Majid Jordan released their self-titled debut studio album Majid Jordan on February 5, 2016, through OVO Sound and Warner Bros. Records, the first full-length statement from the Toronto R&B duo of singer Majid Al Maskati and producer Jordan Ullman. This is a catalogue album, framed as catalogue: nothing here is new, and the Majid Jordan debut album record still matters because it is the point where the pair behind one of Drake’s biggest singles had to prove they were an album act in their own right.
The road in was unusually public for a debut. Al Maskati, born in Bahrain and raised there before moving to Toronto at eighteen, met Ullman in 2011 while both were attending the University of Toronto, first connecting at Al Maskati’s 21st birthday party. Working between a dorm room and Ullman’s parents’ basement, they released the Afterhours EP on SoundCloud under the name Good People. Producer Noah “40” Shebib heard it, signed them to OVO Sound in 2013, and that same year they co-produced and featured on Drake’s “Hold On, We’re Going Home,” a single that reached the top five of both the Billboard Hot 100 and the Canadian Hot 100. Their official debut EP, A Place Like This, followed in July 2014.
Join The iimiTV Letter
Enter your email and we will send you a confirmation link. Click it and your first edition lands on Friday.
Majid Jordan Debut Album Tracklist And Singles
Released February 5, 2016, the album runs twelve tracks and 51 minutes: “Learn From Each Other,” “Make It Work,” “My Love” featuring Drake, “Small Talk,” “Pacifico,” “Shake Shake Shake,” “Love Is Always There,” “Warm,” “Something About You,” “Day And Night,” “King City” and “Every Step Every Way.” Drake is the album’s sole guest appearance, a deliberate piece of sequencing for a duo whose whole introduction to the wider public had come through him. The record entered the Billboard 200 and peaked at No. 69 on the chart dated February 27, 2016, a modest number that understates how completely its sound, airy synths, falsetto hooks and dancefloor tempos beneath the R&B vocal, had already travelled through the OVO catalogue.
The singles carried the rollout in order. “My Love,” premiered by Drake on Beats 1 radio on July 10, 2015 and given its official video on September 1, 2015, is the album’s centre of gravity, a record about doubting the intentions behind affection once fame enters the room, produced with Illangelo and Nineteen85. Majid later described the song’s place in the album’s emotional sequence:
In “My Love,” the narrator is unsure, questioning the intentions of somebody’s love, and that unsettled feeling comes through.
“Something About You,” released November 30, 2015 with its video following on December 22, answers it inside the same album, the moment where the narrator stops letting a past experience jade the way he looks at the world. “King City,” released as a single on the album’s release day, closes the Toronto loop in its title alone, a GTA town named in the duo’s own shorthand at the end of a debut built in the city.
Two Musicians, One Signature
The album’s construction is the duo’s division of labour made audible. Ullman builds the rooms, with minimal, spacious production that leaves the low end and the synth lines to do the persuading, while Al Maskati sings over them in a falsetto that reviewers at the time kept tracing back to Michael Jackson. Songs like “Learn From Each Other,” which opens the record as an argument for growing inside a relationship rather than out of it, and “Warm,” which strips the arrangement back to almost nothing, only work because neither half crowds the other.
That restraint was the bet. In a mid-2010s R&B field filling up with OVO imitators, Majid Jordan’s debut refused the obvious moves, no rap features beyond the label founder, no trend-chasing singles, twelve tracks sequenced as one continuous late-night arc. Canadian hip hop artists and Toronto’s R&B writers alike were working the same after-hours territory in 2016; this album is the document of the hometown duo who had helped invent its commercial version three years earlier, finally filing their own full-length entry in it.
What The Debut Set Up
The album was supported by the duo’s first North American tour, announced on February 17, 2016 with dates running from San Francisco through Miami, Brooklyn, Atlanta, Toronto, Chicago and Los Angeles, the first time the catalogue left the studio and the features economy behind. Twenty months later came the follow-up, The Space Between, and the run has continued through Wildest Dreams in 2021 and Good People in 2023, each record returning to the partnership this debut formalized.
Heard now, Majid Jordan holds up as exactly what it was built to be: not a victory lap off a Drake single, but a foundation. The writing is diaristic, the production is patient, and the best songs, “My Love,” “Something About You” and “King City,” still sound like the blueprint for the duo’s whole later catalogue. Released February 5, 2016, the self-titled debut remains the cleanest entry point into Majid Jordan, the Toronto duo who turned a dorm-room EP and one era-defining feature into an album career.
