Back in 2020, three-ish months into the pandemic, Jayda Guy, who DJs and produces as Jayda G, put out a single titled “Both of Us” — walloping yet tender piano house, bruising but more than a little bruised. In the world of underground house music, there’s no guarantee that an irresistible track will travel; many of the finest producers barely earn streams. But “Both of Us” became a minor hit, earning close to 50 million plays on Spotify, critical enthusiasm, and a Grammy nomination. It also brought a new set of expectations to Guy’s DJ gigs: A lot of people showed up to hear that single.
“I come from this crate-digging kind of scene, where I would be just playing things that I love, finding these random tracks and exposing them to people,” she tells Billboard. Post-“Both of Us,” “I’m just trying to always get creative with it, whether that’s trying to play it at a high point within the set, leaving it to the very end, or playing different versions of the track,” Guy continues. “How do you build up to that? It’s a great challenge to have.”
Friday brings Guy, her first new album since that trajectory-altering release. (She released an enjoyable installment of the DJ-Kicks mix series in 2021 that included one new production, the bouncy throwback “All I Need.”) And while there are club-pop moments — notably “Blue Lights,” which chugs like a late-night drive on an open highway, and “Scars,” with its ’90s house tones — Guy is not going out of her way to cater to the euphoria-seeking fans who fell hard for “Both of Us.” Instead, she turns inward, penning a searching, at times solemn album, based on the experiences of her father William, who died when she was 10.
“I had the idea for the album for a long time,” Guy says. But until the pandemic hit, grounding a DJ used to a relentless gigging schedule, she “really didn’t have the time, energy and space to tackle what that would look like emotionally.”
The source material for Guy is more than 11 hours of archival videotapes that William made before his death. These cover growing up in Kansas, enlisting in the Vietnam War, riots in Washington D.C. in 1968, moving to Canada, the failure of his roofing business, and his eventual pivot into social work. “He had recorded him talking about his life because he knew he was going to pass [away], so he was able to take the time and kind of relay all this information and stories to me and my family,” Guy explains. “When the pandemic hit, I could really sit with the tapes, watch them, dive into his world.”
Theme in hand, Guy also made two notable changes to her writing and recording process. As a producer known for house music, she typically built a musical bed first, leaving lyrics for the end. “But because I wanted to be very intentional with the lyrics, I started with those,” she says. She calls writing this way — words first, rhythm later — “difficult and challenging and really interesting all at the same time.”
Guy also threw herself into the role of lead vocalist, which she had only embraced for the first time on “Both of Us” — it made little sense for another singer to deliver lines as personal as these. “Leading up to this album, I started taking vocal coaching lessons,” Guy says. “Before that, I didn’t really know how to carry a tune. I still have so far to go, but it’s really fun to learn.”
Guy strikes two balancing acts simultaneously. The first is emotional. Guy “shares her grief and her loss, there’s a core of pain” in the lyrics, says Jack Peñate, who co-produced the album. “But she does it with acceptance and jubilance” and flickers of dancefloor momentum.
“I thought this could have a real darkness around it,” Peñate adds. “But what happened was the opposite — we seemed to be able to run with the idea of celebrating Jayda’s father and her relationship with him.”
Musically, Guy and Peñate walked another tightrope: Some musical references were pegged to William’s stories from the ’60s and ’70s and some to Guy’s youthful memories of her father. “That was very nerdy, working out what synthesizers would be best to tie it to a timeline,” Peñate says. But “we never went pastiche with it,” he continues. The goal was to make sure “this sits in a place that you can drive around London and listen and it feels fresh.” (Guy was based in Berlin for a while before moving to London, where she feels far more at home — “house music is really more in the mainstream [there] in a very different way,” she says.)
The decade-hopping blend is realized most effectively in tracks like “When She Dance,” a disco stomp with a handsome, snapping mid-section full of volleyed vocal harmonies, and “Meant to Be,” which folds the impeccably slick guitar of ‘80s R&B into a more modern thump. The latter is based on a period of tumult for William: He was forced to shut down his business and work at the local lumber mill, which Guy calls “a real low point.” But he ended up returning to school and becoming a social worker, finding a vocation that she says “gave him so much purpose within his life.”
The song alludes to those events. “But it’s also about me reflecting on the fact that I don’t get to hear the stories directly,” Guy continues. “It’s bittersweet, learning the kind of man my father was — but having to learn it from these tapes, versus in person.”
Writing and recording Guy was full of similar moments. “It was truly cathartic in a way that you rarely get,” Peñate adds. “Someone’s actually kind of processing grief through the creative process. It’s a cliché, but: For music to in any way be a part of healing? That’s why we do it.”
