EP Review: Candy by Justine Skye

Justine Skye spent a decade auditioning for a lane that kept moving. She’s all the way in one now, and it fits like a thong she didn’t bother wearing.

Courtesy of Warner Records Inc.

Since she was seventeen, Justine Skye has been signed to four different labels. Atlantic, then Roc Nation and Republic, then an independent stretch, then Warner. Her biggest song, “Collide,” came out in 2014 and didn’t go gold until a sped-up TikTok remix she had no hand in made it unavoidable eight years later. She released two albums that charted respectably and vanished quickly, Ultraviolet in 2018 and Space & Time in 2021, the latter executive-produced by Timbaland with a Justin Timberlake feature that should’ve been a bigger deal than it was. None of it stuck the way it should have. Candy, her first EP on Warner, does something her earlier records couldn’t quite manage.

KAYTRANADA produces five of the eight songs, and his fingerprints are all over the remaining three, even when other names share the credits. The bounce is elastic, funk-derived, and built on swung drums that have the knock. Nosaj Thing adds a hazier, more weightless quality to “Heart Attack.” Kito and Noah Beresin give “Bitch In Ibiza” a broader, poppier kick. Channel Tres brings Compton’s four-on-the-floor grit to “YAP.” But KAYTRANADA’s gravity holds the EP together. The beats stay clean and body-first, controlled but never stiff, and they never try to romanticize what Skye is saying. When she’s talking about spending a man’s money, the beat bounces like she’s already out the door. When she’s describing sex, the drums keep their snap and refuse to go syrupy. The beats and the lyrics stay in the same gear, and that consistency is the smartest choice on the EP.

“Ear Candy” puts Skye’s skepticism right at the center. A man is in her ear bragging about what he’s got, and she isn’t buying it. “Big talk, you got big talk/You in my ear telling me you got a big, uh,” she sings, leaving him exposed by what she didn’t say. The verse is funny and specific—“Titties out, top down, drop my roof/Boy, sounds good, but you got no proof”—and the chorus keeps pulling him back to the same demand. She craves taste and feel, and talk alone won’t get him anywhere. It’s the kind of song on which Skye sounds most like herself, amused and in control, testing whether the man in front of her can keep up with the woman he approached.

Half the fun of Candy is watching Skye negotiate the difference between wanting someone and admitting it. “Oh Lala” is the one song where she almost concedes. The hook gives up something she spends most of the EP denying—that she can’t let go. “Don’t think I’m in love/But I can’t let you go tonight, it might be the drugs,” she offers, and the pre-chorus spells out the whole cycle in four flat steps. Cheers, dance, rinse, start over. KAYTRANADA’s boardwork here has the most swing of anything on the record, loose enough that the track breathes between its admissions. Then the bridge flips. “I got a perfect waist/And if I twist my hips, then you’re gonna chase,” she taunts, and suddenly the vulnerability is a setup, another card she’s playing. “Thong” doesn’t bother with subtext at all. “When you lick it up, I held it all I could/And you say it taste so good,” Skye sings over KAYTRANADA’s sparest groove, slipping into a French bridge (“Toujours je t’adore”) that makes the explicitness feel continental. She came out with no thong tonight, she tells us in the first line, and the song just keeps meeting her where she already is.

The whole EP stays in this lane. “Pop It” tells men to open their wallets and their bottles; “Bitch In Ibiza” runs through jet-setting, ice, new rides, and old exes who can’t keep up; “Just a Girl” floats on two drinks and a request for the spotlight; “YAP” flips a complaint about talking too much into foreplay. There are no ballads tucked in the back half, no spoken interludes about growth, no moments when the tempo drops and the singer gets serious. Skye commits to pleasure across all eight songs, and the EP is better for it. Where Rochelle Jordan’s Through the Wall turned dance music into an exercise in poise and composure—the diva nonchalant, the velvet rope parting quietly—Skye is louder, blunter, and more interested in appetite than mystique. She’s here to be seen, bought drinks, pursued, and satisfied, and she says so in plain language.

The lyrics do thin out in a few places. “Just a Girl” leans heavily on its chorus, and the verses don’t give much to hold onto. The second verse picks up with “I’m acting all mysterious” but doesn’t push past the surface of the pose. “Pop It” is the rowdiest cut here, and the Mona Lisa line and the ballerina bar are sharp enough, but the verse between them doesn’t carry the same specificity. These aren’t bad songs. They ride their beats well and they’d sound great in a club. They just don’t reward the same attention that “Ear Candy” or “Thong” demand. On a tight eight-song EP, two songs coasting on vibe while the pen idles is noticeable without being a serious problem.

Skye spent her twenties moving between labels, surviving a public domestic violence situation she was brave enough to name (*ahem* Sheck Wes *ahem*), watching an algorithm make her famous for a song she’d already moved past, and searching for a sound that matched who she actually was at the microphone. Candy is the first record where everything lines up, from the production, the writing, the persona, and the freedom to be as sexual and as frivolous as she wants. At this stage of her career, with an EP this solid, she’s that one woman at a party who knows everyone is watching and has decided that’s exactly the arrangement she prefers.

Favorite Track(s): “Ear Candy,” “Oh Lala,” “Thong”