Before he had ever tried to get Quebecers to drop everything and just chill out, Jérôme 50 was already singing in the streets of Old Quebec at the age of 17 for beer and rent money. While honing his storytelling and crowd-pleasing skills with tourists, Saint-Jean-Baptiste’s favourite son came to understand the power of popular music.

Filled with boundless love for Quebec and its incredibly rich spoken language, the professional chiller went on to study linguistics at Laval University, which contributed to his writing style full of portmanteaus and colourful metaphors drawn from everyday life.

His first album, La hiérarchill, which called for a new Quiet Revolution among today’s disaffected youth, was released in 2018. Forged by a distinctive poetic voice and filled to the brim with nonchalant anthems, brilliant collaborators and infectious melodies, the album bears witness to Jérôme 50’s fascination with pop music (Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, MØ, Rihanna).

Several equally entertaining projects followed, including Le camp de vacances de Jérôme 49, a compilation of campfire songs revisited and subverted with the help of a children’s choir, several tours, and appearances at festivals across Quebec, along with a host of other accomplishments, such as writing the theme song for Star Académie in 2021 with his friend Hubert Lenoir.

Later, he stirred things up with “Tokébakicitte”, a sharp, cheerful satire about his generation’s shortcomings that broke records on Youtube and Spotify and was nominated for Song of the year at the ADISQ awards. As a follow-up, he released in 2022 two new singles: “Embrasse-moi”, a self-referential, deadpan love song sung as a duet with the extraordinary Ariane Roy, and “COLOC RECHERCHER", a short song in which a classified ad posted on Kijiji in hopes of finding a roommate blossoms into romance. With all this new material in hand, it is clear that a second album is in the works.