Rochelle Jordan's new album is so good, even she listens to it

Rochelle Jordan returns to Australia this month, bringing one of 2025's most acclaimed albums with her. (Supplied: Untitled Group) Link copiedShareShare articleFew albums were as widely acclaimed last year as Rochelle Jordan's Through The Wall. The 36-year-old Toronto singer's third album blended house, soul, R&B and electro, and to say the response has been gratifying is an understatement. "I'm just sitting back shocked about the whole entire experience," Jordan says from Washington state, where she's taking some rare respite among the trees before touring Australia next week. "I was just like, 'I hope everyone gets it, but more than anything, I hope that I can look back on this and it [can] be something that I'm extremely proud of.'" Rochelle Jordan's third album draws on the music she has loved across her entire life, but takes it into the future. (Supplied: Untitled Group) Jordan admits that sometimes she doesn't even try to enjoy her own work, she is so focused on what's coming next. "Sometimes I'm very tortured," Jordan considers. "I'll put out a project and I won't look back, because I'm someone that just wants to look forward so much. I'll ignore what I've just done so I'm able to process whatever I feel like is in front of me." Which makes it all the more striking that Through The Wall has Jordan feeling like a fan of her own work for the first time ever. "I am listening to it just like everyone else," she says of Through The Wall. "Like, it's in my playlist. That's the first time I'm having this experience with my own music and just being a fan of myself for a second. I'm really happy right now. It's really cool." Jordan has spent a lot of time thinking about her relationship with her own music. When creating, she's not necessarily doing it for herself, but channelling music for her listeners. "I think you start to realise that this music that you're creating is a gift for others," she says. "It's like you're a vessel and these are messages coming through you to give back to people. "I feel like, when we're creating, that's our celebration of what's happening here. "Our job is to go forward. The listeners' job is to listen and to love and to live in the music. There's just different factions of love of music, really. It's not bad. It's just a thing." Through The Wall draws openly on decades of dance music history. Early 90s house and mid-2000s R&B sit alongside flashes of drum 'n' bass, all anchored by a pop sensibility. "I've never been one to get so caught up on what's happening right now," Jordan says. "Honestly, there's long periods of time where I don't listen to any current music. I'm just listening to the music that I grew up listening to, because that's where I found my voice. "Naturally, I'm gonna consume pieces of what's happening in modern day, but I need like the core to be the core of me, the beginnings of me, in order to thread that through." Rochelle Jordan's new album comes on the back of the viral TikTok success of 2014 track Lowkey. (Supplied: Untitled Group) But revival alone isn't enough; mimicry risks turning an artist into a facsimile. Jordan knows it takes more than that. "When you're hearing reflections of the past like that, that's very intentional of me," Jordan says. "But we also want to bring it to the future. How do we make it forward thinking? "We look at The Neptunes and what they were able to do with their theory of music. It was so futuristic, but with callbacks to the past. "Finding our own ways to do that every single time is key for us. We've had moments where we felt like we were just too ahead. But now I feel like we're very on time." Even in a crowded field, Rochelle Jordan's Through The Wall stands tall as one of the best dance/R&B albums of the year. That's why Jordan's teenage musical obsessions bleed into the work she creates today. She name checks a broad range of artists, from Linkin Park to Luther Vandross to Faith Evans, when talking about what moved her as a young fan. She's always been genre agnostic. If the music moved her, that was enough. "One thing about music back then is the feeling it would give me, the butterflies in my stomach when I'm hearing some of these chord progressions and harmonies," she says. It's been an incredible year of music. Did your favourite album of 2025 make our list? "That's something that, when I decided to make music, I wanted to hold on to and maintain." A lack of cohesion is a common issue for open-minded artists. Too much movement can feel dizzying, even exhausting. But, across Through The Wall, Jordan's restrained, dexterous voice holds it together. "My voice is the thread throughout the genres that I'm playing in, whether I'm deep in my R&B bag, or I'm on a drum and bass record or a deep house record, it doesn't really matter," she says. "I want to make sure I'm telling a story that's not overcomplicated, but something that's real to me. And I want to make sure that all the freque

Rochelle Jordan's new album is so good, even she listens to it

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