Jaywood - Leo Negro [Light blue]

Leo Negro is JayWood's most agitated album to date, eleven tracks of controlled chaos pressed on light blue vinyl by a Winnipeg experimentalist who moved to Montreal and found a weirder, bolder version of himself there.

Jeremy Haywood-Smith has never been interested in stability, musically or otherwise, and this 2025 album is a deliberate departure from the slick pop of Slingshot and the Grow On EP. The title is a self-imposed play on translation: Lions are supposed to be full of confidence, and this album is anything but that, so black confidence becomes his term for something stranger and more honest, a way of writing about identity crisis without claiming to have solved it. His childhood habit of flipping and slowing down songs in a computer media player remains the guiding principle, but he aims to build entire worlds instead of distorting those of others.

Pistachios opens the argument for the defense with vintage hip-hop backgrounds, immediately admitting the need for attention. Big Tings calls upon Tune-Yards for a shimmering synth intro that owes as much to Toro y Moi as it does to D'Angelo, Assumptions channels the energy of Tyler, The Creator through the framework of a ballad, and Sun Baby ends with a warm '60s glow of mellotron and BBC Symphony Orchestra samples.

A Polaris nominee could have repeated himself. He's a Leo, so he didn't do it.