Fresh off being named pop artist of the year at the Basadi in music awards, iranian-South African popstar Ava like lava continues her year of monthly releases with ‘Club Penguin’ — a moody alternative-pop record about surviving the fear of dying too young.
Arriving as Ava’s eighth monthly release of 2026 and her birthday-month record, ‘Club Penguin’ finds her freshly on the other side of 27 — an age permanently mythologised in music through the artists who never made it beyond it. But this is not a song romanticising the 27 club.
It is a song about wanting desperately to live — confronting a fear that extends beyond death itself: dying before the dream materialises, before the work feels complete, before becoming the person you have spent your life believing you could become.
That anxiety eventually gives way to the song’s defining declaration:
“27 I am so alive
27 we will be just fine
27 I don’t want to die
27 I won’t compromise.”
Sonically, ‘Club Penguin’ represents a striking departure from anything Ava has released before. Soulful, more alternative and brought alive by live-recorded instrumentation, the record reveals a side of her musical identity that has always existed beneath the surface.
As a listener, Ava traces part of that instinct back to discovering Arctic monkeys in her early teens — music that expanded her world and taste. On ‘Club Penguin’, that formative influence finds its way into her own artistic language without compromising the multicultural pop world she has spent years building.
That tension — between mortality and appetite, darkness and play, fear and movement — gives ‘Club Penguin’ its pulse. By the time Ava repeats “I don’t wanna rush / I don’t want to die,” the mythology surrounding 27 has become something far more personal: gratitude for still being here. ‘Club Penguin’ will be available on all major streaming platforms on August 27, 2026.
![CTT Beats, Flash Ikumkani, Hannah V – UNDITHWELE [ Official Video]](https://dalakreative.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/126e2320-6774-67b8-c0d0-6e9f02af4d58.jpg)
