Imagine an 8-year-old Rochelle Jordan harmonizing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” with her classmates “behind God’s back” somewhere near Toronto, where her Jamaican parents settled after leaving England. It let off a chemical in her mind, she says. “I was like, ‘Wow, what is this magic that I’m hearing?” It’s the first memory of music she has, a “feeling of butterflies and excitement and enticement” that we’d probably call a “dopamine rush” now that we’ve got the vocabulary. But all those years ago, at the doorstep of Y2K, Jordan was coming of age in a house flush with music. She credits her family for her career, because “they have seen me go through the ups and downs of being an independent artist—always seeming to be on the precipice of something grand, and then seeing that fall through. But never once have they doubted my vision for myself.” Her new record, Through the Wall, is her gift to them, for the “love that they’ve shown me.” Their effort informed her intention, she asserts, revealing that her brother’s loud, vibrating obsession with jungle music is what “pushed me into being able to create the way I create.”
At 16, Jordan had her first “studio experience,” when a producer would send her Fabolous instrumentals and she’d write songs on top of them. By 19, she was getting fed up with the music industry in Toronto, unable to find a producer with the sound that she wanted. She’d always been a left-of-center thinker, studying the beats and performances of Timbaland and Aaliyah. Around then, she’d garnered a following by uploading videos of herself singing to YouTube, which welcomed a producer named KLSH (pronounced like “clash”) into her DMs. “It wasn’t until talking with him and creating with him where he was like, ‘I’m going to fly you out to LA. We’re really going to do this. This is going to be our career,’” she recalls. “And I was like, ‘You’re absolutely right.’”
But the realities of the industry hit Jordan immediately upon her arrival in California, like when an A&R representative from Sony began “courting” her, not her music, on a Skype call. “When you’re young, you just don’t know how to respond to something like that,” she admits. “The naivety of you just trying to be friendly, because you don’t want to create your own blocks.” Jordan calls that type of person a “shark” who wants “to take you and change you within a major label and create some other person that you don’t know, but they also want to try you in other ways, when you’re a young girl.” That’s why she’s remained an independent artist for over a decade, to avoid those battles. “I can only imagine getting caught up in that, what that could do for you and your career and you can just fall down a hill, so to speak.” But KLSH has always been nearby, protecting her from ever falling into those traps again.
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For 15 years, he has executive-produced every Rochelle Jordan release. And their chemistry showed itself on day one, when KLSH sent Jordan a beat on MySpace called “Neptune.” “I was like, ‘What?!? This is my producer,’ and I claimed him fast,” she remembers. “We just listen to people from the past that had such unique ideas in their time, like Earth, Wind and Fire—that sound was so futuristic for the time that they came up. That groomed our thoughts as artists at a very young age, even before [we met].” They bonded over forward-thinking, alternative genres that paired R&B and electronic music together. The Neptunes became their tabula rasa, credited on the Through the Wall track “Get It Off,” and Jordan’s partnership with KLSH, she says, is a reflection of the collaborative combinations that preceded theirs: Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson; Grace Jones and Jean-Paul Goude; and Janet Jackson and René Elizondo Jr.; artists and executive producers who worked with other people but, when colliding into each other, always bled magic. “Our main focus was creating something special that had a true identity over the years,” Jordan acknowledges. “It’s one thing to be an artist, but it’s very hard to see yourself. There’s lots of questions and there’s lots of mistakes that you can make simply because you can’t see it for yourself. But to have someone on the other side that can help guide you in that aspect is key. It creates a legendary story.”
Big hair, mirrorballs, and decorated necklines abound on Through the Wall. Jordan isn’t afraid “to take up space” in her masterpiece—a luxurious, Chicago and Detroit house-inspired saga replete with desire, velvet, bouncy beats, and moody pretense. Produced by KLSH, Jimmy Edgar, Kaytranada, Initial Talk, DāM FunK, and Terry Hunter, Though the Wall is 17 songs long but never drags, and not many contemporary, 60-minute records are as consistent or polished. Cool hooks get woven into boots-n-cats rhythms, while the spanning grooves are pocketed and tactile. Beyoncé’s Renaissance is similarly taut, where you’re never itching to hear the next thing but moving gladly with the album’s gliding tempos and imposing runtime. Jordan labored over the length, worrying that shrinking attention spans would dismiss her art for something bite-sized or more convenient. “You just keep on hearing, ‘Oh, these kids don’t listen to albums no more. They can’t get past five songs without turning them off,’” she says. “I was like, ‘This is going to be a 9-song album, ten songs max.’ I was frustrated but, over the course of creating, I realized it’s not that calculated. It comes down to the vibe. It’s down to the feeling, ‘What are you trying to say, sincerely?’”
