Watch Tsholofelo’s Past Two Years music video

The music video was shot at the Capitol Theatre and Old Netherlands Bank Building in Pretoria, South Africa. It was directed by film director, editor and scriptwriter Sean Mongie.

In the video, Tsholofelo can be seen navigating through beautiful yet empty spaces, showing the void left by the people who once filled them. The visuals feature cellist William Nobela, who played on the single, and several phone recorded clips of Tsholofelo’s memorable moments with friends and family.

Tsholofelo describes the single as a sonic recollection of the past two years. She wrote the single on New Year’s Day while making a retrospective account of her journey in the past two years.

“I was looking at the past two years and thought, ‘Damn, I survived that’. ‘That’ being the COVID-19 pandemic and the havoc that it caused in the lives of many. It was my reminder to be more gracious with myself. Everybody’s in a rush to get back to normal, and I get it completely, but in a lot of ways nothing’s really normal for some. We’ve loved and we’ve lost. It’s like we’re all learning how to walk again. You can’t rush that process and perhaps we can find some beauty in that, too.”

Hope is the central theme here, yet there are elements of melancholy in this song, which addresses different emotions starting with grief and provides the listener with a catharsis of sorts while pondering on “the other side of healing”.

Commenting on the songwriting process, Tsholofelo told Music In Africa: “I was going back and forth with my emotions where some days I was okay and some days I wasn’t. As the song came together towards finalisation, I felt that I had reached a lot more acceptance, emotionally, than I had thought initially – as if I had reached the other side of my healing journey, the part where I’m better off and have actually accepted the change.”

Tsholofelo’s music boasts a diverse soundscape of alternative, R&B, soul and folk music. The single and video are courtesy of the Southern African Music Rights Organisation through the Music Creation Support Fund 2022. Tsholofelo released her breakout album Becoming in 2017.