Savannah Ré No Weapons EP Revisited

Savannah Ré released her second EP No Weapons on September 23, 2022 through Universal Music Canada. This is a catalogue project, framed as catalogue: nothing here is new, and the record still matters because it is the moment Toronto’s most decorated young R&B writer traded the open wound of her debut for something harder to write, confidence with the guard down.

The official video for the closing track, embedded below, is that trade staged in rain: Ré alone, face up, letting the weather hit her while the song asks its mistrustful questions. It was directed by Dragan Andic, with creative direction by Ré and Bobbi Adair.

Six Tracks, Named In Full

The EP runs six tracks, as Universal Music Canada’s release-day listing shows: “Caution,” “About U,” “Last One” featuring Dylan Sinclair, “Closure,” “Bands” featuring Mez and “WTF,” six songs in 17 minutes on the Apple Music listing. Three of them had arrived ahead of the project as singles, “About U,” “Closure” and “Last One,” and three were new on the day. The production bench tells its own story about where she stood by 2022: Boi-1da and Beat Butcha, Jack Rochon, YogiTheProducer, RAAHiiM and Kevinshideout, with Mez and Dylan Sinclair as the only guests.

Universal’s release notes frame the project plainly as “a collection of unapologetic testaments created during a period of self-reflection and discovery,” written from the perspective of “an ever-evolving woman brimming with confidence, clarity, and drive.” That is a deliberate turn from Opia, revisited in our return to her debut EP, where vulnerability was the whole structure. Here the vulnerability is still present, but it answers to the confidence now, not the other way around.

From Caution To The Closing Shout

The sequencing does the arguing. The opener, “Caution,” sets the tone in the label’s own summary, with Ré stepping into her power and warning a suitor, in her smooth and effortless vocal, that she may be bad news and agrees with the assessment. “Bands,” the Mez collaboration, flexes from the other side of the same coin, her tone caressing the beat while she counts what winning looks like. Then the EP closes on its focus track, “WTF,” which Universal describes as a syncopated confrontation, questioning love through a cloud of mistrust and channelling the pain into reaffirmations of her self-worth.

Between those poles sits the record the EP will be remembered by. “Last One,” her duet with fellow Toronto singer Dylan Sinclair, had already passed three million streams before the EP landed and had been named a top new R&B release by VIBE, as the release notes record. A slow, sensual duet between two of the city’s defining young R&B voices, it is the one song on No Weapons where nobody is guarding anything, and its placement at track three, the exact middle, is the EP’s thesis hiding in plain sight.

The Juno Streak The EP Extended

The house detail worth keeping is what happened to that duet after the EP. Ré had arrived at No Weapons as a two-time consecutive winner of the Juno Award for Traditional R&B/Soul Recording of the Year, for “Solid” in 2021 and “24hrs” in 2022, and, as the Junos’ own 2023 page records, the only artist ever to receive that award to that point. In 2023 “Last One” won it again, a third consecutive win in the category, as her later release record states the streak: “Solid,” “24 hrs” and “Last One,” three years in a row. A sophomore EP whose middle track extended a streak no other artist had started is not a holding pattern between albums. It is a run.

The release season around the EP matched that standing: a debut headlining hometown show announced for October 14, 2022 at The Phoenix Concert Theatre in Toronto, a Spotify EQUAL Canada ambassadorship, a main stage set at the Toronto International Jazz Festival, and an ELLE Canada print profile, all carried in the release record. “Solid,” the song that started the streak, is broken down in our reading of that lyric.

Released on September 23, 2022, No Weapons remains the hinge of Savannah Ré’s catalogue: six tracks, 17 minutes, the vulnerability of Opia kept and the confidence added, and a Dylan Sinclair duet that carried her Juno streak to three straight years.