Majid Jordan Spent a Decade Getting to Two Roads

Twelve years is a long time to work toward a record. Majid Jordan have now made one they are willing to call the point of all of it.

Two Roads arrived on 28 August, fifteen tracks from a Toronto pair who have been together since 2011.

A Claim Most Acts Would Not Make Out Loud

Release-day statements are usually written to avoid saying anything falsifiable. This one does the opposite: it names the record as the destination, which means the catalogue leading to it is now framed as the approach.

The duo put it plainly. “Two Roads is the album we’ve wanted to create our entire careers,” they said of the record; “it’s something incredibly dear to our hearts. Throughout writing and recording Two Roads, we continually reminded ourselves to stay focused, listen closely, and, most of all, respect the gift of music.”

That is a large statement to attach to a fifth studio album, and it sets a bar the album has to clear rather than lowering expectations the way most release-day language does.

It also implies the earlier work was approaching something rather than arriving. For a duo whose catalogue is well liked, saying so publicly is a small risk — it invites the reading that the records people already love were drafts.

Two People, Two Jobs, Twelve Years

The catalogue behind it is steady rather than sprawling. The self-titled debut arrived in February 2016 through OVO Sound and Warner Bros., The Space Between followed in October 2017, Wildest Dreams in October 2021 and Good People in November 2023. Five albums in ten years is a working pace, not a burst.

Wildest Dreams carried a detail that says a lot about how they treat their own history: it was released on 22 October 2021 to mark the tenth anniversary of the duo forming, and the date was chosen because it is Al Maskati’s birthday. Acts that measure time that carefully tend to know exactly which record they are on.

Majid Al Maskati sings and Jordan Ullman produces, and that division has held since they formed in 2011. It is the cleanest possible split, and it is why the pair have never had to renegotiate who does what from record to record.

Their debut EP, A Place Like This, came in 2014 through OVO Sound, and most listeners first heard Al Maskati’s voice a year earlier as the guest on a Toronto single that reached the top five in both Canada and the US. That is an unusually high-profile entry point for a duo who then spent a decade making comparatively quiet records.

The obvious path from a hit like that is to chase it. They did not, and the catalogue since has been steadily more interior and less concerned with a chorus that travels.

The label context matters as well. OVO Sound operates as an imprint of Warner Records, which gave the duo major-label distribution from the beginning without the pressure of being a major-label priority. That is an unusually forgiving position: enough reach to be heard, enough distance to make a quiet record without anyone panicking.

It goes some way to explaining a catalogue that never chased a follow-up hit. An act signed directly to a major after a top-five feature would have found that much harder to justify.

Lush Electronics With the Gloss Taken Off

What has changed on this record is texture rather than approach. Clash describes the pair as having expanded the lexicon of modern soul with lush, lucid electronics and left-field production twists, and finds those warming textures here matched to a slightly raw, lo-fi quality in the sonics.

That combination is harder to pull off than either half alone. Lo-fi usually means thin, and lush usually means polished; getting warmth and grain into the same mix means deliberately degrading sounds that were built to be clean.

For a producer whose reputation rests on precision, choosing to rough up the surface after ten years is a real decision. It is also the most common way a long-running electronic act avoids becoming a formula.

They have also stepped away when they wanted to. “Waves of Blue”, the first single from Wildest Dreams, followed a year-long hiatus and a break from social media — an unusual thing to do at the point most acts would be consolidating, and consistent with a duo who have never seemed to be racing anyone.

Fifteen Tracks Is an Argument for Immersion

The length is worth noting against the prevailing direction of travel. Most R&B albums have been shrinking, on the reasonable theory that a shorter record gets finished.

Fifteen tracks pushes the other way, and it fits what Clash calls an immersive quality and a rich world-building instinct. A record designed to be lived inside needs room; one designed to be sampled does not.

It is a bet on the listener who plays an album through, which is precisely the audience a duo builds over twelve years rather than the one a single delivers overnight.

There is a practical benefit too. A fifteen-track record from a duo who write everything themselves is a lot of finished material, and it signals the sessions produced more than they needed rather than exactly enough — which is usually what separates a record made to a deadline from one made until it was done.

Their singles have tended to arrive through radio premieres rather than playlist drops — Beats 1 and the Zane Lowe show for several of them, SiriusXM for others. That is an older promotional shape, and it suits records that reward a full listen more than a first fifteen seconds.

Why the Duo Format Lasted

Most R&B acts that begin as a singer-and-producer pair do not stay one. The singer becomes the brand, the producer takes outside work, and the billing quietly changes.

Keeping both names on the door for twelve years takes an unusual settlement, and the clean division of labour is probably why it held. There is no competition over whose record it is when one person writes the music and the other sings it.

It also means the sound has one continuous author on each side. Our piece on what neo-soul actually described covers the tradition of long producer-vocalist partnerships this sits in.

Their outside work has been similarly sparing. Al Maskati sang on Zhu’s Ringos Desert in 2018, and the pair have kept guest appearances rare enough that each one registers. That restraint is the same instinct as the twelve-year album pace: a catalogue built to be returned to rather than to stay constantly visible.

What the Title Is Doing

The artwork splits the frame in two, one member in monochrome and the other in daylight, which makes the title fairly literal: two people, two approaches, one record.

Read less literally, the phrase is about the choice a long-running act eventually faces — keep refining the thing that works, or make the record you actually wanted. Their own statement says which one this is.

Whether it is genuinely the album of their careers is not something a release-day quote can settle. What it does establish is that they think the decade was leading somewhere specific, and that they believe they have arrived.

Fifteen tracks is, at least, enough room to make the case.

Two Roads is out now.

About The Author

Will Lisil

Founder of MW3.biz, building technology that empowers creators and democratising access to digital tools.

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