Cleo Sol is returning at a moment when her music feels more necessary than ever. Her first album in three years is now here: Gentlewoman, released August 20, 2026.

R&B and soul music has been experiencing a renewed cultural presence lately, with new artists making waves while listeners increasingly gravitate toward music that feels intimate, vulnerable, and human. In a music landscape that often rewards whoever can make the most noise, Cleo Sol has built her career around doing almost the exact opposite.

With Gentlewoman, Cleo has another opportunity to show us why her approach to music has maintained such a devoted audience despite her limited public presence and the relatively long gaps between her projects.

In an interview with Zane Lowe about Gold, an album released in 2023, she explained that every song became a relationship with God and an expression of gratitude. She admitted that she wasn’t even sure she wanted to release the album because it felt so emotionally exposed, describing the project as “so heart-opening.”

Cleo Sol’s Evolution

Cleo Sol's deep, soulful talent is apparent throughout her catalog, from Rose in the Dark to Mother, Heaven, and Gold. Critics have consistently pointed to the intimacy of her work. The New Yorker, writing about Mother, described Sol’s compositions as gentle and intimate, emphasizing the album’s exploration of motherhood and the relationship between mothers and daughters.

Cleo prides herself on talking about things that are difficult to make beautiful. Trauma, parenthood, even life.

Mother, released in 2021, is perhaps the clearest example. The album examines motherhood from multiple directions: Cleo as a mother, Cleo as a daughter, and Cleo trying to understand the woman who raised her. The New Yorker described the album as a gentle and intimate exploration of the cyclical nature of motherhood and the lessons passed between generations.

But Cleo doesn’t romanticize that relationship.

On “23,” she acknowledges her mother’s sacrifices while also confronting the ways her mother failed her. Pitchfork stated it as, “One of the album’s best and most nuanced songs…” highlighting how Cleo manages to hold her mother accountable while still extending grace and understanding. The album’s opening song, “Don’t Let Me Fall,” immediately connects motherhood with inherited pain. Cleo sings about a mother who “never had time to unpack your trauma,” connecting the emotional baggage of one generation to the next.

Before Mother, before Heaven, before Gold, there was Rose in the Dark. And personally, this is the Cleo Sol album I keep coming back to. “When I’m In Your Arms” has to be one of my top favorites.

Released on March 27, 2020, Rose in the Dark arrived at a strange moment in music history. The world was shutting down, people were being forced inside, and suddenly an album built around self-love, spirituality, vulnerability, and perseverance felt almost perfectly timed. Cleo herself wasn’t even sure if it was the right moment to release it.

In a post shared around the album’s release, she explained that she had been going back and forth about putting music out that year, but ultimately reminded herself that the project was “bigger than me” and that she was simply a ‘vessel’. She wanted the album to uplift people, move them, or simply be something they could have playing in the background while everyone was trying to navigate an uncertain moment.

A New Era

With Cleo’s new album now released, she’s about to grace the world with an entirely new journey of her own. She recently revealed on Instagram that she welcomed her second child with her husband and producer partner, Inflo. In a teaser clip announcing the album, a snippet was included.

What makes this era especially interesting is that Cleo isn’t returning as the same woman who made Rose in the Dark. Since that album, she has become a mother, released Mother, explored faith and self-worth on Heaven and Gold, and continued building a body of work centered on the complicated process of becoming more comfortable with yourself.

There has always been a deeply introspective side to R&B. From Marvin Gaye asking what was happening to the world to Lauryn Hill questioning love, identity and spirituality, the genre has never been afraid of looking inward.

Heaven, for example, was described by The Guardian as a collection with “hard lessons, personal growth and ways to cope,” while Pitchfork noted that the album continues Cleo’s exploration of faith and self-love with a greater sense of ease and confidence.

Now, with Gentlewoman, Cleo is extending that conversation of healing and personal growth deeper within contemporary soul music.

What happens when you finally learn how to speak life into yourself?

Jamari Shelton is a Chicago-based entertainment writer and pop culture enthusiast covering breaking celebrity news, television, film, reality TV, and the internet moments everyone can’t stop talking about. She recently graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a degree in Broadcast Journalism and is passionate about telling stories that inform, entertain, and spark conversation.

On August 1, 1981, MTV launched on TV screens for the first time, opening with the words, “Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll,” followed by The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.” At first, the network was heavily centered on rock music, but over the next decade it became one of the most influential forces in popular culture—and eventually, a very important home for Black music.

For R&B, that transformation was huge. Because the music video wasn’t simply a way to promote a single. It became another place for an artist to perform.

You could hear the record on the radio, but MTV gave you the opportunity to see the artist’s world. What they wore. How they moved. Who they were supposed to be. What their neighborhood looked like. What kind of love they were singing about. Whether they were glamorous, rebellious, mysterious, sexy, political, funny, or all of the above.

And during MTV’s golden years, R&B artists understood that the camera could be just as powerful as the microphone.

The Problem: MTV Wasn’t Built for Black Music

It’s easy to look back at MTV now and remember it as this universal music institution, but that’s not how it started.

The network’s early programming was heavily focused on rock, and Black artists struggled to get the same exposure as their white counterparts. In early 1983, the MTV playlist reportedly had around 60 videos, with only a handful from Black artists. Even as Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” climbed the pop charts, MTV initially resisted putting the video into rotation. Michael Jackson was already a massive star, but MTV’s reluctance to embrace Black artists meant that his success on the network wasn’t guaranteed.

When “Billie Jean” finally entered heavy rotation in 1983, it became the first video by a Black artist to receive that level of exposure on the network. Jackson followed it with “Beat It,” and then came “Thriller,” which completely changed the expectations surrounding what a music video could be.

Thriller reportedly cost around $1.1 million and ran roughly 14 minutes—an outrageous investment for a promotional video at the time.

Whitney Houston’s experience with MTV demonstrates just how much the network’s relationship with R&B had changed—and how much work was still left to do.

Houston’s early video for “You Give Good Love” was reportedly rejected by MTV because executives considered it too R&B-oriented. Houston later recalled that MTV eventually had no choice but to play “Saving All My Love for You” because of the song’s enormous success.

Then came “How Will I Know.”

In December 1985, the video was accepted by MTV and quickly went into heavy rotation. It became the first music video by a Black female artist to receive that kind of immediate heavy rotation on the network. Her videos became essential parts of her career– “If I Told You That” being my absolute favorite.

That’s the larger story of R&B, Black music, and MTV.

MTV’s Les Garland later recalled that the network would promote its airings in advance, and each broadcast created a ratings spike. MTV had discovered something important: people would tune in specifically to watch a music video.

When R&B Took Over the Screen

R&B’s women started creating some of the decade’s most recognizable visuals.

En Vogue, SWV, Xscape, Total, Destiny’s Child and TLC all understood that the music video could establish an entire group’s personality before the audience even knew all of their names.

SWV’s “Right Here” and “Weak” presented the group as young, stylish and effortlessly cool. Their debut It’s About Time became one of the defining R&B records of the early ‘90s, and their visual presence helped translate that sound to television.

And then there was TLC. TLC understood MTV probably better than almost anybody. “Waterfalls” won Video of the Year at the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards, along with three other awards. The GRAMMY Museum has described TLC as the defining R&B act of MTV’s “second generation,” specifically pointing to the group’s ability to combine dramatic storytelling with striking performance visuals.

The MTV Video Music Awards Told the Story

Mary J. Blige’s early music videos helped establish the visual identity of hip-hop soul. “Real Love,” “You Remind Me,” “Love No Limit” and “Be Happy” weren’t trying to make Mary look like some untouchable pop star. They branded her as the relatable girl from around the way Black people of all backgrounds could see themselves in.

By the second half of the ‘90s, R&B music videos were getting sleeker, stranger, and more futuristic. “Are You That Somebody?” became one of the defining examples of late-’90s R&B video culture. The video premiered on MTV in 1998 and eventually became MTV’s most-played video for the week of September 20–27 that year. Complex later praised the video’s choreography and Aaliyah’s clothing as revolutionary for the era.

And that choreography mattered. That became one of the defining characteristics of late-’90s R&B videos. People watched these videos and immediately wanted to try the dance themselves. VH1’s retrospective of ‘90s R&B choreography specifically highlights “Are You That Somebody?” alongside videos from Usher, Monica, Next and Mýa as examples of the decade’s dance-heavy visual culture.

By the late ‘90s, MTV’s own awards were reflecting just how dominant R&B had become.

The Best R&B Video category included artists like D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, Toni Braxton, Brandy, Monica, Aaliyah, Usher, K-Ci & JoJo and Lauryn Hill across the decade.

The MTV Identity

After MTV, the image became part of the song’s identity.

You couldn’t hear “Real Love” without remembering Mary J. in those visuals. You couldn’t hear “Are You That Somebody?” without thinking about Aaliyah and that choreography. You couldn’t hear “Untitled” without remembering D’Angelo staring directly into the camera.

It made the visuals inseparable from the music. MTV’s TRL and BET’s 106 & Park became staples in every millennial music lover's life. And eventually, that would change the way artists approached albums altogether. Because once artists and labels realized that a song could have a new life by having its own visual world? It was nothing but magic.

Jamari Shelton is a Chicago-based entertainment writer and pop culture enthusiast covering breaking celebrity news, television, film, reality TV, and the internet moments everyone can’t stop talking about. She recently graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a degree in Broadcast Journalism and is passionate about telling stories that inform, entertain, and spark conversation.

Eric Aldwin Bellinger Jr. has come a long way since his career jump-started with 2014’s “I Don’t Want Her.” A Grammy-winning songwriting career and roughly 45 projects later, the crooner’s decades of hard work are about to pay off with what many will consider to be his magnum opus.

Bellinger’s eponymous new album is his Thriller and Confessions, all rolled into one. The crooner was already placed on a certain pedestal when his new album cover art featured that signature R&B lean, but pairing that with a self-titled album? None of this should be taken lightly. Bellinger peeled back the layers of himself as a father, husband, son, and artist, and it only happened because he’s now just discovering those parts for himself. The confidence that stemmed from that brave “self-healing” was boosted, thanks to his manager, Lee Villegas, who helped him “attack those different types of song concepts.”

He explained, “I’ve never had this album. Now I’m feeling like people are gonna be able to have some ammo to champion the movement.”

For the bulk of his career, that “movement” has been independent, which led to longevity and success. However, this new era comes with new partners and a new label, Berry Gordy’s legendary Tamla/Motown imprint and Rodney Jerkins’ Evolve Music Group. “I’m commanding and demanding what’s rightfully mine without saying a word,” Bellinger noted. “I didn’t wanna sign too early, but I felt like it was just the right time where I had been in rotation and still had just enough relevance. So, I was like, ‘Now let me strike while the iron is hot.’ I never looked at it like I was competing, but now I wanna go No. 1. I wanna get four Grammys. There’s just things that need to be plugged in in order for you to really maximize as an artist out here because these big artists have a powerhouse behind them.”

