“It’s crazy how me and the music have always helped each other out,” Moonchild Sanelly tells Apple Music. The South African phenomenon, who first made waves in 2015 with her debut album Rabulapha!, has transcended geographical borders, establishing her own original genre (“future ghetto funk”) her own, distinctive image—her signature blue “Moonmop” hairstyle is literally trademarked—and counts Beyoncé, Damon Albarn, Wizkid and Fred again.. among her fans. Full Moon, produced by Johan Hugo (Self Esteem, Bruno Mars), is Sanelly’s third studio album. When work began on the record, the only plan in place was for Hugo to helm the entire project. “Everything else came out of me. I just let it happen,” she says. The results combine all the key elements of Sanelly’s artistry—neoteric beats, instantly memorable hooks, bold messages of self-determination, queer pride and sexual liberation—with a new ingredient: raw vulnerability. Two songs in particular, the penultimate track “Mntanami” and album closer “I Was the Biggest Curse”, find Sanelly addressing universal human experiences (absentee fathers, abortion) through exploration of her own difficult history. “Everything that happened—however great, however dark—feels like it was for this moment where the music wasn’t focused on a relationship or how other people made me feel,” she says. “It’s about me. I wasn’t in a rush. I allowed my emotions to come out. There’s things you don’t even remember because you’ve had to fight a lot and you don’t remember because there was no time for tears. You just had to make a plan and figure it out.” For all that Full Moon tackles heavy topics, the album is an undeniably joyous listen, packed full of brain-tickling production flourishes and innumerable flashes of playful humour, sharp wisdom and unshakeable self-confidence. It’s Sanelly’s most fearless work yet, but, she says, “I didn’t question it. I wasn’t even scared recording it. I used to write the songs that I should have heard on the radio, to know that there should be a difference between being violated and actual pleasure. Songs that would’ve made me question the things that were being done to me—that were sexual—that I hid. But these songs, I think it’s the songs that I needed when I was a kid. It’s not in the age or experience that you’ve had. It doesn’t matter what I’m saying, but what I’m able to touch in you, which is the emotion. The feeling of love, feeling of joy, feeling of freedom.” Here, Sanelly shares more insight into the songs on Full Moon, track by track. “Scrambled Eggs” “I was in Sweden making the album and I was making avo scrambled eggs. I was like, ‘I eat avo scrambled eggs. I love bagels, I love bread, I eat avo…’ I was like, ‘Wait, that’s a hook.’ The beat is funny. Johan had this beat for a very long time. It was very close to his heart. He played and he played and he played it. It was played every day. I was like, ‘You know, I’m going to write for this song, but I need to sit with it’—because now I’ve got to the place of knowing that he’s been holding onto to this beat forever. When I think about [the lyric] ‘I’m a walking billboard, bunny’, I’m very chilled, you don’t know how I move. I’m not a Gucci flex girl, so when I make money I’m not wasting it like that. I flex cute, I’m not loud. Eating avo scrambled eggs every day is really a flex for me, I love it.” “Big Booty” “‘Big Booty’ is literally a love letter to my ass, because it’s had my back through thick and thin, and it helps me shake the world. I was curvy growing up and I got teased about my booty, because our examples [of ideal beauty standards] were people like Britney Spears. My mom was the one person who’d give me shorts and say, ‘Own it, own that body.’ And I guess studying fashion helped me to express myself in general. My body became part of my whole thing, because even in fashion school, my models would always be curvy—I just wanted a different example from what was on the screen. So I just wanted to say, ‘Shout out, girl, you’ve had me forever. From when you were a problem because I was teased about you, you stuck by me even though I didn’t appreciate you. And you’re still with me now, and I love you even more. So thank you.’” “In My Kitchen” “Basically, in the kitchen, I cook great sex. I cook penis. I chop it. My sex is banging, so I chop it. I don’t chop veggies, I chop ‘pipi’.” “To Kill a Single Girl (Tequila)” “I had to quit tequila. It came with a lot of regrets. I am pretty much open and honest and ‘the truth hurts’ anyway, but on tequila, my words had thorns, unnecessary thorns. And having to apologise for something you don’t even remember—and you can hear hints of it having some truth, but the way you delivered it, you don’t even know what the fuck came over you—was the problem. I just got tired of fucking up with the ones that choose to love me, because my family is chosen people, not blood. So I was like, ‘OK, instead of dropping the truth, I’ll drop tequila.’ I don’t miss it because I don’t miss what it came with. Pissing yourself! I never thought I’d live piss-drunk. That’s not my story. I’m a stoner.” “Do My Dance” “I don’t need [men]. I want them, I choose them. And I don’t tolerate them because I don’t need them. My 16-year-old daughter’s friend said that her dream is to be a housewife. My daughter was like, ‘I don’t know that. I know hyper-independence. I know my mom dates who she wants when she wants, and she leaves who she wants when she wants. She’s always travelling for work. I’ve never seen a man run my household. I want the freedom I know exists, the freedom my mom has. She speaks her mind, answers to nobody, chooses who she wants, can do whatever she wants and doesn’t need a man.’ Girls are not supposed to be free and liberated and on their own, but I’m a head in my house. There’s nothing you can bring to me that’s going to change how I move. You can join my dance or leave.” “Falling” “My family didn’t support me when I ran away from home after my mum died. I was already different and they thought I was probably going to be on drugs, because I’m forward, I just speak my mind. They attached my freedom to weakness. I felt alone, but that was my fuel. It doesn’t matter what you’re served with, it’s what you do with it. When you know how to find the silver lining in any situation, you become untouchable. Whatever you give me, I will find the lesson in it, and I’ll grow. So in this song, I’m having conversations with myself in the mirror. ‘I’m scared of falling, scared of losing/Bitch, I know my family looking’ and I’m not going to give them the satisfaction. It’s for everyone who is motivated by anyone they need to make proud, they want to make proud. [It’s] that conversation you have with yourself before you leave the house: ‘I’m going to win. Let’s go get it.’” “Gwara Gwara” “This song is a manual on how to dangle pussy when they think you’re just a vagina beyond your worth. Dangle that pussy and get what you want, because they already see you as a vagina they need to get into. Let them. Dangle, dangle, dangle. I flip everything in my power. I don’t recognise victimised women. I’m not that woman. I didn’t come from those women. I knew fucked-up women who took matters into their own hands. So I was always shaking any space I was in. Whenever I had to write, they were shook. No one else sounded like me. That’s how my signature was carved out at the beginning and I was very clear that I wanted to have my own identity, because that licence means you can create any world. I created one where I liberate the bad bitches and we keep fucking shit up. I represent anyone that shakes society—the black sheep and the women.” “Boom” “[When I write a song] the subject matter comes—or pictures come into my head—and then I start seeing the story and then I get the narrative. This one got me thinking about rich n***as. They’re so busy making money they forgot their sexual skill. I’ve met ones that have both, but it’s rare. The most common is the broke n***a who compensates for the zeroes in the bank and fucks so good—you’re buying the condom. Rich n***as do everything, but damn…stamina in is little.” “Sweet & Savage” “The lyric used to be ‘I like boys, I nibble on girls now and then’. It was such a good hook, but it didn’t hit in that project at the time. So I was like, ‘I’m not wasting this hook. I’m going to do it again.’ I hadn’t dated girls at the time, I’d just been playing with girls. Then I had a real relationship with a girl and I think I also had more experience, so even the sound is completely different from when I first used the hook—it was more hip-hop when I was just playing around. I never thought about my sexuality or anything. In the home that I grew up in, we were exposed to queer people. My cousin was queer as a kid, she’s a lesbian. When I fell in love with my girlfriend, I just fell in love with my girlfriend. No announcing. What’s coming out? There’s no coming out to anything. Whenever I write a song, I always imagine my audience being able to sing along to the hook. That’s how I see the crowd. The world can learn what it wants, but this one is for us. For us, by us. We’re celebrating it.” “I Love People” “This was my first poem after losing my virginity. I got horny and I wrote that bitch. 2006. I was 17. I was ready, first of all. All the girls [I knew] that had already lost their virginity said they regretted it and I knew I wasn’t going to have regrets. I was at school in Durban, but I wasn’t fascinated with the boys there, so I went back home for the holidays and lost it to my older brother’s friend. I knew I loved sex from then. Then I went back to Durban for school and wrote exactly what I went through, what it felt like. No regrets.” “Mntanami” “I wrote this song as an apology letter from my kids’ fathers to them, and my father to me. ‘Mntanami’ means ‘my child’. I’m giving a voice to fathers who want to take accountability but don’t have the words because they weren’t taught to speak, to use words to express their emotions. I played the role of those people, so instead of men feeling attacked, feeling hurt, I gave them a voice so they can be heard. I was intentional about writing it in Xhosa, because I played it to maybe five, six people and they all cried, because they don’t have fathers. Two different people that didn’t understand [the language], they were still touched by the subject matter and how I approached the song. I think they got the feeling. It made me think, ‘I’m going to have to write it in English.’ It’s the first time I feel like the subject matter is so broad that it needs to be bigger than how I think it’s going to be. It’s bigger than how I’ve written it.” “I Was the Biggest Curse” “This one just came out. It’s about my experience running away from home, because back then, my baby daddy was a couch potato. He was busy with meetings, but I never saw the money. I didn’t even know girls could stand by the bar and get free drinks because I was out there tucking my tummy in, six months pregnant, paying for two rents. We’d go to his gig, he hasn’t organised how we’re going to get home to our house that I’ve organised for us to live in, because I pay the rent. I get him a job, he gets fired. I had to go through four abortions—I had to change hospitals so they wouldn’t know my face— and the last one, he made me wash my pants. He used to fuck me on my period, but that night he said, ‘A Zulu man doesn’t wipe blood.’ It was dark in that house I found for us. People were in the lounge, there was no light, and I had to guess where the blood was while I was terminating. It was the last time. This is a song about the sacrifices I made, but it’s also a shout out to him for being lazy because I grew up to be a baddie very fast. I had to fight for myself in general. And I won. So thank you for being a lazy cunt. I left you where I left you and I’m gone.”