Sinzere steps back up with new EP
CALGARY — Given her artistic output in 2020, it may seem strange that Sinzere saw it as a relatively quiet year of pause and reflection.
The Calgary hip-hop artist released two accomplished EPS, a bunch of videos and a standalone single in 2020. On Moves, a trippy number from the three-song EP Girl, Sinzere defiantly raps “I’ve been working, I’ve been working, I ain’t taking no breaks” over mellow beats and a chanted chorus.
Girl came out just months after Buy Back the Block, a six-song album that found Sinzere examining institutional racism, family trauma and redemption.
Buy Back the Block came less than a year after Sinzere released Ghetto Gaby, a semiautobiographical concept album — she calls it a hiphopera — about a girl’s coming of age on violence-filled streets.
So, the prolific artist’s idea of downtime may differ from the average person’s. But Sinzere did take a rare break in the summer of 2020, which eventually led to the recharged creativity that produced the new songs on the three-song EP Highkey, which was released earlier this month.
“For the first time in 13 years, I stepped away from music,” says Sinzere. “I learned a lot about my history. I did some digging in terms of my history and there was this sense of enlightenment, this sense of awareness and this presence that I was experiencing at this time. I was at a bit of a crossroads, musically. I wasn’t sure what direction I wanted to go. I thought to myself: What was the message I wanted to tell? Feeling where I was at the time and being a true hip-hop head by nature, I wanted to give something back to rap that was real and very authentic and true to where I was at that point in time.”
On the energetic, endearing opening track Active, Sinzere offers breathless, harddriving rhymes that flow into soft R&B melodies. But the message of the anthemic song seems fairly straightforward: Look inside for strength.
“I was dealing with being overweight and working on taking the weight down,” she says. “Active was really about running toward whatever it is you want, no matter what the odds are, no matter what you’re up against, no matter what the challenges are. It’s being fearless enough and having enough faith to get up and go after whatever it is you want.
“It’s the first song and I think it makes so much sense because I was coming out of a time where I was going through self-discovery and fasting and reaching these milestones of losing weight and elevating as an artist. Spiritually and mentally, it all just fit in a theme of running towards what I wanted.”
On Woop, which rings in at under two minutes, Sinzere takes on the role of protector of her community with chilling determination: “That’s why I keep a woop in my hand. If you play with my family, I’m whooping that ass,” she raps.
If Active was looking inward, Woop came from an artist looking around her in 2020. Pause and reflection and studying up on her parent’s Caribbean heritage — her mother is from Jamaica, her father is from Barbados — led to self-discovery, but so did soaking up the social movements that were taking over streets across the globe.
“(On Whoop), I discuss the lengths that I would go to protect my people, or the lengths I would go to educate my people on what we’re going through, on the traumas that we’re dealing with and then trying to survive those traumas,” she says. “It all goes back to awareness. Having this sense of presence and awareness and enlightenment and waking up. Because I’ve essentially been sleeping in previous years.”
“My spirit was just craving more,” she adds. “I think I began craving truth. With everything that was going on in our neighbouring country in terms of Black Lives Matter and what my family was dealing with globally. I have family in Jamaica, I have family in New York, I have family in Atlanta. I understood that, as an artist, there was this sense of ‘You have to speak to these things going on.’”
Still, this is hardly the first time Sinzere has used her music to process pain, whether it be her own or her community’s. Growing up in Calgary in an unstable household, Sinzere was drawn to poetry, performance and dance early on, all aspects that helped her deal with childhood trauma. She discovered Djing and later began freestyling and eventually joined a rap band before going solo.
“It was an outlet for expression,” she says about her early discovery of hip-hop. “It was a friend who would listen to me or who I could listen to for healing, for guidance. Hip-hop saved my life. Hiphop is the reason why I’m not in the streets. When the world turned its back on me, hip-hop didn’t.”
On Buy Back the Block, one of the two EPS she released in 2020, Sinzere made the cover art out of a picture of her stepfather, who she describes as an addict.
“I put him on the cover to represent the pain that we go through in these streets and I spoke to that pain on Buy Back the Block,” she says. “The song Buy Back the Block is about taking back our power and doing something with it instead of having to be like this guy you see on the cover.”
“It was really me speaking to those horrors, the horrors of those dealings because I’ve lived them,” she adds. “In the earlier part of my music career, I was into street pharmaceuticals. That was just due to being young and poor decision-making. But also, my stepdad was very much in that world. My birth father, who wasn’t in my life, was a pimp. Now he’s a born-again Christian, but in that time, it was just a well that was poisoned by institutional racism and the effects it has not just on the parents but the kids that come generations later.”
In the past few years, Sinzere has become known for her lively performances. She was a favourite at Sled Island and Femme Wave. She was also set to play the Calgary Folk Music Festival in 2020, before COVID derailed those plans. She did perform as part of the Road to Canada Day, an online performance streamed on Facebook and presented by the folk festival and the National Arts Centre. In March, Complex Canada named her one of “11 rising Black Canadian artists you should know.”
“Just wait,” she says with a laugh. “I’ll be honest with you: the best music I’ve ever made is not out yet.”
Highkey is now available.