By Gage Miskimen
As bright and warm summer hits keep coming out every weekend — on and off the radio — an up-and-coming artist is taking a new, but somewhat familiar, cold and cloudy approach to summer.
PLAZA became the newest signee of Drake’s October’s Very Own record label, joining a roster featuring Partynextdoor, Majid Jordan, Roy Woods, Dvsn, and OB O’Brien. The announcement came last weekend at the end OVO Sound Radio on Apple Music, in which host Oliver El-Khatib closed the show with playing PLAZA’s new project.
OVO Sound social-media accounts plastered PLAZA all over the Internet last weekend, but interestingly enough, Drake has not yet congratulated his newest protégée in public.
PLAZA, a Toronto native, isn’t a brand-new artist by any means. He dropped his previous project, One, just last year.
The new project, a five song EP titled, Shadow brings a sound that doesn’t drift far off from the rest of the OVO collective. The music feels dark, cloudy and secretive. It’s a perfect fit for PLAZA’s persona. So far, he has kept his true-identity a secret, much like The Weeknd when he first emerged as an up-and-coming artist from Toronto.
The Weeknd comparisons don’t stop there; Shadow echoes the sounds of The Weeknd’s earliest mixtapes. The falsetto, the misogynistic lyrics, and emotional atmosphere all mirror The Weeknd’s House of Balloons, which is interesting because Drake tried to sign The Weeknd during the early days of OVO, and it looks as if he found someone else to fill the role.
The highlight of the EP is the single “Personal.” It’s the most successful on PLAZA’s Soundcloud as well, clocking in more than 81,000 plays. The track is lust-filled, drunk, and smoky in the layers upon layers of instrumentation that follows the gray-sounding R&B style that Toronto and OVO is known for.
The majority of Shadow sounds the same, which in a way creates the aforementioned “atmosphere.” It’s almost hard to tell when one song ends and another begins. PLAZA creates an emotional and almost sexual ambiance that one can only find in the hours in which it’s hard to tell if it’s night or morning.
Among almost everyone on the OVO roster, PLAZA shows the most promise in lasting in the music industry other than Partynextdoor. His style isn’t different from anyone else’s on the team, but he just has a little something extra compared with Roy Woods and Majid Jordan.
Without beating around the bush, the EP is good. The production isn’t unique, but it sounds nice nevertheless with the droning and echo layers that can make summer feel like winter. The lyrical content and subject matter aren’t unique, either. The Weeknd, Drake, and every other R&B artist from Toronto talk about substance use, women, and lusting for something all the time, too, but PLAZA does it as well as anyone else, so there may be room for him to do it and do it successfully. Hopefully, he avoids the mistakes other OVO artists have made, such as letting Drake take advantage of their talents, rushing to put out a full-length album or not putting out enough music at all. If PLAZA can avoid doing these things, he may have a fighting chance to make it in the competitive world of New Age R&B.
For a taste of PLAZA’s music, go to dailyiowan.com.
Gage Miskimen is the creative director for the Daily Iowan this summer, he’ll examine and critique new music released every week. Have any recommendations of your own? Email him at [email protected]
