Music history is community history. Forget the industry’s promotion of bankable superstars: practically every genre with underground roots is born of stories of migration, family ties, and the opportunities found in new cities, leading to often unexpected and underreported connections. Take the links between London and Toronto, for example: two multicultural financial capitals that might seem worlds apart at first glance, with only vestigial Commonwealth links binding them.

In the popular imagination, there’s not much in common between the home of frosty Canadian R&B and the UK megapolis that birthed a half dozen rave genres, but scratch under the surface, and it becomes rapidly apparent that for generations, both cities’ musical innovations were fuelled by the same immigrant Caribbean communities. This demographic mirroring ensured Toronto developed a robust jungle scene as early as the mid-1990s and that Drake can (semi) credibly announce a concert with ‘The Mandem’ at Wireless Festival. But that only hints at just how much musical DNA London and Toronto music shares, thanks to common West Indian connections.

Few people are more qualified to speak on and dissect this than Tre Mission, the veteran Toronto emcee who found a home amongst grime’s elite without ever downplaying his T.O roots. From his first drops on GrimeForum.com in the late-00s to his current single, “Creole”—which previews his upcoming album, Hell Is Other People, merging his rapid-fire flow to live instrumentation—Tre’s art has always foregrounded his authentic connections to Trini and Jamaican music, a point he emphasised when we spoke at the top of the year. To hear him tell it, it all comes down to the same people making new lives in different places, with his own musical history stretching back generations.

“There’s a slight difference between the diaspora in different places,” says Tre, “but the big similarity with London and Toronto is the Caribbean and Jamaican influence that just bleeds out, no matter what. It’s who we are.” Tre’s Trinidadian mother and Jamaican father met in Toronto as immigrants, but he’s quick to rewind the clock even further, highlighting his grandfather’s role in the Lara Brothers, an all-time great Trini band playing traditional Parang music at Christmas. “I couldn’t escape Caribbean music,” he notes. “Even if my granddad wasn’t necessarily there all the time, he went back and forth to Trinidad; his music was always there.”

His family’s passion for music continued in Canada, thanks to his uncles’ forays into rhyming and production, with Tre first gravitating towards beatmaking at around 6 years old. Just as importantly, Tre received a first-class education in the community side of Caribbean music thanks to his mother. “My parents were big partiers,” he says. “To this day, I don’t remember a time where my mom stopped partying. She would go out with her home girls and my uncles: they’d be 15-20 deep, using my grandma’s as the home base. There weren’t any cell phones back then, so they’d be listening to the community radio stations, college radio… Every Friday, they used to have dancehall shows telling you what parties were going off.”

If hotlines and community radio aren’t ringing a bell, they should: ‘90s England used the same platforms and technologies during the height of the rave era, albeit for different styles of music. But while this led to a fair bit of myth-making in the UK’s case, the impact of Toronto’s West Indian community in the ‘90s remains understated, given it existed in the shadow of American rap and UK rave’s massive cultural footprints.

For Tre Mission, however, these early childhood memories eventually opened his eyes and ears to musical movements taking place an ocean away, though only after he’d firmly planted his flag as an emcee in Toronto. He began recording rhymes at age 12, but in a classic challenge for emcees of his generation, he had to figure out a way to get his music from the computer to the school boombox to play it. Technical challenges (eventually) solved, he won the support of his peers but also pushback from perfectionist elders, a hangover from the days when record deals were rare and official releases had to be impeccable.

By the time YouTube came about, Tre was tired of waiting for approval—an impulse that dovetailed with a period of musical exploration that saw him discover grime: “One of the homies went back to Jamaica during the school year and linked with his cousins from London. They were playing some Frisco and he sent it to me. Off the rip, I’m wondering: ‘Why does this sound like the mandem?’ Then I remembered: there’s bare Jamaicans over there. I kind of had a vague understanding but never thought about it. But that’s what made me gravitate towards grime and UK music in general.”

