The Skiifall
Genre

I moved [to Notre-Dame-de-Grâce] in February and had my first-ever music class there. In my first year of high school, I was always the one to fuck around in my music program. I never took it serious until they changed the teacher for the program, who changed the structure of the whole organization and made it a lot more cool. It still wasn’t music that I was like, “Oh my god!”—she was trying to put me on to Kendrick and that wasn’t what I wanted to hear—but, you know, over time I started to enjoy that process and I learned from her. I took things into my own hands, and started doing my own thing. I went to a studio in that neighborhood that’s free. They don’t make the youth pay, which was super dope. I’m 20 now, they’re supposed to be like, “You can’t come back here,” but they’ll allow me to record. It’s a safe space, a place that I love, a place that I feel comfortable. It’s also a part of my journey: I wouldn’t be where I’m at right now if it wasn’t for them. No other neighborhoods in Montreal, or in the world, have foundations like those, where you have really dope studio equipment and [they] give you the craziest mixes back. I’m grateful for it.

On my first album I’m gonna have my mom do the intro. My mom’s a really dope singer—my mom and my aunt. Back in St. Vincent, we didn’t have an indoor shower and while she was outside, the whole neighborhood could hear her. They used to say it was going to rain because she was singing so much. My mom listened to music but she really got into it when she started going to church. I was the sound engineer at my church. I learned from this engineer Jimmy, and he started coming to the church late, so after a while I was in charge of it. When anyone would piss me off I’d just turn off their mics.

Me and my friends were all from St. Vincent. All our moms know each other, they grew up together. And we didn’t know each other until we got to high school. We spent a few years in the high school in our neighborhood, and then they got so tired of us that they transferred us to the school where they keep the gang members and all the troublemakers. Up until that point, that’s not what I was. Until they transferred us. People used to refer to us as the Jamaicans, just because of how we talked. They didn’t fuck with us. They were envious of what we were on, and the fact that we weren’t from their neighborhoods. They tried to pick on us. They kind of forced this gang persona [on us]. I came here to learn, I didn’t come to fight. But if this is what you want, this is what you’re gonna get. The male ego is so fucked up. That was my entry into something that I didn’t want. And so music is what drove me. Like, ok, for me to not be like this, I want to spend this amount of time in the studio, because I don’t want to go there.

It’s important, I don’t want to ever feel like an outsider. My friends made me feel like I was always at home. It kept the Vinci living in me. You can hear it in my music. It never left me.

When we did the session, we automatically knew that this was it. Finished the song the next day. Shot the video the day after. I met with the guy who is my day-to-day manager now and he was down to invest some money. I didn’t have bread for different promotions on YouTube and marketing things. So he was down to invest 240 bucks. I was smart enough to say, “Let’s use these markets to blow it up”—I wanted London, I wanted Toronto, I wanted New York, I wanted several places in Europe and Ottawa. As soon as we started running, it started going crazy. Virgil [Abloh] posted it, then Jorja Smith. And it kept on going. People in the city were not the most supportive until they saw Virgil, and then I got my Louis Vuitton feature. People are only gassed about things when they become bigger, and you can’t blame anyone for that.

I don’t give a fuck about what anyone says. I’m not ready for an album. I feel like an album comes after you’ve gone through the many different phases of making music at the beginning of your career. Then you give people a different perspective of what you can be, on a bigger scale. I’m in no rush to be like, Oh my God, I need to give them the greatest album right now. When that album comes out, I want it to be a classic. I want it to speak volumes of who I am and who the people are that helped work on it. That’s the result that I want. And, of course, a Grammy.

I don’t want them to expect anything. Expect it to be not what you expected.

Music is bigger than Canada, America, St. Vincent, Jamaica. My music, in all, just represents Black. Just because I’m Canadian doesn’t mean I’m less Black than a Black American, you kow?What’s happening in the ghetto never changes, that story needs to be told over and over and over and over again. But the ways that it should be told in 2022—and then in 2023, or 2050—should always evolve. That’s what I want my music to do. I could rap today and sing tomorrow, it doesn’t matter. It should not be classified as anything. If anything, it’s the Skiifall genre.

It’s dub on monster truck wheels. I love that reverb. I love the feeling of dub. And I only found out what dub really was a year and a half ago. I was making it without even knowing what it was. It’s dub with a little bit of rap, a little bit of pop, a little bit of every single fucking thing in this world that inspires me—my friends, my mom, my mentors, movies. That’s what shapes and forms my genre. For some people it’s going to be hard to understand, but you can only understand it if you want to understand it.