Moonchild Sanelly

Blue hair, a self-coined sound she calls "future ghetto funk" and a frankness about sex that she never softens: Moonchild Sanelly, born Sanelisiwe Twisha in 1987, is a South African musician and dancer. Raised in Port Elizabeth in a musical household, with a hip hop producer brother, a jazz-singing mother and kwaito-dancing cousins, she moved to Durban in 2005 to study fashion and emerged through its poetry and music scene before basing herself in Johannesburg. Her songs, mostly in Xhosa, set experimental electronic, afro-punk and edgy pop against a kwaito, hip hop and jazz grounding.

Her first studio album, Rabulapha!, came out on Transgressive Records in March 2015 and earned a South African Music Awards nomination for Best Alternative Album. She has played SXSW and Primavera Sound, and toured Europe with Die Antwoord in August 2018. In 2019 she appeared on Beyoncé's The Lion King: The Gift, on "My Power", and in 2020 she joined Gorillaz for "With Love to an Ex" on Song Machine. Phases, her second album, followed on 10 June 2022, with the single "Cute" featuring Trillary Banks. Full Moon arrived on 10 January 2025, with a UK and Ireland tour due to start in Manchester that March.