Despite all that’s brewing around him, he admits that he made this album for himself. “I saw an interview where Kendrick Lamar said music is supposed to be artistic expression and that couldn’t be more on the nail of what this album is,” said the father of two. “These are my experiences and my stories that I really wasn’t planning on sharing with anybody. ‘Thank You For Telling Me No,’ ‘Heavy Is The Crown,’ some of these are like burdens that maybe it’s like you wanna bury, but in making them songs and giving them life, it’s just dope because I’m getting more listeners who are connecting with me.”

THE ALBUM

Eric Bellinger (out on August 21, 2026) will arguably become the best album in his catalog, and just like his past releases, it’ll all make sense later. It’s been nearly a three-year journey, marking the longest process to make an album of his. That was because he wanted to sit with each producer when their schedules aligned. He worked with Oak Felder, Troy Taylor, Harmony Samuels, Khris Riddick-Tynes, Antonio Dixon, and more. One particular track, “Closure,” reminded us of a hybrid between Usher’s “Confessions” and Brandy and Wanya Morris’ “Brokenhearted.”

On its conception, Bellinger explained, “When we were writing it, me and Harmony actually had a long conversation. I was like, ‘Man, I have to buckle down on my truth.’ For me, when I fell in love and me and my wife got reacquainted, you just go. When you find that one, you know. There’s really no other way to say it. I had to just go guns blazing. Anybody that I was talking to or dealing with at the time, I didn’t say, ‘Hey, so I wanted to let you know.’ I didn’t do that. I guess you could say [this is] like an apology, just for leading anyone on ever. As a man, even going back and just cleansing any uncertainty.”

The hardest song to write for the 42-year-old, though, was “Just Like You,” a heartfelt tribute to his late mother. It was initially called “To This Day” and spoke to his ongoing grief. However, Villegas challenged him to go deeper, and he wound up celebrating his mother instead of mourning her.

Overall, the album will cater less to commercial success. “We didn’t go for any singles,” Bellinger revealed. “Like, normally I’m like, ‘What’s the single? We need to up the BPM. We need to make sure we got something for the radio, something for the club.’ This time it was like, ‘No. Which emotion did we not tackle? Did we tackle all the emotions? All right, we good.’”

With his emotions at the forefront, Bellinger is looking forward to connecting with fans more in depth as well when he tours the album next year. “The plan is to be able to perform the whole thing so they can experience Eric Bellinger in its entirety,” he quipped.

It’s also the first album where he has no co-writers or featured artists.

“It was almost like, to me, no one could be a part. Not this time. Maybe remixes, but this initial drop needs to be people learning me for real,” he noted, adding that his new home under Tamla/Motown had something to do with that decision. “With it being under Motown, I’m gonna do real music. I’m gonna really sing. I’m finna do everything. You think of the other artists that dropped on this label like Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Tammi Terrell, and now Eric Bellinger. I’m with such perfect company for what I’m trying to do and the legacy that I’m trying to leave behind.”

Bold Enough To Plant The Seeds

In terms of his own legacy, it’s bigger than his wife La’Myia and children, Elysha and Eazy. Bellinger believes “it’s being bold enough to plant seeds, but being okay with not seeing them blossom.”

He shared candidly, “I’m in a place where I know what needs to be done, and I’m gonna do it whether I get to reap the benefits or not. That’s for the cause of music. For the betterment of artist development, I’m willing to stand in the gap and help out 45 artists, whether it’s other artists that I’m writing for, my artists signed to my label, artists that are just looking to me as their mentor, people on Instagram hitting me for a DM.”

Having a record like “Heavy Is The Crown,” Bellinger opened up about the pressure associated with being “Eric Bellinger.”

Looking back on his career trajectory, he’s grateful for a humble albeit meteoric beginning. With “I Don’t Want Her,” Bellinger attained immediate success and admittedly didn’t know what to do with it. “I had a long gap where I was actually pursuing those things again, and I was like, ‘Oh, it ain’t as easy. I thought you could just drop a song.’ It’s not how it goes,” he reflected. “So, it taught me to appreciate what I felt. God gave me a sampler of what I could expect and what was to come. I’m glad I got to feel that because it sustains you and gave me enough ammo to push to where it could become reality.”

The RNB Tour

Bellinger is currently on the road with Usher and Chris Brown for their joint R&B Tour. He’d been in conversation with both men about opening for their respective tours in the past, but it never panned out. Like most things in his career, however, this redirection was him “being preserved and being protected” because “this time with them coming together, it’s just larger than life.” It also helps promote his own wave properly because he’s got the machine ready to “capitalize and maximize” this opportunity.

He further nudged that this moment with the men of R&B is long overdue.

“We need it. We’ve needed it for a long, long time,” Bellinger explained. “I feel like rappers come together. I even feel like the ladies of R&B come together. I think right now it’s showing so much unity that it’s putting R&B in a space where it’s cool again, and everybody wants to do it. For us to be on tour? We’re the runners. We’re the soul singers. It’s been too long where people say, ‘Runs don’t matter. Soul don’t matter. You can just put a vibe-y, airy vibe on [everything.] Impress me, bruh.”

The evolution of Eric Bellinger has impressed us undoubtedly. This “honesty hour,” as he called it, will hopefully open up some hearts and allow people to understand that it’s not as “easy” as you may think to be Eric Bellinger. His legacy is cemented, confirming that his name will live on far beyond a catchy hit or viral moment.

Genia tried to make cool music in the past. Cool in the contemporary sense of I don’t need anybody, f*ck love, I’m good over here. But it wasn’t working. “I was making music with that subject,” she says, “and it just wasn’t correlating with who I am.” The problem was simple: Genia actually likes love. A lot. “I actually do care about love, and I am actually very intense with my love,” she says. “There’s no in between. I take my love to the max. It’s all or nothing.”

That realization became Intense Lover, a new EP from the Def Jam-signed singer that arrives at a moment when emotional detachment feels like a prerequisite for cool. Genia has chosen the opposite stance. She’s making records about wanting somebody, missing somebody, saying too much, feeling too much. The kind of stuff people are often encouraged to keep in journals. She put it on wax instead. “I know it may not be the most, like, cool thing to do,” she says. “But it’s the most honest thing for me.”

Honesty, as it turns out, has been pretty good for her. The song that unlocked the project, “Miss Your Touch,” wasn’t even supposed to be the beginning of anything. Genia made it on a random day last year, essentially as an emotional release, with no big strategy behind it. She sat on it for a few months, teased it, and watched it take off. Her reaction was less I knew it than Wait, what? “This is the most simple song that I’ve ever done,” she remembers thinking. The lyrics were, by her own description, “super mushy and gushy.” People loved it. That surprised her enough to change the plan. “Miss Your Touch” led to “Can’t Wait,” and the project began taking shape around the discovery that maybe the version of Genia she had been trying to suppress was the version people actually wanted.

The rest of Intense Lover expands the palette. The two released singles live comfortably in classic R&B territory, but the EP doesn’t stay there. “Oh Boy” and “No Rulesss” have the glossy, high-energy feel of 2000s radio, while “FuhYuh” digs into something more funky. Across the project, Genia moves through R&B and pop sounds without treating any lane like a permanent address. And she can actually SING over all of it. Genia isn’t interested in becoming an artist whose music works only until the lights come up. She wants the lights. She wants the stage. She wants the whole show.

“I want to be an entertainer,” she says. “I want people to come to my shows and feel like they were entertained the entire way through.” That doesn’t just mean choreography. Genia wants the moments between the choreography to matter too. She wants an audience to leave feeling like they watched a show, not simply a singer perform a collection of songs. “I’m also a creative director,” she says. “So when I make music I can see the show in my head.” The lights. The stage setting. The choreography. The budget, she knows, has some catching up to do. “It’s gonna get bigger for me to be able to do the things I wanna do.” That’s fine. She can see it already.

Her standard is Beyoncé, which you can hear in the powerful presence of Genia’s vocals and in her desire to be known as a performer. Genia grew up in Victorville, California, singing in church, and says she knew from an early age that music was what she wanted to do. By freshman year of high school, the thought had hardened into a plan: she was going to make it a career. Her musical education was partly church, partly the internet, partly obsessive fandom. She would watch Tina Turner performances “back to back” and study them. Prince sits at the top of her list of influences, followed by Beyoncé, Rihanna, Drake, Michael Jackson, Doja Cat, and SZA, among others. The common denominator isn’t necessarily sound. It’s presence. Genia doesn’t just want to make records. She wants to command a room.

That same instinct showed up in the way she approached getting discovered. Coming out of Victorville, she didn’t have a neatly mapped-out industry plan. She didn’t know which label or executive was supposed to change her life. She had a phone, TikTok, and a very specific goal:

So she posted. Every day. Covers, performances, whatever she could make happen with the resources she had. Eventually, a cover of Deborah Cox's "Nobody's Supposed To Be Here" went viral. Multiple people found her. It wasn’t the instantaneous fairy tale she had imagined, and she didn’t sign a deal the next morning. The people who found her came back around a year later, in some cases almost two years later. The delay gave her something she hadn’t expected: time to figure out what she wanted before she had to make a decision. Eventually, she signed with Def Jam at 20.

That was supposed to be the part where the story got easier. It didn’t. At 19, she thought she understood what “signing” meant. “I thought that as you sign, and then you just blow up.” A few years later, she’s a little less naive about the business.

Genia promotes her own music every day. She doesn’t have a social media manager. She pays for promotion herself much of the time. The major-label deal exists, but the fantasy that signing means “the machine” suddenly catapults your career to superstardom does not. “I promote my shit,” she says, then pauses to acknowledge the profanity. “Excuse my language. I promote my shit, like, every day, all day. It’s me on the phone.” That’s Genia in miniature: self-aware enough to know she just swore, but confident enough to mean it.

She’s similarly blunt about the economics of being signed. The advance is not an infinite pile of free money. A couple of years into a deal, some artists can find themselves “damn near independent.” And she wants people to know that. Recently, she posted about everything she’d been dealing with during the year, including losing her apartment. Someone commented on a post, ‘But she’s signed.’

“If only you knew,” Genia says.

She says all of this without sounding bitter or ungrateful. She says it like someone who has finally stopped confusing the appearance of success with the experience of it. “A lot of signed artists may not talk about it,” she says. But it’s a reality for many singers.

A similar lesson came from an unexpected place: Korea. Genia recently traveled through Japan and Korea and worked with K-pop star Mark Lee, exposing her to audiences and artists outside the American bubble. The experience reminded her that there is always another room somewhere, and another person who hasn’t heard the song yet. “There’s a whole other world out there of people that haven’t discovered you or your music,” she says. In an industry where artists are encouraged to release a song, promote it for a few days, and immediately move on, Genia wants to keep pushing. Every day. Until somebody finds it.

Which brings us back to Intense Lover. The EP is about being incapable of feeling halfway. But the more Genia talks, the clearer it becomes that the intensity isn’t limited to romance. She is intense about performing, about promotion, getting better, and making sure the music reaches whoever is supposed to hear it. She even has new music waiting after the EP, including a song she’s particularly excited about, but she’s resisting the temptation to force the next moment. She wants to see what happens with Intense Lover first—who finds it, who loves it without being told to, what grows naturally from there.

