JayWood - Leo Negro

JayWood – the nom de plume of Jeremy Haywood-Smith – is embracing new pastures having moved his music-making from Winnipeg, Manitoba to Montreal, and his new album Leo Negro chimes with a different tone as it looks to reconnect the self and grapple with one’s identity. Marking a moment of meaningful change where controlled chaos takes the lead, it philosophises on what it truly means to be an experimentalist building a multi-faceted world where genre is infinite through sounds braver, more playful, and truthful than he’s dared deliver before. Despite its astute sampling with layers of twists and turns, Leo Negro doesn’t showboat but roars in the presence of vulnerability as it considers one’s abso-lutes as a way of navigating the identity crisis. “Always looking for attention, I admit it, I can’t help it, I’m a Leo,” he reasons between vintage hip-hop scrubs Pistachios,’ recalling a childhood need to be the centre of attention then stepping out of the spotlight as a grown-up. “Leos are confident and sure about themselves, but this record isn’t that; so really, when translated, the title inspires‘black confidence.’ It’s an uncomfortable, weird, and surreal term which bends the truth and embodies everything within.”