Jordan believes not just in the authenticity of her intentions, but in making those intentions known. “People will understand, because they’re going to hear that you’re doing the right thing,” she assures. “I just wanted to create a world for people to get lost in and to move into, especially in this time that we’re living in. People need a healthy escape, and I wanted for this album to be that healthy escape.” Short album, long album, it never mattered to her. It’s always been about bodies of work that deserve to be celebrated. It’s about artists no longer being afraid of being sincere about what they’ve made. “When I started making music seriously, that was the pact that I made with myself. Your responsibility is to pull people into a world and make them feel magic in music,” Jordan adds. “If you can do that, then you’re doing your job. It’s been a lot of epiphanies along the way. I know I’m on the right path.” There is one thing about the music industry that Jordan has her reservations about: how fast artists are putting out their albums. “That’s personally going to be a problem for me,” Jordan, whose two pre-Through the Wall releases came out seven years apart, clarifies.
The seven years separating 1021 and Play With the Changes were practically a lifetime, as far as the music business is concerned. “I spent years on a hope and a wish that an A&R that I entrusted with what would be Play With the Changes would be able to take me over the finish line,” she tells me. “And it was slowly unveiled that they wouldn’t be able to do that. And that slow unveiling takes up a lot of time, and it creates a lot of fear in the mind, especially being independent, because it’s like… all you have is your music, and you want to make sure that the train keeps on going.” That period was a disappointment for Jordan but not always. “It was very exciting, thinking that I had the right support. This person was a support, they were just not the right one, in order for me to get off what I was essentially trying to do. The journey of being an independent artist is hard. Even being a major artist is hard. Pick your poison, at the end of the day.”
Near the end of the 2010s, Jordan drummed up the courage to finally cut ties with that A&R rep. “I was an indie artist that wanted to make it so bad at that point in time,” she admits. “There was a lot of fear built up, but it was just something that I had to break down—the wall of this dynamic between me and this person that was a wall in of itself that I had to, quite frankly, take an ax and bat down and say, ‘It’s done between us. I’m moving on.’” Jordan went on to sign with Tokimonsta’s Young Art imprint and share Play With the Changes in May 2021, establishing her vision for techno music by occupying it with impressive textures of quiet storm, garage, blues, and funk. Its penultimate house track, “Dancing Elephants,” perhaps unknowingly hinted at her next path.
IN 2024, ONE OF JORDAN’S earlier songs, “Lowkey,” had a viral moment on TikTok, but she’s not looking to re-introduce anything from her past to the music she’s making now—partly because she’s never stopped doing any of those things: the harmonies, the melody choices, the ad-libs, it’s all the same but better controlled on Through the Wall. Still, I ask her if it’s been at-all gratifying, knowing that people are communicating with her 1021 material a decade after the fact. “It feels very vindicating, I must say,” she answers, “because I was in a bad place after 1021, thinking, ‘Why didn’t it go further? I know my core fanbase loves it, and they’re celebrating it, but, damn, I wish it could reach the world.’”
One of mainstream music’s great hindrances is its habit of neglecting aging women in pop. Some of our greatest stars, like Madonna and Mariah Carey, made career-defining albums in their thirties and forties, yet a large portion of festival headline slots and number-one hits are commanded by artists in their early-to-mid twenties. Jordan is 36 now and has a handful of albums to show for it, but she tells me that any age-driven doubts are behind her. “I was like, ‘Girl, if you don’t make it by 23, 24 you ain’t never gonna make it!’ Just saying shit like that to myself but still creating, because music is my love.” For every college-aged chart-topper, there’s somebody like Tina Turner, who released Private Dancer, one of the biggest records of her lifetime, five days after her 45th birthday. On Through the Wall especially, Turner is one of the many muses Jordan found herself chasing.
“Age is not a playing factor in my mind,” Jordan confirms. “I think, for artists, the key thing that I’m discovering is how important it is to remember why your fans love you. Like, what are the core things about what they like about your music? And if you’re able to maintain that throughout the years, then you’ll be fine. It’s when you start running after trends, trying to do what the kids are doing now, that’s going to deter you.” She cites her fellow Torontonian, Drake, as a good barometer for that—attributing his long lifespan in the mainstream to his formula being “him always.” “I’m not saying the window will never close,” she clarifies, “but you will have a longer period of time, because people just want what they want from you. You got to know what it is that you give to these people, in order to have great success.”