Intense Lover is a bold re-introduction to Genia as the vocally charged R&B/pop powerhouse she is—an artist who isn’t afraid to embrace vulnerability, desire and big emotions while bringing the kind of commanding presence that makes a star. She doesn’t know how to care just a little bit. So she cares a lot. She loves hard, performs hard, and promotes her music herself.

And that’s what turns good into greatness.

From Blackstreet expressing the desperation of holding onto love in “Don’t Leave Me” to the tenderness of asking for a kiss in “Before I Let You Go”, yearning has always had a place in R&B. Another classic hit that comes to mind is Tank’s “Please Don’t Go” and how it captures the feeling of begging for forgiveness, and let’s not forget Anthony Hamilton gave us one of the most recognizable examples of longing with his plea for Charlene to come home.

And yearning has never been limited to men. Women in R&B have also given us the courage to hear what it sounds like when a heart is open. Jazmine Sullivan introduced herself with “Need U Bad”, a vulnerable expression of wanting and needing her lover back. Tweet shared the same honesty in “Complain,” saying that if her lover would just return, she wouldn’t complain at all. And we can go all the way back to Anita Baker’s “I Apologize”, whose powerful vocals and lyrics reminded us that admitting mistakes and opening your heart is also an act of love.

However, yearning in R&B music is not just about begging. It’s about revealing the truth of your heart, embracing exposure, taking risks, and having the courage to say what you want and need, and even to admit when you are wrong. Openness is what allows R&B lovers to see themselves and connect it to their own experiences. Love isn’t easy, but love can be healing when two people are willing to fight for each other, remain open, and refuse to hide their true feelings.

Many feel that emotional vulnerability and yearning are becoming a lost art in today’s music. Today’s music can feel more toxic, self-serving, emotionally distant, and more closed off. It has also become more sexually driven, sometimes without the emotional connection or conversations about building intimacy mentally, emotionally, and spiritually before physically.

Caleb Minter, an R&B artist from Bolivar, Tennessee, now based in Los Angeles, believes we have lost something important: the ability to communicate with each other. For him, it’s important to create music that gives us the courage to feel our emotions, allowing it to be a bridge to a deeper understanding of one another. During my conversation with Caleb, it became clear that his purpose extends beyond writing songs and creating music. It’s rooted in his faith and his desire to help restore love's true intention. It’s evident that for him, music should reflect honesty, tenderness, devotion, and the willingness to show up fully. “People don’t go the extra mile. I want to bring back music that brings back going the extra mile”, Caleb shares.

In Caleb’s new single, “Southern Love”, he’s not just bringing us back to the art of yearning; he’s introducing the world to a culture. Southern Love is an experience. It’s a love that is generous, devoted, hospitable, protective, soulful, and reflective. It is shaped by honoring heritage, family, and community. Caleb’s rich, bold, and heartfelt vocals bring those qualities to life in this record. His voice pulls on our heartstrings and invites us into a story that moves us and draws us closer to one another. The song makes you want to slow down and be patient, like enjoying a nice glass of lemonade on a hot Southern summer day.

Tierra Whack recognized that same emotional resonance when she reviewed Caleb’s “Southern Love” NPR Tiny Desk submission. Her response echoed what R&B music lovers have been searching for: music that feels familiar, intentional, and reflective of the heart. “...he just gives me a feeling like we’ve been missing”, she shares. She compares Caleb’s artistry to Musiq Soulchild, an artist also known for creating music that encourages openness and raw emotion. Tierra adds, “the song highlights simple times, good food, and comfort. You just can’t beat that”.

Caleb’s not new to being transparent and using music to help himself and others heal, learn, and grow. Recognizing the power of his gift, Caleb shares, “I have a gift of making people feel through song”. That gift became evident in 2015 with his record “Gone Too Soon”, where he walked listeners through tragedy and the process of grieving after losing his brother to gun violence in 2014. “That’s when I felt like I had something to say”, he reflects. Caleb identifies this moment as the moment that changed the trajectory of his life.

In 2019, Caleb’s journey led him to Los Angeles, where he continued to expand his gift by joining Kanye West’s Sunday Service choir. The move challenged him in new ways, but it also revealed another layer of his purpose. While Caleb shares, “sometimes I feel like I’m on an island by myself. I miss the Southern hospitality, culture, and food”, he reminds us not to focus on the place, but to focus on the purpose.

That purpose has carried Caleb across stages and experiences, from honoring Jon B by performing his hit songs in front of the legend himself to performing during Major’s “Why I Love You” 10 Year Anniversary Tour stop in Memphis. In 2023, his hometown of Bolivar, Tennessee, honored him with Caleb Minter Day, celebrated every July 1st. These blessings and achievements also reflect Caleb’s heart and his desire to inspire youth to live wholeheartedly and with divine direction.

Following the release of “Southern Love”, we can expect Caleb to continue bringing us back to the roots of who he is: his church foundation, his soulful singing, and his deep love for R&B music that keeps us yearning. That same intentionality will continue on his upcoming EP, Love Letter from the South, with the next single, “Transparency”. The record explores the many layers people carry into love, from trauma experienced through church, America, and childhood. The song highlights that we are all layered, and to build healthy relationships, we must be willing to be transparent and to understand the layers and experiences each person brings to a relationship.

Through this EP, Caleb hopes listeners will truly grasp what Southern living and loving represent. As Caleb states, “I want people to want to go to the South. I want women to want a man from the South”.

From live performances across Los Angeles to performing at weddings around the world, you can continue to experience Caleb operating in his gift and calling people back to a place of presence and togetherness. Yearning isn’t a lost art, and through Caleb’s artistry, it will continue to live on.

Syd, Steve Lacy, and Matt Martians of The Internet, through their appearance on the NYT’s Popcast, have confirmed that the band’s next studio album is coming out next year. The excitement with the announcement, being that it would be 9 years since their last release, Hive Mind, has stirred up ideas of what the band’s new sound could be in the forthcoming project.

Continuing to build anticipation for this new project were the releases of Syd’s and Steve Lacy’s new solo projects, Beard and Oh yeah?, respectively. These two album releases can make fans feel more personally connected, as they showcase the artists’ individual growth and creativity across genres, adding depth to their discographies.

Syd’s Beard, her third studio album and first project in four years, feels like a warm sunrise. An embrace of R&B mixed with stylized production influences from smooth bossa nova, bouncy afrobeat-esque sounds, and more of a realized version of Syd’s artistry.

The first track on the album, “Walls,” opens listeners to a world of crooning and yearning that makes you feel like she is directly spilling her feelings to you from song to song.

In an NPR interview about the project, Syd says she feels like she’s now fully “blooming” in her 30s. Through the music on this album, it feels like a flower blooming into a new era and a new perspective for listeners to peek into. Some of my personal favorites on the album were “Callin” featuring Blu June, “Always Be Mine” featuring Jordan Ward, “Bad Guys”, and “Any Time” featuring James Fauntleroy.

If I had to pick a number one favorite off the project, I’d have to say “Any Time” would take that spot. The collaborative production from Syd and Raphael Saadiq, the vocal choices from Syd and Fauntleroy, and the songwriting all keyed me into my favorite soft rock-tinged R&B songs from the late 80s into the 90s.

Where Beard feels like a sunrise, Steve Lacy’s Oh yeah? feels like a sunset that’s closing out a coming-of-age movie. Fitting with the inclusion of the first track and title track on the box-office smash “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” soundtrack, leaning more toward a grounded yet psychedelic sound.

The album carries this hypnotic guitar sound and vocal layers across songs like “the feeling” and “pure color,” featuring Erykah Badu. Even singles like “nice shoes”, which got expanded in the best way with “in your world”, and “is it cool?” featuring SZA, sound more colorful in the full context of the project.

“doom”, whose subsequent music video also captures the feeling of the song perfectly, is one of the standouts on the album. A grungy and angsty-toned song with Lacy’s silky vocals across the record, a song that definitely showcases the versatile sounds the album takes listeners on.

Jumping through genres of pop, punk, and alternative r&b, among others, Oh yeah? is another notch in Lacy’s growing artistic belt.

These two projects together also give listeners a slight glimpse of what their combined styles may bring to a new Internet era.

With both artists embarking on new journeys, whether self-assured or still figuring things out as they go, this can also help lay the foundation for how a new group album will situate their sounds, energies, and stories.

Whichever way these artists and the Internet go for their new album, it’s safe to say these new projects from Syd & Steve are great new additions to our musical libraries.

There’s a bargain at the center of R&B that acts as an unwritten rule or truth.

The man sings. He comes apart while he does it. And we love him more for the coming apart — not less, never less. That’s the deal. K-Ci Hailey built a whole career with it. Jodeci put out “Cry For You,” and a generation of grown men learned that the fastest road to forgiveness was to make the begging sound expensive. Tank inherited it. Tyrese inherited it. Keith Sweat, Sisqo, Boyz II Men, the list goes on. Every live show where somebody drops to a knee is that same contract being honored in public, thirty years later, by men who were teenagers when it was signed.

Kenyon Dixon knows the contract. Kenyon Dixon is the contract, or has been, for a decade. The guy you call when you want the harmony stacked right, the writer other artists borrow their best from, the living argument that quality R&B never went anywhere.

So the most interesting thing he’s ever done is rethink it. “No Jodeci” landed a few weeks ahead of the new album EGO RUINS EVERYTHING, and it is not a hard-guy record, though it might get filed that way by people who only heard the hook. It’s a man narrating his own vulnerabilities in real time.

“It’s about saying, like, you’re admitting to wanting to be vulnerable,” Kenyon says, “and admitting to all of the things that would make you a yearner. And saying, ‘Yeah, I miss you. I miss these times. I love you. I wish things could be different. However, I’m in a space right now where I’m getting a lot of validation, and people expect me to be a certain thing. So unfortunately for the both of us, I can’t really give you what you know you deserve right now, because I prefer to be ‘the man’ and play into what other people think.’”

He pauses. Then he puts the whole album in perspective in one single sentence. “My ego won’t let me be as honest as we know that I should be.”

Somewhere online this week, somebody is arguing that R&B lost its yearning. That the men of R&B aren’t singing like they used to. Kenyon made a record about why. But he also shows you that if you pay close enough attention, everything that people are searching for is right in front of their faces.

Putting Ego In The Backseat

Here is where a lesser album would go: ego is bad, kill your ego, healing arc, credits.

Kenyon isn’t interested in that. He gave the record a title you can print on a shirt. He’ll tell you flat out that EGO RUINS EVERYTHING is “the hook,” and he says the word the way a songwriter says it, meaning the part that gets you in the door — but the thesis underneath is more complex than a t-shirt ever could be.

“I think ego has its benefits,” he says. “It protects you. It helps you navigate through a bunch of crazy stuff. So ego itself is not terrible.”

Then the line I’ve been repeating all week:

That’s not self-help. That’s a man with life experience, who has been independent his entire career, has five Grammy nominations, and has had to be his own hype man every single morning for ten years — telling you that the voice which got him out of bed is the same voice that will wreck his relationships if he ever hands it the keys.

