As a kid growing up in the provincial little village of Halse Hall, in the Parish of Clarendon, Jamaica, the now-force-of-nature songstress Ammoye (Shernette Amoy Evans) was not even allowed to listen to reggae music, which her grandmother, who was raising her, considered vulgar. But by the age of six she was singing in the church choir, which imbued her with a strong sense of music as a great communicator of spirituality.

Her considerable will eventually won out, and she ultimately threw herself into the local dancehall scene. When her grandmother passed, she joined her mother in Toronto, where she discovered hip-hop, soul, house music, R&B… and the musical foundation was laid for what is now her genuinely inimitable style. Still, she points to a “profound spiritual awakening” in 2012 as the true watershed moment in her artistic odyssey.

Since then she has been nominated for a Juno Award (the Canadian Grammys) on five separate occasions, and released the utterly singular solo album The Light in 2017.

But as we struggle out of this global pandemic at the tail end of 2021, she finds herself decisively poised for the next great chapter of her musical journey, with a new album whose title, Water (via Lulaworld Records), is very much about her personal rebirth. The first single ‘Give It All’, a lush, chill-inducing empowerment anthem, has already netted her the latest of those Juno nominations – while the sultry, slinky-grooved ‘Bad Behavior’ also definitively reminds that Ammoye is not someone to be messed with or taken lightly. Overall, the thirteen tracks represent a remarkable fusion of genres, and exhibit an artist arguably at the height of her creative powers.

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