Album Review: Moonchild Sanelly – Full Moon [Transgressive Records; January 2025]

Words by Lucas Keen

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Moonchild Sanelly’s career has been on the rise for some time. With her new album, Full Moon, the Port Elizabeth-born South African visionary now eclipses her own high standards and may have delivered her best work yet.

Since the release of her debut album, Rabulapha! in 2015, the instantly recognisable Sanelly (a former fashion student who, with great foresight, trademarked her distinctive blue “Moon Mop”) has been busy with collaborations with everyone, from Beyoncé to WizKid and Major Lazer.

An intersectional artist in the fullest, Sanelly has carved out her own space, combining elements of gqom, amapiano, and electronic music to create a genre she calls future ghetto funk. For Full Moon, she teams up with producer Johan Hugo (Kano, Baaba Maal, Mumford & Sons) to craft an impeccable album recorded between Sweden and Malawi.

Her intent and confidence are clear from the opening bars of “Scrambled Eggs,” where she sings over a heavy bassline: “I do not flex my darling, I’m stating facts, don’t worry” blending English and Xhosa, as she does throughout the album.

Then comes “Big Booty,” on which the sex positive Sanelly pens a love letter to her own body. Her Xhosa clicks syncopating with and lining up perfectly with a beat that is nasty in the best possible way.

Sanelly named the album Full Moon as it is the sum of her journey as an artist and a person, and as such, she is unafraid to present a vulnerable side as on the anthemic “Tequila (To Kill a Single Girl).”

This mix of joy, sass, and heartache is expertly navigated as the clubiness of “Do My Dance” flows into the confessional beauty of “Falling,” where Sanelly opens up: “I’m scared of falling, scared of losing, bitch I know my family looking.”

To borrow from one of her own song titles, Moonchild is both “Sweet & Savage” on Full Moon.

The final act of the album begins with “I Love People,” a track that sees Moonchild revisiting her spoken word roots, before closing with two cuts that somehow blends trap hi-hats with soaring vocals (“Mntanam“), and glitchy and dreamy textures (“I Was the Biggest Curse“).

By the end of the album one thing is clear. We are all in Moonchild’s orbit now.

 

Full Moon was released on the 12th of January via Transgressive Records.
You can get your copy of the album HERE