Sean Leon released his debut studio album I Think You’ve Gone Mad (Or the Sins of the Father) on February 5, 2017, through The IXXI Initiative, the Toronto collective he founded in 2012. This is a catalogue album, framed as catalogue: nothing here is new, and the Sean Leon I Think You’ve Gone Mad record remains the founding document of a Toronto scene corner that went on to feed some of the biggest records in the world.
Leon, born Matthew Sean Leon, had been building toward it since his 2013 debut mixtape Ninelevenne, the Tragedy and 2014’s Narcissus, the Drowning of Ego. The IXXI Initiative was his infrastructure answer to a city he felt did not know how to support its own talent: a self-built house where he could be, as he put it to The Fader in 2017,
“the first independent, documented from the basement rapper to cut through and change things, on this side, especially.”
The album’s subtitle is its thesis. The sins of the father are what a son inherits; the record opens by handing the inheritance to the next generation instead.
Sean Leon I Think You’ve Gone Mad Opens With A Daughter
The first track is “Daughter (Hailey-Nirvana),” produced by Leon with WondaGurl and named for his own daughter: the debut album of Toronto’s most restless shapeshifter begins not with a flex but with fatherhood, the father in the subtitle answering for himself in the present tense. From there the record moves the way Leon’s whole catalogue moves, between grunge, bounce and confession without asking permission: “God / Guard Up” and “Deep End (Off The)” ride WondaGurl production, “Suburbia (Heaven Or)” asks its title question about the Toronto edges he came from, and “Kill My Mind” stretches past five minutes of pressure.
The production credits map his circle at the time: Leon himself, WondaGurl, Eestbound, Jack Rochon, Jordan Evans, Bijan Amir, Cubeatz and Daniel Caesar among them. That is not a guest list assembled for reach. It is the IXXI basement, documented, exactly the unit Leon had described building since 2012, with Caesar, the first artist he brought into the Initiative, present on both sides of the boards.
Six Singles Rolled Out Over Fifteen Months
Unusually for a debut, the album arrived pre-documented. Six singles rolled out ahead of it: “81” on November 5, 2015; “Europe Freestyle / I Made It / Debt & Vendettas,” featuring Savannah Ré, on March 25, 2016; “Deep End” on April 7, 2016; “Matthew In The Middle,” featuring Daniel Caesar, on April 15, 2016; “Killin’ Mind” on April 20, 2016; and “Fav Rapper / Hundred Million Religion” on December 11, 2016. By release day, a listener could already know a third of the record, and the album still played like a reveal, because the sequencing recontextualised every single around the fatherhood frame.
“Matthew In The Middle,” the official audio above, is the centre of that frame: Leon, whose first name is Matthew, caught between the father above him in the subtitle and the daughter below him in the opener, with Caesar singing the middle distance. The song travelled further than the album did at first, landing on the soundtrack of HBO’s Insecure, and it remains the cleanest single-song summary of what the IXXI house sounded like before the world called: Toronto gospel edges, rap verses, and a hook built like a hymn.
Redway, And What The Album Cost
The album also carries a collaboration with Redway, the Toronto rapper who died in 2015, before the album was finished. His presence gives the record a second kind of inheritance to carry: not just what fathers hand down, but what a scene loses young and has to honour in the sequencing. Leon followed the album within the year with C.C.W.M.T.T., released as an audio-film and album on November 29, 2017, a project he had started before this one even came out, and then Sean Leon (The Death Of) in 2018, closing a three-album opening run that most independent artists never get to make on their own terms.
The longer receipt is the writing room. The same IXXI foundation documented here is the one Leon carried into co-writing on Kanye West’s Jesus Is King, Donda and Donda 2, and into a co-write on Justin Bieber’s “Peaches.” None of that is audible as ambition on this record. It is audible as method: build the house first, document everything, and let the catalogue argue.
How To Hear It Now
Play I Think You’ve Gone Mad from “Daughter (Hailey-Nirvana)” straight through, and listen for a debut album that is really a foundation pour: the collective, the producers, the Caesar partnership and the fatherhood frame all set in concrete at once. For the wider Toronto story around it, the Daniel Caesar hub on iimiTV carries the other half of the IXXI partnership. Released February 5, 2017, this is Sean Leon at the start, and Toronto hip hop has been building on the pour ever since.
