to work with next. “Wizkid,” she giggles. Does he know that? “He will know now,” she laughs.
Zee is curious, especially about how her music is received, and still seems amazed about its global reach: she wants to know my favourite song and which one I played to folks in Canada. But in London, we won’t have to open a music streaming app to catch a little of Zee in the city. She’s just opened her first global pop-up spaza shop in south London: “a staple South African neighbourhood store, a place to grab essentials, airtime, catch up, and find a little bit of everything,” she explains on social media.
Changes are to be expected with any young artist, and Zee’s music reflects that. Funk 55, for example, came from drinking Ace of Spades champagne (“for the first time ever in my entire life”, she tells me). “Ace of Spade anginayo / Moët, anginayo”, she sings, meaning “I don’t have Ace of Spades / I don’t have Moët”, later in the song referencing drinking Heineken instead.
And changes are to come. Zee says she’d like to do more short films; she jokes that she’s recording with Wizkid later in the day (“manifesting”, I tell her); she muses about sprinkling “a bit of” English words here and there (“30 per cent English?” she asks. “That’s enough, right?”). “It would be the biggest injustice for me to be the same person that I was three years ago,” she says.
But some things remain the same, like her social-media origins, now ballooned to over 5 million fans combined over platforms. She turns her phone to me and I grin at the screen until she tells me to wave and I realise she’s been on TikTok Live the whole time; she is taking selfies when we blow our farewell kisses. Her mind seems to move many places at once, but perhaps her music is one way we can track it. In her words, “Music is a state of mind.”
Words by India Das-Brown