The first signs of “Let The World Burn” taking off didn’t come in a neat, trackable way for Chris Grey. It showed up in bits and pieces. A random gym video, an anime edit, someone flipping the song into something that didn’t even feel like the original anymore. Within days, it had moved far beyond anything he could’ve planned, landing in corners of the internet he wasn’t aiming for in the first place.
That loss of control is something Grey seems comfortable with, mostly because of how controlled everything is on his end. His process starts alone, building ideas from scratch, shaping them layer by layer before anyone else hears them. He’s not jumping between ten people in a room or chasing quick outputs. It’s slower, more internal, and it shows in the way his music holds together.
Even when the songs get intense, nothing feels accidental. There’s emotion, but it’s held in place. The instinct is to push things as far as they can go, then step back and figure out what actually needs to stay. That balance between going overboard and pulling it back is what gives his records their weight without letting them fall apart.
Now, with more people finding his music through moments he didn’t manufacture, Grey isn’t trying to repeat the formula. If anything, he’s sticking to the same approach, letting the process lead instead of trying to keep up with where the internet takes things next.
Your music feels very intentional from a production standpoint. How much of that world are you building yourself?
Almost entirely. I produce most of my records alone, and even when I bring in collaborators, I’m still guiding the overall direction. I actually started out producing before I ever really focused on writing or singing, so that foundation is core to how I work. There’s something addictive about hearing a fully realized version of an idea that started in your head.
“Let The World Burn” really took off online and brought a lot of new listeners in. What did that moment show you about how people are discovering your music now?
I think it showed me how fast things can move in this current moment and how little control you actually have over where a song goes once it’s out. In the span of a week, it went from being another song in my catalog to one of the biggest songs in the world. It was definitely a whirlwind to catch up to that. It’s been cool to watch all the different communities that have embraced that song. One of my favourite things to watch was seeing how different communities made it their own and put the song in completely different worlds. Gym communities, anime, BookTok, Stranger Things edits, K-Pop edits, relationship videos, and car edits, just to name a few. It stops being your song at that point. I think all the covers were a big part of that, too. Hearing people reinterpret it in their own way made it feel bigger than just me.
Your music leans into darker, almost cinematic textures while still sitting in R&B and pop. Where did that instinct to build something that layered come from?
I’ve always been drawn to songs that feel like they evolve and escalate, and by the end, it’s almost overwhelming in a good way. Growing up on artists like Queen, Ozzy Osbourne, and Michael Jackson, there was always that sense of scale and drama in the production. I think I’m always chasing that. My process is usually to take things too far, stack too many elements, push it emotionally and then carve it back until it still feels big but focused.
Your songs carry a lot of emotional intensity, but the production is very controlled and precise. How do you balance those two sides when you’re making music?
I don’t really see them as separate. The production exists to serve the emotion of the song; if it’s not doing that, the song isn’t working. In that case, either I scrap it or I rework it. A good example is “Wrong.” The original demo had a four on the floor drum groove, and something just felt off. I didn’t immediately know why, but after sitting with it for most of a year, I went back in and shifted it to more of an R&B/trap groove. It completely changed how the emotion came across.
When your sound is this distinct early on, is there ever pressure to stick to it, or are you actively trying to push against it with new work?
I’m aware of it, but I don’t feel boxed in by it. I think what helps is that it’s a sound I love and still feels authentic to me. So it’s not like there’s a completely different genre I’m itching to make but can’t. That being said, I want to keep things fresh and as a creative, I think making something that sounds new is always more exciting. Going into uncharted territory. I think collaborations, especially across genres, can be a way to explore that.
When you think about the future of music in Canada?
I think it looks brighter than ever. Canadians have been dominating the charts lately, and I don’t think that will stop anytime soon. I would love to see more infrastructure for those artists to stay in Canada if they want to. I’ve talked to a lot of Canadian artists who felt like they needed to move to LA to keep moving forward. I haven’t felt the need to leave personally, but I think the next step for Canada is building an environment where artists don’t feel like they have to to compete globally.
Can you share details of the projects you’re working on in 2026?
The honest answer is I don’t know exactly and I’m kind of excited by that. I have a blank canvas right now, which I haven’t had in a while. I’ve been making music without overthinking where it fits, and I want to let that process shape what the next project becomes instead of forcing it too early. I do know I want to bring in some new collaborators and see what comes out.
There’s no immediate resolution in any of this. There’s no surrender either — and a lot of great escape. White’s slide guitar in “Dollar Bill” sounds like a National Steel on steroids until the solo, when it turns into what seems like a theremin gone postal. “I Can’t Believe What I’m Hearing” has a great pop-wise chorus closer to the Pretty Things than Son House. And don’t miss White’s wry aside to the White Stripes’ old creation myth in the second verse of “G.O.D.,” on the way to the real business at hand. “Well, it’s the beginning of the world now,” he declares at the song’s end. “Let’s do it all over again.”
