Esquire Studio Sessions: Tkay Maidza embraces the impossible with Defender

While in Sydney for Volume recently, Esquire caught up with Tkay Maidza. Here’s what the genre-defying artist had to say about taking the road less travelled

By Amy Campbell

Published: Jul 24, 2024

“WHEN I FIRST STARTED out, there was this idea that there weren’t a lot of hybrid artists,” says Zimbabwean-born Australian musician Tkay Maidza. “So when you’re constantly told that being able to jump into different sounds isn’t really possible . . . you kind of get disheartened sometimes . . . I think the biggest thing is to just keep going, and to have that excitement.”

Maidza knows what it means to embrace the impossible and back herself in. The singer has been proving people wrong since choosing to trade her architecture degree for a career in music, dropping her debut single ‘Brontosaurus’, as an 18-year-old in 2013. At that time, critics didn’t know what box to place her unique sound in; but fans loved it, and so did other artists — she’s since collaborated with French DJ Martin Solveig, Killer Mike and Flume. Just days ago, Maidza ticked another item off her bucket list, playing Pitchfork Music and Arts festival in Chicago alongside industry icons like Jamie XX and Alanis Morissette.

“To move forward has been like the biggest challenge, there’s always another wall where the answer is believing in yourself, really.”

It’s this trailblazing attitude that brought Tkay Maidza to the attention of Defender, the pioneering British car marque that’s all about taking the road less travelled. The singer joins a global cast of boundary-pushing musicians — British rapper Kano and Aussie DJ Fisher among them — who embody the Defender ethos of losing yourself in the experience and carving out a niche in the process.

Now based in Los Angeles, recently, Tkay Maidza travelled back to Australia to play at the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ Volume festival, where she transformed the institution’s Tank space into a retro-futuristic rave. While here, we spent some time hanging out with the singer, talking overcoming social constructs, building a stable career on experimentation and overcoming self-doubt to find confidence.

Watch part one and part two of our Studio Sessions with Tkay Maidza and Defender, below.