Ten years, four cities and one Polaris-shortlisted debut after leaving Montreal, Aïsha Vertus made the album of her life from a Lisbon apartment — and the DJs who matter have noticed, even if home is still catching up.
Here is a fun way to measure a moment: open the tracklists for Tru Thoughts’ *Unfold*, Robert Luis’s weekly radio show, and count. Over the last six episodes, Gayance appears in four of them — three different songs, repeat plays, her name in the episode headlines. Luis is not a neutral observer; he’s the co-founder of the label that just released her album. But tastemakers putting their own signings on blast only works if the music holds up, and *roaming*, out October 9, holds up beautifully.
Gayance is the project of Aïsha Vertus, born in Montreal to a Haitian family, raised in Montréal-Nord, and gone from the city for roughly a decade — Brussels, Amsterdam, now Lisbon, with Brazil in the mix along the way. What makes her story unusual is that she was documenting this world long before she was making records for it. In 2012, as a young filmmaker, she directed *Piu Piu*, a documentary about the Montreal beat scene, featuring a barely-known local producer named Kaytranada. She went on to programme the MURAL Festival and POP Montreal, and book Arcade Fire’s Haitian restaurants, Agrikol and Ti-Agrikol. For years, she was the person building the rooms other artists played in.
The production career came late and fast. She taught herself Ableton during lockdown, released a debut EP, *No Toning Down*, in 2021, signed to Bradley Zero’s Rhythm Section International, and in March 2023 dropped *Mascarade* — a debut album so assured it landed on the Polaris Music Prize shortlist. Gilles Peterson picked its single “Moon Rising” among his best tracks of 2023 on BBC 6 Music. CBC Music named her one of eight artists shaping the future of Canadian electronic music. Canada, in other words, had the memo. It just filed it somewhere warm and forgot about it.
*roaming* has been described by Gayance as a record she didn’t know she was making: “a project I didn’t know I was working on for the past decade by just living and travelling around,” she said on release, “these songs are stories from this era of my life.” Most of it was written across two years in Amsterdam and finished after a move to Lisbon that, by her account, slowed her down in the best way. “I live in the Longueuil of Lisbon,” she told Exclaim! — closer to the beach, calmer, in no hurry to say yes to everything.
The seven tracks play like postcards that argue with each other. Opener “Better For My Heart” reunites her with singer Judith Little D for a house-and-gospel purge about self-worth. “Ensemble,” sung in French — a first for her — is about chosen family and the boundaries that protect it. “Podjab,” the lead single, is pure diaspora joy: Haitian Mizik Rasin carnival energy, Dutch producer Jarreau Vandal on the beat, and fellow Haitian-Montrealer Waahli, who was handed the track and reportedly returned his verse within the hour. Closer “Agua,” built on a sketch dating back to 2020, brings in Montreal mainstays Narcy and De.Ville. And yes, one track is actually titled “hellooooo????” — confidence with a sense of humour is kind of the whole thesis. Across the record, her own voice steps forward in a way it didn’t on *Mascarade*: less producer hiding behind the desk, more singer telling you exactly what happened to her, city by city.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world has been less slow on the uptake. She has played Panorama Bar, Fabric, Dekmantel, Primavera Sound Porto and the Montreux Jazz Festival. Exclaim! reports that Eric André — whose late father was Haitian — DJed alongside her in Amsterdam, and that Trevor Noah has been spotted at her sets. Her reaction to all of it remains winningly unpolished: “I’m still here thinking I’m a little girl from Montréal-Nord.”
She launched the album with a live-band show in Lisbon on release night and spends only about four weeks a year in Montreal now — family, shows, a couch at her mother’s. “I live in my luggage,” she says. It’s a line that could sound like a complaint; on *roaming* it sounds like a manifesto. This is a record about building home out of friendships, languages and dancefloors rather than postal codes, made by an artist who spent a decade filming, booking and championing everybody else’s scene before building her own.
Robert Luis clearly gets it. The album is short — seven songs, under half an hour — and it still somehow feels like the decade it took to live. The question is whether Canada catches up this time — because Gayance, plainly, is done waiting around for it to happen.
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