Twenty-one tracks. Zero features. The new album follows a character who gets asked one question in the opening four seconds (“when was the last time you were happy?”) and spends 49 minutes finding out how to articulate that answer.

The Detour That Paid Off

This album was supposed to arrive two years ago. Then Terrace Martin called about making something together, and EGO RUINS EVERYTHING got put on pause. Come As You Are came out instead, and picked up two Grammy nominations, and Kenyon says in hindsight that getting delayed was the best thing that could have happened — not because of the hardware, but because of what it did to his listeners’ ears.

“Come As You Are was a lot different,” he says. “There was a very progressive R&B, jazz, hip-hop influence, which is something fans hadn’t heard from me — but it was something that I’m well-versed in. It’s just that I had never done any music like that. So following up with a project like this, they’re now already prepared for the fact that they know that I can be versatile.”

Read that again, because he’s being gracious about something that bothers him, and bothers most artists to a degree. Being the “classic R&B guy” is a beautiful cage. The audience arrives already loving you. They also arrive with a list of demands.

“People come to me for a certain caliber of R&B,” he says. “I love that they know to come to me for a certain quality of music. But then it makes you feel like you can’t explore or make anything else.”

Every great R&B singer eventually meets this dilemma. D’Angelo met it. Musiq Soulchild met it. Mary J. Blige. The ones who survive it are the ones who figure out that their audience’s loyalty is not actually to a sound — it’s to a feeling, and the feeling can be re-housed.

Doing Whatever The Story Required

The real shift on this album isn’t sonic. It’s a rule.

“I told myself that I would do whatever the story required this time.”

Understand who is saying this. Kenyon Dixon arranges vocals. He’s the guy in the room who hears the third harmony nobody else clocked. His reputation is built on craft that musicians can hear, on being unimpeachable; never once turning in something messy.

And he decided the craft doesn’t run the room anymore.

“Usually I’m all about having a body of work and a collection of quality songs that are all about being pleasing to the craft and the ear, and to those who know music,” he says. “This time, I’m not making music to appease musicians. It’s not for people who understand music theory and all this stuff. I just wanna make music that makes sense for the story.” This album is for the casual R&B fan, just as much as the musicians who grew up in church choirs as Kenyon did.

Which is how “THE MAN” exists — a record with a knock and a strut that a lot of his people did not see coming, and which is, full disclosure, the one I’ve told him about being one of my favorites when he sent me the project a couple of months back. His producer Frank Rose sent him the track, and Kenyon says he knew it was needed immediately.

“I already knew what the story was based on what I felt from listening to the production,” he says. “It just felt necessary. I don’t think EGO RUINS EVERYTHING would be the same without that track, because there is a certain swag there that sets everything up nicely.”

The one he keeps coming back to himself is “NIGHTS LIKE THESE (COME THROUGH),” and his reasoning is the most quietly radical thing he said to me. He is a nostalgia artist. He has built entire projects on the study of eras. He is also completely done with nostalgia as impersonation.

“It feels like a record from the early 2000s that’s like Little Brother, or like Slum Village, Q-Tip-esque. It’s in that hip-hop world. Even with where I’ve played around with nostalgia, I don’t think I’ve ever been able to get a record with that feeling.”

For the record, he will fight you about the “best R&B era” conversation. “Even between ‘90s and early 2000s, I’ll fight to the mill to say that I think early 2000s is better. For my own personal reasons.”

Correct answer, incidentally. But that’s a different story.

He’s Done Running

The four RUNNING interludes — a motif that recurs throughout the album, which he explains was meant to let his fans know a bad decision was coming whenever it surfaced — were built the day before he turned the album in.

The original plan was narration by G.G. Townson, an actress and one of his closest friends. She opens the album with the question that haunts the whole thing, and she was supposed to carry interludes throughout. Then he thought about it and realized he’d done something adjacent on The R&B You Love.

“So being in a rush, one, and not having much time, but also trying to be creative, I was like — I’m looking at this as a concept album, and I want it to be cinematic. What’s something that happens in movies?” he says. “I started thinking about a familiar image that you would see repeated throughout a movie. So I said, how do I do that sonically? And I’m like, oh — maybe I just take something that they’ve heard, and we just score it instead.”

But here’s the detail that actually tells you who he is, and most won’t consciously catch it on a first listen.

“It was important to know with the scoring that as that interlude went on throughout the album, the frequency of it changed,” he says. “So by the time you hear it the last time, it’s a lot brighter and lighter. Because now there’s less running. There’s more acceptance instead of running away from it.”

He was under the gun, out of time, improvising the structural spine of a 21-track album — and he still built the emotional arc into the timbre of a thirty-second cue that most listeners will register only in their chest.

That’s the guy. The panic just made him quicker.

So, When Was The Last Time You Were Happy?

The album opens with a woman asking that question. Forty-nine minutes later, the character still hasn’t answered. So I asked him.

He laughed at the contrast, because the truth is the exact inverse of what the record sounds like: he was happy the entire time he made it.

This is the part that separates a confessional record from a constructed one, and Kenyon is careful about it in a way I wish more artists were. We’ve spent a decade demanding that R&B be diaristic — that every song be a receipt, that we name-check the ex we saw on Instagram in months past. He’s pushing back, gently, on behalf of craft.

“There’s still the art of being creative, so you still have to turn that into a story and make it interesting for people,” he says. “Because not everybody’s sole experience is something that people are interested in. So you have to find ways to be like, okay — what would make somebody wanna hear this?”

And then, the line that makes the whole album communal instead of confessional: “My story might be some of your story. It’s some of everybody else’s.”

There Is No Quality Problem in R&B

Ask most people who love R&B this much about the state of R&B, and you get a eulogy. I bring up the fact that some of his peers see R&B as something they need to escape to achieve “bigger” success. Meanwhile, an artist like Kelela (who is far more alternative-leaning than some of her traditional R&B counterparts) treats R&B as home, and treats herself as a champion of the genre.

Kenyon is on the Kelela side of things.

“I think it is unfortunate, because I do think R&B is looked at as lesser than in comparison to the other genres,” he says. “But if we break it down, it really comes to the fact that it has a lack of support. R&B doesn’t get supported as much, so I think people are afraid to have to work a little harder to get the support.”

And the kicker, which every nostalgia merchant should be forced to read aloud:

“Even back in the day, when we talk about how great music was in the ‘90s and 2000s — there was bad music there too. That’s what made the good music so good. You had the contrast. Not everybody was making the music that we love.”

The prescription follows naturally. Protect the weirdos.

“I like to champion original ideas, because what I’ve learned being in this industry is the stuff that they laugh at today will be the thing that’s moving the needle tomorrow. You gotta just kinda let people be creative, because that’s how we keep the genre moving. If everybody is making the same thing, it’s not gonna go anywhere.”

So What Can You Offer Me?

The last time we spoke on the record, he was sitting in on label meetings, thinking about what a major-label future could look like for him.

Today, he is still independent and is one of the more successful independent acts in R&B, thanks to his work ethic, quality music, and willingness to promote himself. I wanted to know what he learned in those rooms.

He isn’t anti-label, and he’s precise about who the machine actually works for. “I think labels are for superstars. So if that’s what your plan is, I think it works for you. I’ve built something so specific that it can get me consistent results for the rest of my life, and I realize I might compromise it by going to a label. Because when I sit in these meetings, and they tell me what they can offer, alot of times it’s stuff that I’ve already gotten myself independently.”

He’s watched the other side of that door too many times to be seduced by it.

“Look how many dope artists we get a project from and never another project,” he says. “They sign to a label, they don’t have proper motion, they don’t understand what it looks like to have to promote their own stuff. And they don’t understand that the labels expect them to still do the work and are hoping that something pops off on its own. And next thing you know, they’re dropped from the label and uninspired, and they don’t wanna make any more music.”

A beat.

“It’s a lot of dope artists that that keeps happening to. So I’m like — yeah, I think I’m good.”

What makes EGO RUINS EVERYTHING a great album for me isn’t the concept; it’s the discipline. A man who could coast on a golden voice instead built a room with doors, put a character in it, and trusted us to notice when the light changed. That’s a harder album to make than a good one, and it’s a better one to live inside — the kind you finish and immediately restart to catch what the interludes were telling you the first time.

A decade in, still independent, Kenyon Dixon keeps earning the respect of everybody in this genre for the least glamorous reason there is. He does the work that most don’t want to do. And then he does more of it.

Hip-hop has always been regional. Atlanta shaped trap music while Chicago pioneered drill. But when it comes to the West Coast, one sound continues to stand above the rest: G-funk.

Defined by buttery synths, deep basslines, talk box vocals, and infectious grooves, G-funk transformed hip-hop in the early 1990s. It captured the sun-soaked streets of Southern California, blending the grit of gangsta rap with the smooth musicianship of ‘70s funk.

While artists like Warren G, Dr. Dre, and Snoop Dogg helped push G-funk into the mainstream, DJ Quik carved out his own lane as one of the genre’s most gifted architects. A rapper, producer, engineer, and multi-instrumentalist, Quik’s music showcased a level of musicianship that continues to influence artists decades later.

What Exactly Is G-Funk?

Short for “Gangsta Funk,” G-funk emerged in the late ‘80s and exploded into the mainstream during the early ‘90s. The genre drew heavily from legendary funk groups like Parliament-Funkadelic, Zapp, The Gap Band, and Ohio Players, sampling or recreating their signature grooves and pairing them with rap flows.

Rather than focusing on aggressive drums or dense production, G-funk prioritized melody. The sound became recognizable through several defining elements:

• Warm synthesizer leads

• Thick, rolling basslines

• Slow-to-midtempo rhythms

• Talk box vocals popularized by Roger Troutman

• Funk-inspired guitar riffs

• Rich harmonies and layered instrumentation

The result was music that could feel smooth, celebratory, reflective, or intimidating—all while keeping listeners locked into mellow grooves.

DJ Quik: The Man Behind the Sound

Although DJ Quik earned recognition as an MC, production has always been his greatest strength.

Unlike many producers of his era who relied heavily on drum machines and chopped samples, Quik approached every record with the mindset of a musician. He played instruments, layered live sounds, and meticulously mixed his records until every kick drum, bass note, and keyboard melody sat perfectly in the mix.

His 1991 debut album, Quik Is the Name, introduced listeners to his signature style. Songs like “Tonite” blended classic funk influences with modern hip-hop production, creating records that sounded polished without losing their street edge.

As Quik’s career evolved through albums like Way 2 Fonky, Safe + Sound, and Rhythm-al-ism, his production became even more sophisticated. Jazz chords, live instrumentation, vocal harmonies, and intricate arrangements became staples of his work, proving that hip-hop production could be just as musically complex as any other genre.

A Lasting Influence

The influence of G-funk extends far beyond the 1990s.

Artists including Kendrick Lamar, Anderson .Paak, Tyler, the Creator, YG, and Blxst have all embraced elements of West Coast funk throughout their careers. Whether it’s lush synths, bouncing basslines, or live instrumentation, the DNA of G-funk continues to shape modern hip-hop and R&B.

DJ Quik himself has also remained one of hip-hop’s most respected producers, collaborating with artists across multiple generations while continuing to refine his sound. Many producers still study his mixing techniques, drum programming, and ability to create records that feel both polished and deeply human.

