Bongeziwe Mabandla

Bongeziwe Mabandla first encountered the Bantu folk songs and Christian hymns that inform his 2012 debut, Umlilo, while growing up in the rural Eastern Cape area of South Africa, where he was born in 1988. Mabandla plays acoustic guitar and sings his Xhosa and English lyrics in an ethereal, soulful tenor voice. He calls his style “urban traditional African folk”, but you'll also hear traditional Xhosa music, mbaqanga, soul, hip-hop and dub. Alongside producer/bandmate Tiago Correia-Paulo, Mabandla introduced subtle electronics on 2017's Mangaliso. While the popular “Ndokulandela (I Will Follow You)” navigates spiritual yearning, Mabandla and Correia-Paulo wrote a song cycle about earthly love for iimini, a spacious, innovative album charting a relationship's dissolution. As he told Apple Music, “With my previous work I felt like a lot of my subject matter was very serious, so I wanted to do something totally different, to hit a subject that was lighter. I wanted people to know that I'm not one dimensional and don't think in one way."