DJ Agile released Off Top featuring Leila Dey on Friday, October 16, 2026, through Foundation Media, and the DJ Agile Off Top single carries a story that reaches back seven years. For anyone keeping score of toronto rappers and the producers behind them, this is a veteran of the city’s scene finishing a record that television viewers first heard in 2019 and refused to forget.
The record pairs Atlanta bass energy with a Toronto R&B and soul vocal. It is the first single from a forthcoming DJ Agile project planned for the second quarter of 2027, which makes October 16 the start of a rollout rather than a one off release. An official lyric video arrived with the single, and its credits alone map the collaboration: produced by DJ Agile, additional keys by Mark James, vocals by Leila Dey, additional vocals from Toi, Kash Phillips and DJ Agile, mixed by Spencer “Moose” Muscio and mastered by Dave Huffman at Chris Athens Masters in Austin, Texas, with artwork by Baby Teddy.
DJ Agile Off Top: Born as a Netflix Cue
The beat at the centre of Off Top first surfaced as a cue in Dirty South, an episode of Season 3 of Netflix’s Hip-Hop Evolution. Agile produced music for seasons 3 and 4 of the series, and this particular piece of music followed him home. For months after the episode aired, he received two to four messages a week on Twitter and Facebook from viewers asking about it. Most television cues disappear into the background. This one kept knocking.
His first attempt to finish it came with frequent collaborator Kash K, who wrote to the beat before the demo was shelved for a couple of years. In January 2025, Agile reopened the session, rewrote the verse with Dahlia Fernandes and brought in keyboardist Mark James. The record was rebuilt piece by piece, and one question stayed open the longest: who should sing it.
Kardinal Offishall Names the Singer
The answer came from Toronto’s hip hop ambassador himself. After months of searching for a vocalist, Agile played the record for Kardinal Offishall, his longtime collaborator and the artist he serves as official DJ for, and Kardinal immediately suggested Leila Dey. Agile already knew Dey’s work. He had followed her development through the late King Reign, his bandmate in BrassMunk, which gives this collaboration a real lineage inside the Toronto scene rather than the feel of a feature arranged at a distance.
Dey, born in Jamaica and raised in Toronto, answers the record with soulful vocals and layered harmonies, in HipHopCanada’s description. Her own catalogue supports the casting. Her 2021 visual EP DETOUR was backed by a Spotify Canada campaign with a billboard in downtown Toronto, she joined Jessie Reyez’s Yessie Tour and played to more than 30,000 fans across North America, and she appears on Roy Woods’ Mixed Emotions project. Her stated influences, Lauryn Hill, Jazmine Sullivan and H.E.R., sit right where Off Top lives, between soul tradition and modern R&B polish.
Reviewers heard the fit immediately. Uranium Waves, writing about the single on October 18, put it this way:
DJ Agile knows how to make a groove walk into the room before anybody says a word, and ‘Off Top’ moves with that kind of confidence.
The lyric video’s own description calls the song an anthem about ambition, confidence and refusing to be held back, a record made for late nights and turning the volume up. That is the record’s posture from its first bar, Atlanta low end under a Toronto voice that never sounds hurried.
A Builder of the Scene, Still Building
Agile, born Ajene Griffith, has been part of Toronto hip hop’s infrastructure for more than two decades. He is a founding member of BrassMunk, the Scarborough group formed in 1997 whose album Dark Sunrise, released in 2002, was nominated for Best Rap Recording at the 2004 Juno Awards, with a second nomination following for FEWturistic in 2008. He is also a member of Big Black Lincoln, a former member of the JLJ Productions DJ crew, and the maker of Toronto Love Jay, his J Dilla tribute that won Mixtape of the Year at the 2009 Stylus DJ Awards.
His production credits run through Nas, Melanie Fiona, Glenn Lewis, Dwele, Jully Black and Ivana Santilli. He opened the Canadian AllStars night of Drake’s 2022 OVO Fest, has DJed Toronto Maple Leafs Rivalry Series dates and Raptors game nights, served as Dean for Recording Arts at the Remix Project from 2010 to 2015, and has sat on the SOCAN Foundation board since 2009. HipHopCanada, which published the Off Top release story, notes its own coverage of Agile goes back to around 2000 or 2001.
That history is what makes the single land differently. Off Top is not a legend returning for a victory lap. It is a working producer taking a cue that fans chased him about for months, rebuilding it across two years of sessions, finishing it in Austin, and releasing it as the first step toward a 2027 project. Toronto’s scene was built by people who did every job in the room. On this record, one of them is still doing them all.
