Daddy Duties Delay Chronixx’s Sophomore Album

Chronixx’s Dela Splash, his highly-anticipated, but overdue sophomore album, will not be released any time soon, as daddy duties have taken precedence.  Dela Splash was initially slated for release in the Summer of 2020, and after that did not materialize, speculations were rife that it had been delayed due to the pandemic.

However, according to Chronixx, the delay had to do with the fact that he was spending time being a good daddy and raising his two-year-old daughter, whom he had said in a past interview, he plans to bring on the road with him as much as possible.

“Really, why I didn’t release the album was because of where I was in the journey of being a father to my daughter,” he said in a recent interview with Rolling Stone.

“It wasn’t what I was expecting, but really, there was nothing I could expect. It was a new feeling, and I was not ready to leave her to do anything. The pandemic was the perfect time for a father to be beside his daughter and also a good time to create,” he added.

In early March 2020, two weeks prior to New York City going into lockdown, Chronixx had staged a listening session at the Harman Store in Manhattan, where he shared, along with several other tracks, the album’s first single, Dela Move, which was laid on Trap-infused Dancehall beat.

Back then, Vanity Fair magazine had revealed that the album would be what Chronixx described as “dark”. “The main word I would use is dark…It’s so much darker than anything else I’ve ever done,” he had said.

In March this year, Chronixx also released Safe N Sound, and Freedom Fighter in late August.

Following the listening party for the album, Billboard had noted that among the other songs included were Jordan River, which was vintage blues and contemporary hip-hop, Nobody, which “incorporates African guitar flourishes and a subtle dancehall lilt”, Same Prayer, which is a blend of Reggae, jazz and R&B, as well as the Hip Hop-influenced Darker Dayz.

Chronixx’s 2017 album Chronology, debuted at No. 1 on the Reggae Albums chart and also copped a Grammy nomination.

Now, according to Rolling Stone, Chronixx has been working on copious amounts of music throughout the pandemic, including an album with his band Zinc Fence Redemption, as well as an instrumental project with his brother Universal and wife Kelissa.

“The long-delayed Dela Splash may never be released, but the songs he recorded for it will make their way out to the world, Chronixx promises,” Rolling Stone noted.

Dela Splash was named after the discontinued annual concert in De La Vega City in Spanish Town, Chronixx’s birthplace.

According to the original founders, the Dela Splash show came about in 1982 when the community football team needed to raise funds to purchase gear for a local competition.

Due to the number of top artists who lived in and around Spanish Town, the footballers decided that they would put on a stage show to raise funds.

The first event featured the likes of Papa San, his brother Dirtsman, Anthony Red Rose, Buccaneer, Major Worries, Galaxy P and Major Christie and Chronicle, Chronixx’s father, among others.

Because it was set for the summer, weeks after the Sunsplash stage show, and so the name was adapted to reflect Dela Splash.

That show over the years had featured the likes of Bounty Killer, Vybz Kartel, Macka Diamond, Merciless, Mad Cobra, Capleton and Agent Sasco.  Dela Splash was was also the event where Vybz Kartel and Bounty Killer forged peace in 2007.

Chronixx had told Billboard in March 2020, that for Dela Splash, he had recorded each of the songs “straight through…then took the best from those recordings and comped them together and that there was a lot of “learning and experimenting on the album because he was “stepping out of his comfort zone”.

In another Billboard imterview, Chronixx explained that a primary objective in making Dela Splash was building upon the musical range he incorporated into the production of Chronology.

“Dela Splash is like what I would do on a mixtape: exploring sounds limitlessly because you don’t have to worry about clearing samples, so you put everything you want on it and come up with a recipe for your next thing… I am looking at this long road ahead of producing, writing and making music and I’m not just going to do one-drop Reggae or Dancehall songs. Now is a good time to be authentic and explore all the music that I like,” he had explained.

Chronixx had also said that he co-produced several of the tracks and compared his approach to “what hip-hop artists do, putting different things together and rapping on top of it”.

He had also said that most of the project was done in “hotel rooms, in my home studio, wherever I could set up” and that he used the same microphones, sang into his laptop and then did the harmonies and the instruments.  The instrumental overdubs were recorded in studios in London and Los Angeles with musicians from Africa, America and Jamaica.

According to Billboard, Chroxixx had also cautioned that “the new sonic frontiers explored by him on Dela Splash, may not please those who are “obsessed with one dimension of Reggae music and are expecting it in a pure form.”