Lwazi Asanda Gwala, a.k.a. Durban-born producer and selector DJ Lag, has a working definition of gqom. He lays it out over a Zoom call from an Ibizan hotel, smiling as he ticks each idea off on his fingers: “There’s what I call the four big sounds. There’s the 808s, the strings, the synths, and the chants—The wha!”

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Gqom, which emerged from Durban in the 2000s and whose name comes from the Zulu word for “drum,” is hefty and acrobatic in equal measure, with heavyweight kick drums, MIDI strings, and ice-cold synthesizers twisted into an unmistakable sneer. It’s chrome-plated minimalism played for maximum heft—If you time a gqom track right, you’re liable to crack a dancefloor in half. (Hyperdub founder Kode9 once likened the sound to “being suspended over the gravitational field of a black hole, and lovin’ it.”) Gwala, of all people, would know. He’s one of the genre’s originators, and he’s one of its most well-known figures. For the past ten-plus years, he’s been sticking to its core ideas and stretching them as far as he can manage.
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In order to fully understand gqom, though, you also have to understand Durban’s taxis. In Durban, gqom is full-on pop music: It fills streets and dancefloors alike, with taxicabs blaring the stuff in an effort to attract customers. “It doesn’t get quiet, dog,” Gwala says, grinning. “You need to have the biggest sound system to get customers—everyone will hear it.” During our conversation, he framed gqom as a genre defined for, and by, kids from Durban; as a style built for maybe-legal raves and sweat-stained sneakers; as a scene about the kind of sheer volume that headphones just can’t replicate—in short, as a physical thing. 

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In the past decade, Gwala has traded taxis for trans-Atlantic flights and moved on to bigger and bigger stages. Gqom, not coincidentally, has taken a similar path, catching on in Durban and then, seemingly overnight, in the rest of the world. This happened, to no small extent, thanks to Gwala’s own work. His barnstorming productions and DJ sets have ensured him years of acclaim by exposing all sorts of curious ravers to a sound that was once confined to BlackBerry Messenger and WhatsApp inboxes. 

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But, just for a moment, never mind all that. Gwala might be an ambassador for a musical universe at this point, but, once, he was another child growing up in Durban. He surrounded himself with the sounds of hip-hop and kwaito, an ebullient style of house music beloved by the city’s older generation. Before his turn towards production, Gwala nurtured dreams of being a football star, but an ankle injury spurred a change of plans, and a young Gwala went all-in on hip-hop.  

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To hear Gwala tell it, he got hooked early. Perhaps this shouldn’t come as a surprise: He idolized Msawawa, a kwaito MC who shot to fame at ten years old. (More on childhood stardom later.)  “[Msawawa] was one of the [people] that made me fall in love with music,” he says. “He was huge when I was growing up—I always wanted to be like him.” It wasn’t just the radio, though: A cousin of his took rapping seriously, and Gwala would tag along to the recording studio and try his hand at the craft too. (“I was writing lyrics; I was rapping. But I wasn’t good.”) It wasn’t long before he saw someone working with FL Studio, making beats from scratch on the spot.

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“And that,” Gwala recounts with a glimmer in his eye, “was that.” 
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Gwala got his hands on a laptop and went to work, producing hip-hop on VirtualDJ and FL Studio. As time passed, his focus on production only deepened. Eventually, though, he realized that his beats weren’t catching. “Hip-hop is always inside me,” but, he laughs, “It was bad, man. Nobody played my music.” So: Where to next? Fortunately, Gwala was hardly the only person asking that question.

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In Durban, kwaito was beloved by the city’s old guard, and it was wildly popular in its nightclubs. But a new wave of dancers was emerging, and, with it, a new sound. In 2011, Naked Boys, a pair of high schoolers two years ahead of Gwala, released a track called “iThoyizi” (or, later, “Hunters Gold”). That song, a minimal composition of pitter-patter tom drums and heaving vocal loops, became a blueprint for Gwala’s cohort. Given its spare composition and bracing aesthetics, it was more or less a photonegative to kwaito’s more sun-kissed approach—a kind of rebellion perfect for a teenage generation’s sound. “If you ask any gqom producer, they will tell you the same thing: They were trying to make that song,” Gwala says, matter-of-factly. “It changed everything.”

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This new sound was young in two different ways. First, it was brand new, with a clear, traceable genesis; secondly, and more importantly, it was dominated by people who weren’t even old enough to drive, let alone drink. Plenty of names who would go on to be critical names in the genre—Naked Boys, Rudeboyz, Gwala—were still in high school at the time, so Gwala, their peer in sound and age alike, had license to jump right in. Gwala, in the past, has said that he’s one of the genre’s “godfathers,” but he complicated that narrative during our conversation, insisting it was a more communal thing. “I wouldn’t say I’m the one who started gqom,” he says. “Naked Boys created that sound, and we all just jumped in. [They] were first; Rudeboyz were second; Sbucardo [da DJ] was third; and I was fourth.”

Gwala heard “iThoyizi” and jumped into gqom more or less immediately, burning his beats onto blank CDs and passing them out to cab drivers as a kind of guerilla promotion. A sea change was underway, and Gwala was on the crest of the new wave. One night halfway through high school stands out, all these years later. After a friend’s Matric dance—”In America, you call it prom”—he met up with friends and went to an afterparty. “When I arrived,” he says, still sounding a bit incredulous, “There were, like, 12 taxis. I kept hearing my music, left, right, and center.”
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Once Gwala’s music started picking up steam, he snagged a slot at Uhuru, a local club where many early gqom DJs refined their sound. Gwala found himself playing later and later sets to larger and larger crowds. He started throwing house parties, announcing them on BlackBerry Messenger and Facebook; when the cops started shutting those down, they’d take to the streets, renting minivans and dancing in parking lots. Every year, on the final day of classes, high schoolers spill into the road for what’s called umqhumo. (Roughly translated: “Explosion.”) Students rent taxis, throwing the doors open and dancing to their own music. Gwala’s productions were increasingly common at events like this. He put it simply: “I was the king of those,” he says, punctuating the sentence with a laugh. 

