Raised in the Eltham View neighborhood of Spanish Town, about an hour outside Kingston, Koffee drew her first musical influences from the artists her Seventh-Day Adventist mother played in their home on Sundays. The musicians on rotation represented a diasporic melange—American R&B and soul singers such as Aretha Franklin and Etta James, as well as classic reggae artists including the Jamaican greats Beres Hammond, Dennis Brown, and, of course, Bob Marley.

Koffee taught herself to play guitar at age 12, after a friend let her borrow a spare, and began listening to modern reggae soon after. At 14, she made her first attempts to write within the genre. “I was listening to Protoje and Chronixx and dem flows and lyrics were very fascinating, and I was like, you know, feel like mi wan try this a little,” she recalled with a laugh. “And I just started playing around with lyrics, writing a few lines and trying to rhyme some words and getting bigger and bigger each time—so bigger words, more syllables, or longer rhyme schemes.”

During her final year at Ardenne High School in Kingston, Koffee auditioned for a talent show orchestrated by her music teacher. Though she’d never planned to pursue music full-time, the 17-year-old competed against a beatboxer and a few fellow singjays, and rocked a crowd that she estimated must have been nearly 1,000 people. “It was a huge moment for me,” she said of the competition. “And it basically gave me my first confidence in being able to perform and deliver music live.”

The Bolt tribute, and the resulting onslaught of attention, came a few months later. Among the viewers of Bolt’s Instagram repost, for example, were representatives of the Jamaica-based label Upsetta Records, who asked Koffee to join reggae veterans such as Busy Signal and Jah Vinci in singing on Ouji Riddim, a collaborative record on which each singer recorded their vocals over the same production, or “riddim.” Her contribution, the October 2017 hit “Burning,” showcased a young artist whose vocal dexterity could handle flows beyond the stripped-down acoustics of “Legend.”

At turns solemn and celebratory, “Burning” keenly reflects Koffee’s interest in producing music that speaks to the concerns and triumphs of Jamaicans. The record is personal—she wrote the song after failing to gain entry into sixth form, or a precollege program of sorts, but her anxieties about education reflect broader patterns among the country’s youth. Even so, the lyrics are resolutely hopeful. “Neva be ungrateful / Life is such a teacha,” she sings of the disappointment she felt upon learning of her results and the determination that kept her going. In this, she draws from the genre’s most iconic bards, whose music soundtracked moments of inner turmoil and political strife alike.



For Koffee, the stakes of her own trajectory remain high well after the setback that inspired the track. “I think it’s good to have a positive influence on youth sometimes. That’s wavy,” she said of her mission to push through the grit that characterizes Jamaica’s contemporary musical scene. The singer knows that teenagers aren’t listening to the kinds of artists they associate with their parents, but she wants to channel the social consciousness of legends such as Bob Marley with a fresh twist. “I try to modernize positivity very distinctly,” she added. With its infectious melody and bouncy spirit, “Burning” is also the record that piqued the interest of Major Lazer’s Walshy Fire, who would later co-produce her debut single, “Toast,” with the Jamaican sound engineer Izybeats.