Tyla drops emotional new single ‘IS IT LOVE’ with heartfelt music video, days after her FIFA World Cup 2026 opening ceremony performance with Future
Tyla released “IS IT LOVE“ on June 19, 2026, and the timing is deliberate. The South African afro-pop phenomenon has had one of the most visible weeks of her already exceptional career, performing “Game Time” with Future at the FIFA World Cup 2026 opening ceremony at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles on June 12, in front of a global audience of millions. Now, days after that moment, she has stepped away from the stadium scale and delivered something intimate and emotionally exposed. “IS IT LOVE” arrives with a music video that matches its emotional register exactly, and it serves as the latest preview of her forthcoming second album, A-POP, due July 24.
The song’s central lyric does the work quickly: “Is it love, if you don’t cry? It don’t mean shit if I don’t see tears in those eyes.” It is a direct and specific demand, the kind of lyric that only works when the vocal behind it is completely committed. Tyla’s performance here is exactly that: each word carrying weight, the delivery restrained enough to let the emotion read rather than announcing it. The music video pulls at the same emotional register, extending the feeling of the single rather than illustrating it.
What Tyla Told Zane Lowe About the New Album
Tyla spoke to Zane Lowe about “IS IT LOVE” and gave the clearest picture yet of what A-POP is built from. “For this album, I really just wanted to go back to myself and why I wanted to become a pop star in the first place,” she told him. “Making this album, I listened to a lot of my childhood favourite songs and I made an album that sounded exactly like what I wanted a pop star to sound and look like when I was growing up.”
That framing is significant. Tyla’s debut self-titled album established her as a global phenomenon on the strength of “Water,” which won the first-ever Grammy Award for Best Afrobeats Performance in 2024 and introduced her sound to an audience far beyond the South African market where she first built her fanbase. A-POP, with its title and its Zane Lowe description, suggests an artist who has absorbed that international recognition and is now turning inward, revisiting the pop music that shaped her before she became the pop music that is shaping others.
The World Cup Moment and What It Signals
The contrast between “Game Time” and “IS IT LOVE” captures exactly where Tyla is operating right now: across multiple scales simultaneously. “Game Time,” produced by Grammy-winning producer Cirkut and released May 29 on SALXCO, Epic, and Def Jam, marked the first hip-hop track in FIFA World Cup soundtrack history. Tyla described the moment as “a full circle moment, from South Africa hosting the World Cup in 2010.” She and Future performed it live at the opening ceremony in Los Angeles, before Lisa of Blackpink, Anitta, and Rema took the stage. That was one version of Tyla’s 2026. “IS IT LOVE” is another.
The A-POP album already has two singles on record. “SHE DID IT AGAIN” with Zara Larsson arrived earlier in the campaign. “IS IT LOVE” now joins it as the second preview of a project that Tyla has described as a return to something personal and foundational. At 24, with a Grammy, a FIFA World Cup performance, and a second album arriving July 24, Tyla is moving with the kind of purpose that does not look like momentum from the outside so much as inevitability.
