Label: Vybz Kartel Music / Greedy Lion
Text: Davide Bortot
There’s a peculiar bit of Grammy folklore in the fact that you can’t take the awards seriously, yet they are taken more seriously than almost any other institution in the music world. Nowhere is this truer than in the reggae category. Nominated for a Grammy Award – in a genre whose struggle for recognition has always been profoundly built into its DNA, those words carry extra weight. And yet, the Academy tends to reward whoever most people know. Over the past decade, that’s meant ”Marley” four times and ”Sting” once. A pretty natural outcome of a process in which more than 10,000 voting members from across the industry can cast ballots in up to ten categories. This year, 73 albums were up for Best Reggae Album alone. Nobody can realistically listen to that much music. The Grammy is, in the end, a visibility prize.
Which brings us to the nomination of Vybz Kartel’s ”Heart & Soul” – a decision that is, paradoxically, spectacularly noteworthy in the case of a 50‑year‑old gangsta deejay who has spent the supposed prime of his career behind bars. Kartel has earned this second consecutive Grammy nod in the most literal sense. It’s the result of 35 years of relentless work, increasingly also in service of the culture.
That said: ”Heart & Soul” mostly proves that having a concept doesn’t automatically make an album, certainly not a good one. Across eleven tracks, Kartel explores various shades of love, but many of them sound just as generic as the title. Maybe the album came from the heart indeed. I personally still don’t hear much soul in it.
Take the opener ”They’re Outta Love We Aren’t” (for Sidem, with Sidem in the video) and the closer ”Only Gets Better” (also for Sidem, but with someone else in the video). They bookend the album with a romantic frame – cute in theory, but in practice it’s Island Pop by the rulebook, with the rulebook written about ten years ago. ”Bad Bad Bad” with Ishawna, meanwhile, walks the tightrope between old‑school homage and the kind of conga‑line your parents might’ve done in the basement with notable unc‑energy.
And yet Kartel is, of course, still Kartel – always one moment of brilliance away. Hooks that he clearly freestyled on the spot with producer/engineer Redboom Supamix (”11:45”, ”Ghetto Girl Chosen”) are the kind of lines other artists can’t conjure after six weeks in a writers’ camp with eight co‑writers. His ability to fuse seductive melodies with a hardcore edge, bridging the proud history of his genre with the demands of modern consumption, remains unmatched. ”I Know,” for example, had serious TikTok traction last fall and is still a highlight in 2026. The title track, too, is pure Kartel canon: nothing you haven’t heard before, but executed flawlessly.
Also striking: ”You Walked Away,” in which Kartel reflects on his broken relationship with Tanesha Johnson – essentially a reprise of his last major love album, ”To Tanesha” (2019). Instead of airing dirty laundry or staging grand confessions, Kartel lets the thoughts spill out in real time, exactly as they tend to in moments like these. You messed up, I messed up, now we’re in this mess. What a mess.
So is it Grammy‑worthy? Well, that’s for the Grammys to decide. (Keznamdi took home the thing after all.) What ”Heart & Soul” is not, is the big masterpiece – the global pop breakthrough – Kartel talked to me about after his release in summer 2024. He remains firmly in dancehall mode: session, drop, repeat. He can’t help it, and ”Heart & Soul” makes that clear. At an age when others complain about their backs, order Cialis, or cash out their catalogues, Vybz Kartel is still fully locked in – album number four in sixteen months – working with, well, heart and soul.