His influence often flies under the radar compared to some of his contemporaries, but among musicians and producers, Quik is frequently mentioned as one of hip-hop’s true perfectionists.

Essential DJ Quik Listening

If you’re just beginning to explore his catalog, these tracks offer the perfect introduction:

• “Tonite”

• “Born and Raised in Compton”

• “Dollaz + Sense”

• “Pitch in on a Party”

• “Safe + Sound”

• “Summer Breeze”

Why G-Funk Prevails

More than thirty years after its rise, G-funk continues to resonate because it was built on timeless musical foundations. Funk has always emphasized groove, rhythm, and musicianship, and producers like DJ Quik translated those qualities into hip-hop without losing their authenticity.

In an era where production trends can change overnight, Quik’s music still sounds remarkably fresh. His records are warm, dynamic, and full of life—qualities that make them just as enjoyable today as they were in the early ‘90s.

G-funk isn’t simply a nostalgic chapter in rap history. It’s one of hip-hop’s richest sonic traditions, and DJ Quik remains one of its finest craftsmen. His music reminds us that sometimes the most powerful records aren’t the loudest. They’re the ones that make you roll the windows down, turn the volume up, and let the groove do the talking.

Although G-funk reached its commercial peak in the ‘90s, its influence never disappeared. Today’s artists continue to reinvent the sound, blending classic West Coast funk with modern hip-hop and R&B.

Blxst has become one of the clearest examples of G-funk’s evolution. Songs like “Chosen” and “About You” lean into the same laid-back California vibes with a new formula for a new generation. Even Kendrick Lamar has paid tribute to the genre throughout his career. Songs from good kid, m.A.A.d city and To Pimp a Butterfly borrow from classic West Coast production while honoring the artists who helped define the region’s sound.

Jamari Shelton is a Chicago-based entertainment writer and pop culture enthusiast covering breaking celebrity news, television, film, reality TV, and the internet moments everyone can’t stop talking about. She recently graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a degree in Broadcast Journalism, and is passionate about telling stories that inform, entertain, and spark conversation.

By the mid-1990s, R&B was reaching a commercial peak. The genre was polished. Vocalists competed through technical precision, powerhouse performances, and immaculate production. Record labels wanted crossover hits. Radio wanted bigger choruses.

Over 30 years ago, one woman dropped out of Grambling State University in Louisiana and dedicated herself to mastering her art full time. In Dallas, Texas, Her cousin, Robert Bradford, sent her some beats that he was working on. Turning a bedroom in their grandmother’s house into a studio, the two created magic. A demo.

That demo was taken to the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, and landed in the hands of Tammy Cobb, the then-manager of Mobb Deep.

That demo sprouted into a hit we now know as Baduizm by Neo soul pioneer Erykah Badu.

For nearly three decades, Badu has existed as more than a singer-songwriter. She’s become a curator of culture, a mentor, a tastemaker, and one of contemporary music’s most influential creative minds. Long before “creative director” became a job title, Badu was building worlds around her music—through fashion, visual art, spirituality, performance, and an unwavering commitment to authenticity.

The Woman Who Changed the Sound of Soul

When Baduizm arrived in 1997, R&B was dominated by polished harmonies, glossy production, and radio-ready love songs. Hip-hop soul was thriving, and mainstream R&B was bigger than ever.

She didn’t sound like anyone else.

More importantly, she didn’t seem interested in sounding like anyone else.

With songs like “On & On,” “Appletree,” “Next Lifetime,” and “Certainly,” Badu blended classic soul, jazz, hip-hop, spoken word, and African musical traditions into something that felt both ancient and futuristic.

When Baduizm was released in February 1997, it arrived at a time when R&B was dominated by polished vocal groups and radio-ready love songs. Then came this 26-year-old woman from Dallas wearing headwraps, burning incense on stage, singing over jazz chords and dusty hip-hop drums like she wasn’t interested in chasing anyone else’s lane.

People didn’t really know what to call it.

The term “Neo soul” was still finding its footing, used to describe a new generation of artists pulling from classic soul while blending jazz, hip-hop, funk, spoken word, and African musical traditions. But even then, Baduizm felt bigger than a genre label. It wasn’t trying to recreate the past—it was reshaping it.

Listeners connected immediately. Baduizm debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and No. 1 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, eventually earning triple-platinum certification in the United States. At the 40th Grammy Awards, Badu took home Best R&B Album, while “On & On” earned Best Female R&B Vocal Performance. For a debut album that sounded nothing like what dominated commercial radio, it proved there was an audience hungry for something more adventurous.

Back then, people called it Neo soul because they needed a way to explain this new wave of artists. But nearly thirty years later, the “neo” feels unnecessary. Listen to Baduizm today, and it still refuses to sit still. Some moments feel rooted in jazz. Others borrow from hip-hop, gospel, funk, spoken word, or psychedelic soul. It doesn’t belong to one genre because Badu never believed music had to.

The Badu Effect

If you spend enough time reading interviews with musicians, you’ll notice something interesting. People don’t just talk about collaborating with Erykah Badu, they’ll talk about learning from her.

Long before Baduizm made her a Grammy-winning artist, those around her recognized that she approached music differently. Questlove remembers meeting Badu before the world really knew her, immediately noticing the way ideas seemed to pour out of her.

Badu has built a reputation as the person artists call when they’re stuck creatively—not because she’ll tell them exactly what to do, but because she’ll push them to think differently. Instead of giving answers, she asks questions. Instead of encouraging artists to chase trends, she encourages them to chase themselves.

If there’s one artist who embodies Badu’s philosophy, it’s Solange.

The two have shared a friendship for years, and Solange has spoken openly about her admiration for Badu, calling her an inspiration and someone who showed her what artistic freedom could look like.

“She is mother, she is sister, she is friend, she is auntie, she is chief, she is warrior of many tribes,” Solange said while introducing Badu at the 8th annual Black Women in Music ESSENCE event in 2017. “She is a beautiful reminder that you cannot put us in a box.”

That holistic approach to art echoes what Badu had been doing since the late ‘90s.

Neither artist separates music from identity. Everything matters. The visuals, the clothes, the live performances, even the silence between songs all become part of the story.

Over the years, Tyler, the Creator has spoken about his admiration for Badu and has sought her advice, while Badu has consistently praised his willingness to take risks in venturing into genres. Their mutual respect comes from a shared belief that creativity shouldn’t have boundaries.

Even in a tweet posted in 2012 to X, Tyler shared, “Pronounced Zhane; Brandy; Share My World; Baduism; Faith; Are The Earliest Albums That Shaped Me Musically Today. I Love Them.”

Tyler is known for creating new eras with distinct visual identities. Flower Boy, IGOR, Call Me If You Get Lost, and CHROMAKOPIA, just to name a few. They’re immersive experiences complete with distinct looks, fashion, stage design, and storytelling.

She Made Being “Artsy” Feel Cool

One thing I’ve always loved about Erykah Badu is that she reminded me so much of home. The headwraps, incense, jewelry, all things I saw in the neighborhood in Chicago. Long before social media made “having an aesthetic” part of an artist’s rollout, Badu did it.

I remember flipping through the channels, and I saw the live performance of ‘Tyrone’. It was so magnetic. It was the first time I ever heard of and seen her. Something about her just made me so enticed. It’s like chasing after a butterfly almost.

Maybe that’s why Erykah Badu still feels less like a distant icon and more like that artsy friend who’s always putting you onto something before everyone else catches up.

Jamari Shelton is a Chicago-based entertainment writer and pop culture enthusiast covering breaking celebrity news, television, film, reality TV, and the internet moments everyone can’t stop talking about. She recently graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a degree in Broadcast Journalism and is passionate about telling stories that inform, entertain, and spark conversation.

Nobody in the room is resting because nobody wants to. They’re high off the work itself. This is a city, she reminds me, where if you get sick, you just book an IV drip and keep it moving. She says it like a joke. It’s also a little bit of a warning. By the time the dust settles, she’s got a name for what the making of her latest album entailed: she was romanticizing being a workaholic.

That’s the album right there, tucked inside the process. No sleep in paradise.

But the grind is only half of Naomi, and honestly it’s the less interesting half. The other half is the part where she keeps signing up to be uncomfortable on purpose. Take “Light My Soul,” a song from the new album No Sleep In Paradise. She didn’t like it when it first came together. Too clean, too radio, “too mainstream for me,” she says, and you can still catch the tiny wince in her voice. Naomi came up on music she calls vibey, dark, and ambient, the kind of song you feel in your chest before you can even hum it, so a shiny pop thing felt wrong. Jordan walked her through it. She sat with it a little longer. “Okay, you’re right,” she told him, and now it’s one of her favorites on the record. She’s got a name for that whole sensation; the one where you make the thing that scares you and want to crawl out of your skin doing it. She calls it the ego death.

So let me put you on. The cool thing about Naomi Sharon isn’t just that she can sing, though my God can she. It’s that she walks straight at discomfort, the sleepless kind and the scared kind, and calls it paradise.

Refreshing, She Calls It

First, the new album is genuinely great, and I want to be specific about why. No Sleep in Paradise is her second, out now on OVO, and it follows a debut that critics and fans obsessed over. It’s lush. A little dystopian. Completely unbothered by the genre borders everyone else treats as law.

To understand how far she’s traveled, you have to know where she started sonically. Obsidian, back in 2023, was cinematic and hushed, alternative R&B laced with ambient house and little threads of Afrobeats and Spanish guitar, all of it built to frame that voice, the deep alto that had half the internet reaching for the same comparison. Sade. She’s heard it a thousand times. On No Sleep in Paradise, she does something sly with it. Instead of parking the voice out front and letting it do the heavy lifting, she tucks it into the groove and lets the low end lead more. There’s deep-house shimmer, there’s real soul, and running under all of it is this lounge-at-3-a.m. quality that turns out to matter way more than you’d expect (more on where that comes from in a sec). She built the thing to feel like “three different EPs almost,” and that’s exactly how it plays, drifting from ambient to mainstream-ready to stadium status without ever once stopping being her.

I ask her to describe her own sound, and she doesn’t reach for a genre. She says “refreshing,” then hits you with a challenge. “Who is just R&B nowadays? Even Drake, he raps, but a lot of his songs are pop.” She’s tired of the strict boxes, basically. “We’re so opinionated sometimes,” she says. “Even when I’m dropping something that has more genres on it than just R&B, people think I’m just R&B.” This album is her rebuttal; an expanded palette.

“Try,” the Kaytranada collab, is the one I’ve had on repeat this week. She’s known him for years, ran in the same circles. Somehow, they never talked about music until they finally got in a room last year, and it clicked, Naomi and songwriter Blush chasing it down while Jordan sat in. His fingerprints are all over the groove, and it’s the loosest she has ever sounded, which is saying a lot for a singer whose early reputation was built on control. Then there’s “Miss That,” the dance record, the “this-is-a-new-Naomi” moment, and she knows it. There’s the music video where she’s dancing like a pro, which leads to a small, funny thing she volunteers up. For years, she performed in latex dresses she could barely walk in. On her recent tour run opening for Doja Cat, she essentially decided she needed to be able to move on stage and brought on two dancers. “Try” is now her favorite thing to do onstage.

