Langa Mavuso’s love, loss and return

This story was first published in New Frame.

It is early October 2017. Soul singer Langa Mavuso stands before a modest crowd looking on to the sloping hills of Northam, Limpopo. Dressed in a black top and short dungarees with a pair of clip-on traditional Zulu earrings, iziqhaza, Mavuso belts out songs from his short but impressive catalogue. It’s his first time performing at the annual music festival Oppikoppi, and the defining moment comes towards the end of his set. With the crowd firmly in his grip – drunken bodies colliding and lips locking to the sound of his music – Mavuso performs a remix of Vivid Dreams, the first song on his debut EP. Produced by Johannesburg-based producer Illa N, the remix features languid guitar plucks, smooth rhodes chords and neck-snapping drums.

“My lover’s name is a secret,” declares Mavuso at the beginning of Vivid Dreams. For the most part, he has faithfully kept that pact of silence, often speaking around the hurt that inspired his best work. When asked about the subject of his songs, he says they are about a lover who has since died. He never names his dead lover.

Liminal Sketches, the breakout six-track EP that Mavuso released in 2016, dealt with themes of love and loss. In a previous interview, the artist said the project was an attempt at airing out an old wound.

“I wrote Liminal Sketches as a way of mourning a lover who passed a few years ago,” he told me during a Skype interview in 2017. “It was an attempt at catharsis. That was my way of interrogating how something so beautiful could find its way into your life and be taken away so easily.”

Three years later, the 26-year-old admits his debut album, Langa, has broken this pact of silence.

“This album is the end of the journey, the closing of the chapter,” he says now. It’s about finding a resolution to Liso’s passing. This is me saying: this is who I am. This is the pain I carry, and this is what grounds me. I was trying to find a resolution to Liso’s passing. I’ve come to the realisation that the end of love doesn’t always have to be painful. It can be transformative, healing even.”

The messy work of healing

Langa is an album dedicated to cataloguing healing. The first third of the album details the emotional and psychological toll of heartbreak. Calamities, the album opener, starts off with a string section and twinkling piano before segueing into a throbbing bassline and rattling kick drum. “Maybe this is karma,” starts Mavuso, later singing the refrain: “I’ve heard you’re messing around, messing around.”

Mvula, the third track on the album, is a meditation on the memory of fading love. “I knew when you broke it. I felt it. We lost it,” he sings over a looping piano melody. There are also references to the previous material on his debut album. Searching, the fourth track, contains lyrics lifted from Vivid Dreams. “I found love in an empty room, searched the scene, even looked [like] a fool,” he says over layered harmonies and finger snaps. Similarly, Love Lost features a vocal interpolation from Love Six, a song on his EP. “Screens fade to grey. You still hide in your buried grave,” he sings, lyrics that immediately bring to mind Love Six’s, “In the age of colour screens, people stare into boxes while colours fade to grey.”

“I’m surprised not that many people have noticed that,” he says. “Langa is in conversation with my earlier works. Because I’m discussing the same themes I did in previous works, I felt like I had to reintroduce the lover I’m speaking about to the audience.”

Capturing the journey of heartbreak

The album’s middle section is the most upbeat. Cheat Code opens with the noise of crackling vinyl static and atmospheric pad layers. From the start, Mavuso’s tone is confrontational. “Was it you in his backseat?” he asks, later singing that he’s “searching for a new love”. Panther, which features rapper Yanga Chief, is a trap-infused number produced by duo Noble Production, who have production credits with Rowlene, Lady Zamar and Beyoncé.

“I still feel the heartache, fucked up on champagne,” Mavuso sings in Cheat Code. The subject – indulging in your worst habits after a break-up – is well worn in R&B but works in the context of the album. The animating theme on the 12-track project is that no one outruns trauma: pain hollows you out and, if left ignored or unintended, the wound festers and the work of healing grows more difficult with every subsequent bad decision.

“That’s the point of the album. I wanted to be honest about my journey through heartbreak. So, the album is essentially made up of three parts: heartbreak, the mess that follows it and then arriving at a point of resolution or healing. The cover also alludes to that. It’s about reflection. John Baloyi [the photographer] captured that perfectly. But, yes, songs like Panther and All of You capture the ‘baddie phase’ that usually follows a break-up.”