Jay-Z has turned the 30th anniversary of his classic debut album into a major marketing event
Jay-Z Knows the Past Still Pays
There’s a pleasant absurdity to the advertisements for JAŸ-Z30 that are currently found across New York’s subway tunnels. Their dramatic imagery — a stark black backdrop pierced through the center with a pair of hands, presumably Jay’s, fixed into the famous Roc diamond — invites a kind of religious authority that feels a touch ironic for anyone who’s old enough to remember all types of handwringing over those very hand symbols only a few years ago. And maybe that’s the point. By now, nostalgia’s grip extends layers deep. So much so that you could find yourself waiting for the train, reminiscing on the days when people still made jokes about the so-called Illuminati.
Jay-Z’s months-long campaign commemorating the 30th anniversary of Reasonable Doubt and the 25th anniversary of The Blueprint has indeed resurfaced the rapper-turned-mogul’s success story. Reasonable Doubt, released in 1996, positioned Jay as not only a resonant voice in hip-hop but also in the increasingly lucrative business around it. After major labels passed, the album was released independently through Roc-A-Fella Records and Priority Records, setting the tone for Jay’s career as a business…man.
And in the full-court press campaign around this summer’s anniversaries, culminating in this weekend’s trio of performances at Yankee Stadium, Jay’s business acumen is again at center focus. You’d be forgiven for throwing around buzzwords like “multichannel” or “cross-platform” to describe the slate of festivities. There was a Spotify-backed takeover of the J and Z trains; custom JAŸ-Z30 subway maps and a Google Maps guide; commemorative Brooklyn Public Library cards; and most recently Bowery Station and DUMBO pop-ups with archival footage and merch. (That these Yankee Stadium shows come on the heels of Taylor Swift’s wedding at MSG suggests some sort of mega-rich takeover of cultural institutions, but let’s leave that one for another day.)
The moves come as nostalgia continues to drive a considerable chunk of the music industry’s profits. In an era when old songs can circulate infinitely on streaming platforms, gaining new life in the form of everything from samples to memes, and when superfans are willing to spend on physical goods, limited merch, and live experiences, album anniversaries have become their own product launches. Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt campaign is only the splashiest recent example.
No wonder, then, that Beyoncé already appears to be setting the stage for her own run of commemorations for the upcoming 20th anniversary of her album B’Day in September. Over the weekend, she released her first new song in two years, titled “Morning Dew (Donk),” to tease the upcoming reissue. According to Luminate, older music still dominates attention, with only 43 percent of U.S. on-demand audio streams in 2025 coming from tracks released in the previous five years. This is also one reason why vinyl and physical formats have seen renewed value in recent years, with the RIAA reporting that vinyl sold 46.8 million units in the U.S. in 2025, compared with 29.5 million CDs. Luminate says superfans are 20 percent of U.S. music listeners and spend heavily on live events and physical merchandise; 73 percent of these fans purchase physical merch, versus 26 percent of general music listeners.
In today’s industry, having a major anniversary is like having a new product to promote, a way to participate in an already thriving marketplace for nostalgia. The demand is visible well beyond official artist stores: Vintage concert tees now trade as collectibles, with one 1967 Grateful Dead shirt selling at Sotheby’s for $19,300 and rare rap tees treated as wearable archives of hip-hop history. Anniversary campaigns give artists and labels a way to reclaim that energy, turning the secondary market’s appetite for old symbols into new, officially sanctioned products.
Jay-Z’s official anniversary store turns that logic into a menu of objects: a $1,500 collector’s crate, a $300 cassette box, $400 Yankees jerseys, and four-figure varsity jackets. Of course, Jay is far from alone when it comes to legacy acts cashing in on nostalgia. He’s more like one salient example of a much larger wave of artists and promoters marketing anniversary products that includes the Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness 30th anniversary super-deluxe edition, My Chemical Romance’s Black Parade stadium tour, and the returned Warped Tour, among many others.
Five years before Reasonable Doubt became the occasion for library cards, pop-ups, collector crates, and stadium spectacle, its 25th anniversary was marked by an NFT. In 2021, Sotheby’s and Roc Nation auctioned a one-of-one Derrick Adams artwork tied to the album, billed as the only official Jay-Z-authorized commemoration of the anniversary. Around the same time, Roc-A-Fella was in court over co-founder Damon Dash’s attempted sale of a Reasonable Doubt-related NFT, a dispute that ended with a judgment making clear that no shareholder could sell or dispose of an interest in the album — including through an NFT — without the company’s authorization.
That ownership question is becoming harder to avoid as music enters the AI era, where the archive is not only something to reissue, exhibit, or sell, but something that can be scraped, modeled, and trained on. Last week, SZA took to Twitter to express frustration with AI music company Suno, notably calling out Diplo by name as one of the company’s investors. “DO NOT GIVE AWAY YOUR VIBRANIUM !!! DO NOT TRAIN AI WITH YOUR GENIUS,” she wrote on Twitter. Her complaint was joined by Kenneth Blume, who said Suno’s workers were “stealing from countless struggling musicians.”
For an artist with a legacy as impactful as Jay-Z’s, the current anniversary boom feel like the latest phase of a longer project of deciding who gets to turn hip-hop history into intellectual property. Jay-Z’s legacy deserves preservation; few catalogs have made a stronger case for it. But the more that preservation arrives through limited-edition objects, auction platforms, luxury merch, and authorized experiences, the more it has to answer a harder question: When does protecting the archive become another way of extracting value from it?