Alternative-leaning releases by Tricky and jungle and garage raves aside, this level of immersion into UK music wasn’t common in Toronto, but the West Indian connections and Tre’s own musical curiosity pushed him to dive deeper and eventually try his hand at a grime flow himself. “I don’t know what made me want to spit on a grime beat,” he tells me. “I didn’t even have intentions to really put it out—it was just another track. Not everyone got it: there wasn’t really a lane for that and there was no money in it. But I said to myself, ‘Let me try a thing.’ That decision set it all off because I was struggling to get 300 views on a video, but my first grime freestyle on a dubstep beat—it was a True Tiger beat—I posted it on GrimeForum.com and I woke up the next morning and had close to 2,000 views. From there, I just started just going harder with it.”

Grime, of course, was highly territorial at the time, with emcees casting aspersions on rivals from across the Thames—let alone across the Atlantic—but Tre insists any negativity was drowned out by encouragement. He spoke his own truth in his own voice and fans gravitated towards him: “I think it’s a combination of my authenticity—I didn’t change the way I sound to rap on a grime beat—combined with the skill that I already possessed. I was used to a competitive atmosphere, because when I came up rapping, niggas used to get their verse taken off and replaced if it wasn’t as good as it could be. That helped me get the attention of established people in the scene. Before I even came to London, I already had a relationship with Wiley. I’d already met him because he came to Toronto.”

These early meetings led to Tre touring with Wiley in England, connecting with peers and freestyling on BBC Radio 1Xtra. To be certain, some people had issues with his take on English music, but he notes that any controversy only helped his buzz. Meanwhile, he was soaking in UK music past and present, exploring dubstep and garage but also older D&B, trip-hop and rock—all of which helped expand his own musical palette. He emphasises the fearlessness of early Dizzee Rascal as an inspiration: “‘Fix Up Look Sharp’—that’s so outside of a regular single, and he was 19 when he made that. It’s the sort of thing you can do when you don’t know the rules.”

All of this development, from Tre’s family’s musical history to his passion for UK styles to the collision of Caribbean and American sounds in Toronto, is on display on Hell Is Other People. Yet another artistic risk, the project sees Tre combining his flow to live instrumentation and organic sounds, opening a new avenue in his creative process. Jazz, another sound his uncles would play for him as child and one that features on the new album, is a genre he didn’t really appreciate until recently: “We all have stuff like that from our upbringing. It doesn’t matter if you like the Bob Dylan record that your mom used to play—when you get to 25 years old, it’s gonna hit different.”

The genesis of the project occurred when Tre linked up with Junia-T, a fellow West Indian producer who understood both his history in grime and how it could be expanded with live instrumentation. “Junia-T is, like, super connected musically all over Toronto,” Tre explains, “and he’s been involved in the scene since forever. What makes him different, as a producer, is that his sampling game is top-level, but his drum work is also crazy. He also plays the bass, some keys and guitar, and he can even call the illest flute man you’ve ever heard to come to the studio session. When we’d smoke, we would just play tracks we’ve been listening to, just going down these rabbit holes—from Sizzla to Yussef Dayes.” It’s through these talks and sessions that they started articulating what Tre wanted to accomplish with his next music, landing on a concept where they’d record it as live as possible. “We did this album, the full meat and potatoes of it, in two and a half months. It’s the fastest I’ve ever made a project in my life.”

While noting that a sequel to Malmaison is also in the works, the new sounds on Hell Is Other People opened Tre up to being more intentional with his writing. “I think it’s a lot less wasteful, bar for bar,” he says, “and it’s a lot more honest while still keeping that same intensity.” The result is an album that sees Tre grow up with his influences, with references as varied as Chicago vocalist Valee, Toronto emcee and close friend Raz Fresco and the newest wave of UK jazz, all without toning down the speed and energy of a flow honed over classic grime riddims. It’s very much the culmination of years of musical development, and the result of both careful writing and the kind of spontaneity that can only come from close musical interaction. Closing out our chat, I mention the energy of lead single “Creole”, evoking a rare smile from Tre as he explains its genesis: “We tracked that live. That’s what gives it that feel, you know? And there’s something that comes out of that, like analog: an imperfect experience that evokes emotion.”