Into The Music
Jessie Reyez dropped a surprise EP this week and barely announced it. A story post here, a story post there, the project just appearing on streaming at midnight like it had somewhere else to be. That is Reyez in miniature: she operates on her own timeline, follows her own logic, and the industry keeps catching up to her instead of the other way around.
The EP is called $till Paid, a companion piece to last year’s Paid in Memories, and it arrives exactly one year after that album’s release. Five tracks. A Stormzy collab on a reworked “Palo $anto.” A freestyle on the title track where she drops a rap verse that reminds you she has always had bars, she just does not always choose to pull them out. The project is lean and confident, exactly the move you make when you have just wrapped a 54-date world tour and want to come home with something in your hands.
Reyez built her reputation the hard way. The Toronto-raised, Colombian-Canadian singer-songwriter broke through with “Figures” in 2016, a controlled burn of a song that introduced a voice capable of going from whisper to howl with almost no warning. The industry took notice. She signed to FMJD/Island after years of grinding the Toronto circuit, and she never let the machine sand off her edges.
Her discography reflects that stubbornness. Before Love Came to Kill Us (2020) arrived mid-pandemic with more emotional weight than anyone knew what to do with. She put out a record about heartbreak and loss right when the entire world was experiencing those exact things, and it landed accordingly. Yessie followed in 2022, a sharper and slightly more defiant record that found her leaning harder into the pop-R&B hybrid she had been circling since the beginning.
Paid in Memories was the synthesis. A record that pulled together everything she had been building toward: her songwriting craft, her voice at its most controlled and most unhinged, her knack for collaborations that feel organic rather than calculated. It spawned the kind of tour that fills rooms on multiple continents, including the hometown Toronto finale that closed the run in December 2025.
What makes Reyez interesting beyond the voice and the work ethic is the POV. She writes about the music industry with a directness that makes label executives uncomfortable. She writes about desire and power and the cost of both with specificity that earns it. There is no vagueness in her work, no retreat into abstraction when things get difficult. Every song has a position.
The Stormzy collaboration on $till Paid is a good example. Two artists from different worlds, neither of them especially interested in playing it safe, finding common ground on a track that has no business working as well as it does. It works because neither of them is performing. That is Reyez’s skill set in a single data point: she pulls the best out of the room she is in.
She is not the most famous artist in the world. She is not trying to be. What she is, at this point in her career, is one of the most reliable ones. You know what you are getting from a Jessie Reyez release: something honest, something with teeth, something that sounds like it cost her something to make. That is rarer than it should be.
