If there’s a lesson to be learned from the Ali Gatie story, it’s that you should never delete the voice memos on your phone. That’s where the seed for his 2019 breakout hit, “It’s You”, was first planted, after the Iraqi Canadian singer dictated an intimate message that was only ever meant to be heard by his girlfriend. But the raw, unfiltered quality of his words would inspire a beautifully spare R&B serenade that landed Gatie on singles charts around the globe. “That song was just me being so vulnerable,” he told Apple Music. “And I think that’s why the world received it as so relatable, because I was literally talking to someone through the song.” Born in 1997 in Yemen, Gatie relocated to the suburbs of Toronto as a kid, just in time to experience the city’s emergence as a hip-hop and R&B hotbed in the 2010s; after dropping out of university to pursue music, he arrived at a chilled-out style pitched somewhere between the sad-rap ruminations of Drake, the free-floating late-night reveries of Frank Ocean and the congenial acoustic soul-pop of Ed Sheeran. His debut mini-album, 2019’s YOU, revealed that “It’s You” was just the tip of the iceberg in a repertoire that documents the emotional roller-coaster of romance in achingly personal detail, while flirting with a more experimental production style that evokes the fever-dream headspace of a lovesick mind. He continued to teeter on the fine line between amorous and obsessive on 2020 singles “What If I Told You That I Love You” and “Running on My Mind”, proving that, even as he sings to an international audience, Gatie still sounds like he’s crafting a DM just for you.