Moonchild Sanelly: The Gift That Keeps On Giving
A bundle of joyful, body positive, sex positive energy, since bursting onto the scene in a flurry of blue hair and booty shaking, Moonchild Sanelly has challenged the status quo. Now, with new album ‘Full Moon’, the South African singer is challenging herself too.
Styling: Delaney Williams
MUA: Yong-chin Breslin
It’s barely 10am on a wintery November morning and Moonchild Sanelly is talking about dicks: what she likes about them, what she’s learnt about them, her first virginity-shedding experiences with them and more. It’s not so much that no topic is off limits for the South African singer, it’s that conversation around sexual freedom and the joys of the flesh trip merrily out of her mouth like… well, we probably wouldn’t be able to print the end of her answer to that sentence. Since first making waves outside of her local Durban scene, Sanelly has become synonymous with a kind of total self-empowerment that’s been hard won. But there’s also far more to the singer - born Sanelisiwe Twisha and affectionately known as Moon - than the cheeky chat that can turn as blue as her signature hair.
Gamely posing with a tower of gifts, vaping and dancing amongst DIY’s Christmas photo festivities the day before, on set we get the bubbly, life-of-the-party Moon. Sitting down after to dig back into the decade-plus of hustle that’s slowly, steadily delivered her to this increasingly successful place, we get the determined career woman. Peppered throughout her mile-a-minute conversation, meanwhile, she drops disarmingly frank revelations about the hurdles she’s faced along the way; now aged 36, the last couple of years have been instrumental in processing all that’s come before. It all coalesces, then, in third album ‘Full Moon’: not just a great arse pun amidst an album with a lot of love to give to that particular body part, but also an accurate description of the holistic approach she took to representing the person at the centre.
“With ‘Full Moon’, I’ve been able to find the words to emotions where I previously would have said, ‘Fuck it, whatever’; situations where I didn’t have time to think about them before because I had to move,” she says. “When I was writing, I found words for the situations I never had words for because that comes with healing. It wasn’t easy but ‘Full Moon’ is the full story, so now let’s go.”
2024 has been a big year for the singer as a whole. Having previously worked with Gorillaz on their 2020 album ‘Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez’, and a little-known rising star called Beyoncé on her Lion King soundtrack cut ‘MY POWER’, this year she added Self Esteem to her run of high profile co-conspirators with their summer collaboration ‘Big Man’. Introduced via their mutual album producer, The Very Best’s Johan Hugo, Sanelly is effusive about the immediate bond that formed between the two women. “Our energy in the studio, I called it elite energy from the time we met,” she grins. “It was so authentic. I think because we’re bad bitches, we deal with a lot of performatively secure people and so when that all crumbles, I’m not here for that.”
Where ‘Big Man’ tackled these topics with levity and an earworm of a chorus hook, imagining the ideal of a partner who would support them and their successes without any insecurity, the pair have also got another track in the works that treads a different path. “I think [the next song] is more Becca - I’m in her world but we were in the same space. She wrote for me and I wrote for her, she even cried; the connection was there with the empowerment and the vulnerability,” Moon explains. “It’s ridiculous, we just connected like crazy.”
It’s a connection that’s clearly had a ripple effect amongst fans of both artists, too. Debuting the cut during her Glastonbury set mere days after its release, it provoked an excitable sing-along that exceeded any of the singer’s expectations. “There’s been such a growth in everything, like what the fuck is going on?!” she exclaims. “It’s so trippy. It’s like watching it happen in front of your eyes, and the feeling of the audience giving back that energy is just crazy.” For years, she explains, she’d developed the tactic of “partying in my head” first before her set; if the audience is quiet, her internal vibes will still be high. Now, however, the party has very much gone IRL.
“After an hour’s set I’ll have more energy than when I started. It’s like I’ve done nothing when I’ve just given it my all because of the energy in the air. It fuels me,” she says. “Especially since Glastonbury, it’s just been like wildfire. I could have never imagined the impact from people finding themselves - [from singing songs] about liberation, speaking out, how your voice matters, to own your body and fucking shit up. How it resonates has been wild.”
For Moon, the journey started many years ago when, as a young woman in South Africa, she had to learn to stand against a lot of the patriarchal systems of the country, following her mother’s lessons in self-love and empowerment that more often than not would go against the grain of social expectation. “My mum was different, even in our hood. A lot of people would hate on how she brought us up independently but she was a hustler; she was a bad bitch,” says Sanelly. “She taught me how to make gold so I wasn’t fascinated by glitter, and so there was no man who was gonna come and [adopt a] father figure role and say they’ve given me everything.”
