Pressa released his debut studio album Prestige in April 2019, the first full-length statement from the Toronto rapper after two mixtapes and a run of singles that had already travelled well beyond his city. This is a catalogue album, framed as catalogue: nothing here is new, and the Pressa Prestige record matters because it is where a singles artist had to prove he could hold fifty minutes.
The runway was unusually public. Pressa, born Quinton Gardner and raised in the Driftwood area of Toronto’s Jane and Finch neighbourhood, broke through in 2016 with “Deadmihana,” only his second song out, and followed it with “TBH,” proof early on that he could write for more than one audience. By the end of 2016 he had drawn millions of YouTube views and landed on a tour with Drake, and through 2017 he released two mixtapes, Press Machine in March and Press a Brick that December.
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The Singles That Built Prestige
Press a Brick carried the record that changed his scale: “Canada Goose” featuring Tory Lanez, released in December 2017, a Toronto collaboration that became his most popular release to that point and later earned a Platinum single certification in Canada on May 29, 2020, per Music Canada’s certification record. Around it sat “Novacane,” produced by Murda Beatz, the Canadian producer whose co-sign ran through Pressa’s whole rise. The album campaign then added one more major single in October 2018: “420 In London” featuring Lil Uzi Vert, also produced by Murda Beatz, whose video arrived on January 10, 2019. Pressa explained its inspiration plainly:
“The inspiration behind the video was mainly my moments that I spent in London for the first time, along with the first time Uzi brought me out in my city, and showing the backstage life and behind scenes of this rap game.”
That single later earned its own Gold certification in Canada in May 2020. By the time Prestige arrived, in other words, its audience was not hypothetical. The singles had done the travelling first, which is the oldest sequencing lesson in Toronto hip hop: the album lands on ground the singles already cleared.
Pressa Prestige: Sixteen Tracks, Two Guests
The album itself runs sixteen tracks at roughly fifty minutes, and its most telling decision is restraint with features: only two guests appear, Toronto’s own Burna Bandz and Atlanta rapper Lil Richie. For a debut arriving off collaborations with Tory Lanez, Lil Uzi Vert and Giggs, a nearly solo tracklist is a statement. The argument of Prestige is that Pressa’s voice, high, melodic and instantly recognisable, is the feature, and the album asks the listener to sit with it at full length rather than in three-minute bursts.
Two of its songs had visuals in place around the release: “Long Way,” in which he takes stock of how far he has come in music and in life, and “Should of Been a Pimp.” “Long Way” is the album’s thesis in the way “Attachments” would later be for Gardner Express: the distance travelled, measured honestly, over a beat built for the hook. Contemporary coverage of the release described a record of high energy flows matched with fast hitting drums and cinematic synths, the sound he had been refining since the mixtapes, now sequenced as one long statement instead of a string of loosies.
What Prestige Set Up
The album’s place in the catalogue is structural. Before it, Pressa was a Toronto singles story with major co-signs; after it, he was an album artist, and the industry treated him that way. The next project, Gardner Express in December 2020, was his major label debut EP through Sony Music Canada, and it converted the album’s groundwork into a Gold album and a Double Platinum single. None of that run starts without Prestige proving the long format first.
Heard now, Prestige holds up as the hinge record of the Pressa catalogue: the mixtape energy of Press Machine and Press a Brick on one side, the certified major label run on the other, and sixteen tracks of a Toronto artist refusing to let the guests carry his debut. Released in April 2019, it remains the fullest early document of the voice that Jane and Finch sent across the border.
