JJ Wilde

With her songs’ raw energy and unbridled force, JJ Wilde was bound to make an impact when she broke through at the end of the 2010s after a long struggle to get her music heard. Born in 1992 in Kitchener, ON, the singer and guitarist born Jillian Dowding grew up on her parents’ Bruce Springsteen and classic rock albums and began pursuing her own musical ambitions while still a teenager. She continued writing through her twenties, amassing a body of over 500 songs while working two or three jobs at a time and playing in a Kitchener folk-rock band called The Royal Streets. Her hard work paid off when 2019’s Wilde Eyes, Steady Hands, Wilde’s first EP after signing with BMG/Black Box, yielded a Canadian radio hit with the punchy, bluesy “The Rush.” It was followed in 2020 by Ruthless, a debut album that demonstrated both her penchant for gritty, impassioned rockers and—on the softer likes of “Funeral For A Lover”—a vulnerability more suggestive of Damien Rice, another of Wilde’s inspirations.