Stalk Ashley & Alkaline

How it happened

Alkaline — Earlan Bartley, the Vendetta boss behind “Champion Boy” — spent the early 2020s famously guarding his features: his 2021 album Top Prize, a chart-topping release voted Reggaeville’s Album of the Year, carried fourteen tracks and not a single guest. Which is what makes “Incognito” remarkable: in that same era, he showed up on a rising singer’s record.

“Incognito” (2020): the fatal-attraction record

Released October 23, 2020 via Atlantic UK, “Incognito” went to #1 Trending in Jamaica on arrival, clearing 300,000 views and five thousand overwhelmingly positive comments in days, per DancehallMag — which also noted Stalk Ashley had been covering Alkaline’s songs for years before the collab. “‘Incognito’ is a song about fatal attraction,” she told The FADER. “It’s about wanting to be with someone that you have no business being with. That’s what makes it so spicy.”

The FADER premiere

On December 23, 2020, The FADER premiered the video worldwide: a tense mafia face-off with Stalk Ashley as the femme fatale and Alkaline as the dangerous attraction. Her account of the shoot made the personal stakes plain: “Everyone who knows me knows Alkaline is my absolute favourite artist so it was a very fist clenching and very surreal moment.” The video has since passed seven million views.

The timeline

Oct 23, 2020 — “Incognito” drops via Atlantic UK; #1 Trending in Jamaica · Dec 23, 2020 — The FADER premieres the mafia-styled video · Today — 7M+ views and counting.