Dancehall superstar Popcaan, who has been a member of Drake’s OVO Sound since late 2018, has announced that he will soon be a free agent.
The “Promise” singer stated in a Crack Magazine feature that was just released today (March 6): “I have so much music. The label can be weird sometimes. I love the label, but I don’t like them… But I’ll be independent soon.”
The Level Up deejay also pledges to release another new album this year, albeit his most recent, Great Is He (GIHE), is still fresh in the hearts of Unruly fans all around the world. Nevertheless, it is unclear what timeframe “soon” would entail.
The third album he published under OVO Sound was made available on January 27. OVO functioned as a Warner Records subsidiary from 2012 until 2022.
Andrae Sutherland, better known by his stage name Popcaan, claimed he has been lobbying his peers to abandon Dancehall’s “sporadic” singles-based riddim culture in favor of a more unified presentation like GIHE.
“No one’s doing it,” he noted. “I try to appeal to my Jamaican artists, telling all of them to put out more albums. People just see Jamaican music as singles.”
A lower position than his previous four studio albums’ first-week debuts, GIHE, which included Drake, Burna Boy, Toni-Ann Singh, and Chronic Law, debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard Reggae Albums list. On the first week after release, 3,200 copies were sold.
Crack mentioned in other parts of the interview that Popcaan had given his foreign career a lot of attention. ” I have to care,” he allegedly said. “Because if I’m one of the biggest artists in dancehall music, I have to send the right product out into the world,” he said.
“If Popcaan puts out a certain kind of music, it’s OK for anyone who follows Popcaan to do that too. So, I have to keep that standard.”
Drake and Popcaan are seen as being “like two peas in a pod,” despite the fact that Drake has worked with dozens of foreign musicians. The deejay once again praised Drake in an interview from February titled “Great Is He Album: A Conversation With Popcaan,” and it was clear that he valued the relationship the two had developed.
“It’s a link up weh happen through music. It jus’ happen naturally because I remember when I sing Only Man She Want an my friends was showing me like Drake tweeted your music so then I did the FIXTAPE an’ di man dem rinse da mixtape deh an’ I had a concert here; it was my first time here an’ den Drizzy invite mi to him OVO Fest an’ den a after party an’ dats where the whole family start off,” he remarked.
Great Is He was Popcaan’s sixth entry since he started his music career in the late 2000s on the weekly Billboard Reggae Albums list.
On Dre Skull’s Mixpak Records, he released his first studio album, Where We Come From, in 2014. On Billboard’s Reggae Albums list, it reached No. 2.
His follow-up album “Forever” was similarly completed under the supervision of Mixpak Records, with Dre Skull once again serving as the primary producer. It debuted at No. 171 on the Billboard 200 list and reached its highest position at No. 2 on the reggae albums chart.
Vanquish and FIXTAPE, his third and fourth albums, both debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard Reggae Albums Chart like his previous albums. Both albums were distributed under OVO Sound.
