Pressa released his major label debut EP Gardner Express in December 2020 through Sony Music Canada. This is a catalogue project, framed as catalogue: nothing here is new, and the Pressa Gardner Express record still matters because seven tracks and eighteen minutes carried the Toronto rapper from mixtape momentum to a certified Gold album in his home country.
The title does the introductions by itself. Gardner is Pressa’s last name, and the Gardiner Expressway is the highway that runs through the downtown core of his hometown, so the EP names the artist and the city in one move. It arrived after the mixtapes Press Machine and Press a Brick in 2017 and the debut album Prestige in 2019, and it was built to be short: every song is a single, and three of them had already been released before the EP landed.
Join The iimiTV Letter
Enter your email and we will send you a confirmation link. Click it and your first edition lands on Friday.
Pressa Gardner Express Tracklist
The EP runs seven tracks: “Attachments” featuring Taliban Glizzy, “Blackberry Zap” featuring Jackboy, “O.T.M (Out The Mud),” “Ouija Board” featuring D-Block Europe, “Head Tap” with Sleepy Hallow and Sheff G, “Dracula” featuring Flipp Dinero, and “96 Freestyle.” The guest list is the strategy in miniature: Brooklyn drill on “Head Tap,” a Florida voice on “Blackberry Zap,” a London collective on “Ouija Board,” and Pressa’s own high, melodic delivery holding the middle of every record. “Blackberry Zap,” whose official video, directed by Michael Vincent, is embedded above, gave the EP one of its defining visuals within a week of release.
The London slot was not a cold call. Pressa’s catalogue had carried a United Kingdom connection since 2017, when he collaborated with Giggs, and his early records drew attention in Canada and the United Kingdom at the same time. “Ouija Board” simply formalised that bridge inside a project, the same way “Head Tap” formalised the New York drill exchange that Toronto artists were trading in throughout 2020.
Three of the seven songs were already working before the EP existed. “OTM,” “96 Freestyle” and “Head Tap” had been released as singles ahead of the project, and the EP sequenced them as proof rather than filler. The rollout kept moving after release day: a cinematic livestream event followed on December 16, 2020, and in February 2021 Pressa released Gardner Express: The Official Film, a concert film built around the EP and his earlier hits. By that February, the EP had accrued nearly 26 million combined streams, according to his label’s release notes at the time.
The Certifications Caught Up
The Canadian record of the EP is written in its certifications. Music Canada lists Gardner Express as a Gold album, certified May 12, 2022, and its singles kept climbing after it: “Attachments” went Gold in January 2021, Platinum that April and Double Platinum in October 2022; “Blackberry Zap” earned Gold in July 2021; “Head Tap” earned Gold in February 2022; and both “96 Freestyle” and “O.T.M (Out The Mud)” reached Gold in January 2024, more than three years after the EP’s release. Catalogue that keeps certifying that long after release is not a moment, it is a foundation.
The critical read at the time matched the numbers. Complex, quoted in the label’s release notes for the EP’s breakout single, wrote of Pressa:
“Not a lot of musicians can claim to have the attention of the biggest music names in their country, or have toured with one of the most successful acts of all time and have released an album all before the age of 23. But Canadian artist Pressa is one of the few that would fit the description.”
The Deluxe And What It Set Up
On November 3, 2021, Gardner Express (Deluxe) expanded the EP to fourteen tracks through Sony Music Canada, adding five new songs at the front, including a new version of “Attachments” with Coi Leray in the opening slot, “Cool, Calm and Collected” with Swae Lee, and “Dead Body” with Rowdy Rebel. The deluxe was mixed with spatial audio work by Mike Dean, a credit that underlines how far the project had travelled from its seven-track beginnings. The story of that opening song is its own chapter, told in full in our reading of the “Attachments” lyrics.
Heard now, Gardner Express is the tightest document of Pressa’s major label arrival: eighteen minutes, no wasted slots, a Toronto title, and a guest list that maps exactly where Toronto rap was trading verses in 2020. Released in December 2020, it remains the project that turned his name into a certified album artist in Canada, and the shortest complete way into his catalogue.
