"A handcrafted pop star": Tyla on Zara Larsson, and the two songs they made

Tyla's second album A*POP arrived last week, and one of the songs on it has quietly turned into the most wholesome story in pop this summer. "She Did It Again", her duet with Zara Larsson, came out in April. A month later Zara returned the favour, putting Tyla on a remix of "Hot & Sexy" for Midnight Sun: Girls Trip. Two songs, two directions, one friendship.

Asked about her this week, Tyla did not reach for the usual press-release warmth. She called Zara "an amazing friend, such a vibe, amazing artist", and then landed on the line that stuck: "a handcrafted pop star, like, perfect."

"Handcrafted" is a strange compliment until you look at the two careers side by side. Zara won a Swedish TV talent show at ten and had a number one at home at fifteen; she has been a professional pop artist for most of her life, and it shows in every rehearsed second of a Zara Larsson set. Tyla got there the opposite way. Johannesburg, amapiano, a song called "Water" in July 2023 that became the first Billboard Hot 100 entry by a South African solo artist since Hugh Masekela in 1968, and then, six months later, the first Grammy ever handed out for Best African Music Performance. Eighteen years of groundwork against six months of freefall, and they ended up on the same stages anyway.

What they do have in common is harder to put on a spec sheet: neither of them is easy to manage in an interview. Zara has spent a decade being openly political in a job that quietly rewards blandness, on feminism, on women's health, on Palestine, and she has said more than once that she does not consider any of it radical, just obvious. Tyla's version was more personal. When American media kept pressing her on describing herself as coloured, a word that means one thing in South Africa and something else entirely in the United States, she declined to perform that debate on cue, and then answered in her own time and her own words: she has never denied her Blackness, and she named the Zulu, Irish, Mauritian and Indian sides of her family herself. She later told British Vogue that even the best explanation will not stop people choosing not to understand, and that she is at a point where she knows who she is.

Completely different subjects. The same refusal to be talked out of a position. You see it on stage too, they sometimes have a bit of the same mannerisms. Personality, music, attitude. Of course they're friends.

We have them both, a year and a continent apart

We shot Zara Larsson at Superbloom in Munich in September 2023 and Roskilde 2026. And Tyla at Roskilde on 5 July 2025. Different countries, different years, no idea at the time that the two of them would end up trading verses and calling each other best friends. That is the ordinary magic of an archive: you photograph people one at a time, and the connections turn up later.

A*POP is out now. "She Did It Again" is the one to start with, and then go and find what Zara did with "Hot & Sexy".

Credits

Tyla at Roskilde Festival, 5 July 2025, and Zara Larsson at Superbloom Festival, Munich, September 2023, shot by Annelies Vollmuller for Coda Photos.