Majid Jordan released their second studio album The Space Between on October 27, 2017, through OVO Sound and Warner Bros. Records, the follow-up to their 2016 self-titled debut. This is a catalogue retrospective: nothing here is new, and the Majid Jordan The Space Between record matters to Toronto because it is the moment the duo stopped being the city’s best-kept OVO secret and sequenced a full album around guests, singles and a sound built for rooms bigger than the after-hours.
The Toronto-formed duo of singer Majid Al Maskati and producer Jordan Ullman, formed in 2011 and signed to OVO Sound after Noah “40” Shebib heard Afterhours, their EP released under the name Good People, announced the album on Instagram on July 31, 2017 and revealed its tracklist on October 17. Production is handled primarily by Majid Jordan themselves, alongside Nineteen85 and Stargate, and for the first time on one of their albums the guest list extends beyond Drake: OVO labelmates PartyNextDoor and dvsn, the two acts closest to the duo in the label’s R&B wing, take the only features.
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Majid Jordan The Space Between Tracklist And Singles
Released October 27, 2017, the album runs thirteen tracks: “Intro,” “Gave Your Love Away,” “OG Heartthrob,” “Body Talk,” “Not Ashamed,” “One I Want” featuring PartyNextDoor, “You,” “Phases,” “Asleep,” “What You Do to Me,” “My Imagination” featuring dvsn, the title track “The Space Between” and “Outro,” the last of which folds back into “Gave Your Love Away” in a chopped and screwed reprise, so the album literally ends inside its own second track. It entered the Billboard 200 and peaked at No. 74 on the chart dated November 18, 2017.
The singles were rolled out across the whole of 2017. “Phases,” the lead single released April 28, 2017 with its video on May 25, is the autobiographical one, Al Maskati looking back at a youth split between Bahrain, where he was born, and Toronto, where he moved at eighteen. “One I Want,” released June 15, 2017, pairs the duo with PartyNextDoor over a hook that tallies the whole run and dismisses it in one line:
“Fifty bands later, you the one I want.”
The song was certified Gold in Canada and its official video, directed by Adrian Martinez and released in July 2017, is embedded above. “My Imagination” with dvsn followed on September 28, and “Body Talk,” released October 19, closed the rollout with a Common Good directed video at the end of that month.
The Song Fans Named Before It Existed
The album’s most told story belongs to its second track. “Gave Your Love Away” first reached the public not as a single but as runway music, premiered during Louis Vuitton’s Men’s Spring-Summer 2018 show in Paris in the summer of 2017. Fans ripped the audio from the show, circulated it, named the song themselves and campaigned for its release until the duo acknowledged the demand, performed it on tour and placed it near the top of the album, where its breakup lyric, a singer admitting he gave a love away and retracing his steps, sets the record’s emotional weather. Its official video, released in 2018, restaged the song as an intimate karaoke session, the opposite of a fashion runway and a neat summary of the duo’s instincts: take the most public song they had and film it in the smallest room available.
Around those anchors, the album’s middle stretches furthest from the debut. “OG Heartthrob” leans into a classic heartache posture, “You” had already been road-tested on the duo’s 2016 debut-album tour, and “What You Do to Me” and the title track keep Ullman’s production spacious enough that the sequencing, intro to outro, plays as one continuous set. Among Canadian hip hop artists filing R&B records in 2017, few others on a Toronto label were building albums that flowed like DJ sets and confessed like diaries at the same time.
From Album To World Tour
In October 2017, Majid Jordan announced The Space Between Tour, which opened on January 16, 2018 in Montreal at M Telus and carried the album worldwide, the duo’s move to a headline run under their own album’s name. The catalogue after it, Wildest Dreams in October 2021 and Good People in November 2023, keeps returning to this album’s template: a small guest list drawn from inside the house, singles that live for months before the record, and sequencing treated as part of the songwriting.
Heard from here, The Space Between is the bridge record of the Majid Jordan catalogue, wider than the debut, darker than the pop turn that followed, and still the fullest document of the duo working at the exact distance their title names: between Toronto and the world, between the runway and the karaoke room, between giving love away and asking for it back. Released October 27, 2017, it remains the second chapter every Majid Jordan listener has to pass through.
