Saukrates released his second studio album Season One on April 24, 2012, independently through FrostByte Media and eOne Music. The Toronto rapper and producer, born Karl Amani Wailoo, had waited 13 years between full-length statements: his debut, The Underground Tapes, arrived in 1999, and the Saukrates Season One story is the story of everything that happened in between, finally set down on one record.
This is a catalogue album, framed as catalogue. Nothing here is new. The album was recorded between 2009 and 2012, runs 17 tracks, and carries the title Saukrates gave it for a reason he stated plainly at release: Season One is a reference to what he calls
“a wonderful new beginning”
in his career. After a decade of shelved albums and label exits, he was numbering the seasons from one again, on his own terms.
Saukrates Season One Was Thirteen Years In The Making
The delay was not idleness, and the record only makes sense with the gap in view. Saukrates signed to Def Jam Recordings in 2000 and began work on a second album, Bad Addiction, slated for 2004. He was dropped, the completed album was shelved, and no other major deal carried it out. In 2006 his group Big Black Lincoln released Heaven’s Caught on Fire in Canada, a record that put his R&B singing in the foreground years before that singing became central to his collaborations. The voice that producers called on for hooks through the 2000s, on records by Redman, Method Man, Nas and Nelly Furtado, was being trained in public while his own album waited.
When the album finally came, Saukrates produced much of it himself and reached out to a small circle for the rest. He told interviewer Chase March, ahead of the release:
“I did a bunch of them but I also reached out to some of my favourites. Rich Kidd’s got a couple on there.”
The production credits bear that out: Saukrates, Rich Kidd, School of Velocity and Phraze & Rell divide the album between them, which is part of why it moves between boom bap, electronic production and live instrumentation without splitting into pieces. Toronto hands made a Toronto record, and the guest list follows the same logic, one American headliner folded into a hometown cast.
Two Singles, And A Song Built For P.K. Subban
The first single, “Drop It Down” featuring Redman, was released on July 26, 2011, closing a loop that had been open since Saukrates produced for Redman’s Malpractice in 2001 and joined his Gilla House collective. It lands as the album’s closing track, a veteran’s handshake placed at the end of the record instead of the front. The second single, “Say I,” was released on October 25, 2011 and re-released on January 31, 2012 with a new verse by OB O’Brien, produced by Rich Kidd.
“Say I” carries the album’s strangest and most Toronto backstory. Saukrates wrote the song in 2011 for a Nike campaign built around NHL defenceman P.K. Subban, then rising with the Montreal Canadiens. He explained the pairing to Sportsnet:
“They figured me and P.K. would be a perfect combo, because I grew up playing hockey and I’m a fan of PK and what he’s done in the NHL.”
A campaign song could have stayed a campaign song. On Season One it sits second in the tracklist, doing the work of a proper single: the inspirational record RapReviews singled out as a sure-fire radio track, with Saukrates arguing that nobody should be afraid to dream because hard work eventually pays off. For an artist whose own dream had been deferred by two labels, the lyric was not a slogan. It was a progress report.
Seventeen Tracks, One Rapping And Singing Voice
The middle of the album is where the self-reflection the title promises actually happens. “Doorite” pairs him with Nickelus F and k-os, two writers who treat verses as arguments. “Sometimes” takes on alcohol and drug abuse from an empathetic angle rather than a glamorous one, a choice RapReviews highlighted in its 8 out of 10 review. “What a Day” and “Lost” lean fully into the singing, piano-led and unhurried, and “Tomorrow,” produced by Rich Kidd, has the veteran proclaiming himself a voice for a new generation while sounding entirely aware of the claim’s weight.
Then there is “On the Run,” featuring k-os and Nelly Furtado, which some listeners already knew under another name. The song had previously been released as “I Wish I Knew Natalie Portman,” a single from k-os’s 2009 album Yes!, and it is built on a sample of Phantom Planet’s “California.” Placed near the end of Season One, it reads as a bridge between the two Toronto careers that had been crossing since the early 1990s, and it remains the album’s most travelled song.
RapReviews summed up the record’s achievement this way:
“The self reflection and maturity of Season One clearly make it an overall effective album.”
Exclaim! was favourable as well, and the two reviews agree on the shape of the thing: a comeback album that refuses to sound bitter about the comeback taking so long. Among Canadian hip hop albums of its period, few carry this much biography per track, and fewer still turn the biography into the concept rather than the excuse.
How To Hear It Now
Play Season One after The Underground Tapes and listen for what the 13 years added: the singing, the patience, the willingness to put “Sometimes” and “Lost” beside “Drop It Down” and let both halves stand. For the earlier Saukrates, start with iimiTV’s breakdown of “Money or Love” and its lyrics. Released April 24, 2012, Season One is Saukrates restarting his own numbering, and Toronto rap is still counting from it.
