Kaytranada released Bubba on December 13, 2019 through RCA, a 17 track second album that went on to win Best Dance Electronic Album at the 2021 Grammy Awards. This is a revisited look at that record, stated plainly as catalogue: not a new release, but an album whose influence on Canadian music keeps compounding.
The Montreal producer, born Louis Kevin Celestin in Haiti and raised in Montreal, had already changed the sound of online rap and R and B with 99.9 percent in 2016. Bubba was the follow-up that had to prove the sound could carry a full major label album, a Grammy stage, and a guest list that ran from Pharrell Williams to Charlotte Day Wilson.
Kaytranada Bubba Tracklist And Guests
The album runs 50 minutes across 17 tracks, and the sequencing is the argument. It opens with Do It and 2 The Music with Iman Omari, moves through Go DJ with SiR and Gray Area with Mick Jenkins, and lands its best known single at track six: 10 percent, featuring Kali Uchis. That song won Best Dance Recording at the 2021 Grammys, making it the rare album cut that carried both a commercial and a critical peak inside the same project.
The middle of the record is where the Canadian thread shows. What You Need features Charlotte Day Wilson, one of Toronto’s most distinctive voices, placed between Estelle on Oh No and GoldLink, Eight9Fly and ARI PenSmith on Vex Oh. Need It pairs Kaytranada with Masego, Taste brings in VanJess, and The Worst In Me gives Tinashe one of the album’s most replayed performances. The closing run, Culture with Teedra Moses, September 21, and Midsection with Pharrell Williams, ends the record at its most confident.
Read as a tracklist, Bubba is a map of who Kaytranada could call in 2019. Every guest is placed on the kind of beat that flatters them, which was always his real skill as a producer. The drums swing, the basslines bounce, and the vocalists are given space instead of being buried under the production.
The Grammy Night That Made History
On March 14, 2021, Bubba won Best Dance Electronic Album and 10 percent won Best Dance Recording. The album win made Kaytranada the first Black artist to win Best Dance Electronic Album since the category launched in 2004, and the first openly gay producer to win in the field, a milestone widely reported at the time. He was also nominated for Best New Artist that night.
A lot of young kids who aspire to be musicians probably have the same inner struggles as me, being Black and gay, just trying to fit in. It could be inspiring to them. That’s why I want to win, that’s who I’m going to dedicate it to.
That dedication, given to Billboard ahead of the ceremony, explains why the album still gets written about. Bubba was not only a dance record from a hip hop producer. It became a reference point for a generation of Canadian producers who saw a Montreal artist win at the Grammys without sanding down the bounce that made his remixes travel in the first place.
The chart record backed the awards. Bubba debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Electronic Albums chart and No. 3 on the Billboard R and B Albums chart according to the JUNO Awards, in a career that has since added a 2022 JUNO for Dance Recording of the Year. TIME described Kaytranada as sitting at the intersection of house and hip hop, and Bubba is the album where that intersection became a full address.
Why Bubba Still Plays Like A New Record
Part of the album’s staying power is practical. At 50 minutes with short tracks and constant motion, Bubba plays like a DJ set that happens to have guest vocalists, which is how Kaytranada’s Boiler Room sets built his audience in the first place. Songs flow into each other, interludes like Puff Lah and Scared To Death reset the ear, and no idea overstays.
Part of it is lineage. The Canadian electronic and hip hop scenes that followed, from Montreal house producers to Toronto R and B singers working with dance producers, all pass through the door Bubba opened at the Grammy level. When a Canadian producer today places a singer on a bouncing house beat and treats it as a rap record and a club record at once, that grammar was standardized here.
Revisited honestly, Bubba holds up as Kaytranada’s defining album length statement: 17 tracks, released December 13, 2019 on RCA, two Grammy Awards, and a guest list that still reads like a festival lineup. It does not need a new release to justify attention. Six years on, it remains the clearest document of how a kid from Montreal rewired the space between hip hop and house music.
