Bambii

Retail, call centres, and a party called JERK

Kirsten Azan records and DJs as Bambii, and is described in reference listings as a Canadian-Caribbean artist, DJ, record producer and songwriter based in Toronto. The household she grew up in supplied reggae and dancehall through Caribbean heritage; rock, house and punk arrived alongside it. None of that paid rent at first. Before music became the job she worked in retail, in call centres, and for nonprofit organisations.

The thing that changed her standing in the city was not a record. In 2013 she launched JERK, a Toronto club event built on club music and Caribbean influences, which she organised, promoted and DJed herself. Jerk chicken was part of the proposition. For roughly a decade JERK was the main public fact about her — a recurring night that gave Caribbean-diaspora artists a room and gave Azan a weekly laboratory for what mixes and what does not.

The habit of mind that came out of it shows up in how she talks about production. In a June 2024 interview she described her method as running "what if" scenarios in the studio and refusing to be timid about the answers. Speaking to Bandcamp around her second EP she put the same thing more plainly: "I really respect people who decide for themselves what they like in a world that's deciding for you."

Nitevision to a Juno

Her recorded career starts in 2019 with "Nitevision", featuring the Jamaican dancehall artist Pamputtae — hi-tech dancehall rather than a DJ's calling-card edit. "Twitch" followed in 2021, "Ride with Me" in 2022, then "One Touch" and "Wicked Gyal" with the London MC Lady Lykez in 2023.

Those singles fed into INFINITY CLUB, a debut EP issued on 4 August 2023 through Innovative Leisure. It did the thing debut club EPs rarely manage in Canada: it crossed into the award infrastructure. INFINITY CLUB won Electronic Album of the Year at the 2024 Juno Awards — her first Juno — and was shortlisted for the 2024 Polaris Music Prize, which judges Canadian albums on artistic merit alone.

2023 was also the year her name started appearing on other people's credits at scale. She contributed production to Kelela's RAVEN, an album that reframed Kelela as a dance artist and, by extension, put Bambii in front of an audience that had never been to a Toronto basement.

INFINITY CLUB II

The sequel arrived on 20 June 2025 on Because Music, written after a 2023 trip to Jamaica. It runs twelve tracks in under half an hour and is structured as a guest list as much as a tracklist: Ravyn Lenae and the British MC Scrufizzer on "Remember", Lyzza and Sadboi on "Blue Sky", Jessy Lanza and Yaeji on "Mirror", BEAM on "NSYNC" and again on "Spit" with Lady Lykez, Aluna on "Island Criminal", Lamsi on "In My Mind" and its reprise with £Monzo, and JELEEL! on "Thunder". "Mirror" and "Spit" had already gone out as singles.

The compression is the point. Individual tracks move from pop-rap to deconstructed club to bass in the space of a verse, with dancehall, jungle and ragga underneath and hyperpop gloss on top — Bandcamp's reviewer called it genre-hopping mixology and argued she was "taking the rave to the charts—and vice versa" without sanding off the eccentricity. The dance press read it as a bid for scale rather than a retreat into the underground; one June 2025 review reckoned it had the makings of the club-kid record of that summer.

What the EP does not do is settle into a lane that could be summarised for a radio playlist, which is probably why it has worked better as a live document than a streaming one.

2026: other people's records, then four of her own

The past eighteen months have been split between work-for-hire and a steady drip of singles. She guested on Shygirl's "Flex" in 2025. On 17 April 2026 she took production and songwriting credits on JT's "Numb". In May 2026 she appeared with Madison Beer on "The Ambition", from Zara Larsson's remix album MIDNIGHT SUN: GIRLS TRIP — a long way, commercially, from a Queen Street party.

Her own 2026 output has been released as singles rather than collected into a third EP: "Hot Girls" with Che Mario, "Level Up", and "Touch Down". The most recent is "Drop", a two-minute-twenty-four-second track released on 6 November 2026, credited to Bambii under exclusive licence to Because Music outside Canada. Nothing published so far announces a parent album, and the shape of the run — short, fast, club-length tracks arriving every few weeks — suggests the DJ set is the delivery mechanism, not the tracklist.

What the set actually does

The clearest recent account of her live work comes from Festival d'été de Québec on 11 July 2026, where she went on at 11.30pm at the Quebec City Armoury. Exclaim!'s reviewer described a set built from Caribbean music, jungle, dancehall and drum and bass, with two moments that tell the whole story: a run at Corona's 1993 Eurodance standard "The Rhythm of the Night", and an aggressive, dubstep-leaning rework of "Sandstorm". Neither is a credibility play. Both are crowd levers, and she pulled them without apology.

The reviewer's phrasing — a set "just rude enough to have the crowd on all fours", a DJ who "conducted the enthusiastic crowd as if they weren't even there" — captures the performance register. There is no live band, no theatrical staging reported, and the visual identity on the night amounted to a white beanie and oversized red ski glasses. The write-up concluded that she left the city with the faint smell of burnt rubber.

Azan has said touring works on the records rather than the other way round: the volume of stimulus and the unfamiliar underground scenes she passes through end up metabolised into the productions. That holds up against the catalogue, which has got faster and more guest-heavy the more she has been on the road.

Where she is in November 2026

She is currently out as a support act rather than a headliner, which is the honest framing of this run. The Toronto date on 11 November 2026 at the Opera House on Queen Street East — an 850-capacity room, doors at 7pm, on sale since roughly September — is billed with Nia Archives on top and Bambii beneath her. Listings put the same November cluster at the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco on 8 November and the Society for Arts and Technology in Montreal on 10 November, with Liberty Station in San Diego already played on 17 October.

Pairing with Nia Archives is the most legible thing about the booking: two Black women making jungle and drum and bass out of sound-system lineages, on the same bill, in rooms under a thousand people. For a Toronto crowd it also means the Opera House show is the first chance to hear "Drop" and the rest of the 2026 singles in the setting they were built for, days after release.

The open question is scale. The records have the guests and the label backing of an artist who could headline those rooms herself; the current itinerary has her warming them up. Nothing published indicates a 2027 headline run yet.