Lelowhatsgood’s new EP Rebirth Is Necessary pushes gqom into new sonic and linguistic territory across five tracks of experimental South African club music.
Gqom came out of Durban’s townships in the early 2010s, built by young Black men and shaped by everything the genre’s name suggests: dark, confrontational, percussive. Lelowhatsgood, real name Ntsikelelo Meslani, is not breaking with that history on Rebirth Is Necessary. He’s stretching it.
Out now, the five-track project pulls gqom into conversation with is’qinsi, Afro tech, 3-step and experimental club music, while broadening the linguistic range that the genre has historically operated within. The result sits in the darker, more textured corner of South African electronic music: gqom’s pounding, mercurial energy is still the spine, but the body has been rebuilt.
Meslani has been building towards this for nearly a decade. He started DJing in 2017, broke through on the underground circuit playing ballroom, gqom and Afro-electronic sounds, and went on to play Boiler Room (twice), Tresor Berlin and Ultra Music Festival.
His debut EP Next Level earned a SAMA nomination, a recognition he described at the time as unexpected. Before music became the main act, he was a writer, with bylines in the New York Times, Mail & Guardian and HUNGER Magazine. That dual life as critic and creator shows up in how precisely he articulates what he’s doing.
“Rebirth Is Necessary is about allowing music to evolve in the same way we do,” he says.
“I’ve always believed that our stories, our languages and our identities deserve to exist across every dance floor. This project is an invitation to hear gqom differently, to embrace its ability to hold many voices, many influences and many futures.”
The five tracks each bring in different collaborators. Lead single “Ba Ko Kae” features Espacio Dios. “Hypnosis” pulls in DJ Emotive and KIING BHUTIE. “Mind Your Business” brings spoken word artist Lazarusman back to his domain, with KIING BHUTIE returning. “Ngiw’logogo” features Unkle Ken, Rifle Deep and Thobeka and Sunornza, and closer “Ten Toes” features Omagoqa and Joshua Futura.
The cast spans electronic music, spoken word and underground dance culture, which is less a flex and more a structural argument: the EP’s thesis about gqom’s capacity for multiplicity is made through its feature list as much as its sonics.
The artwork extends that argument visually. Meslani appears on the cover fragmented, his image broken into jigsaw pieces and reconstructed into something new. It was inspired by the late multidisciplinary artist Lunga Ntila, a close friend whose approach to identity and form shaped the visual language of the project.
In a conversation with Texx and the City, Meslani said the comparison to Grace Jones had occurred to him too. “There was something so deeply personal and moving about the way she [Ntila] executed complex ideas of identity,” he told the publication. “The concept of having all these fragmented pieces of ourselves and putting them together to make a new whole, that’s something that represents me right now. I’m too many things to be boxed into one idea.”
That fragmentation is also the point. Gqom at its origins was a genre of otherness, built by communities making space for themselves. Meslani, who founded VNJ Ball (formerly Vogue Nights Jozi) in 2018 as a home for queer ballroom culture in Johannesburg, has spent years arguing that gqom and ballroom are closer cousins than they appear. Both emerged from exclusion. Both are languages of self-determination. Rebirth Is Necessary is where those threads tighten into something you can actually hear.
* Rebirth Is Necessary is out now on all major streaming platforms.
