Moonchild Sanelly
Moonchild Sanelly was born Sanelisiwe Twisha in Gqeberha, then Port Elizabeth, into a musical house — her mother sang jazz — and moved to Durban in 2005 to study fashion design. Performing poetry and hip hop there from 2006, she distilled kwaito, gqom, punk and electronic pop into a genre she named herself: future ghetto funk, sung mostly in Xhosa beneath her trademark blue hair. Her debut Rabulapha! (2015) earned a SAMA nomination for Best Alternative Album, and the international run came quickly: My Power on Beyoncé's The Lion King: The Gift (2019), a Gorillaz feature on Song Machine (2020), and a signing to Transgressive Records the same year. Phases (2022) broadened the palette; Full Moon, her third album, arrived in January 2025, followed by a UK and Ireland tour from March.
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