In her new album Through The Wall, Rochelle Jordan confidently occupies the role of dance floor diva.Amanda Elise K/Supplied
As a young girl playing with Barbie dolls in her bedroom, Rochelle Jordan would hear the booming beat of house music through the wall.
Jordan’s family had moved to Whitby, Ont., from England when she was 4, and her older brother brought along the sounds of the nineties London dance scene, in two briefcases stuffed with cassette tapes.
Those tapes taught Jordan the harmonies, beat patterns and chord progressions of U.K. music genres such as drum and bass, garage and soulful house. More than two decades later, those sounds serve as a sonic blueprint for the singer’s new album Through The Wall, on which she confidently occupies the role of dance floor diva.
Released in late September by independent label Empire, the record earned a coveted Best New Music selection from Pitchfork and was named one of the best new dance recordings by Billboard, which branded Jordan “perpetually one of the coolest artists in the scene.”
Jordan isn’t new to this kind of esteem: Back in the early 2010s, she released several projects with a throwback R&B sound that were beloved by the niche music blogs that ruled that era, earning her a sheen of Soundcloud cool. For a moment, it seemed like Jordan would follow the Weeknd and Drake’s footsteps from Toronto to international stardom.
Then she disappeared.
After 2014’s lush 1021, her debut full-length album, Jordan battled sickle cell anemia, bouts of depression, imposter syndrome and a management deal that went sour. She didn’t release an album for seven years. In 2021, she dropped a vibrant, house-oriented comeback album, Play with the Changes. That record was longlisted for the Polaris Music Prize and represented a step forward after a fallow period. Jordan’s latest Through The Wall sees her even more confident than ever.
Backed by production from her long-time collaborator KLSH, the Chicago house legend Terry Hunter and acclaimed Canadian dance producer and performer Kaytranada, the album features Jordan boasting about her influence on mainstream music, gliding effortlessly across genre-spanning beats and finding liberation for herself on the dance floor. Call it her diva era.
And Jordan’s looking the part: On the poster for her current string of sold out shows across the U.S., she’s striking power poses in stilettos, calling to mind the glamorous women of dance pop’s past, from Donna Summer to Chaka Khan.
It’s the day after her 39th birthday and Jordan has hair pulled back behind over-the-ear headphones, skin glowing from a spa day. Though she’s channelling the energy of the dance floor in her music, off stage Jordan is a self-described tomboy who wears sweats and is more likely to be found in her home studio surrounded by vanilla-scented candles than out at the club.
The dance floor she conjures on Through The Wall, Jordan explained, is an act of both creation and manifestation. During the writing process, she worked through self-doubt and pain to find healing and joy. Key to this formula was the powerful figure of the musical diva, occupied in the past by both pop centrists such as Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey and genre superstars like house queens Robin S. and CeCe Peniston.
Amanda Elise K/Supplied
“A diva is someone who has lived,” Jordan said. “Who has experienced life. Who has gone through challenging things they’re able to express in their music.”
She has channelled her career and personal setbacks into her work.
“There’s a lore behind me,” she said. “There’s a long trail of trying and failing.”
Some of those perceived failures now seem, in retrospect, more like the long route to success. The song Lowkey, from 1021, for instance, found an audience a decade after its release, collecting nearly 25 million spins on Spotify after going viral on TikTok.
“I was a bit scorned back in the day,” Jordan said of her debut, which earned buzz, but not commercial fortune. That one of its songs is now a sleeper hit after a long gestation period has served as validation. “I feel like 1021 has been fully vindicated,” she said.
The producer KLSH has been working with Jordan since well before 1021. The two met online after he saw a video of her covering Kelis on YouTube in 2009. KLSH worked with her to define her retro R&B sound, then saw her through a major genre pivot, helping her craft a full-fledged dance record more than a year before both Drake and Beyoncé made similar pivots. “I don’t think Rochelle gets enough credit for that,” KLSH said. “She’s an innovator.”
Sixteen years after her first mixtape, Jordan’s still making sounds from the past feel fresh. And she is having some of the biggest pop success of her career to date, from mainstream media attention to a Spotify audience north of one million monthly listeners. She is, in her own words, fully seasoned.
“The rise of the indie artist is slow and steady,” Jordan said. “It’s a slow cook.”