Drake, who would come by the Yorkdale Mall Sephora while Jordan was an employee there (when he was in his post-Degrassi, mixtape era and she hadn’t yet hitched it to Los Angeles). Though they knew each other but never personally, he name-dropped her on “Club Paradise” in 2011, rapping: “Now I’m that guy that / Know them strippers by their real names / Rochelle, Jordan / Thick bitches, they just / Talked me out of four grand.” Jordan calls the bar “bizarre” and says there was no real conclusion to it, except for her song “_Shot,” which she wrote from the perspective of a resentful stripper. “I had all my fans thinking that I was really a dancer, but I wasn’t,” she laughs. “But then, down the road, we found out—from somebody who knows him and his crew—that the reason why he called me a stripper is because, at the time, I was remixing a lot of rapper beats and we stripped down and simplified the beat more. I did a ‘Marvin’s Room’ remix back in the day, and apparently he really liked it, so he name-dropped me, calling me a stripper… of music.”
THROUGH THE WALL BELONGS in the conversation of greatest contemporary dance music releases, alongside Dawn Richard’s Second Line, Kelela’s Raven, and Beyoncé’s Renaissance—the latter having opened the mind of the mainstream to, as Jordan puts it, “accept that sound of a Black woman being on dance and house records.” While the language Jordan is speaking on Through the Wall may be easier to understand now because Renaissance came out in 2022, one year earlier she was performing curious, palatable music that mixed R&B vocals with house, electronic, and D&B samples on Play With the Changes. Jordan has always been on the cutting edge but rarely given her due for it. Her nineties vocal on top of trap beats throughout Pressure in 2012 was called “trap soul” by 2015; in 2014, she wrote “Follow Me” and “Lowkey” before Kehlani and Ella Mai could write “Distraction” and “Boo’d Up.” “I know that I set a lot of groundwork that would, in the future, be doors that are wildly, widely open,” she attests, crediting Azealia Banks and AlunaGeorge for their soulful stance on dance music changing the culture first. “I think I opened my own door. Sometimes where I had resentment… I realize now that it’s all about timing.”
Through the Wall communicates with Black exemplars from then and now, like Janet, Diana, Chaka, and Sade, and Jordan aims for the “boldness, the bigness, the enchantment” of songs like the Spice Girls’ “Say You’ll Be There” or Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy.” You can hear those motivations in the album’s addictive, acrobatic DNA, in the Brandy-summoning “Sweet Sensation,” the bouncing, provocative “Crave,” and the serpentine, four-on-the-floor “Sum.” “Get It Off” sounds like an aughts pop record, while “The Boy” is this plush, feral synth hit that exists not in the post-R&B or electronic tracts, but in a campy, escapist pantheon of its own. The colors streak and the repetition tastes so good you don’t even realize the party ended hours ago. After releasing Play With the Changes, it would have been reasonable to assume that Jordan would plunge even deeper into a techno space. That was her initial plan, at least, she reveals, “but I’m just so in love with nostalgia. I’m so in love with the past and mixing that with the future. I’m happy that I stuck to my guns and took the risk to do that, because you never know what people are going to take to.” She’s not a revivalist, though, but a tastemaker ready to talk her shit.
And Jordan is braggadocious on the mic but never obnoxiously so, after years of staying “modest” in an industry that’ll eat you alive if you ever blow your cool. There’s a method to her madness, she says. After the album’s hour is up, there’s no doubting that Jordan has come completely into her own, attacking every song with a time capsule of seductive vocal struts, disciplined and slinking rhythms, and lightweight, chrome-dipped improvisations. “That gives you bragging rights, when you have some history and lore and growth and dedication behind you that you can be proud of,” she declares. “There’s no Grammy or accolade that can replace the time that I’ve spent developing myself as an artist and trusting in my vision and, moving forward, that’s what I’m celebrating. When I’m singing a track like ‘Ladida’ and I’m saying, ‘got my dreams and got these dollar bills,’ it’s because I know. I know honestly and deep from within.”
Jordan calls herself a “queen of the night,” because she doesn’t need to be in the club to “understand the language of what that is and what that feels like.” It comes down to joy and it comes down to wanting people to feel that. On Through the Wall, she wants marginalized people to feel celebrated. On Through the Wall, she’s putting Black women back in the dance spaces they created. Someone called her recently and left a message she kept: “I was just brushing my teeth listening to ‘Do It Too’ and it was a party.” Jordan says that is exactly what the record is about, that it’s “not just in brackets of people, it’s for everyone. I’m honoring the ones that started this and the voices that have not been heard.”
She’s earned this drama, and she’s done right by the “diva” label that Play With the Changes first afforded her four years ago. To Rochelle Jordan, being a diva means that she has essence, that she’s a woman who’s lived a life, possibly many lives. “That’s why they call divas ‘bitches,’” she emphasizes. “It’s not because they’re being a bitch just to be funny with it. No, they’re actually scorned in some way, and their response is quite blunt. The music that they create is powerful. It’s undeniably powerful. They have something to say. And, even when they’re saying nothing, you can hear the emotion in their ad-libs. It’s something that is carried, something that others will recognize in you.”
Through the Wall is out now via Empire.
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Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.
