Lady Zamar on Friday burrowed a triumphant return to the charts with the premiere of her second solo studio album, Monarch. It’s a project which devoted fans have been waiting for since she made the announcement earlier this month.
Co-penned by Moonchild Sanelly, Msaki and DJ Choice, the 20 track project is a confident and vulnerable display of the singer’s rare ability to summon her own wave and ride it.
Parts of the album are a constellation of fantasies that luxuriate vibey dance sonics – creating perfect feel good summer jams. We’ve fallen in love with the sun-drenched vocals she lays down to lavish the lush and catchy melodies of her records; it’s the ingredient that makes her such a delight to so many.
Melody has been her thing since, well, Mamelodi.
We know by now that Lady Zamar is a story teller with an impressive gift of giving melodic and poetic justice to her world. It’s a world of joy, disappointment, triumph, love, pain and the many layers of life.
Monarch embraces all these layers and fashions them into a catalogue of sublime songs.
“I write all these stories of love coz of the love I’ve had, love I have and love I one day want to have..”, she tweeted, confirming the central role played by her own experiences in the creation of the album.

Other parts, however, reveal anew the elastic layers of her artistry. Many words are billowing with complexities of love, and the blues that attend to romantic relationships. Our Process and More and More made me teary throughout the weekend and I’m no softie.
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The 20 track project comes hot on the heels of her first SAMA win for Collide, easily one of the biggest street anthems from 2018.
The single came from an even more successful debut, King Zamar, which spawned a slew of chart topping bops and single handedly catapulted her career to first league.
The meteoric success of her critically lauded King Zamar really does place a level of expectation on Monarch. And, as artists with killer debuts would attest, the fear of a sophomore slump is very real.
Though, Lady Zamar’s second album is more than just an attempt to sustain the standard she set for herself and the local soundscape. It’s a cohesive project of 20 songs delivered with undeniably brilliant writing, a whole lot of emotion and overall dope ass quality.
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The album kicks off with This Is Love, the first single. In some ways the song, already a commercial success, sets the tone for the record. Like a few songs here, it has all the elements of a feel good hit.
Except – and this is consistently true for many big moments throughout the album – there’s a constant element of sadness that creates an interesting contrast between some of the dance bops and the words she laces over them.
“I think he’s taking me for granted, because I decided to be kind” is the first line in the entire album, creating the space for other even more poignant lyrics down the line. She’s crying out a lover whose affections are elusive. We later learn that the said lover is not the main. “Oh, he saying he loves me. Saying now I should leave my man.”
A love steeped in betrayal and lies continues on ICU, the 12th track. The sirens in the beginning, which stop after creating a dramatic atmosphere, establish a mood of urgency. “Baby I see you, and all the things you do. Broken, dying and I’m lying in the emergency room”, she signs over one of the album’s grooviest beats.
“Don’t deny my love, I know I need it, hold me near. It’s a crisis that we feel but we are torn apart”, she trills on Destiny, one of the album’s most beautiful highlights. Fans have been looking forward to having the studio version of the song since hearing its unreleased acoustic debut during her Feel Good Live Sessions performance in 2017.
Though furnished with the haunting words and emotional vocals, lovers of dance and House music will revel in the stylings of this track, with all the machinations of a dance floor filler. “Cupid, you are playing games with my heart”, she laments ever so soulfully on Sharp Shooter.
What really sets Lady Zamar apart, when you think about it, is that she plays by her own rules. King Zamar came out with a whole catalogue of new music from an artist we were just getting to know, thereby resisting the new singles until further notice policy that defines most new entrants these days.
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We’d loved her on those collaborations with Junior Taurus and Prince Kaybee, but she opted to have us fall in love with her through album.
Monarch features a catalogue of 20 new songs, again a departure from the 7-13 outspoken rule that now informs the length of most new releases. She knows we will stream her whole album, so she went ahead and let us have it all.
Monarch is damn near perfect.