Instead of kowtowing to the established route of playing the nice wife, Moon was taught to be financially independent wherever possible and to learn to be proud of her body on her own terms. “At the time, the bodies that were in were Britney Spears and people like that, and this ass was just there!” she laughs. “So I had to own it. By the time you see me here, this has been work from when I was younger to learn to accept my shape.” Her relationship with her home country, it seems, is mixed. When she posted a couple of years ago about wanting to set up an OnlyFans account she explains now that she was “just trolling” - largely because of wanting to keep her image away from South Africa. “Because of it shocking them, they interpret it as selling sex,” she says. However she’s enthused by the more open-minded younger generation that’s coming through across the globe. Given the recent US election results, it’s undoubtedly a bleak time to be a liberated woman but Moon is still feeling “fearless”.
“If I can say ‘fuck you’ to my own country because they don’t understand [then I’ll be fine]. I don’t bother arguing with them because I make the hits and they shut the fuck up,” she shrugs. “I can’t be scared of who I am. I can shake the world and they’ll fear who I am, but I’m not scared and I love shaking the world, so let’s go! I’ve been speaking the same language for as long as I’ve existed. When you look at the dynamic in South Africa, the younger people, the kids connect to the truth. There’s a liberation that comes with this age. Even the boys, there’s a connection they have with their emotions and owning it. In every genre, you’ve got the nail polish gang and the skirt gang and it’s fashion; they’re just in tune with their emotions.”
Emotional attunement is a facet of ‘Full Moon’ that might come as something of a curveball for longtime followers of Sanelly. Fans of the gleeful self-expression that’s become her saucy bread and butter need not worry: between ‘Do My Dance’ (Opening lyric - “I don’t want no head in my house / I just want it in between my legs and between my thighs”) and the fairly self-explanatory ‘Big Booty’, there’s still plenty more where that came from. But as the album rounds out, Moon concludes LP3 with a pair of tracks that eschew her usual supreme confidence for something altogether more vulnerable.
On ‘Mntanami’ (Xhosa for ‘My Child’), she swaps between the two languages, speaking first as her own father addressing herself, and then as the father of her children apologising to them. It’s a raw and unadorned portrayal of both of those fractured relationships; “My daddy never had time / He was never mine / He was never mom’s / I didn’t know love,” goes one verse. But, says Moon, the message is of understanding rather than judgement. “It’s coming from a place of forgiveness, to be able to have the heart to realise that we weren’t all afforded the same options,” she says. “My twins’ baby daddy comes from a polygamist family situation and his mother is in the middle so it’s even wilder. I don’t know what love was in his upbringing, and it’s taken me using my options and choosing to want to move forward and not living in my past [to fully see that].”
Using both languages is a way to ensure that all of her listeners are brought into the fold and given the message; often, she’ll prioritise singing in her mother tongue when addressing common issues within her community. Closing track ‘I Was The Biggest Curse’ feels like the most pertinent example of this. Speaking in Xhosa during a set of verses that act as an origin story of sorts, it touches on an early abortion and her subsequent relationships with men before emerging into an English-speaking chorus that triumphs in the hustle. For Sanelly, it’s only since she’s been able to relax in her recent success and take her foot marginally off the pedal that she’s had the time to reflect on that journey.
“When I started touring it would be at festivals with conferences, but I’d go find pubs [to play extra shows] and start creating my name. [Other artists] would be treating it like a holiday but I’d be planting seeds. Doing SXSW, I had 100 Rands - which is about £5 - for the week, but my hunger for my career was bigger than my hunger for my stomach,” she remembers. “It’s so crazy how all the dark times are the magic. I was like, what am I gonna write about now because it’s not the same? But then when I was writing [this album] I found words for the situations I never had words for because that comes with healing and space. After I finished, for almost two months I [was in] this hole. I couldn’t drink, I couldn’t smoke weed. I didn’t want to numb it. I wanted to go through it; it was the physical part of letting go and I let it happen.”
‘Full Moon’ then, is something of a line in the sand for the singer: the victorious next step of an artist who’s fought for her place and earned every shred of career success, but who is also reaping the personal rewards of a life lived fearlessly. This festive season, she’s gearing up - unsurprisingly - for a big party. There’ll be a belated Thanksgiving celebration post-Christmas (“Slaughter an animal, talk to ancestors and all that jazz…”) and then she’s off to Cape Town to paint the beach red. Heading into 2025, she’s not bothering with any subsequently-scrapped new year’s resolutions; instead, she’ll just do what she’s always done - make the magic happen on her own terms.
“Any time is tea time. I was in the studio on my birthday because I might as well make something iconic,” she chuckles. “I just write my vision board and I stay working. I just want to make the world shake - and shake our asses while we’re at it.”
‘Full Moon’ is out 10th January via Transgressive Records.
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