Evidenced by the massive spectacle that is Kingston's carnival season, music has been a lifeline, a memory and the muscle of the island - especially in hard times
A magical, colourful spectacle is unfolding on the streets of Kingston. People are covered in jewels from head to toe, and women are carrying flowery wings like carnival fairies. Trucks roll slowly through shut-down streets, bass travelling through concrete before it reaches bone, while feathers and sequins catch the afternoon sun that's beating down as the Road March parade - the biggest day of Carnival In Jamaica's week-long celebrations - takes over the city.
Across the route, floats cut through the crowd with a steady rhythm. Soca legend Machel Montano commands one - carnival time is his heyday, as he soundtracks some of the biggest songs of the season - while international Jamaican music superstars like Shenseea, Ayetian and Klassik Escobar keep the energy high from above, playing to the crowd. Below, the response is immediate: waistlines wukking, arms flinging, cups pushed skyward.
Just months earlier, parts of this same island looked unrecognisable. In October 2025, Hurricane Melissa tore through Jamaica's south coast, flattening homes and farmland - stripping people of their livelihoods. It caused an estimated USD$8.8billion worth of damage, killed 45 people, injured nearly 100, and left thousands of families without homes.
For a diaspora scattered across continents, Jamaican music has always functioned as more than entertainment - an anchor back to roots. In the wake of the storm, it became a way to rebuild and reconnect, and from London to Kingston, club nights turned into fundraisers and sound systems into lifelines, its familiar rhythm something to return to when everything else felt uncertain.
In St. Elizabeth - one of the hardest-hit regions - leading modern reggae star Protoje watched it unfold in real time. "It looked atomic," he says. "Like a bomb went off." His stark description matches the reality of the situation - the strongest hurricane ever to hit the island country caused an aftermath that was both economic and emotional. "My mom used to grow a lot of produce there, and it all got ruined in the storm," he explains.
That loss threads through 'At We Feet' - a Damian Marley-featuring track from Protoje's latest album, 'The Art Of Acceptance', that moves between documentation and defiance. In the song's accompanying visuals, he shows onions, melons, and pak choi - crops native to the region - and uses them to show the fruitfulness of the area before. "God a wipe out while man a make plans / So in all things, yeah we haffi give thanks," he sings at one point, proving that, despite devastation, positivity and gratitude for life are what push the nation forward. "We have this resilience to rebuild and go again," he explains to NME. "To huddle and come together as people and help each other out, and emerge victorious."
Proteje practised what he preached in February. Nearly four months after the hurricane, while other events across the island were being cancelled, he pressed ahead with Lost In Time, the festival he founded with his sister, festival director LeAnn Ollivierre. Logistically, it didn't make sense. But the decision came down to something simple: presence. "[My sister] said just showing up would be enough," he recalls. So they did, building the entire event in six weeks and bringing people together at a time when it would have been easier to retreat.
According to Protoje, music - whether you hear it at Lost In Time or Carnival - is so important because "you could still be hearing a topic about struggle, but the feel of the drums and the bass... you're moving, and on your face is a smile". People come back to Jamaica for big events like Carnival because "music has the power to heal, power to kill, power to uplift, power to drag down - it's not a joke thing".
That belief is built into the spaces Jamaican music moves through. At Tuff Gong International, the Kingston studio founded by Bob Marley, they function on the ethos of one of Jamaicans' core attributes: resilience. Long before 220 Marcus Garvey Drive became a one-stop shop for the island's creatives, it was a battleground for access. "Bob Marley first tried to get here and record, he was told no because, one, he's a Black man, and two, a Rasta man," Oneika Young, Group Marketing Manager of the Bob Marley Group of Companies, which owns the studio, tells NME. He got through eventually - but not before declaring that one day he'd own the space, so that people who looked like him could create there freely.
Carnival season 2026 arrives in the middle of that promise being kept. The studio, recently renovated under CEO Cedella Marley, now functions as a full creative hub - recording, rehearsal, visuals, vinyl pressing, all under one roof - and its rates are deliberately affordable, starting at 5,000 Jamaican dollars (£23.35) an hour. "This is for everybody," says Stephen Marley at the relaunch. The intention behind those words runs centuries deep.
"Reggae is the music of the people, and the drum is the heartbeat of a society," Young says. "Jamaicans especially have been able to use music as a platform to speak about our injustices and our resistance - but it has also been a way for us to advocate for ourselves." In the months since Hurricane Melissa, that advocacy took on new urgency - in fundraisers, in festivals that refused to cancel, in a carnival season that showed up louder and more purposeful than ever.
If Tuff Gong represents the backbone, the diaspora shows how far that reach travels. "Music is probably the most prominent thing that keeps me connected to the island," says Jephina Lueche, a Chinese-Jamaican creative known as @jlueche online, based in Toronto. "There's nothing that brings me home like hearing lovers rock playing in the kitchen." Her Guyanese father, once the lead vocalist in a reggae band called Leejahn, raised her on that genre and roots - Bob Marley, Steel Pulse, Beres Hammond, Sanchez. Over time, those songs stopped being something she just listened to and became cultural currency she passed down to her eight-year-old son.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa, that sense of shared identity became visible in action. People returned home to bring aid and rebuild - and even during the storm itself, in the places less badly hit, people were still outside and still finding music to move to in the middle of it. Lueche watched it unfold on social media in real time. "I think people are able to still party and dance because they know they have each other's backs. If you know one Jamaican, you know all Jamaicans - it's always love," she says.
For Lueche, who returns to the island regularly to visit family, Carnival represents an extension of that same instinct - communal, deliberate, restorative. "Carnival brings in a lot of revenue - the island thrives on tourism," she adds. "People coming back, especially for things like Carnival, helps put money back into the economy." In a way, this year's event carries a smidge more weight - it's still a bold demonstration of Caribbean joy, but this time, there's a thread of recovery and grit in it, too.
For months, people have been trying to rebuild their lives, but for a week, they come together to release that stress. The season all starts with fun, soca-filled warm-up parties like Sunrise - a formal outdoor brunch party with surplus food and special musical guests - and I Love Soca Fête. Often, on the morning of or the day before the famous colourful masquerade band parades, J'Ouvert takes place.
The event - which name means "daybreak" in Creole - started in the 1780s in Trinidad and Tobago, when the formerly enslaved reclaimed the streets in response to the pre-Lenten masquerade balls held by French colonial elites that they were excluded from. NME rolls out with the Gen X Immortals band this year, waking up at 3am to party until the crack of dawn, spraying Fruit Shoot-style bottles of paint and flinging powder packets around in a carefree free-for-all - a messy affair not concerned with appearances. Even after the Road March is over, there are endless afterparties where bejewelled bodies continue to dance on under the night sky. There's still music on every corner, parties on every street, and carnival season pulls Jamaicans at home and across the diaspora into a shared moment of unity.
The island hasn't forgotten what it's been through - you can still see it in the flattened fields, and in the work still being done to rebuild - but it hasn't stopped either. "Wi likkle but wi tallawah" - small, but mighty - isn't just a motto of Jamaican people, but also a way of understanding how the country and community move through moments like this. The bass still rolls. The songs still carry. And long after the road clears, what's left isn't just the memory of a party, but proof of something steadier underneath it - a rhythm that holds.
