Northern Dial Artist Profile

Jessie Reyez

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Toronto-raised Colombian-Canadian singer-songwriter Jessie Reyez broke through with the 2016 single "Figures" and the following year's Kiddo EP, bringing an unusually raw vocal style and blunt emotional writing into contemporary R&B and pop. Being Human in Public deepened that approach and earned a place on the 2019 Polaris Music Prize shortlist. Songs such as "Gatekeeper" also showed how directly Reyez was willing to address power, misogyny and exploitation within the music industry rather than separating personal experience from the conditions surrounding her career.

Her debut album Before Love Came to Kill Us arrived in 2020, followed by Yessie in 2022 and the expansive Paid in Memories in 2025. Reyez has also developed a parallel career as a songwriter and collaborator, working with artists across pop, rap and R&B while retaining a vocal identity that is immediately recognizable. In 2026 she released A Little Vengeance, her fourth studio album, extending a prolific period that also included touring, poetry and the launch of a fund intended to expand opportunities for women and historically underrepresented communities in music.

Reyez matters in the Canadian landscape because her work connects Toronto's R&B ecosystem to a more confrontational singer-songwriter tradition. Her records can move between stripped-down confession, rap cadence and large pop production without smoothing away the rasp, tension or specificity in her delivery. Multiple JUNO wins, Grammy recognition and an increasingly international catalogue reflect that reach, but the stronger through-line is authorship: Reyez's career has consistently treated emotional exposure and industry critique as compatible with mainstream ambition.