The Montreal singer-drummer-songwriter is building her “Empowered Pop” movement one perfectly-timed beat at a time.
There is a moment, sitting in a trailer at Complexe Pointe-Claire after a headline set, when Gloria Gaynor offers you a chicken wing. Most people would have been too starstruck to even eat. Jordyn Sugar took the wing, sat down, and spent the next 45 minutes talking shop with the woman who wrote the anthem her mother and grandmother both claim as their own. That’s not luck. That’s someone who already knows she belongs in the room.
The 22-year-old Montrealer is quietly becoming one of the city’s most interesting pop voices, and her new single “Oops” is the first real signal flare of where she’s headed.
Born to Keep the Beat
Jordyn’s relationship with rhythm started before she could form full sentences. Growing up in Dollard-des-Ormeaux (DDO), her father, a Rush devotee, had a kit at home, and somewhere around age three, she picked up the sticks and didn’t put them down. “I couldn’t talk, but I knew how to play drums, I knew how to keep a beat,” she says, proudly.
By five or six, she was picking up Tom Sawyer and Subdivisions by ear. Neil Peart, one of the most technically demanding drummers in rock history, was her first frame of reference.
It wasn’t just the kit. Jordyn was also deep into basketball, playing point guard from the time she could dribble.
To her, the two were never separate pursuits. “There is something about how you dribble a basketball and how you keep a beat. Drumming is all about control. If you start going off beat, the whole song will be thrown off. If you mess up a chord, you might not hear it as prominently as if the drums start going off. Same thing with basketball as a point guard. If you mess up, everyone else will crumble as well.”
The through-line was simple: control and follow-through, whether she was behind the kit or running the point.
The Video That Started Everything
For all her athletic confidence and early musical ability, singing was the thing that terrified her. She could walk onto a basketball court without a second thought and sit behind a kit with full composure. Put a microphone in front of her and she would run off.
“I knew I had potential. Music has always come pretty easy to me. Singing was there, and I just wasn’t confident.” she admits. “I was battling my own head.”
COVID changed the Math. With high school effectively over and the world shut down, she made a calculation that turned out to be one of the smartest of her career: if she embarrassed herself online, at least she was starting a new chapter and would never see those people again anyway.
She posted a Justin Bieber cover to an audience of about 100 friends. Her sister had confidence in her talent and told her to go for it. Her friends responded by asking why they’d never heard her sing before.
“I still couldn’t sing in front of anybody, it was only in front of the camera,” she admits. Progress.
What happened next is well-documented. Bieber reposted it. What nobody saw was the five hours it took to record that one 30-second video. Jordyn had enough self-awareness to know that it needed to be done, because there was potential.
Others saw potential. Within a month, vocal coach Vito Loprano, who has worked with Celine Dion, came into her life. A teenager who had never been in a proper studio was suddenly tracking sessions, working with professional songwriters, and figuring out that this was not a hobby. “I realized this is something I really do want to do,” she says. “It’s not just something I like. It’s something I’m passionate about.”
From a Safari to the Main Stage
The momentum built fast. A trip to South Africa for The Fashion Hero brought her into the orbit of Backstreet Boy AJ McLean, a collaboration she describes as something she’ll never take for granted. She also filmed the music video for “Summer High” on her last day there, between bouts of food poisoning.
Only Jordyn Sugar would squeeze a music video shoot into the final 24 hours of a five-day trip that also included a bucket list experience: a real safari!
Back in Montreal, her agent pushed gala organizers to put her on the main stage at the Strangers in the Night event headlined by Gloria Gaynor and Kool and the Gang, rather than the smaller tent stage. They pushed back. He pushed harder. Jordyn went on directly before Gloria Gaynor, performing for a crowd of three to five thousand people.
Performing for Gloria Gaynor‘s crowd meant reading the room. Jordyn opened with covers of It’s Not Unusual and Michael Jackson‘s PYT, a deliberate choice. ‘I may not be your age, but I resonate with all the same music you grew up with.’ The crowd was hers before the headliner ever took the stage.
There were technical issues. Her in-ear monitors failed. She lost a song to a time cut. Yet, she survived, and left her mark. She then walked off and went to find Gloria, another woman who left a legendary mark.
“I walked up to her trailer, said I was a big fan and had opened for her, and she let me in,” Jordyn recalls. “It was just her, her manager, and her stylist having chicken wings. She was nice enough to say, want one?” They talked for 45 minutes. Gaynor played her an unreleased song. Jordyn asked questions about career and next steps. “That is hands down something I will never forget.”
