Ask Nonofang Disetlhe what changed when she became Blulyt, and she will tell you almost nothing did. The stage name, to her, is just a new cover on the same book. “There’s no difference between Nono and Blulyt,” she says. “The only difference is the presentation.” It is an unusual way for a young artist to describe a rebrand, since most treat the new name as the moment a new person begins. Disetlhe treats it as the moment the public caught up with someone who had been there all along. The claim is confident, and it holds up well, because everything else she tells you about her life points the same way.
The evidence starts early. People who knew her at five, she says, knew the same girl the industry is meeting now: the child who won trophies at school and stood in the middle of a crowd of older people as though the spotlight had been installed for her. “I always have been drawn to the spotlight,” she says. Blulyt’s mother ran a dance group she eventually joined, which meant that performing in front of a thousand people was just an ordinary Saturday. Many kids would bow out of stage fright, but Blulyt always walked calmly and confidently onstage to the shock of the adults around her. “Yeah, I’m ready to rock,” is how she remembers telling people when they asked if she was sure she could perform. Many artists spend years building the nerve to face a crowd; Disetlhe was born with it.
Like many artists, her love for music began in church. It only became a profession after she decided it was do-or-die and left her hometown for Johannesburg in 2017. By then, she had also earned a degree in dramatic arts, and she isn’t shy about what that gives her. “I feel like I have a very unfair advantage because I got a formal arts education,” she says, “but it is also an earned advantage because I had to give my all to get the degree”. The attitude is almost old-fashioned in a pop landscape that celebrates the myth of effortless, innate talent. Disetlhe talks about performance as a trade with credentials, a craft she apprenticed in and keeps refining, and she says learning never finishes. She is clearly gifted, but understands that natural ability can only get you so far. She wants to be exceptional, not just good enough, and recognises that the careers that endure are made through the unglamorous work of practice, discipline, and continued study. The verdict her career is already delivering is that stagecraft learned thoroughly pays off.
It shows in the music, which refuses to stay in one lane. Her debut EP, Shades of Blu, moves between Amapiano, Afrobeats, Gqom, and R&B, and she is unmoved by the usual anxiety about picking a genre and defending it. Her method is almost disarmingly simple. In the studio, she tells the producer what kind of day she is having, whether she feels like dancing, being emotional, or reaching out to people. The sound follows the feeling. “It’s how you feel,” she says, which is the whole theory. Every song she releases is a page from her diary translated into sound. For Blulyt, genre is closer to a mood than an allegiance, and the EP’s range reflects all the different things going on in her life while making it.
That is also why the lead single, Want It All, works. Coverage of the song credits her drama training for the way she plays with her delivery, sure of herself and friendly at once, so that the ambition at the centre of the lyric never tips into arrogance. The song is about gratitude for all one has, but also wanting more and refusing to shrink for anyone in the way. That balance is hard to fake and is the clearest signal of how Disetlhe wants to be heard. She is announcing hunger, and the record proves that a singer can be both openly ambitious and warm if she has the presence to reconcile the two.
The business side of the story is a deliberate pan-African bet. In May 2025, Disetlhe became the flagship signing at Pond Entertainment, a Nigerian label that framed the deal as the start of a pan-African push and described her as bold, genre-pushing talent. The early numbers back the thesis: over a million combined plays on Apple Music and Spotify, with Lagos as her top listener city, Johannesburg holding the home base, and New York showing early diaspora interest. Her collaboration with Victor AD on Celebration is the proof of concept, a South African voice moving through the Nigerian pipeline and landing with the audience on the other side. The map of her listeners already looks like the map she says she wants to work in, and Lagos, specifically, has taken to her first.
What makes the arrangement more interesting than a standard cross-border signing is how plainly she describes her own position in it. She does not pretend to feel at home in Nigeria just yet. “I’m still South African by blood,” she says, and she is only now finding the time to settle in, this year, after years of coming and going. “It’s a learning curve,” she says. In an industry that rewards instant fluency in whichever market is paying, admission is rare, and it earns her more credibility than a polished claim to belong would have. She is not performing Nigerianness for a Lagos audience. She is learning to appreciate it in public, and the audience seems to prefer that.
It also explains why she shrugs off the usual pressure to be one thing or the other. She does not feel pushed to sound more Nigerian or more South African, and she resists the shorthand that would reduce her to either. She says she will not be identified as the South African who just does Amapiano, or as the Afrobeats singer, and the fusion is deliberate. Being South African and signed to a Nigerian label does not mean being stuck between two countries, she argues. “I’m not making music for just the two countries,” she says. “I’m making music that is universal, that people from all over the world can appreciate. It is a clear statement of intent. The Lagos and Johannesburg axis is her launchpad, but she refuses to let that mean it must be her ceiling,
Blulyt’s influences and idols indicate just how high she plans for her ceiling to be. When she is asked whose careers shaped her creative direction, she names Beyoncé and Ciara, and what she takes from each is specific. Of Beyoncé, she admires the trajectory: an artist who found success young with Destiny’s Child before using the group as a springboard for an even more successful solo career that eclipsed the group’s success, demonstrating that her star power was never confined to the collective. As for Ciara, Blulyt singles out her movement, the way her body is an instrument in its own right, which makes sense from someone who grew up in a dance group. The choice of those particular two is revealing because both are performers whose music is inseparable from how they move and how they hold a stage, and Disetlhe is plainly aiming for the same unity.
The third name she offers is the late trailblazing South African singer-songwriter, Brenda Fassie. Blulyt does not want to sound like anyone else and does not want to, and cites Fassie’s success as proof that standing out works. That is the ambition under the genre-hopping, the Pond contract, and the Grammy talk: Blulyt wants to be unrepeatable. In a streaming economy that rewards sounding like whatever is working this month, that is either naive or the smartest long-term position available, and her track record so far suggests the latter.
The price of that position was paid in rejection, and she describes it without bitterness. She sent messages to people already established in the industry and got silence. She was in rooms and friendships with people who could have opened a studio door and did not, and some followed her songs without following her back. She recalls the strangest version of it: someone who would sing a track she had just released and be surprised to learn it was hers, a person who watched her closely and still did not know what she was putting out. She treats it as fair. “It’s not given on a plate of gold,” she says of breaking into the business, and that is why it matters that you make your mark. The experience taught her what she calls the basics: to be disciplined, to be patient, to be grounded, never to lose focus, and to keep believing in herself, especially when other people do not see what she sees. The grudge she might have held has become fuel for her fire.
She has a metaphor for the long game, and it is more concrete than most. To make wine, she says, you grow the grapes, crush them, leave them to ferment, and only when they are ready do you bottle and serve them. She tells herself the same thing on the hard days. It does not matter how long it takes. “It’s not luck, it’s progress. It’s a process,” she says. The framing turns every setback into an ingredient and makes impatience the real risk, which is a useful way to think for someone whose rise has been fast on paper, with a label signing, a million plays, and cross-border milestones inside a year. She is not treating that speed as an arrival. She is treating it as the early part of a fermentation, and she plans to let the rest take its time.
The ambitions she lists for the next five years are large and delivered without hedging. A Grammy, “definitely.” Platinum records and sold-out world tours, “and even beyond.” She names Tyla as the collaborator she would most like to work with, a pairing that makes obvious sense for a South African artist with a continental plan. She wants her music to heal people and reach as many of them as possible. She wants the success to be visible, so that wherever people turn, they see Blulyt billboards, which she describes as the level they are aiming for. She makes these declarations without bravado, speaking as calmly as she did when she first walked onstage as a little girl and announced: “Yeah, I’m ready to rock”.
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