YESSIE

In her first half-decade as a recording artist, Jessie Reyez’s strikingly unvarnished voice and take-no-prisoners candor earned her collaborations with the likes of Beyoncé, Eminem, and 6LACK, and a Top 10 spot on *Billboard*’s R&B charts for her 2020 debut LP, *BEFORE LOVE CAME TO KILL US*. But the Toronto singer’s proximity to pop’s A-list has done little to buff away the jagged edges of her open-diary confessionals. Her second album, *YESSIE*, wastes no time drawing lines in the sand: “I get along with most men more than I do with some women,” she declares at the start of “MOOD,” before taking down fair-weather friends with her machine-gun flow, pitch-shifted hooks, and a skin-thickening mantra—“life ain’t easy!”—that she wears like armor. Even the album’s most soothing beatscapes are littered with lyrical landmines, as she lays into a cheating ex amid the breezy, finger-snapped backdrop of “QUEEN ST. W” and transforms the string-plucked soul of “MUTUAL FRIEND” into a slasher-flick soundtrack with each lacerating one-liner. This is a record whose idea of an uplifting chorus is “If you died tomorrow/I don’t think I’d cry.” Many R&B singers seek to mend their broken heart; Reyez prefers to pick at the scabs, open up the wounds, and wince from the pain to prove she has the strength to withstand it.

Jessie Reyez looks to the long game. The Canadian artist may have garnered a Polaris nomination with her debut EP, but she’s never been content with the

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