SadBoi makes music that feels built for motion. Her songs borrow from dancehall, rap, R&B, and club music to create something that feels informed by pop, while staying personal and honest. The energy is restless by design: confidence collides with heartbreak, bravado folds into vulnerability, and the night out often arrives carrying the emotional residue of whatever came before it.
Raised in Toronto and shaped by Caribbean influence, SadBoi has built a world that feels deeply tied to the city’s language, nightlife, and emotional rhythms, even as her audience stretches well beyond it. Her music carries the spirit of Toronto, but refuses to stay geographically fixed, absorbing new sounds and perspectives while remaining rooted in the culture that formed her. For SadBoi, genre matters less than instinct, and identity matters more than expectation.
As her career grows, she remains protective of the emotional honesty that made people connect in the first place.
Your sound pulls from so many scenes and styles. Do you think about genre when you make music, or is it more about feeling?
Definitely more about the feeling. People always ask me what genre I’d call my music, and honestly I never really know how to answer because I don’t create with genre in mind. I just make what feels good and what feels honest to me. The second you start trying to label yourself too much, it can feel like putting yourself in a box.
You first built a following under your own name before becoming SadBoi. What did the name change allow you to express that you couldn’t before?
I think the name change really helped me tighten my identity and build a real world around the music. Before SadBoi, I loved so many different sounds that I would just create whatever inspired me in the moment and put it out. Now I still love everything, but I have a clearer understanding of what fits within the SadBoi universe and what doesn’t.
Toronto has such a specific language and rhythm to it. How important is it for you to keep that in the music as your audience grows globally?
It’s very important. Toronto is such a huge part of who I am, the slang, the energy, the music, the people, all of it shaped me. No matter where I go, I can never stay away too long. Even when I’m traveling or experiencing new cultures, I’m always comparing it back to how we do things in the city.
There’s a strong Caribbean influence in your music. Is that intentional or ingrained in you?
I’d say a little bit of both. I’ve always naturally gravitated to Caribbean sounds based on how I grew up. I love the energy that it brings to music. Now that I have developed a sound, producers know what to send me, so I think it has become more intentional.
Your music often moves between vulnerability and confrontation. Do those emotions come from the same place for you?
Absolutely. I’m not naturally someone who likes to sit in vulnerability for too long. If I’m hurt or going through something, my instinct is usually to turn up, go outside, be around my friends and escape it for a little while. A lot of my music lives in that space between feeling everything deeply and trying not to let it consume you.
You’ve said your music is “for the girls,” and there’s a real sense of community around it. Who are you thinking about when you write?
I think about myself, my sister, my friends, and honestly just women I’ve met throughout my life. As girls, we go through so many of the same emotions and experiences. I’ve had girls come to my shows alone, fresh out of relationships, looking for an escape or a sense of community. That means everything to me. If my music can give someone confidence, freedom, or even just a few hours to forget what they’re going through, then I’ve done my job.
A lot of artists are pushed to soften or polish themselves as they grow. What parts of SadBoi are you most protective of?
I’m protective of all of SadBoi. Some of the biggest setbacks in my career came from letting people tell me who I should be or what they thought “the girls” wanted from me. I’ll always be open to growth, criticism and coaching, but never at the expense of my identity or what I stand for.
Future of Music is about artists shaping what comes next. Do you feel like you’re reflecting where Toronto music is now, or pushing it somewhere new?
I think I’m helping push it somewhere new while still respecting what came before me. Toronto will always be my foundation, but I’ve also been lucky enough to experience so many different cultures and sounds around the world. That perspective naturally finds its way into my music, and I think that’s what makes it feel fresh.
As Canadian music becomes more global, what do you think artists here need to hold onto in order to keep that momentum going?
I think Canadian artists have to hold onto what makes them unique instead of trying to blend in elsewhere. Canada has its own perspective, sound and culture, and that’s exactly what makes people connect to us globally. The more authentic we are to where we come from, the further the music travels.
Holzman and Hughes at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.Courtesy of Ekko Astral
Holzman and Hughes in Brooklyn, May 2026.Griffin Lotz for Rolling Stone
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?