As the pop landscape becomes progressively bolder and more crowded, it becomes more difficult for any new artist to make an impact. The bandwidth is saturated. Billie Eilish is a hard act to follow; she has rewritten a lot of rules. “Attitude” is standard among R&B singers, and is just as often a pose. Shock value depreciates. But on her debut album, the breakup-fuelled Before Love Came to Kill Us, Toronto’s R&B star-in-waiting Jessie Reyez makes herself unforgettable pretty much from the word go.
Her album, out on 27 March, opens with a toss of her mane. “I should have fucked your friends, it would have been the best revenge,” Reyez seethes – you can hear her eyes are narrowed. A little later in the song, Reyez imagines shooting that cheating ex. “If I blow your brains out I can guarantee that you’d forget her, if I blow your brains out, I can kiss it better.”
All this is delivered in a swaggering, kittenish R&B tone that catches and swoops – a voice that’s not a million miles from singers like Kehlani or Ariana Grande, but distinctive enough to skewer at 100 paces. That first song, Do You Love Her, is the kind of track that might serve as the climax of most albums. Here, it’s just how Reyez says hello.
Throughout the course of 14 tracks, this 28-year-old singer, a second-generation Colombian-Canadian initially nurtured by Toronto’s Remix Project incubator, cements the reputation she has established over a pair of EPs as a raw and heartfelt talent. Yes she can sing, but Reyez can also deliver lines that drip with character. Her out-of-the-ordinary credentials are best expressed by 2017’s landmark Gatekeeper, a coruscating song about being propositioned by a record producer that prefigured the #MeToo tsunami, while a short film dramatised the song’s circumstances.
But Reyez has a wicked sense of humour too. “I dodge dick on the daily! I know it’s funny but it’s true,” she sang on 2018’s lilting Body Count, a song that took issue with slut-shaming.
Body Count was about listing previous lovers. Reyez’s full-length album is, by contrast, borderline homicidal, racking up another kind of body count. On Intruders, a deceptively mellow, bossa-nova-ish guitar track, Reyez imagines loading a weapon and killing again. On the striking Ankles, where she measures her man’s “other bitches” against herself (“Levels? Ankles!”), she’d “kill for a mute button in my head” to tune out his open philandering.
By the fourth track, Eminem is throwing down a strong verse on a doo-wop song called Coffin, and Reyez is getting, if anything, even more emo. “I’d rather a coffin hand-made for two, cos I love you to death,” she sings. (The album cover art features that very coffin made for two.) Eminem originally sought Reyez for an appearance on his 2018 album, Kamikaze. Another fairy godmother in Reyez’s grind-to-grandeur tale was Calvin Harris, who catapulted Reyez to a massive audience with a rare sweet-natured tune, 2018’s Hard to Love.
The remainder of these largely excellent 14 songs pay close attention to everything that has happened in the past few years of pop: Ariana Grande’s radical candour, the entertainingly foul mouth of Cardi B, the Latin pop boom, the so-wrong-they’re-right soundbeds made for Billie Eilish by her producer brother Finneas. (Reyez was scheduled to open on Eilish’s world tour).
But there is no sense that Reyez is making anything other than her own record, serving the tired trope of heartbreak up in a most engaging way. One song, La Memoria, is sung entirely in Spanish but doesn’t sound anything like Camila Cabello, with Reyez referring to herself as “una perra” (a bitch).
The magnificently furious Deaf, by contrast, is virtually rapped, throwing all sorts of sonic detritus around a production that the Eilish siblings would appreciate. Reyez herself snarls, pouts and sings the sort-of hook – “I never listen, no, I never listen, so, I never hear yo’ ass anyway” – in a way that Cardi B might envy.
A few choices puzzle. The album closes with Figures, a track that dates from long-ago 2016. It suits the thematic suite of breakup songs that constitute Before Love Came to Kill Us. But crazily, the album doesn’t have room for No Sweat, an all-out feminist party banger that came out in January disguised as a Secret deodorant advert.
There are so many good tracks on here – the breezy trap-pop of Roof, in which Reyez declares: “I might be petite but I’m a fucking monster”; the hyper-processed bop that is Dope, the co-sign with Atlanta-based rapper 6lack, Imported, which finds two artists contemplating “getting over” someone by “getting under” someone else – that you want to say there is not a bad track on this outrageously fine pop record.
But there is. Love in the Dark is a flaccid ballad, the most anodyne and conventional tune Reyez has done by far. It features by-numbers piano chords, namby-pamby violins and a soaring nice-lady vocal that almost undoes all the powerful work Reyez has done thus far. Almost, but not quite.
Before Love Came to Kill Us is out on FMLY/Island Records on 27 March