Oops, She Wrote a Song
The new single almost didn’t happen the way it did. Jordyn and her co-writing team, songwriter Bayla and producer Lucas Liberatore, were doing what they always do in the room: hunting for a single word to spark a concept. Ghost came from Jordyn mentioning she’d been ghosted. Oops came from something far more random.
“I think I spilled something or dropped my phone, and I was like ‘oops,'” she says. “We all looked at each other.” The question the room asked was simple: when was the last time that word anchored a song that went massive? The answer was obvious. “Oops, I did it again.” That was over twenty years ago. Nobody had really touched it since.
The challenge was finding the right angle. Oops-I-spilled-my-drink felt too surface. It was Bayla who cracked it open: “Oops, I woke up in your bed.” From that line, the song wrote itself in about three hours.
Production landed on a late-nineties/early-aughts palette, nodding at the Britney-era DNA of the word itself while staying firmly planted in 2026. “That’s what I grew up listening to,” Jordyn says. “I wanted that throwback sound, and I know it’s coming back.”
The studio dynamic with Bayla and Lucas is worth noting on its own. Jordyn describes it as the closest thing to therapy she’s found. “I walk in, I spill everything that happened, and they say, let’s write about that.” What the team has also done is push her voice somewhere she hadn’t previously let it go: lower, fuller, darker than anything she’d recorded before. Ghost, the single ahead of Oops, features a deep register that doesn’t appear anywhere in her earlier work. They told her to trust it. She did.
Empowered Pop
Jordyn has coined and trademarked her own genre tag: Empowered Pop. It’s not a marketing move so much as a genuine description of intent. “All my songs have something empowering, either in the concept or the words,” she says. “When I started this, I had no confidence. I needed someone to empower me to just go for it. So now I want to be that voice for anyone else.”
She pushes back on the idea that talent is fixed or obvious. “I hate when people say, I’m not talented. Everyone has something they’re good at. It’s just a matter of finding it.” There is a direct line from the girl who spent five hours recording a 30-second singing video in her bedroom to the artist performing in front of thousands before Gloria Gaynor walks on.
“Go for what you love. Life is too short to be scared of living what you really want to do,” she proclaims.
She put in the reps when nobody was watching, and now everybody is. The overnight success took about six years.
More music is coming: three or four additional tracks already recorded with Bayla and Lucas, a collaboration with Tyler Shaw, and several projects she’s not yet allowed to talk about. A Tyler Shaw collab and an artist who can’t stop saying “oops” when she slips up in conversation about her own secrets. There’s a theme emerging: Jordyn is constantly moving forward, looking at the next step to reach a higher level.
Fantasy Rock Band
When asked to assemble her dream lineup, Jordyn’s choices landed without much hesitation:
- Drums: Neil Peart (Rush): “He’s the king of drums.”
- Lead Vocals: Michael Jackson: The gold standard, full stop.
- Piano: Stevie Wonder: “No one beats him on the piano.”
- Guitar: Eddie Van Halen: After a brief pause considering Alex Lifeson, another nod to sheer technique.
- Bass: Geddy Lee (Rush): “I don’t know many bass players by name. I don’t think they get enough credit.”
- Alternate drummer (if Neil’s unavailable): Phil Collins
Look at what this lineup actually says. Peart and Lee means Rush is the spine of the whole thing, the band that first made music feel like a physical force to a six-year-old in DDO.
Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder represent the soul and feel-good expressiveness she chases in her own songwriting.
Eddie Van Halen is pure fire and spectacle.
Phil Collins as the backup says something too: he’s one of the few drummers in history who could also step to the front mic and deliver.
Is that an indication of what is next? Jordyn as the player and the front-person at once? Stay tuned and find out. As the poster on the wall behind her with Justin Bieber on it…he would say: Never say Never.
We do know that Rush gave her the discipline, Motown gave her the feeling, and the rest filled in the gaps.
Follow Jordyn Sugar on Instagram, TikTok, Spotify, and YouTube under the name @JordynSugar. “Oops” is out now.
Writer: Randal Wark is a Tech entrepreneur, Managing Partner of MTech Cyber with a focus on cybersecurity along with a passion for live music. You can follow him on Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. His Podcast RockStar Today helps musicians quit their day jobs with out-of-the-box advice from Ted Talk Speakers, Best Selling Authors and other interesting Entrepreneurs and Creatives. He created the Rock Star Today Music Business Jam Session for musicians. Randal is a collector of signed vinyl, cassettes and CDs.
