LONDON — To command stages and mesmerize crowds, musicians often have to be larger than life: a bigger head, a heavier foot. But Nakhane slipped quietly into a grand London hotel late one Sunday last month, soft-stepping even in combat boots, taking up little space in a corner armchair with a feline kind of grace.
Nakhane, 31, who was born Nakhane Mavuso and has used Nakhane Touré as an artist name, had shrugged off the opportunity to show off his East End neighborhood, his home since moving from South Africa in 2018. “My life has always been internal,” he said. “Journalists say, ‘Take us to your favorite places,’ and I never had them. I don’t go anywhere except to the coffee shop around the corner.”
Nakhane’s music, on the other hand, stretches up and out. His voice — grand, sweeping, choir-trained and soul-stirred — is a trumpet blast. And his new album, “You Will Not Die,” released last year in Europe and Africa and in the United States last month, is an LP of aching contradictions, at once sensual and spiritual, wrestling with faith, love, lust and country.
Nakhane’s music has an orchestral grandeur and a quicksilver soul. Raised by an aunt who sang opera, he grew up to a score of Handel, Mozart and Bach, to which his aunt eventually added Marvin Gaye and the O’Jays. But the glamorous spirit of David Bowie hovers over the record, too, and when Nakhane began working with producer Ben Christophers (Bat for Lashes), the singer told him, “Let’s take the second side of ‘Low’ and write songs with it, but as if it was in the streets of South Africa.”
For the moment, though, he has given up South Africa for a life abroad. In his home country, Nakhane, who is queer, has been threatened with both death and damnation. He wrote “You Will Not Die” after leaving his church, for which he had evangelized an anti-gay theology. He ultimately left the country after starring in “The Wound,” a film that set a gay love plot against the backdrop of the traditional initiation ritual for Xhosa boys. The film was a hit on the festival circuit and was South Africa’s submission to the Academy Awards. But it also drew fury for revealing intimate details of the Ulwaluko, the circumcision ceremony he underwent as a young man, and for showing that gayness, far from being a foreign infection as some South Africans prefer to believe, exists among the Xhosa, too.
“I still can’t go home to Port Elizabeth,” he said of the city on the Eastern Cape where he grew up. “I know my people. We are very passionate people.”
South Africa is relatively permissive on LGBTQ issues, but the churches he and his family attended were rigidly doctrinaire. So despite coming out at 17 to his friends and 19 to his family, Nakhane renounced being gay after a chance meeting with a pastor’s son at the record shop where he worked. He threw himself into the church, attending Bible studies, singing in the church band and preaching the possibility of conversion. Eventually, buckling under the strain of denying himself — coupled with a growing awareness of the colonialist implications of the church’s teachings, and a racist dynamic he could no longer ignore — he left.
“I’m not angry at it anymore,” Nakhane said of his life then. He has removed those he knew in the church from his life, he said, but has less venom for them than the press would wish, he added. “They did love me,” he said. “This is all they knew.”
What he knew was the destiny he believed in for himself. “You are going to be one of the most important South African artists to come out of this country,” he recalled telling himself while still a student in Johannesburg. “You don’t know when. You don’t know how. But it’s going to happen. And the work starts now.”
The work started with “Brave Confusion,” a folksy 2013 album released in South Africa that performed better critically than commercially. But it was the collapse of all that he knew — his exit from the church after six years, a period of financial hardship and quasi-homelessness — that led to the emotional breakthroughs he explores on “You Will Not Die.”
Even for someone who had grown up thinking of songwriting as a form of divine inspiration (“It seemed like such a priestly job. You’ve been chosen to write a song”), being chosen is not an uncomplicated blessing, and Nakhane is not romantic about the alchemy of turning experience into art. His work, as he described it, is taking the “shrapnel” of inspiration and forming it into something. “Songs are dangerous,” he said. “Art is dangerous. And painful. You do it because you have to.”
For all its pain and longing, “You Will Not Die” is not bleak: It tracks a long arc toward joy. “Interloper” is dark but up-tempo — self-affirmation to a propulsive beat. “Never live in fear again, no, never again,” is the chorus of “New Brighton,” a single recorded with Anohni, whose music has sonic parallels with Nakhane’s own. The two never met, Anohni said in an email, and completed the track separately. But she called it “exuberant and so heartbreaking,” and Nakhane’s music “very beautiful and soulful and smoldering.”
His fearlessness is drawing admirers. Madonna called him one of her favorite artists, and filmmaker John Cameron Mitchell cast him in his new project, a musical radio-play-by-podcast called “Anthem: Homunculus,” which will debut in late April. “To me, he is some kind of love child of James Baldwin, David Bowie and Grace Jones,” Mitchell said. “He’s the most exciting new renaissance artist I’ve seen this century.”
For now, Nakhane is adjusting to his own new horizons: living in London with a boyfriend, touring his music, beginning to write more. (He is at work on what may turn into his second novel.) He is back on good terms with his family, and spiritual, if no longer religious, about the unique privilege of being Nakhane.
“Someone like me could never have existed in any other era than now,” he said. “The fact that I have an album being released internationally, being an out, political, queer black person who speaks his mind and makes good music? My existence is miraculous.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.