Jessie Reyez released her debut studio album, Before Love Came to Kill Us, on March 27, 2020 through FMLY and Island Records, and more than six years on it remains the clearest statement of who she is as a writer. This is a revisited deep dive, not a new release: the Jessie Reyez Before Love Came to Kill Us story is how a Toronto artist turned four years of singles, EPs and songwriting credits into a debut that still anchors her catalogue.
The album runs 14 tracks and 46 minutes, and it arrived with an unusual weight of expectation. Reyez, born in Toronto to Colombian parents and raised in Brampton, had already gone multi-platinum in Canada with Figures, her sparse 2016 heartbreak ballad, and had co-written One Kiss, the Calvin Harris and Dua Lipa number one. The debut had to prove the songs were not the ceiling. It did.
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Jessie Reyez Before Love Came To Kill Us Tracklist
The standard edition, as listed on the album’s release page and in uDiscover’s tracklist reveal, runs: Do You Love Her, Deaf (Who Are You), Intruders, Coffin featuring Eminem, Ankles, Imported with 6lack, La Memoria, Same Side, Roof, Dope, Kill Us, Love in the Dark, I Do and Figures. Only two guests appear across the whole record, which keeps the focus exactly where a debut should keep it.
A deluxe edition followed within a week, adding Far Away II with A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie and JID, an Ankles remix with Rico Nasty and Melii, and Worth Saving. A further expanded edition in September 2020 added No One’s in the Room and Sugar at Night. The core 14, though, are the album.
Figures And Imported Built The Runway
Figures, released on August 26, 2016, closes the album, a sequencing choice that frames the entire record as the answer to the song that started everything. Imported, released as a single on April 19, 2019 with 6lack, sits at track six and became the album’s other pillar, later certified platinum in the United States in its reimagined form. Love in the Dark, the third pre-release single, showed the ballad side the album would need between its harder edges.
Anyone familiar with the range Jessie Reyez has shown since 2016 was not taken aback by news that the artist fought the pressure to make her first album a cohesive one.
That was Qobuz, writing on the album, and the tension it names is the record’s engine. Coffin puts Eminem beside her on a song about a love worth dying in. La Memoria reaches back to her Colombian roots in Spanish. Intruders turns a home invasion metaphor into one of the sharpest writing performances of her career. The album is deliberately messy in the way its maker described her own head at the time, and the mess is the point.
The Canadian Context Still Matters
Reyez is one of the defining Toronto voices of her generation, and this album is where that standing was earned rather than announced. It is filed the way this site files its Canadian catalogue: a Toronto artist, a Brampton upbringing, and a debut that carried Canadian R and B onto tracklists beside Eminem without asking permission. Her songwriting run since, including arena tours that opened this autumn, traces straight back to the standard this record set.
Six years on, Before Love Came to Kill Us holds up because it never sanded down its contradictions. It is a love album with a threat in its title, a pop record with a body count in its metaphors, and a debut that trusted its writer completely. That trust is why it still gets revisited.
The road to the album ran through the Kiddo EP in 2017, where Gatekeeper, her account of a predatory industry encounter, first marked her as a writer willing to say the unsayable on record. Before Love Came to Kill Us widened that honesty into a full album’s worth of love, faith, anger and repair, and Canadian audiences had already voted with their streams: Figures was a hit at home years before the debut arrived to explain it.
