A useful phrase exists in the academic world that applies equivalently to the realm of music: cite down and punch up. What this means is that newcomers — to any creative field — ought first to give credit to those below them on the ladder and problematize if not all-out attack those above.

On the opening track to Quinton Barnes’s 2024 album, Have Mercy on Me, the Montreal-based hip-hop maverick begins by taking aim straight at the top: “Yeah, and boy we tired of that Fisher-Price Yeezus.”

It’s a bold and necessary diss on a deserving and dishonoured figure, and hints at once at the heights Barnes himself might hope to achieve. Why not? With the throne of rap music left vacant, it’s anyone’s game. And Barnes, 27, is poised to claim a key position on the court.

Unlike so many hip-hop artists, Barnes is unabashed about putting his vulnerability on full display. Although he exudes an effortless cool onstage, there’s no contrived thug or ‘gangsta’ posture about him, no Instagram posts boasting of luxury lifestyle aspirations. Barnes’s rapid-fire falsetto register, too, betrays an individual who is comfortable venturing into sensitive territory — something like a mix of Frank Ocean and Ol’ Dirty Bastard.

“You’re going to hear in the first few songs,” Barnes confesses after sending me an advance copy of his latest recording, “I try to act tough. But that doesn’t last for long. It doesn’t take me long to get emotional.”

It’s that emotional sincerity that immediately draws audiences into Barnes’s music, and world. On Have Mercy on Me, Barnes grapples with issues of loss, family, addiction, memory, and hope, with a rare kind of honesty that is both raw and empowering.

“Grown men cry for the love of their mother,” Barnes raps on “Glory,” among the album’s standout singles. “I can read him like no other / Just know when he cries, better run, duck for cover.”

The breadth of sentiment is infectious for Barnes’s listeners as well, who feel an immediate sense of identification in his ability to put complicated feelings into song form. “When I hit upon the ideas but they’re still new, I’m not thinking about them, I’m just creating,” Barnes states. “The creation process is seamless.”

Barnes was born and raised in Kitchener, Ontario, and has only been a fixture on Montreal’s music scene for a little over a year now. However, in that time, he has established a nearly legendary reputation, the kind of artist fans want to discover, to tell their friends about.

Barnes attempted at first, unsuccessfully, to relocate to this city during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. “It was a really terrible idea,” Barnes admits. “But I was allowed to have terrible ideas when I was 23. I think that’s appropriate.”

Eventually, Barnes connected online with the musician Jean Néant, who performs under the name Joni Void, and the two acquired a large apartment together with fellow artist José Lobo, which stimulated their respective creativity.

“I think it’s easy to tell what the move to Montreal has objectively done for Quinton,” Néant tells me via email. “Just by looking at the list of gigs they have had the chance to perform since residing here, and the mood shift in their music.”

Indeed, Barnes began the summer by opening at La Sala Rossa for Backxwash in a triumphant performance as part of the city’s storied Suoni per il Popolo festival. And Have Mercy on Me is destined to rank highly as one of 2024’s standout releases.

Astonishingly, Barnes recorded the album in only three weeks leading up to the Suoni engagement. “I felt really in the zone for that whole month,” Barnes recalls. “Just focussed. I really wanted to do something good. I wanted people to walk away having had an experience.”

Live, Barnes has an uncanny ability to resonate profoundly with his crowd, to communicate his personal experiences in ways that make those experiences personal to others as well. His musical aesthetic is a unique blend of R&B and soul with inflections of early-2000s IDM and dance music, wrapped in a hip-hop package. Although a somewhat problematic fav today, Michael Jackson was one of Barnes’s earliest influences.

“I saw those videos, I saw that he was the Motown guy, the Moonwalk, all of that. I thought, ‘this is it.’ My favourite album of his was Dangerous because it was so industrial, it was so digital, but he filtered that through the instruments of soul, like James Brown and Gospel. I feel like a lot of hip-hop and R&B has evolved from that. I’m not a fan now because of all the conversation around him,” Barnes discloses. “But the music will always mean a lot to me.”

Barnes’s production style fuses that soul tradition with a more techno-infused convention that, until recently, has been regarded as comparatively soulless — and undoubtedly white.

“I really love Autechre,” Barnes tells me. “I love SOPHIE a lot. I love Aphex Twin. It’s so forward. I always hate when people talk about digital music. I love digital music. People have this construct of a human as it relates to music. I personally can’t think of anything more human than a digital, quantized machine. At least in this world, this existence, that’s a very human thing. That’s not something you’re going to find in nature.”

Barnes is acutely aware of the imaginary cultural and racial borders that have circumscribed musical tastes and is intent upon breaking through them. “I know it’s so complex, and music evolves,” Barnes muses. “But I often wonder what a free music could be. Free from being coded that way. Because I think of music not just in terms of how I listen to and enjoy it, but in terms of how people have certain reactions to music. Like the same way someone can be anti-Black or racist towards someone else, they can have a Black reaction to a certain sound.”

The elephant in the room is that Barnes’s lyrics are peppered with the noun that is, in our society, most racially loaded. I bring up the late comedian Richard Pryor as an example of a Black man who at one time embraced and later renounced his use of this particular word. Barnes is mindful, nonetheless, and clearly deploys his language deliberately.

“I don’t think anything a refusal I can do on my end can change the status of what it represents and what it means,” Barnes explains. “I feel like when I’m creating and when I’m engaging with the world, it’s part of the culture, and it’s an interesting part of the culture. I think most of us do. So, I don’t want to refuse it and pretend that if I just don’t say it, my stance will mean something. I know it’s there for a reason and we engage with it for a reason.”

That reason, obviously, is to confront the lived experience of perceived difference in contemporary culture, and in doing so, to collapse the categories that only serve to divide and conquer us. Barnes’s music is part of a larger unifying current underway that seeks understanding through honest communication. “Tell the truth,” Barnes repeats on the album’s eponymous closing track. It comes across at once as incantation and commandment from a singular new prophet.

Though Barnes is conscious of the ecosystemic character of creativity in Montreal, specifically. “I personally also have a great group of friends and an artistic community here,” says Barnes. “I’ve been lucky to be embraced by so many great artists.”

As a dear friend, Jean Néant is especially awestruck by Have Mercy on Me and the giant leap that it represents for Barnes. “I was completely taken aback how it progressed into this personal outpouring,” Néant tells me. “I have listened to the album a lot and I do have lots of thoughts about it. But I think I’m actually more interested in seeing how it will be received and how others will react to it, given that it’s a very honest, self-explanatory album.”

Music is an extraordinarily powerful tool for transformation because it is a universal language that every person, regardless of linguistic or cultural identity, innately understands. Throughout the course of our conversation, Barnes recurrently meditates on the processual nature of his intentions for musical expression.

“What you really want to do is get into people and touch them and reach them,” Barnes reflects. “I often feel like there’s a confinement. But we can reach people to find a better understanding and more freedom.”

Barnes pauses for a moment and laughs.  

“I don’t know, I’m just talking.”◼︎

Have Mercy on Me is released 23 August 2024.

_{Cover image: Chelsey Boll}