Chapter 05
Music beyond the headline genres
7 min
Gospel, contemporary popular music, youth ensembles and studio collaboration widen the field beyond the artists most often associated with Carnival. The quickest way into that wider field is through people rather than categories.
CP Peters: a voice across stage and studio
Claudette "CP" Peters is one of the clearest starting points for contemporary Antiguan popular music. Her career connects the competitive Carnival stage with recorded soca and national performance. Listen first for the authority of her lead voice: a phrase is projected toward a crowd, the rhythm leaves room for response, and personality remains audible even inside a large arrangement.
Peters appears at the centre of One Family, a collaborative song created for the 2024 United Nations conference on small island developing states in Antigua. The recording joined established Carnival voices with younger artists and a pannist rather than presenting national music through a single star. Hear Peters first as a lead singer, then listen again for how she shares space with the other performers. Her 2025 recognition as Soca Artist of the Year and Best Recording Artist adds a dated marker to a career already audible in performance and on record.
Her visibility also makes a broader point without reducing women to a sidebar. Women are not newcomers to Antiguan soca, yet their careers have not always been preserved with the same consistency as those of the most celebrated male calypsonians and band leaders. Peters offers a substantial recorded route into that history; Laurena Davis provides another point of entry into the island's female soca lineage.
Rasheed Walker and music outside the Carnival frame
Rasheed Walker opens a route into gospel and the weekly musical life that a Carnival-centred account can miss. Gospel is not simply a quieter alternative to festival music. It has its own performance settings, vocal expectations and relationship to testimony, worship and community life. A singer may work with the same microphones, arrangers and digital platforms as a soca artist while addressing a very different room.
Churches remain important places of musical training. Singers learn harmony, projection and the discipline of working inside an ensemble; instrumentalists develop repertory through regular service rather than an annual competition. Some musicians later move between church, school, hotel work, Carnival and recording. The result is not a neat ladder from amateur to professional. It is a local musical economy in which several kinds of work can coexist in one career.
For a first route, look for Walker's appearance on the gospel night of the 2025 One Nation Music Festival at the Antigua Recreation Grounds. The programme places a local singer in a full public gospel setting rather than a short ceremonial clip. Listen to how the lead voice shapes testimony, repetition and audience response. His 2025 Gospel Artist of the Year recognition helps identify a current performer; the musical reason to stay is the change of room, purpose and vocal address. Gospel places devotion and testimony beside satire, rivalry and Carnival release.
Young Destroyer: calypso in the present tense
Leston "Young Destroyer" Jacobs brings the argument-centred tradition of calypso into the contemporary field. His competition performances make topical writing, stagecraft and command of an audience immediate rather than historical. He was named Calypsonian of the Year in 2025 and won the Calypso Monarch crown in 2026, two dated markers for a voice whose real interest lies in how an argument is built and delivered.
Young Destroyer also took part in One Family. That appearance places competitive calypso beside a purpose-built studio collaboration with CP Peters, Island Prince, Naycha Kid, Drastic and Ge'Eve. The contrast is instructive. In competition, a calypsonian must hold attention through an individual song and argument. In a collaborative recording, the same performer has to contribute character without consuming the whole arrangement.
For a first listening session, place one of Young Destroyer's competition performances beside the ensemble recording. The change in function is audible even before every lyrical reference is understood. One setting rewards the focused public statement; the other depends on hand-offs, shared refrains and a collective message.
Aubrey Samuel, Malik Smith and the work behind the front line
Steelpan history is often told through orchestras, but the people who shape an ensemble deserve to remain audible. Aubrey "Lacu" Samuel played pan on One Family. His presence gives the instrument a specific musician and a specific contemporary recording rather than leaving steelpan as a national symbol floating above the people who play it. His 2025 Pannist of the Year recognition is useful context after the ear has found the player.
Malik Smith of Panache Steel Orchestra points toward another kind of authorship. An arranger decides how melody, harmony, rhythm and register are distributed across a steel orchestra. The audience may remember the tune or the band's name, but the arranger has made hundreds of practical decisions about entrances, balance, repetition, contrast and momentum. Recognition for his arranging in 2025 provides a dated signpost; listening for those decisions turns pan from spectacle into composition in motion.
A panyard reveals this work gradually. A phrase moves from one section to another; rhythmic cells are tightened through repetition; players learn where to leave space. On stage the result may feel effortless, but the sound carries weeks of instruction and revision. Samuel and Smith provide two useful ways to hear that labour: the individual instrumental voice and the architecture of the ensemble.
Gavin Christopher and the collaborative studio
Gavin Christopher wrote and produced One Family, with Andy Liburd contributing as a co-writer and Dalton Dyer handling mixing and mastering. The credits matter because they reveal what the finished song cannot explain by itself. A multi-artist recording requires someone to build a form, match voices, organize sessions and turn separate performances into one coherent object.
The cast included CP Peters, Young Destroyer, Island Prince, Naycha Kid, Drastic, Ge'Eve and Aubrey Samuel. Their different public identities did not disappear inside the project; the production had to make those differences useful. This is a good contemporary example of national representation being assembled through collaboration rather than assigned to one supposedly definitive genre.
Studio work also connects Antigua to regional and international circulation. Files, musicians and audiences can move without every contributor living in the same place. That mobility does not make a recording less connected to the islands. It makes the route of authorship worth noticing: who wrote, who performed, who arranged, who recorded and who brought the result to listeners.
Youth orchestras, choirs and the next set of ears
The Antigua and Barbuda Youth Symphony Orchestra, launched in 2018, supports a senior orchestra, a junior orchestra, training for local music educators and an Inspire Youth Choir. Its public programmes move among venues rather than belonging to one permanent concert hall. Repertoire can place classical works beside Caribbean material and familiar popular music, giving young musicians experience in several musical languages.
The organisation's work reaches both islands. Instrumental training, school partnerships and public concerts create a route into strings, winds, ensemble playing and choral performance that sits alongside the better-known paths through pan, church and Carnival. The Antigua Barbuda Chorale belongs to the same wider picture of collective vocal music: an ensemble tradition built through rehearsal, blend and shared breath rather than celebrity.
Youth performance should not be treated as a preview of the "real" scene. A junior orchestra or school ensemble is already part of musical life. It gives players the habits that every larger institution depends on: arriving prepared, listening across a section, following an arranger or conductor and recovering together when a performance changes unexpectedly.
These artists and institutions do not form a definitive top ten. They form a set of selections. CP Peters leads into soca and recording; Rasheed Walker into gospel; Young Destroyer into present-day calypso; Aubrey Samuel and Malik Smith into pan performance and arrangement; Gavin Christopher into studio authorship; the youth orchestra and choirs into training and collective music beyond Carnival season.
