The Eye features music’s finest rising artist in a stripped-down studio performance space to deliver renditions of their best songs with just one camera, one microphone, and one take. The latest to step up to the plate is R&B singer IV JAY, who combined a couple highlights from her discography into one medley.
JAY, who is also a trained dancer, first developed her interest in music upon hearing some beats from her producer uncle. Then, she got herself a keyboard and used to power of social media to help fuel her ascent. She’s approaching 400,000 Instagram followers now, and between the start of her account and today, her covers have helped her gain a lot of traction. A 2018 cover of Billie Eilish’s “When The Party’s Over,” for example, has hundreds of thousands of views and one like from Eilish herself.
She managed to generate so much buzz for herself online that she found a label home with Atlantic Records starting in March 2018. In late 2020, she dropped her debut album, 5th Element, which includes a feature from Don Toliver. She has followed that up this year with some more new songs, including a Pink Sweat$ collaboration, “Vibrate.”
Speaking of “Vibrate,” that’s one of the songs JAY performed on The Eye. Instead of giving it a standalone rendition, she combined it with “Tweakin’” (a collab with Luh Kel from his 2019 album Mixed Emotions) for a minimalist medley, on which she is accompanied by just a piano. Really, though, she could have taken the tracks on a capella, as her vocals have a smoothness, comfort, and warmth that would still sound world-class if she was singing the phone book.
Watch IV JAY perform “Vibrate / Tweakin’” for The Eye above.
IV JAY is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.