Roy Woods breaks down X, his 10 track OVO Sound album, in a new interview about returning to the sound that first built his name. The conversation, published this month by YAMS Magazine, finds the 30 year old singer in a reflective place, talking about control, honesty and why this record had to feel like the early Roy Woods, carried by a decade of lessons.
Back To Where It Started
Woods told the magazine that his last few projects were spent chasing a specific vision, and that X is where the chase stopped. Instead of reaching outward for approval, he went back to the feeling of his earliest records and rebuilt from there, with everything he has learned since layered on top of the foundation that made fans fall for him in the first place.
“For the last few projects I’ve really been trying to attack a certain vision, and for this one, I wanted to just go back into that earlier, what it felt like listening to Roy in the earlier years, but with new wisdom, light and pain.”
The response, he says, has justified the decision. Fans have told him this is the project that finally feels complete, and that word keeps coming up whenever he talks about the release. The album title itself marks the moment. X stands for ten years in the game, and where a milestone like that can read like a finish line, Woods treats it as a crossroads, the point where everything that came before informs everything that comes next.
It is the sound of an artist who stopped trying to prove something and started documenting where he actually is. The honesty runs through the whole conversation, from the way he talks about learning what kind of lover he is to the way he describes slowing down and giving more to himself.
Ten Tracks, One Feature
X arrived on August 7 through OVO Sound, carrying 10 songs in a tight runtime of about 30 minutes. The tracklist runs How You Say My Name, Beautiful, Trust and Believe, For Me, I Wanna Know, Brunch, Set Fire, Down In Your Ways, Break Ties and Do You Get Angry. The only guest appearance comes from Grammy winning songwriter Jozzy, who joins Woods near the end of the album on Down In Your Ways.
The album opens with How You Say My Name, which Woods and his fans both count as a favourite. He admits the record took longer than most to finish, because it pushed him into a creative bag he was not too familiar with before. He knew exactly what he wanted from the song, and he stayed with it until the record matched the vision. Listen to it below.
Elsewhere, Set Fire reconnects Woods with Caribbean inspired sounds alongside producer Di Genius, while Brunch gives him room to have fun with romance. Break Ties takes the album’s heaviest emotional turn, sitting with the difficult reality that walking away can sometimes be the healthiest decision in a relationship. By the time Do You Get Angry closes the record, X has moved through attraction, confidence, insecurity, desire and conflict, and landed somewhere close to release.
Beautiful Is Still Climbing
Two months after release, the album is still producing results. Beautiful, released through OVO and Sony, landed at number eight on Yangaroo’s Top CanCon Downloads chart for the week of October 5, 2026, holding a spot on a national ranking topped by new music from Taylor Swift and Madonna and Charli xcx. For a slow burning R and B record, that kind of staying power on Canadian download charts says plenty about the album’s legs and the audience that keeps coming back to it.
Woods has kept the momentum moving outside the album as well, recently sharing Solar Eclipse, a RoyMix that has been making the rounds on Toronto rap blogs this month, one more sign that his creative output is speeding up rather than slowing down.
Control, Then The Stage
The theme Woods returns to most is control, over his sound, his direction and his life. It is the clearest line between the young artist who arrived with Exis in 2015 and the man speaking now, a decade deeper into a career that has included Waking at Dawn, Nocturnal, Say Less, Mixed Emotions and Flower City Heartbreak.
“I know what I want and what works. I’m here to deliver in all ways, so I feel like me being more in control of my sound, direction and my life, realistically, is the main key.”
That control is about to get a live test. Woods says he is continuing to experiment with new sounds, and he wants to bring this era to the stage properly. He told the magazine he really wants to perform with a live band and go on tour, giving fans both his calm side and the rock star within. No dates have been announced yet, but the intention is clear.
Ten years after Exis introduced one of Toronto’s most distinctive R and B voices, Roy Woods sounds settled without sounding finished. The fans feel complete with this one. Judging by the interview, so does he. X is streaming now on all major platforms.
