TOBi released Panic on October 12, 2023 through RCA Records. This is a catalogue album, framed as catalogue: nothing here is new, and the record still matters because it won two Juno Awards in a single night, and because it is the most demanding album the Nigerian-born, Brampton-raised singer and rapper has made, a record about anxiety, memory and agency that opens with a choir and never lets its subject hide.
The official animated short for the opener, “Someone I Knew,” is embedded below. TOBi called that song, in Sony Music Canada’s release announcement, “one of the most important songs I have ever done,” adding: “I have always wanted to have my own version of a Florence Welch record. This is what music is about to me. To capture the feeling of timelessness that we wanted on PANIC. I wanted to make a song that would make anybody want to wake up and take agency over their life.”
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Twelve Tracks, Eight Singles, Four New Songs
The album runs 12 tracks, as its published tracklist shows: “Someone I Knew,” “Get Yours,” “Flowers” featuring MAVI, “Flatline” featuring Kenny Mason, “Hoodwinked,” “Move,” “Time Out,” “All Night Long” featuring Topaz Jones, “She Loves Me,” “Keep From Falling,” “Protect You” and “How Much Longer?” The honest shape of the rollout is part of the record’s story. Eight songs arrived as singles ahead of the album, from “Move,” which was featured in the Netflix film Do Revenge with Camila Mendes and Maya Hawke, through “Flowers,” “All Night Long” and “She Loves Me,” so when Panic landed on October 12, 2023, only four songs were new: “Get Yours,” “Time Out,” “Protect You” and “How Much Longer?”
The production story gives the album its sweep. Alex Goose, who also produced the prelude single “Before We Panic” featuring Mikky Ekko, built much of the immersive landscape of horns, strings and melodic beats, and Detroit jazz trombonist Phil Ranelin, the Tribe Records co-founder TOBi met at a birthday party, introduces the record with the words “This is Panic” after the opener. A rap album narrated at the door by a spiritual jazz elder is making a claim about lineage, and the music keeps honouring it, from the orchestral opener through the COLORS performance of “Flowers” that RCA had released the year before.
Someone I Knew Sets The Whole Record
“Someone I Knew” is the introductory track and, in RCA’s words, the thematic backbone of the album. Its short animated film was created by BAFTA-nominated animator Renaldho Pelle with Los Angeles-based Studio Linguini, and TOBi noted the accuracy of its sample, fifty years after it was originally sung, as part of what made the song feel timeless to him. The lyric’s journey, pivotal moments balanced between being an artist and being a human, is the album’s journey in miniature.
That is the Toronto and Brampton detail that makes this a hometown story on this desk. TOBi is a co-founder of UNPACK Community, a series of discussions on mental wellness in creative fields, and Panic is that work turned into an album: a record that treats anxiety and depression not as branding but as material, with joy as the other pole. “Flowers,” with MAVI, became the single Canadian audiences had already lived with through its COLORS session, and placing it third, right after the new “Get Yours,” lets the familiar song carry listeners into the harder new material behind it. The project that preceded it, Elements Vol. 1, is revisited in our return to Elements Vol. 1.
Two Junos In One Night, And A Polaris Shortlist
At the Juno Awards of 2024, Panic won Rap Album of the Year, and “Someone I Knew” won Rap Single of the Year. The album was also a shortlisted finalist for the 2024 Polaris Music Prize. That double win gave TOBi a rare Canadian sweep: Rap Recording of the Year for Elements Vol. 1 in 2021, Rap Album or EP of the Year for Shall I Continue? in 2023, and then album and single together in 2024, three consecutive projects, three consecutive Juno years, a run no other artist in his lane was matching in that window.
Heard now, Panic holds up as the album where TOBi’s unapologetic soul music grew teeth. The title is honest, the opener is orchestral, the features, MAVI, Kenny Mason and Topaz Jones, are chosen for writing rather than for reach, and the closing question, “How Much Longer?,” leaves the record open rather than resolved. Released on October 12, 2023, it remains the clearest proof that a Brampton-raised artist could make a rap album about panic itself, win the country’s rap album prize with it, and have its first song named the country’s rap single of the year in the same night.
