Charmaine Hood Avant Garde EP Revisited

Five Tracks In Twelve Minutes

The EP runs five tracks, as its published tracklist shows: “I Don’t Care,” “WOO!,” “BOLD,” “Double Dutch” and “SMH.” At just twelve minutes, there is no room anywhere on it for a wasted bar, and the two singles do the heavy lifting in the middle of the sequence: “BOLD,” her late 2020 debut single, at track three, and “WOO!,” the follow-up, at track two, surrounded by three new songs that, as the release coverage put it, go just as hard as the tracks listeners had already heard.

Exclaim’s review heard the same density: a five track EP practically bursting at the seams with personality, its beats as bombastic as its author’s attitude, with the opener “I Don’t Care” putting that attitude front and centre from the first seconds. The title does the rest of the framing. Hood avant garde is a claim about where experimentation lives, and the EP’s blend of rap, pop melody and outright singing, sometimes inside a single song, is the proof she offered for it.

Three Million Streams Before The EP Landed

The introduction numbers were already on record the day the EP arrived, as its Warner Music Canada release notes show: “BOLD” and “WOO!” had combined for three million streams before the project dropped, Charmaine had been named one of Complex Canada’s 25 artists to watch in 2021, and she had been selected as Spotify Canada’s April RADAR artist and Amazon Music Canada’s Breakthrough artist at the same time. For a debut EP from an artist who had released her first single only months earlier, in the thick of the pandemic, that is not a slow build. That is an arrival.

The biography under the numbers is Toronto’s, even though it starts elsewhere. Born in Harare, Zimbabwe, Charmaine came to North America with her family as a child, moved through stops in the United States, and settled in Toronto, the city she now calls home and the city this EP sounds like: confident, funny, unbothered, and entirely unwilling to tone itself down for anybody. She had started writing music at seventeen, with Missy Elliott, Lil Kim and Nicki Minaj among her named inspirations, and the lineage is audible in the EP’s balance of technical rap and pop instinct.

The Deluxe Chapter And Double Dutch

The project kept growing after April. A deluxe edition followed in the summer of 2021, as its release notes record, adding “We Don’t Care” featuring Haviah Mighty, a remix of the opener that put Toronto’s Polaris winner on the same record as its fastest rising newcomer, “A Mi Manera” featuring Warner Music Latin artist Valentino, a Latin dance turn that showed off her singing, and “Sizzle” featuring Atlanta rapper Kali. The deluxe is the EP’s second argument: the five song original proved she could rap, and the additions proved how many rooms she could walk into.

Its visual chapter closed with “Double Dutch.” The Spencer Edwards directed video, released in June 2021, served what the coverage called culture and couture, and Charmaine’s own summary of what she wanted fans to take from it is the EP’s ethic in one line: “I want them to understand that the only competition they have in life is themselves and you should always do your best to outdo yourself.” By then she was also, as the same notes record, the only Canadian included in the global First on SoundCloud campaign.

Released on April 2, 2021, Hood Avant Garde remains the cleanest first draft of Charmaine: five tracks, twelve minutes, two singles that had already done three million streams between them, and a deluxe chapter that widened the record in every direction at once. Toronto has produced louder debuts. It has produced very few this efficient.