Tellaman is at home in Johannesburg when we speak, patches of flu hanging over him from a weekend he spent largely in bed. Nasty C is recovering from the opposite kind of weekend.
Shows in Johannesburg and Botswana, the usual machinery of being one of South Africa’s most in-demand performers.
They’re in separate places, separate parts of the city but the ease between them when they appear together on screen is the kind that comes from years of watching each other grow up.
They’ve been doing exactly that since their teenage years in Durban, when both were figuring out what kind of artists they wanted to be.
Nasty C, born Nsikayesizwe David Junior Ngcobo, became one of the biggest names in African hip-hop, earning co-signs from American artists many of his fans had grown up watching on television.
Tellaman, born Thelumusa Samuel Owen, built something quieter but no less devoted — a catalogue of R&B that sits warmly in the chest, the kind of music people play without needing to explain why.
Now, more than a decade into both their careers, they are releasing a joint album.
It’s called T’s and C’s Apply, a title Nasty C describes as “very on the nose” — Tellaman and C’s two names folded into a phrase most people scroll past without reading. Low-hanging fruit, he says, but sometimes that’s the right call.
The album has been a long time coming. Both artists had been accumulating ideas in what Nasty C calls a vault — songs and fragments sitting untouched for years.
At the start of 2026, they made the decision to do it, locking in properly, sifting through what they had, keeping what fit the mood they were after and building outward from there.
By the time this conversation takes place, the recording is finished. They are deep in mixing and mastering, somewhere between 16 and 17 songs, with features they’re not yet ready to disclose.
The album is, Nasty C says, “R&B-leaning. Made for winter.”
He pauses, then adds with a deadpan that makes it hard to know how seriously to take him: “We heard there’s been population issues in the world, so we’re trying to get people to procreate. We’re saving the planet.” We all share a good laugh.
Tellaman confirms that quite a few of the tracks will find their way onto bedroom playlists. He doesn’t elaborate but he doesn’t need to.
In the studio, the two of them work without much ceremony. The method, as Tellaman describes it, is essentially: throw ideas at the wall, spend time on what sticks and move on from what doesn’t.
Recently they introduced what he calls speedballing — putting on a beat, setting a 15-minute timer, recording whatever comes without overthinking it, then returning to
the rough sketches later to develop them into something more considered. It keeps the sessions from getting too precious.
That lightness doesn’t mean they always agree. At the time of speaking, there is a song on the album over which they are gently at odds.
Nasty C’s view is that the track doesn’t need him, that Tellaman carries it entirely on his own. Tellaman’s view is that a verse from his collaborator would complete it.
“You just have to trust your brother,” Nasty C says, with the resigned warmth of someone who has made his peace with this. “If you say so. I’ll give it a shot.”
The disagreement, such as it is, reflects something real about how they work together. They come from different sonic worlds — Nasty C’s shaped heavily by American hip-hop, Tellaman’s by a more introspective R&B tradition.
In the studio, the gap becomes less a division and more a resource. Each of them hears things the other misses.
“Sometimes you see things that the other person might not see,” Tellaman says. “And vice versa.
You know and it happens a lot in this field.”
The subject of success comes up and both men take their time with it. It’s a question that has clearly been sitting with them for a while — longer, perhaps, than any single interview could account for.
For Nasty C, the early years were about money, recognition and the thrill of being acknowledged by the artists he’d grown up admiring. The co-signs came, they were real and then they weren’t enough.
“As time went by and I started ticking a lot of these boxes,” he says, “I started trying to fulfil something bigger than just my pockets.”
What success means to him now is harder to reduce to a sentence. It’s about remaining the same person to his family and friends. Not sacrificing things that matter to maintain an image. Not going insane.
“If I can do all those things,” he says, “I’m successful.”
Tellaman arrives somewhere similar. He talks about making music not for critics or industry insiders but for an ordinary person with an ordinary life — someone going to work or school who needs something to carry them through the day.
“If I can reach those people,” he says, “that would be some kind of success for me as well.”
He also wants to enjoy the life he’s living. It’s a short life and he’d like to find things to enjoy about it while he can, he says.
Both of them talk about fame the way people do when they’ve had long enough to develop a considered opinion. Nasty C travels with security now — a practical measure, not a statement.
Without it, a public encounter can escalate to the point where he loses patience, snaps at someone and then that becomes its own social media story. Better to have someone else handle it with grace.
Tellaman’s discomfort with visibility has always been different. He describes himself as a calm, quiet person who spent years being told, in interview settings, to bring more energy, be bigger, perform a loudness he doesn’t feel. He has stopped pretending otherwise.
“Now I just be myself,” he says. “If people like it, they like it.”
What he guards more carefully is privacy — the freedom to walk to a shop alone, to move through the world unrecognised. He mentions that going out with Junior means cameras and crowd logistics he’d rather avoid when it’s not necessary.
“He’s too famous for me,” he says.
Nasty C laughs. He gets it. “Sometimes I want to do stuff with my son and I don’t want to be Nasty C,” he says. “And it’s a thing I can’t escape. Sometimes it’s fun. Sometimes it isn’t.”
When the conversation turns to the wider landscape of South African music, both men land on the same frustration.
There is not enough genuine collaboration happening across genres, Tellaman says — not just a guest verse but artists sitting in the same room, sharing ideas across each other’s parts, writing together in the real sense. A hip-hop artist and a house producer. An R&B singer and a rock musician. Territories that haven’t been mapped yet.
“I feel like there’s a lot of potential that we can tap into as musicians,” he says.
For Nasty C, when asked about dream collaborations, the answer is revealing. It’s not artists he finds himself thinking about but producers — the architects of sound rather than those who inhabit it.
Tellaman echoes the same instinct, though he also names singers whose voices have stayed with him: Siphokazi and Lira. People he would like to sit in a room with, just to see what happens.
The question of longevity arrives near the end of the conversation and both men give it proper consideration.
Nasty C talks about making music that addresses real, human things — everyday anxieties, relationship doubts, the quiet fears most people carry without naming. He talks about social media balance, maintaining a little mystique, not giving everything away.
“I’m not saying this is what everyone needs to use,” he says. “But this is what’s kept me around for a long time.”
Tellaman’s answer is simpler: keep creating. Not obsessively, not without rest but consistently. “If this is your career,” he says, “you should spend most of your time trying to improve it.”
What Tellaman hopes people feel when they reach the end of T’s and C’s Apply is something he struggles to reduce to a single word. Satisfied, maybe, though the album is a roller-coaster — happy songs and sad ones, slow and uptempo.
What he really wants is for it to become part of people’s lives.
“Whenever they think of specific memories down the line,” he says, “part of the album is attached to that.”
The terms and conditions, as always, apply.
On fame, friendship and a long-overdue joint album, Nasty C and Tellaman are exactly where they want to be