Kaytranada released his debut album 99.9% on May 6, 2016, and the kaytranada 99.9% album turned ten this year. This is a catalogue revisit, not new music: 15 tracks and 59 minutes on XL Recordings worldwide and HW&W Recordings in Canada, from the Montreal producer born Louis Kevin Celestin.
Before 99.9%, Kaytranada was a remix and production name passed around by other artists. The debut turned that reputation into an album artist’s career, and it did it with a guest list that read like a map of where R&B and rap were heading.
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The Kaytranada 99.9% Album Tracklist In Full
The full sequence runs: Track Uno; Bus Ride featuring Karriem Riggins and River Tiber; Got It Good featuring Craig David; Together featuring AlunaGeorge and GoldLink; Drive Me Crazy featuring Vic Mensa; Weight Off featuring BADBADNOTGOOD; One Too Many featuring Phonte; Despite the Weather; Glowed Up featuring Anderson .Paak; Breakdance Lesson N.1; You’re the One featuring Syd; Vivid Dreams featuring River Tiber; Lite Spots; Leave Me Alone featuring Shay Lia; and Bullets featuring Little Dragon. Five singles carried the rollout: Leave Me Alone, Drive Me Crazy, Bus Ride, Glowed Up and Lite Spots.
Read as a whole, the tracklist is the information: a Toronto band on Weight Off, a Montreal peer in Shay Lia, a Detroit drummer in Karriem Riggins, and a UK garage voice in Craig David, all inside one producer’s bounce. Few Canadian debuts have ever assembled a room like that.
Glowed Up And The Singles That Travelled
Glowed Up, with Anderson .Paak, debuted on Annie Mac’s BBC Radio 1 show on April 7, 2016, a month before the album, and it remains the record’s centrepiece: .Paak riding a beat that keeps sliding between soul and house. You’re the One with Syd and Lite Spots, built on a Gal Costa sample, became the album’s other long life tracks, the ones that kept introducing Kaytranada to new listeners years after release week.
The Polaris Prize Made It Official
On September 19, 2016, 99.9% won the Polaris Music Prize, the juried award for the best Canadian album of the year. The win placed a Montreal electronic and hip hop producer at the centre of the Canadian album conversation in a year when the prize could easily have gone to a rock or folk record, and it set the terms for everything Kaytranada did next, including 2019’s Bubba and his Grammy winning run that followed.
Ten years on, 99.9% plays as the blueprint: house, funk, soul and hip hop folded into one groove, Canadian at its core and international in its guest list. It is the debut that turned a producer’s producer into a headline name, and it has not dated.