And then there’s “No Sleep in Paradise” itself, the song where the record quietly says the thing out loud. It reads like an insomnia song, but the insomnia is only the symptom. The city’s asleep, and she’s not. The room clocks the fire coming off her, and still nobody actually sees her. The higher she climbs, the less the ground underneath fits. That’s the whole dystopia tucked inside such a pretty title. Paradise, and she can’t sleep in it. Once you hear how the album was actually made, it sounds less like a complaint and more like a confession.

A Mini Toronto With Turntables

So where does that rooftop-lounge-at-3-a.m. thing come from? Rotterdam, mostly. And a dad with turntables.

Naomi Sharon Webster was born in Rotterdam to an Aruban father and a Dutch mother, which means the Caribbean and the North Sea have been fighting for the aux in her head her entire life. She grew up in what she describes as a micro Toronto or New York, industrial and urban and stacked with culture, and above all with what she keeps calling talent development. Her high school let you pick a theater class or an art class your very first year. The city, in her words, “kind of allowed me to do whatever I wanted.” And early on, she wanted all of it. She was a serious track-and-field kid, convinced she was headed to the Olympics, until theater got its hooks in her.

Her home was musical in a way that creates taste at an early age. Her cousin did musical theater. Her mom sings. Her dad DJ’d: “a producer first, and a writer.” He put her on to deep house and lounge music, Buddha-Bar, Café del Mar, and that zen is still the water she swims in. It’s why she works with Alex Lustig. It’s why her records breathe. Underneath all of it sits a broad palette she rattles off when I ask about influences: Tina Turner, Whitney, Stevie, Sting, Eva Cassidy, Babyface, Richard Bona. World music. Everything, honestly.

By four years old, she was lip-syncing Stevie Wonder with zero English, “making up my own type of English,” she laughs, comparing it to Simlish. She picked up the language partly through the music, watching TV in the original audio with Dutch subtitles running under it. Before she knew what the words meant, she already knew what they were supposed to feel like.

The Ensemble Was Never the Full Plan

You do not get to Naomi Sharon, the recording artist, without going through Naomi Sharon, the theatre performer. Before OVO, she spent years on Dutch stages, deep in the machinery of musical theater. Three years in The Lion King, playing Shenzi, eight shows a week. Dreamgirls. Later, Tina. She even did a run on The Voice of Holland early on, an experience she’s since described as the thing that taught her she wasn’t ready yet, that she was so busy panicking about whether the coaches would turn their chairs that she forgot to actually be present.

Somewhere in there, she went through vocal surgery, and the way she tells it, recovery cracked something open. If she was going to do something with real stakes for her own body and her own health, she decided, it had to be a decision she made for herself, not one a theater company made for her. That’s the seed of everything that follows.

For the longest time, she assumed making your own music meant you needed a record label and permission. Then she found out you didn’t. She dropped her first song in 2019, made it in GarageBand on her phone, took it into a studio to get it done properly, and dropped it independently.

“I was kind of done with working for a company,” she tells me. “If I wanna work, I wanna do it for myself.” Then comes the line she immediately worries sounds arrogant, but it’s just honest truth. “I saw myself much bigger. I was part of something, and I wanted to have a show that was about me. You don’t wanna be part of an ensemble. You wanna tell your story.” She’s quick to add that her theater years were beautiful, that she learned a ton, but you can feel how big that decision was. She walked away from something safe to go build something unfinished. But something that was hers.

First Lady of OVO

The OVO chapter is the part everyone already knows, so I’ll keep it moving and let the details do the work. She drops her first single in 2019 independently, and Drake finds it and messages her. It was a track called “Breeze” that caught his ear, and as she’s recounted it elsewhere, she was standing in a Zara when the message came through, certain it couldn’t possibly be real. He wrote back within a few hours, wanting to hop on a call. She stayed tapped in with his camp, and the deal became official at the top of 2023, making her the first woman ever signed to OVO. When he announced it, Drake framed it as the world finally getting to see the work she’d been quietly putting in since they met.

She refuses to treat it like a lottery ticket, which I love. To her, it read like a receipt. “A confirmation of the hard work I put in,” she says. She talks about the Instagram grind especially, the years of building an image and an aesthetic and the whole visible-artist project, because, as she puts it, “nowadays we find each other on social media.”

And once she was inside, the freedom is what actually moved her. Noah “40” Shebib, the architect of the entire OVO sound, she describes as a kind of wizard, someone who never pushed her in a direction so much as pointed at things and let her choose. She brought her own producers into the fold, and met people like Alex Lustig through the label. But the relationship that reshaped her music is Jordan (of Majod Jordan). The first time they got in a room together, they made “Waiting For You” in twenty minutes.

“To find that on your own label is very special,” she says. They work like “one brain” now, sometimes talking it out, sometimes just doing. She calls it a softening, which is such a good word for it, because this is an industry she loves that also grinds you down, and she’s hard on herself, and here’s a room where she gets to be vulnerable and have fun and stop performing being okay. Most of No Sleep in Paradise came straight out of that room.

Obsidian

If you’re only meeting Naomi now, do yourself a favor and go back to Obsidian, released October 2023, because it’s where the shape of her whole approach snaps into focus. The album is named after the stone. She’s told the story before: she was wearing an obsidian necklace and felt it get heavier as the day went on, like it was absorbing the bad energy around her, and she loved that an object could confront you like that, could sit you down in your own discomfort. Rebirth, confrontation, healing. Those were the assignments. In our conversation, she puts it plainer. “The difference with me is that I just write about it,” she says. “I put songs out about it.” That’s the whole deal she’s got with her audience. The diary stays open. “Life is very real right now. I find music very healing.”

That ego death she keeps chasing on the new record? It has a prequel. On Obsidian, it was Drake himself who nudged her out of her musical comfort zone and toward something more uptempo, and she’s admitted it scared her at the time; leaving that lane felt like leaving safety. She trusted it because she figured he heard something real. That leap gave us “Push,” the Omah Lay collaboration built on a Nineteen85 beat, one of the brightest things she’d done to that point. The discomfort is the tell that she’s growing.

In 2025 she dropped an EP, The Only Love We Know, and described it as lighter, carrying the energy of moving forward, of showing more of herself. Her words: on Obsidian she was “kind of hiding.” Read that against the woman on No Sleep in Paradise who’s dancing in the “Miss That” video and singing about being wide awake in her own success, and you can watch her unhide in real time, project by project. She opened for Tems in that stretch too, another room full of strangers to win over, another rep in the gym. Nothing about the arc is accidental. She has been methodically, stubbornly turning the volume up on herself for years.

She Is the Show

The commanding presence that Naomi Sharon has, the aura on record and the command onstage, is mostly theater. Eight shows a week for years will build it into your bones. “You get so used to performing, and to failing,” she says. The nerves are always about the wrong note, the dropped ball. Theater taught her to just pick it back up and keep going, to improvise through the mess. She’ll walk offstage and flatly call it “shit,” her word, and mean it, and also have had the time of her life. Both at once. Always both. That’s the muscle that most singers may never build.

Which is exactly why she comes most alive in our whole conversation talking about Doja Cat, whose European run she just opened. She calls it her TED Talk, affectionately. She’d finish her own set, decompress, then head up to catch the last thirty minutes of Doja every night, studying. What floored her was that Doja was pulling off the stuff Naomi learned in theater school, carrying an arena with a band and backing vocals and no dancers, just being the show. On her own off nights, Naomi would watch Doja find energy in anything – a fan, a bit with the mic – and yank the entire room back. “She is the show,” Naomi says, half in awe. You get the feeling she’s describing a mountain she fully plans to climb.

Greedy, in a Healthy Way

Which is where all of this lands. She wants the arena. She says it flat out, and I love her for how little she pretends otherwise.

The Doja tour was a challenge, winning over rooms full of people who didn’t know a single song of hers. Her own No Sleep in Paradise tour, kicking off in September, she calls “a warm bath.” Her people. Her music. The high of watching a crowd lock into a song in real time. And she’s hungry for what’s next in a way she refuses to apologize for. “I’m kind of greedy for the success I want,” she says. “In a healthy way.” The small rooms are done for her. She’s had a taste of the arena air. “I’m kinda spoiled,” she admits. “So I have to work harder to get there.”

I told her the music already sounds like it belongs up there, that “Another Life” and “Definition of Love” sounded stadium-sized the first time they hit my ears. She lit up. Singing “Another Life” in an arena, she said, felt exactly as big as she’d hoped. “Let’s work and manifest.”

What she wants from you, in the end, isn’t worship. It’s patience. “I’m gonna make more albums. I’m not gonna do it in the same lane every time.” You don’t have to love wherever she goes next. “But it would be nice if people would respect the journey.” That’s the ask. Follow the artist, not just the song.

No sleep in paradise. She’s fine with that. She’s romanticizing the whole thing on purpose, and after talking with her for an hour, honestly? So am I.

Artificial intelligence has officially entered the studio.

‘AI’ as a music tool has become a mainstream phenomenon in recent years, with the release of ChatGPT, a chatbot created by OpenAI in 2022. At the time, it wasn’t as advanced as it is today, but that’s changed drastically. AI can now write lyrics, generate instrumentals, imitate vocal styles, and even create entirely virtual artists capable of landing record deals and charting alongside human musicians.

For some, it’s the future of music. For others, it’s a threat to everything that makes music human.

As tech companies race to develop increasingly sophisticated AI music models, a growing number of artists are asking an uncomfortable question: Was my music used to build these systems without my permission?

Generative AI platforms like Suno and Udio train their systems by analyzing massive datasets of existing audio, sometimes containing millions of tracks by our favorite artists. Meanwhile, AI-generated artists are beginning to find commercial success, forcing the industry to wrestle with what creativity looks like in the age of algorithms.

For R&B, a genre built on vulnerability and raw vocals, the debate feels especially personal.

The New Gold Rush

Throughout history, every technological breakthrough has sparked a race for opportunity. Like the release of the iBook in 1999, forcing other tech companies to adapt to wireless networking. And fast.

Streaming changed how artists released music. Social media reshaped marketing. TikTok transformed songs into viral moments overnight. Now, artificial intelligence has become music’s newest gold rush.

Companies developing AI music software need enormous amounts of data to make their models sound convincing. That means feeding systems thousands of existing songs so they can learn melodies, harmonies, vocal inflections, production techniques, chord progressions, and songwriting structures.

The more music the models consume, the more realistic their output becomes. But many musicians argue that this process often happens without transparency. Or consent.

Unlike a young songwriter studying their favorite album for inspiration, AI can analyze an artist’s entire catalog within minutes, learning patterns that allow it to generate songs that feel eerily familiar. Even duplicate the artist’s flow and personality.

That distinction has become one of the industry’s biggest ethical questions.

SZA’s Breaking Point

Few artists have been more vocal about AI than SZA.

Earlier this year, the Grammy Award-winning singer shared that she searched an AI music database and allegedly discovered 238 of her songs had been included in AI training datasets. According to SZA, some of those recordings may even have been unreleased.

