Nasty C and Tellaman have terms and conditions

With a joint album on the way and more than a decade of friendship behind them, Nasty C and Tellaman are ready to let the music speak

- Kibo Ngowi

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 16s 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.”