Kaytranada Glowed Up with Anderson .Paak is the loosest and most joyful record on 99.9 percent, pairing Montreal bounce with one of the most charismatic vocal performances of 2016. The song was released as a single on April 7, 2016 ahead of the album and remains the clearest early example of Kaytranada turning a guest feature into a full collaboration.
Glowed Up appears as track nine on 99.9 percent, Kaytranada’s debut studio album, released on May 6, 2016 through XL Recordings worldwide and Ultra Records in Canada. The album went on to win the 2016 Polaris Music Prize and Electronic Album of the Year at the 2017 Juno Awards, a rare double that confirmed a SoundCloud era producer as a major album artist.
Kaytranada Glowed Up Anderson Paak Production
The kaytranada glowed up anderson paak production works because the beat keeps changing its mind. Sparse synth trills and a hard knock open the record, then the track drops into a stripped, bouncing second half where .Paak stretches his delivery over space that most producers would have filled. That two part structure is a Kaytranada signature from this era: a first idea stated cleanly, then a flip that recontextualizes the vocal and turns a good song into a memorable one.
.Paak was in the middle of his own breakout year, with Malibu released that January, and the two artists had already connected on Malibu’s Lite Weight. Glowed Up sounds like a reunion of equals. .Paak raps, sings and ad libs across the whole record, and Kaytranada mixes him like an instrument, riding the fader on his rasp the same way he rides a sample.
When you are in a trance and you realise you are DJing right now, at that very moment, it goes hand in hand with when I make music and everything just happens.
Kaytranada told XL Recordings that in the label’s 99.9 percent feature, and Glowed Up is that trance state caught on record. The official video leans into the dream logic, placing Kaytranada in a hazy, pastel house party while .Paak performs through an old television set, a visual that matched how most listeners first met both artists in 2016: through screens, at all hours.
99.9 Percent In Full Context
The album around Glowed Up is stacked with deliberate pairings. Craig David on Got It Good, AlunaGeorge and GoldLink on Together, Vic Mensa on Drive Me Crazy, BADBADNOTGOOD on Weight Off, Syd on You’re The One and Little Dragon on Bullets all serve different corners of Kaytranada’s taste, from UK garage to Toronto jazz to Swedish electronic pop. Our earlier coverage, Kaytranada Returns To Polaris Long List, follows how that range kept him in Canada’s top prize conversation for years.
Kaytranada, born in Haiti and raised in Montreal, produced the entire album himself, a point worth underlining for younger producers. Fifteen tracks, one producer, and a guest list that never overwhelms the host’s identity is a hard balance to strike, and it is the main reason 99.9 percent is still taught as a debut album blueprint.
Why Glowed Up Still Hits Live And Online
The Toronto connection matters here too. Kaytranada’s Montreal to Toronto circuit in 2016 helped define a Canadian electronic sound that crossed into hip hop and R and B without losing its dancefloor core, the same cross genre space occupied by Charlotte Day Wilson, whose story sits alongside his in our piece Charlotte Day Wilson Lands Two Polaris Nods.
Glowed Up also proved durable in the simplest way: it never left the setlists. .Paak kept performing it with his band, Kaytranada kept it in DJ sets, and each new audience that discovered Malibu or 99.9 percent found the collaboration waiting as the natural bridge between the two catalogues.
Revisited a decade on, Kaytranada Glowed Up is the sound of two artists arriving at exactly the same moment from different directions. The production still feels playful and precise at once, .Paak still sounds like he is having the best day of his life, and the parent album still stands as a Polaris winning debut that changed what a Canadian producer album could be. Press play above and listen for the flip halfway through. That is the moment the whole record lifts.
