A voice that slides between French, Creole and Ewondo, an unhurried tempo, hooks built to last: in just a few years, Tayc gave a name to a musical shade many were already working in without labelling it — afrolove. Behind the stage name is Julien Bouadjie, born on 2 May 1996 in Marseille to Cameroonian parents.
Before music came dance and theatre. As a teenager he trained in movement and stage work, moved to Paris in the early 2010s and only came to singing afterwards, almost as a knock-on effect. That training as a dancer is still audible: with him, rhythmic placement matters as much as melody.
The first markers were Alchemy in 2017, then H.E.L.I.O.S in 2018 — two projects that laid down the raw material before the fame. He signed with H24 Music and, between 2019 and 2020, rolled out the three instalments of the NYXIA series, where audiences properly took notice of him.
The turning point was Fleur froide, an album released in 2020. From it he drew Le Temps, a single put out on 26 February 2021, which would become his biggest hit and be certified diamond. The song locked in his formula for good: little showing off, direct writing, a chorus that sticks on first listen.
That same year he widened his audience well beyond R&B fans by winning the eleventh season of Danse avec les stars, in November 2021, alongside dancer Fauve Hautot. In the final he finished ahead of Bilal Hassani and Michou. The television run brought him a mainstream profile that streaming platforms alone had not.
What sets Tayc apart is studio discipline rather than a single flash of brilliance. He works on his projects in cycles, claims the afrolove label as a brief — softness, sensuality, African grounding — and holds to it from one record to the next instead of chasing every trend.
His Cameroonian ancestry is not exotic set dressing in his lyrics: it surfaces in his word choices, the linguistic nods, a way of owning a heritage without putting it on display. Marseille and Cameroon share the same sentence, with neither used to set off the other.
His path says something about today's French-language scene: you can come from dance, pass through an entertainment show, sing in several languages and still hold credibility with a demanding audience. The balancing act, with him, was never an admission of weakness.
To salute Tayc is to acknowledge an artist who chose to name and hold a style rather than follow the wind. Afrolove existed before him; he gave it a word, a face and a method.
