Mr. Vegas swapping dancehall bounce for a slow, sweet lovers rock groove was not on many 2020s bingo cards. Yet here he is alongside Etana and The Supersonics Band on “Walk Away from Love / Rocksteady Riddim,” a release that leans hard into the gentler side of Jamaican music.
The billing alone tells you plenty. The track pairs a vocal cut with a riddim version, the classic Jamaican habit of giving selectors and singers a backing track to run with long after the original drops.
For Mr. Vegas, born Clifford Smith, this is a long way from the late 90s. “Heads High” made him a dancehall fixture in 1998, and later songs like “I Am Blessed” showed he could pivot toward something more reflective. A lovers rock duet still feels like a fresh lane for a voice most fans associate with sound system energy.
Etana makes more obvious sense in this setting. Shauna McKenzie broke through with “Roots” and “Wrong Address,” and her 2008 debut “The Strong One” on VP Records cemented her as one of the most reliable singers in modern reggae.
Her album “Pamoja” later landed a Grammy nomination for Best Reggae Album, so she arrives with serious credibility in the softer, melodic end of the genre.
The band name will ring a bell for anyone who knows their history. Tommy McCook and the Supersonics were the house band at Duke Reid’s Treasure Isle studio during the rocksteady boom of the late 1960s, the era this riddim’s title points straight back to.
How closely today’s Supersonics Band connects to that lineage is not spelled out in the release, but the nod is hard to miss.
There is also a genre tug of war going on. Rocksteady grew up in Kingston around 1966, slower and more soulful than ska, while lovers rock took shape in London in the mid 1970s through singers like Louisa Mark and Janet Kay.
Calling this a lovers rock style track built on a rocksteady riddim stitches two scenes, two cities and roughly a decade of history into one record.
Purists might ask which tradition the song really belongs to. Others will hear it as the natural family tree of Jamaican romance music, where the lines between rocksteady, lovers rock and roots reggae were always blurrier than the labels suggest.
Duets between a dancehall deejay and a roots singer are not new, but this one tilts the balance toward Etana’s home turf rather than Vegas’s. That choice alone makes it worth a spin for fans of both.
The real test now is the riddim side. If other artists start voicing “Rocksteady Riddim,” this could quietly turn into a bigger project than one love song.