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With all this commotion, it would be easy to forget Gwala was still a kid. When London’s Goon Club All Stars came knocking, he had to tell them to wait a few years so he could graduate high school first. Even this early on, the dominoes were being laid for a career in the arts, something his mother was—perhaps understandably—a bit skeptical about. She was supportive, to be sure, but when Gwala started failing classes and putting music ahead of his studies, she threatened to take his laptop unless he turned things around. He ended up scraping by, making music on friends’ computers until the end of the year. As soon as he passed his exams, he threw a Hail Mary. “I told my mom: ‘Can I just do music this year? And then, the second year, you can take me anywhere you want to take me.’”

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The gambit worked out. Six months later, he was in Johannesburg, shooting a documentary with Boiler Room, and he got his first check before he even had a bank account. In the years since, Gwala’s profile has skyrocketed, with a touring schedule that sees him regularly crossing oceans and a C.V. that includes collaborations with superstars and underground legends alike. Gqom became an increasingly common fixture in multi-genre DJ sets, providing a nice contrast to the comparatively busy sounds of U.K. and U.S. club nights and tossing new dancefloor bombs to open-minded partiers.

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Years later, the world briefly shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic. This gave Gwala—who had, at this point, become perhaps the best-known gqom producer in the world—a chance to slow down a bit. He’d long since fallen down the gqom rabbit hole with no intentions of finding his way out, but he wanted to broaden his horizons a bit. Thinking back to that time, he says, “That’s when I was like, ‘Let me try this and that,’ you know? I started falling in love with all these sounds.” His debut LP, Meeting With the King, was the fruit of this labor: A long-form tangling of gqom, amapiano, hip-hop, and Afro-tech that held his preferred style at the center, using gqom’s thousand-pound kick drums to create a new center of gravity. Its title underlined the coronation that he’d undergone a decade ago, but he wasn’t comfortable resting on his laurels, choosing instead to push gqom further afield.
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With his latest release—The Rebellion, released in late June—Gwala has doubled down on the genre entanglement he practiced on Meeting With the King. Going by Gwala’s own definition of the stuff, these tracks are undeniably gqom, but there’s so much more going on, too. “Kwenzakalan” hints at stadium-ready trap records; “Oke Oke” sits somewhere between vintage Afro-house and new-school drum workouts; and “Umlilo,” tellingly, went by the working title of “Gqom / Drill.” This is the work of a genre scholar, but Gwala is hardly a traditionalist; he knows the rules well enough that he’s comfortable bending them.

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When I asked Gwala about his thought process behind the latest record, he made those intentions clear. “I want to mix [gqom] up with other genres,” he says, weighing each word carefully. “Right now, I have a feeling that gqom is getting left out. Everything is changing now.” In the past few years, as gqom has slightly faded from the international spotlight and amapiano, afro-tech, and 3-step have taken its place. Gwala has held steady to his preferred style. Asked if he was interested in making something with a greater focus on amapiano, he laughs: “Never! No, no, no, no, no. Gqom is something that I’m always gonna be doing. I’m a gqom person.” This is the skeleton key to Gwala’s approach: In his work, he has branched out into umpteen styles without losing track of the aesthetics that excite him most.

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Gqom, in his eyes, is filled with unexplored territories, and he’s clearly excited to chase the style into parts unknown. This all leaves Gwala in a bit of a curious position: He is an outsized figure in a highly particular style of dance music, a liaison between a genre’s traditions and its futures, and an international representative for the stuff that floods the streets in Durban and Cape Town. As the de facto representative of an entire style, Gwala carries a certain pressure to represent his city. “I try not to put it in my head, because it’s gonna put too much pressure on me,” he tells me. “But I have a responsibility. I have to keep this sound going. This music was made for young kids. All these young producers [in Durban] who are starting to get into music—they’re all starting with gqom.” 
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As he’s moved from one of the young guns to a genre veteran, Gwala has become something of a mentor to gqom’s fresh faces. A generation of younger producers looks up to Gwala, a fact evinced by his WhatsApp messages. Gwala states his admiration for these musicians plainly: “[They’re] coming up with crazy stuff that I’ve never heard. I play it internationally! But before they release their music, they send it to me. They want to see the crowd dancing to it before they release it.” His party series, called Something For Clermont, showcases talent from his home township; and in the coming year, he’s hoping to take it around the world, using the rechristened Something From Clermont to highlight Durban’s still-vital local scenes.  “When they were growing up,” he tells me, “they were listening to me, and they were learning from me. Now, I'm older. I'm listening to them, and I'm learning from them. We're learning from each other.” 

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To Gwala, all this—the rise of gqom, the touring, the incoming producers—is only natural. Even as he’s taken it to ever-growing stages, Gwala understands gqom as a local thing; fundamentally, it’s a scene fueled by teenagers, taxicabs, and a communal desire for a great party. The Rebellion, then, is a celebration of gqom’s history, a document of its present, and a suggestion of where it could go next; it’s music for busted speaker phones, thousand-dollar amplifiers, and minivans packed with high schoolers. It’s a teenage Gwala’s wildest dreams made manifest. “I always knew it was gonna happen,” he tells me near the end of our conversation, beaming all the while. “Ever since I was in high school, I could see it. I’m just glad it happened the way I wanted it to.”

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