Kelissa releases The Good Side of Things, continues roots reggae run
Kelissa’s The Good Side of Things landed June 30 as her first full-length step after a steady run of singles. The album builds on a roots path shaped by St. Andrew and Chakula.
Kelissa returned with The Good Side of Things on June 30, 2026, a full-album release that marks the newest step in a steady run of music and keeps her firmly in the roots reggae lane. For longtime reggae listeners, the biggest shift is not a genre pivot but the scale of the statement: after years of singles, collaborations, and smaller releases, Kelissa has now put a full-length project behind a catalog that has stayed consistently visible.
That visibility has been built in public, track by track. Reggaeville’s release history shows a clear sequence that runs through Natural Lift, Spellbound, Satu Dunia / One World, Take Your Time, and later recordings including I Don’t Even Know and Skyline Rocking, with Way You Make Me Feel listed in July 2025. The Good Side of Things fits that pattern as the latest chapter rather than a surprise detour, and it arrives with the momentum of an artist who has kept putting work into the market instead of disappearing between projects.
Kelissa’s biography on Reggaeville places that sound in the hills of St. Andrew, Jamaica, where she was raised in a Rastafari and reggae household. Her parents, Errol Scott-McDonald and Kerida Scott-McDonald, were lead vocalists in the reggae band Chakula, and Kelissa summed up that upbringing with the line, “I was living music before I was born.” That lineage helps explain why her work has stayed rooted in spiritual and melodic songwriting instead of chasing pop crossover trends.
The new album also lands with useful history behind it. Reggaeville lists Spellbound as a release dated January 19, 2017, while Jamaica Observer described it as Kelissa’s second EP and said it was released on January 20, 2017. The same paper later reported that her 17-track mixtape Anbessa World was set for release in January 2019. Those milestones show a career that has moved steadily from EPs and mixtapes into a first full-length album after a long recording run.
That arc matters because Kelissa has already been framed in Jamaican music journalism as part of the broader roots-reggae revival. A 2014 Jamaica Observer profile described her as an emerging female element in a fresh wave of reggae artistes, and a 2013 interview noted that she had spent five years away before returning to Jamaica to reconnect with her roots. The Good Side of Things does not reset that story so much as it extends it, giving her roots-reggae run a fuller, more deliberate landing point.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
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