“Just checked and music AI has trained off 238 of my songs… If you’re a musician and you support this degenerate… you’re disgusting,” the singer posted to her Instagram story.

She has previously urged fans not to create AI-generated images or songs using her likeness, writing, “Hey, I hate AI. If you f— with me, PLEASE don’t make any AI images of me or songs.” She has also criticized the environmental impact of AI data centers, arguing that the technology carries costs beyond the music industry. AI requires large amounts of electricity to power processing chips and uses tons of gallons of water to cool data centers.

Kehlani Says “I Don’t Respect It”

SZA isn’t alone.

When news broke that AI-generated R&B artist Xania Monet had reportedly secured a $3 million record deal, singer Kehlani publicly condemned the development.

In a video shared online to her Instagram account, Kehlani said, “Nothing and no one on Earth will ever be able to justify AI to me, especially… AI in the creative arts, in which people have worked hard for, trained for, slept on the floor for, got injuries for, worked for their entire lives.”

Responding specifically to Xania Monet’s deal, Kehlani added simply, “I don’t respect it.”

Her criticism reflects a concern shared by many musicians: AI-generated performers could eventually compete for playlist placements, radio spins, label investments, and audience attention without ever spending years learning to sing, write, or perform.

Meet Xania Monet

Xania Monet has become one of the first AI-generated R&B artists to achieve legitimate commercial success. The “singer” made history by charting on Billboard’s Adult R&B Airplay chart before signing a reported multi-million-dollar deal with Hallwood Media.

Unlike what many assume, Xania isn’t simply created by pressing a button. Behind the project is Mississippi poet Telisha “Nikki” Jones, who writes every lyric herself before using AI music platform Suno to generate vocal performances.

Jones sees AI as a creative partner, not a replacement. Speaking with CBS Mornings, she explained, “Xania is an extension of me, so I look at her as a real person.”

When challenged about whether AI gave her a shortcut into the industry, Jones disagreed. “I wouldn’t call it a shortcut, because I still put in the work… I look at it as a tool, as an instrument. Utilize it.”

To Jones, AI simply expands who gets to create music. Instead of replacing creativity, she argues, it lowers the barrier to entry for people who may have stories to tell but lack access to studios, producers, or even the ability to sing. That perspective highlights why the AI debate has become so complicated.

The technology itself isn’t inherently creative, but the humans using it still are. When the pain weighs too heavily on our chests and we want to scream it out, we can’t. We look to a robot to develop it for us. But is that fair to the singers and instrumentalists who have trained and studied since childhood to perfect their craft?

Where Does Inspiration End?

One of the biggest legal gray areas surrounding AI is training data. Human musicians learn by listening to their influences. Prince studied James Brown; Beyoncé has cited Michael Jackson; SZA has drawn inspiration from jazz, neo-soul, and alternative rock.

That’s how art evolves.

AI, however, studies music at a scale no human ever could. It can process thousands of recordings, identify recurring vocal patterns, analyze songwriting structures, and simultaneously generate music influenced by countless artists. Supporters argue that it’s no different than human inspiration.

Critics argue that it’s fundamentally different because machines don’t simply learn—they replicate patterns at extraordinary speed.

The lawsuits emerging across the music industry could ultimately determine where that legal boundary lies. Recently, iHeartRadio enforced a “Guaranteed Human” policy that bans AI-generated music, synthetic voices, and AI-powered DJs across all of its radio stations and podcasts.

What Makes R&B… R&B?

Perhaps no genre raises these questions more than R&B. Great R&B has never been defined solely by perfect vocals. It’s defined by emotion. By the rhythm and the heart. A computer cannot mimic that.

Whether it’s Brandy’s harmonies, SZA’s vulnerability, Jazmine Sullivan’s storytelling, or Frank Ocean’s introspection, listeners connect because they recognize genuine human experiences.

An AI model can imitate vocal runs. It can recreate lush harmonies. It can even generate heartbreak-themed lyrics. But can it actually understand heartbreak?

That’s where many artists believe human musicians will always have the advantage. The AI conversation is no longer hypothetical. More artists, day by day, are discovering their catalogs inside training databases.

At the same time, musicians continue to use AI responsibly for tasks such as vocal cleanup, stem separation, and production assistance. The technology itself isn’t going away. The real investigation is how the music industry chooses to regulate it.

Should artists be compensated when their work trains AI systems?

Should listeners know when a song is AI-generated?

Should record labels prioritize human performers over digital ones?

Those conversations are only beginning. For now, one thing is certain: R&B stands at a crossroads. The genre has always evolved—from doo-wop to soul, new jack swing to neo-soul, trap-soul to alternative R&B. AI may become the next chapter in that evolution.

Because while artificial intelligence can learn the mechanics of music, it still has one thing left to figure out: Can you teach a machine to feel?

PJ Morton’s “last album” has been a few albums in the making. He fully planned on retiring as a musical artist after he released his magnum opus, Watch The Sun, in 2022. He said the same thing in 2017. “Gumbo was gonna be my last album. I moved back to New Orleans to start a sneaker store, and I thought that I’ll do music, but I just didn’t want it to be the way I survive necessarily or do it competitively,” he recalled before noting that as the reason he “swung for the fences” on Watch The Sun.

Then, he got the dream of a lifetime to travel to Africa, which led to the creation of 2024’s Cape Town to Cairo. Yet, there were still parts of his story left untold, of which may be considered his grand finale. He’s just not quite sure.

With his latest LP (and debut double album), Saturday Night/Sunday Morning, he’s making room for new dreams to come to fruition, adding, “If I don’t say anything else, I have said all I need to say.”

In this exclusive conversation, the crooner breaks down his layered beginning, the swift process behind the album, the dichotomy of being both sacred and secular, and why he feels Saturday Night/Sunday Morning could be a storybook culmination.

When did you fall in love with R&B?

It was very early still. I mean, the irony is that my dad’s favorite singer was Anita Baker. It was Stevie [Wonder] in the house. Prince, Whitney, of course Michael [Jackson]. I’m an '80s baby, and so I fell in love with it very early. There’s a video of me when I was two years old dancing to Motown 25. That was before I was thinking about music in a real way. I think about 12 or 13, a friend of mine gave me a cassette tape. One contained Donny Hathaway live on it, and one contained Stevie Wonder’s “Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer.” I hadn’t heard that Stevie before. I knew nothing about '60s or '70s Stevie, and that kinda changed my world. That’s when I started to look at it like, “Wait, this changed my chemistry.”

At which point did you start pursuing music professionally?

I guess about 14 or 15 is when I started to write songs for real. I knew secretly that I wanted to write about everything. It was more just the pressure of my atmosphere and my environment [to write gospel music]. What I’d try to do is write it as contemporary as possible, you know? That was, like, my first shortcut. My first placement as a songwriter was on Men of Standard, but I was secretly writing R&B songs. By the time I got to Morehouse, I met India.Arie and was able to place my first song outside of gospel music on that Voyage to India album. That’s really what broke me into it altogether.

Saturday Night/Sunday Morning is both the name of your album and your memoir. Which one came first?

To be totally honest, just the title itself came first. I was a marketing major at Morehouse, so I’m always thinking of presentation. Initially, it came as a potential title for a documentary that I was gonna work on, and I just knew that the name really worked. It’s like when I said Saturday Night, Sunday Morning to people, they immediately got it without me explaining anything else. And I [know] those are hard to come by. I had the name and the documentary didn’t happen, but then I was approached about doing a memoir and I said, “Well, let me just use it for that.” I wasn’t thinking of an album. I had just finished Cape Town to Cairo. My whole point was I’ve done a lot of music and it wasn’t as inspiring for me to go do another R&B album. It’s like, you know, all the marketing tricks have been used. Everybody’s heard everything I’ve had to say and I needed something that was gonna challenge me, excite me. When I thought about Saturday Night, Sunday Morning,the album version [was] where I finally do a gospel album [and] I’m actually singing the songs as opposed to just writing and producing them [but] still doing my R&B thing. And that really did become exciting and like a challenge. Before I had one song, it’s like, “Okay, what does this look like?”

How long did it take you to make the album itself?

Man, we locked in. The majority of it was done January of this year. I went faster than I thought. That’s why I [wanted] a Juneteenth release date. That wasn’t gonna happen at first. I’m like, “Well, if I’m moving this fast, let’s try to drop it on Juneteenth. It just makes sense. It’s the Black experience.” It really just started to flow so fast. Once I got inspired, I was on the move. I was done by the end of February and [handed] it in the first week of March.

Was this the fastest album you’ve ever made?

Well, aside from Cape Town to Cairo [which was made in 30 days]. It’s so crazy you bring that up though, because I think that is what released me. I used to overthink a lot. Then, I went to four countries for 30 days and said that I was gonna do this experiment and write and record a completely brand new album in 30 days. I didn’t have any time to overthink. It made me trust whatever was coming naturally, you know? So for this, I was just in that and I’ve never done a double album in my life. So yeah, per capita, this is the fastest album I’ve ever made.

Is New Orleans also part of the reason why you wanted to push for the Juneteenth release date?

Not necessarily New Orleans but, I think Black. The raw Black experience. When I started to think of this album, it was like, “Oh man, this is the complete Black experience.” Folks used Saturday [night] to party, decompress, but we were going to church Sunday to recharge and get ready for this week that we’re about to go into. I’m like, “June is Black Music Month. Juneteenth is right there. Let’s celebrate.”

Which side came easier to you?

My plan was to do gospel one day and R&B the next. [But] every time I tried to write an R&B song, it turned into a gospel song. Again, it was about not forcing. So my brain, and maybe it’s part of my OCD, was like I can’t do both at once. Part of it too [was that] I hadn’t really done a lot of gospel albums, especially as me. I think, for me, it was the newer, fresher thing. It’s stuff I just hadn’t touched on as PJ. I’ve done plenty R&B albums and it was more daunting because it’s like, “What are you gonna say that you haven’t said before? What sonically are you gonna do that you hadn’t done before that pushes you forward?” ‘Cause I always need to be moving forward in some kinda way. What ended up happening is I finished Sunday Morning first and then it freed me to go and do Saturday Night.

I did not expect you to just go that route.

Me either.

Even with Saturday Night being the R&B side, it still doesn’t fully cater to what contemporary R&B has transformed into.

It’s probably why I lean towards soul music. What Donny Hathaway was. What Stevie is, you know? It’s like that intersection where there’s some spirituality in R&B. What’s going on is probably what inspired my album Gumbo when I said, “This is the first time I wanna try to talk about things other than just love and relationships.” [On] “Sell My Soul,” it’s talking about life in a way. “Protect My Heart” is a song I’d never heard before. So I was drawn to a lot of those things that I hadn’t talked about before. But then of course, I think it’s important to have those love songs where it’s like setting the atmosphere. We’re enjoying each other; we’re enjoying life. It was bigger than just relationships.

Is the documentary still coming?

We’re working on it. It’s turned into so many things. It’s now starting to find some focus.

For you, what has been the greatest challenge and reward in balancing the duality of being both sacred and secular?

