I really loved your EP, Kiddo, and the song that really strikes me is “Figures.” Obviously it’s deeply personal for you, but it’s also personal for the listener. Now, Reyez is headed out on tour with a handful of sold out dates in the US and Europe, and she’s featured on Calvin Harris’ new album, out June 30th. Just last night, she stunned us with a breathtaking performance of “Figures” at the BET Awards. Since the release of her excellent debut LP Kiddo two months ago, Reyez has been focused on bringing her music and message to life. Last month she released Gatekeeper, a gut-wrenching short film about music industry sexism which resulted in a lot of buzz online, and when we meet, she’s just played Governor’s Ball, her first New York festival. She refers to her own blend of genres as “Quentin Tarantino.” Songs vary from dark hip hop/R&B arrangements to mellow electric guitar hooks, but what shines through is the rawness and purity of her voice and the brutal honesty in her lyrics. Her father plays guitar, and she felt a deep connection with reggae, which she was introduced to as a child. Jessie Reyez was born and raised in Toronto, the daughter of Colombian immigrants, and has been around music her entire life. Perhaps these qualities have something to do with her background. “No one can interrupt your song,” she says about this dynamic. “I mean, they can pause the song, but you know what I mean.” But that spontaneous burst of energy remains mostly in service for her performances and recording–when we speak one on one, she’s focused and thoughtful about talking about her music. When she sings, she belts from the bottom of her stomach to the top of her throat, as if her voice could rip through her frame with its integrity and candor. “It ended up being a blessing.”Īs a live performer, she is even more striking and exudes an unbridled energy that’s buoyantly captivating. “The song was still so real to me that I couldn’t quite hold it together,” she tells me when we meet a few days after her performance at a New York festival. It's the reason she is generating buzz and momentum as she works towards her inevitable and anticipated full-length release.During her four-minute music video for “Figures,” Jessie Reyez smashes her guitar to the ground with full force before looking into the camera with an intensity that implies she can see into the darkest corners of your soul. For the 26-year-old singer from Toronto, emotional honesty is admirable if not easy–she’ll wreck shit and then delve into tear-jerking vulnerability, revealing different sides and complexities in emotion. With Kiddo, Reyez proves she's musically fearless yet frank, ripping open emotional convention to mine the prickly realities that lie beneath. Closing things out are the interlude "Voice Mail" and the pop-minded "Great One," its piano strains underscoring its all-or-nothing metric when it comes to love. "Toronto is my city," she declares, setting the locale on the anthemic energizer that is "Blue Ribbon." The boom-bap of "Gatekeepers" explores the potential price of fame, symbolically and literally speaking, taking its lyrical and melodic cues from House of Balloons-era Abel Tesfaye. The EP follows along this wavelength, as Reyez expounds her forthright views on life, love and the connective emotional tissue in-between. Previously heard tracks "Shutter Island" and "Figures" are multifaceted echoes of her soul, glimpses of emotion and reason that depict a fully realized individual who's greater than the sum of her parts. Kiddo deals in equal parts emotional availability, intelligence and vulnerability. New school R&B tends to operate in this kind of "profanity as verisimilitude" mode, but whether one subscribes to that performance method or not, it's not hard to find something to like on the singer-songwriter's much anticipated, seven-track release. "I told you I'm a loco Colombian, now" Toronto-raised Jessie Reyez proclaims on "Fuck It," the opening track of her new EP, Kiddo.
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