There are artists who make you move, and then there are artists who make you feel something you did not know you were carrying. Tyla has always occupied that rarer territory, and with the official music video for “IS IT LOVE,” released on June 18, the Johannesburg-born star makes her case more powerfully than ever. The clip arrives as the third single from her eagerly awaited sophomore studio album, A*Pop, and it signals that the full project, due July 24 via FAX and Epic Records, will be something genuinely worth the wait.
At 24 years old, Tyla is no longer the emerging talent the industry watched with curiosity after “Water” rewrote the rules for South African music on the global stage. She is the main event, and “IS IT LOVE” is the kind of single that reminds everyone paying attention why that is. Built around soft R&B synth textures and a laid-back Amapiano groove courtesy of producers Cole Ostrin, P2J, and Troy Taylor, the track is a careful, deliberate departure. Where much of her catalog leans into rhythm as the primary vehicle, here it is her voice that does the heavy lifting, circling a question that turns out to be far more loaded than its four words suggest.
“Is it love, if you don’t cry, cry, cry? It don’t mean sh*t if I don’t see tears in those eyes.”
Tyla — IS IT LOVE
A Room That Falls Apart Around Her
The visual language of the video, directed by Aerin Moreno from a concept developed by Tyla herself, works because it refuses easy symbolism. We open on Tyla performing fluid, deliberate choreography inside an apartment washed entirely in cold blue tones. The space initially reads as controlled and beautiful, a world as curated as the feeling of new love before reality arrives. Then, slowly and with stunning restraint, the environment begins to give way. Glass shatters. Water rises from the floor. The walls and surfaces that seemed so solid start to deteriorate around her, yet she keeps dancing, keeps moving through the wreckage with the same focused grace she brought to the opening frames.
The effect is quietly devastating. The choreography does not pause for the chaos; it absorbs it, turns it into texture. Rather than stopping to mourn what is collapsing, Tyla moves through it, which is precisely what the song is asking about. Is endurance the same as love? Is performing normalcy in the middle of emotional flooding proof of devotion, or proof of something more troubling? The video never answers the question, and that ambiguity is exactly the point.
The sequence that lands hardest arrives near the end, when a love interest appears at the window, watching from outside the disintegrating apartment. Two people physically close but emotionally unreachable, separated by a pane of glass even as the room beyond it floods. It is the kind of image that sticks because it does not explain itself.
The Woman Behind the A*Pop Era
Speaking with Rolling Stone earlier this year, Tyla was unusually candid about what the making of A*Pop has meant to her personally. “Me being in it, I feel so different to how I felt during the first album,” she said. “I’ve been through stuff. I don’t know, I feel like a woman. I’m 24. I feel like a woman.” Those words map directly onto what “IS IT LOVE” is doing. The song does not arrive from a place of confusion or naivety; it arrives from someone who has done the emotional work, who knows what real vulnerability looks like, and who is asking whether the person across from her has done the same.
That evolution is also audible in the production choices. The track places her vocal performance front and center in a way that her rhythm-driven breakout hits did not always demand. There is a moment in the chorus where the delivery becomes almost stark, where the instrumentation steps back and lets the question breathe on its own. It is a reminder that behind the choreography, the fashion, and the global momentum, there is a vocalist who knows exactly what she is doing with her instrument.
One of 2026’s Defining Summers
Context matters here, and Tyla’s 2026 context is extraordinary. She performed South Africa’s national anthem at the FIFA World Cup opening ceremony in Mexico City, then joined Future for the official tournament song, “Game Time,” at the Los Angeles opening ceremony. She took home her second Grammy Award, this time for “Push 2 Start” in the Best African Music Performance category, and at the American Music Awards she won both Best Afrobeats Artist and Social Song of the Year for “Chanel.” She also landed a i-D magazine cover and closed a pop-up in New York’s SoHo neighborhood that sent the internet into a brief spiral of excitement.
Against that backdrop, releasing a video this quiet and interior feels like a meaningful choice rather than an accident. Tyla could have leaned into spectacle. Instead, she and director Aerin Moreno built something that rewards attention, that asks you to sit with the discomfort of an unanswered question. The album name, A*Pop, is itself a statement of intent: Afrobeats and pop fused into something that carries a new asterisk, a new qualifier, a refusal to be flattened into a single lane.
Tyla fans first got a taste of the single’s existence through a 15-second teaser she posted across Instagram and TikTok, a clip that reportedly reached a quarter million views in the first hour alone. The reception since the full release has confirmed that momentum is very much intact. The video is available now on YouTube, and the single can be streamed across all major platforms.
With the BET Awards airing June 28 (where Tyla is nominated for Video of the Year and Viewers’ Choice, both for “Chanel”), and the A*Pop album less than five weeks away, the summer belongs, in no small part, to a 24-year-old from Johannesburg who keeps asking the questions nobody else thought to put into a pop song.
“Tyla’s records hit the dance floor and the heart at the same time. She’s built a catalog that moves bodies while saying something deeply personal underneath.”
