TOBi released his debut studio album Still on May 3, 2019 through RCA Records and Same Plate Entertainment. This is a catalogue album, framed as catalogue: nothing here is new, and the record still matters because everything the Nigerian-born, Brampton-raised singer and rapper later won was already audible on it, the singing and the rapping in the same breath, and the refusal to treat vulnerability as a weakness.
He explained the title himself in his release interview: “STILL is being calm in the eye of the storm. Staying present and persistent, in my goals, in my vision, in my purpose in life. Navigating through adversity and coming out on the other side battered, bruised and still standing.” The deluxe chapter of the album closes this post: the official video for “24 (Toronto Remix),” embedded below, is the Still story told as a Toronto posse cut.
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Thirteen Tracks, Three Singles, One Guest
The album arrived on May 3, 2019 on RCA and Same Plate, as its reference listing shows, a 13-track debut built in the open. Through early 2019 TOBi released its singles one by one: “City Blues,” “Sweet Poison” and “Werking.” The finished album kept its guest list to a single name, the duo VanJess on “Come Back Home,” which makes Still the purest statement in his catalogue, one voice carrying a whole record about masculinity, migration and post-traumatic growth, the themes his later Juno citations would name outright.
The runway had been long. TOBi, born Oluwatobi Feyisara Ajibolade, moved from Nigeria to Canada as a child, grew up largely in Brampton, studied biology and psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University and released his first EP, FYi, in 2016. “City Blues” was premiered by Zane Lowe, his song “Ride” was placed in HBO’s Ballers, and he performed “Beige” on COLORS before the album cycle had even closed. Asked at release which songs showed his widest range, he named two: “I think City Blues and Caged Bird Sings show the widest range of what I am capable of artistically, from the rapping to singing, playing with different cadences. I just had the most fun constructing those two songs.”
Still Plus And The Toronto Remix
The album’s second life came a year later. The deluxe edition, Still+, followed in April 2020, adding two new songs and three remixes to the original thirteen tracks and reversing the solo logic completely: The Game joined the “City Blues (Remix),” Kemba joined the “180 (Remix),” and the “24 (Toronto Remix)” stacked Jazz Cartier, Haviah Mighty, Shad and Ejji Smith alongside TOBi on one record. TOBi announced it as “a perfect way to close the STILL chapter,” and the remix’s video, directed by Kit Weyman, was longlisted for the 2021 Prism Prize.
That video is the house detail this desk keeps coming back to. Three of the voices on it, Shad, Jazz Cartier and Haviah Mighty, are tracked artists in their own right on this site, and the clip plays like a roll call of the Toronto generation Still belonged to: a debut album by a Brampton-raised singer-rapper ending its run with the city’s rappers standing in the snow beside him. The original album asked one man to carry thirteen tracks; its closing chapter answered by showing the company he kept.
What The Debut Set Up
Heard now, Still is the foundation under a run this site has already revisited piece by piece: Elements Vol. 1, in our return to that album, won the 2021 Juno Award for Rap Recording of the Year, the EP Shall I Continue? won Rap Album or EP of the Year in 2023, and Panic, in our return to Panic, won Rap Album and Rap Single of the Year in 2024. None of that run is a departure from the debut; it is the debut’s method, unapologetic soul music built from hip hop, R and B, soul, jazz, blues and Afrobeats, scaled up one project at a time.
Released on May 3, 2019, Still remains the clearest first draft of TOBi: calm in the eye of the storm by his own definition, a 13-track debut with one guest, three singles that still anchor his live sets, and a deluxe ending that turned a solo statement into a Toronto document.