The sacrifice on the front end. It was that a lot of times I got looked over. I ain’t never been nominated for an R&B category at the BET Awards. I’ve done all of this stuff in soul music. I have six Grammys, but because I didn’t line up with a Chris [Brown] and wasn’t that edgy, I think some people put me on the other side. But then the other side were like, “He ain’t all the way us either.” I was just stuck in the middle and that was a challenge, but I started to embrace it. Now, I’m so happy it went the way it went because I stuck to who I was, and now I’ve been able to create something that is all mine. Initially, that was disheartening. It’s like, dang, y’all don’t see me as this; I don’t belong over here. I think those sacrifices are necessary [though] when you’re trying to do something that just isn’t the norm.

The reward is the fan base and the creative freedom?

For sure. I had given up on the fact that I would be able to get a Grammy or anything like that. Once I said, “Okay, this is gonna be what it’s gonna be.” I slipped into that mainstream somehow and got into that conversation. So it was almost like the cherry on top.

Would you still say this is your last album?

Oh, you tryna break news here.

You been saying that it is your last album for the past several albums.

If I’m being totally transparent, I don’t know. To me, this was kind of like a magnum opus vibe— where it’s like here is everything. If I don’t say anything else, I have said all I need to say. I watched that Billy Joel doc, and at some point he said, “I’m done writing lyrics. I’ve said everything.” For me, it’s like making room for new artists, new things. It’s like you don’t have to say something new to be relevant. Frankie Beverly and Maze is like my North Star. The way he toured for 30 years without a new album and my audience feels very similar in the fact that it’s community. It’s like family reunion every year. So, I won’t say that this is my last album, but I will say that I don’t know what’s next. I’ll always make music; I’ll always perform. I [just] don’t know that it’ll be in the traditional [sense].

I love the transparency of that answer. Has your dad reacted to the double album?

Yes. We ate at my parents’ house on Mother’s Day and I got to play them the whole album. My dad is my number one fan though. He’s over the moon. He was the one that said, “Look, you’re different from me. You gotta do it the way you do it.” On Father’s Day, for the first time, he preached and I was able to sing in Baltimore. We did a service together. That was really special on Father’s Day.

It’s like that was the culmination of who you are as an artist and a person.

It’s really special. And like, you know what I’m saying? That’s a nice end of a chapter. That’s why I don’t know. It’s like I don’t wanna mess it up. I certainly am not gonna block it. I love music. I’m a creative. I can’t not create, but I have a dream to own a hotel. I eventually plan to do a festival in Bogalusa, Louisiana. I’m still independent, and it takes so much to put into these things, especially today, to get people to pay attention, and we’re cutting through the noise. I would love to put that energy into other things. I don’t wanna be limited to music. I love music, but let’s not just box ourselves in.

Not for nothing, we’re all a little bit of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. We all have that duality in us.

Facts! That’s the whole point. I wrote this book called Why Can’t I Sing About Love? In the foreword, my dad was like, “Look, when I was courting your mother, I wasn’t listening to ‘Amazing Grace.’” Like, let’s be honest. The dichotomy of who we really are is a little bit of both, and art should reflect life.

Where are the bridges? Long gone are the days when everyone understood the power of a mid-song melody or pitch shift that would elevate songs to a new level. The verses and choruses of a superb R&B song are like rooms you spend all your time in. They feel at ease. You are aware of the locations of the furnishings, how the lights operate, and what to expect upon entering.

But the bridge? The bridge is the staircase. It’s the part of the track where the walls completely drop, the key changes, and the artist decides to take you somewhere you didn’t know you needed to go. It is the emotional peak of the record, the exact moment where the singer stops being polite and just lets the raw truth rip.

As streaming algorithms started dictating how music was written—demanding shorter tracks that loop quickly on TikTok and never cross the three-minute mark—the bridge was one of the first things the industry threw overboard to save time.

In an interview with Revolt TV after her Grammy win for ‘Folded,’ singer Kehlani recalled a story she heard Missy Elliott tell. “She wrote that the label stopped calling her to executive produce R&B albums because they didn’t want too much singing. So now, getting to see that everybody’s coming out like, 'Wait, you guys want us to flex again and sing and do three-minute songs and bridges and key changes?’ It’s going to be a great year for R&B.”

The Anatomy of the Switch-Up

To understand why the bridge matters, you have to look at how it actually functions during a song. It isn’t just a random third verse or a filler section to pad out the runtime. It is a calculated structural pivot that completely alters the track’s DNA.

If you’ve been paying attention to the underground R&B scene out of London, you know Kwn is a master at using the bridge to completely flip the perspective of a song. Take her track “Back of the Club.” In the early parts of the record, she sets the vibe. A slow jam made for when the lights tone down at the club. Towards the bridge, we get an atmospheric tone. The whole structure of the song flips. The production thins out, her vocal layers multiply, and the melody shifts gears entirely.

What makes this shift so brilliant is that it wasn’t even part of the original plan. The song’s producer, ZEEK, went on TikTok to pull back the curtain on how that moment came together, admitting that he originally didn’t envision a bridge for the track at all.

“The bridge to me is very important, because when I first sent this off I didn’t think of a bridge,” ZEEK explained. “But once Kwn said that she wanted a bridge, I’m like, ‘So she’s really tryna take this record up!’”

For ZEEK, answering that call meant drawing on his musical roots to build something that felt fresh yet deeply grounded. As a musician who grew up in the church, he knew exactly how to manipulate chords to elicit a genuine emotional response without overcomplicating the track. He wasn’t trying to overproduce it or show off with unnecessarily complex runs, but he knew the moment demanded to be distinct.

To pull it off, ZEEK and Kwn focused on a chord progression that felt familiar yet completely unexpected. As ZEEK put it, they wanted to come up with chords that would be “palatable” to the average listener but still offer “something that we weren’t used to hearing in R&B at the time.”

It hooks you with a melody that makes sense to your ears, but it twists the progression just enough to shock your system. By forcing that church-reared musicality into a modern, secular club record, Kwn and ZEEK proved that the bridge is still the ultimate weapon for taking a song from a casual vibe to an absolute masterpiece.

The Holy Grail of the Breakdown

Of course, we can’t talk about the resurgence of the bridge without honoring the absolute blueprints of the craft. And if we’re talking about vocal arrangements that can bless your ears, we have to talk about Michelle ‘The Bridge’ Williams.

During Destiny’s Child’s DC3 era, Beyoncé and Kelly Rowland were the heavy hitters who held down the front-facing hooks and the verses, but Michelle was a weapon in disguise exactly when the song needed to rise.

Think about “Cater 2 U”, “Survivor”, or “Girl.” When Michelle comes in on the bridge, the entire atmosphere of the track shifts. Her tone has this distinct, textured warmth—a little bit of gospel grit mixed with pure, velvet soul—that completely blows the roof off the record.

In fact, Michelle’s bridges are so legendary that they have achieved a sort of mythical, core-memory status among R&B fans. Even if we’ve spent the last twenty years singing the wrong words. She jumped on social media in 2025 to clear up a decades-long lyrical epidemic, writing:

“Y’all have been butchering the lyrics of my bridge in ‘Cater 2 U’ for years, and I’m sick of it!”

The fact that fans have spent decades passionately shouting whatever phonetic sounds they thought they heard speaks to the sheer power of her delivery of the bridge. When Michelle stepped up to the microphone, the literal vocabulary mattered less than the emotion.

Why We Need the Melt

A great bridge sticks because it’s a complete sonic pivot. It breaks the rules of the very song it’s inside of and gives you a moment of pure, unexpected awe.

Look at “Darling, I” by Tyler, The Creator featuring Teezo Touchdown, my personal favorite. The track is already a gorgeous, colorful exploration of fluid desire and rejecting the nature of commitment. All while bouncing along on this high-vibrational rap beat.

But when the bridge hits, the entire track slows down and melts into something completely otherworldly. Tyler leaves and Teezo strips away all the frantic energy and just sinks into that lush harmony: “Keep fallin’... Darling, I.”

In an X post back when his album CHROMAKOPIA debuted in 2024, Tyler posted his favorite moments. Noting, “the bridge of DARLING I is just…” among his others on the album.

It’s supposed to be an experience that completely sweeps you off your feet, leaves you a little bit exposed, and makes you feel entirely alive, so that you just have to keep repeating it.

Jamari Shelton is a Chicago-based entertainment writer and pop culture enthusiast covering breaking celebrity news, television, film, reality TV, and the internet moments everyone can’t stop talking about. She recently graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a degree in Broadcast Journalism, and is passionate about telling stories that inform, entertain, and spark conversation.

If you turn on the radio right now or scroll through the latest streaming playlists, you’re bound to notice a very specific, very icy trend. Everybody is detached. We have tracks dedicated to text messages left on read, songs bragging about how easy it is to replace a partner by tomorrow morning, and late-night anthems celebrating the art of the situationship. It’s clever, but is it getting played out?

Whatever happened to just begging?

Think about the R&B we grew up on. Like Jodeci’s ‘Stay’. He sang, “I’m sorry I left you, I left you crying. Since you’ve been gone, I’ve been all alone…Please, baby, I’m begging for you to stay at home,”

While my mother played the song every day, it made me feel like I was going through a devastating divorce at 10 years old and about to beg my husband not to leave me.

There was a time when music was anchored by an absolute, unashamed willingness to look pathetic for the sake of love. We had grown men in oversized suits sliding across the floor in the pouring rain, crying out for another chance…just like Boyz II Men's ‘On Bended Knee’.

We had vocal powerhouses screaming at the top of their lungs because the thought of their person walking out the door was quite literally the end of the world. There was no pride. No ego. Just raw, unfiltered yearning.

Once more, take a look at Boyz II Men. When Wanya screams, “I’m down on my knees, begging you, please,” you feel the sheer desperation in his throat. Or look at someone like Usher during the Confessions era. He built a monument to accountability and heartbreak, laying his flaws completely bare on the table because the thought of losing what he had was too much to bear.

Now, the dominant mode is self-preservation.

It’s a reflection of how we date now, sure. We live in an era of endless options and hyper-independence, where showing too much interest is seen as a tactical error. But R&B is supposed to be the one safe space where we get to drop the armor. It’s supposed to be the place where we admit that we are lonely, that we are hurting, and that we actually need someone else to survive the night.

When you strip that yearning out of the music, you lose the soul of the genre. Tank, one of the literal blueprints for 2000s R&B, stated in an interview with The Breakfast Club, “Men…You have to fall back in love with the idea of making love to a woman. You have to study a woman…in order to do this thing the right way,”

But if you look closely at the underground and the edges of the mainstream, you can see that people are getting tired of the cold shoulder.

In an X post, a user posted, “You know why 90s rnb is the best! They knew how to yearn! BRING BACK YEARNING! BEG FOR IT AGAIN !”

The appetite for real, heavy-chested emotion is starting to claw its way back.

The Cool-Guy Routine

Look at an artist like Giveon. When he reveals his signature baritone in “Heartbreak Anniversary,” it feels heavy. He sings, “I get like this every time. On the days it feels like you and me, heartbreak anniversary,” He’s letting you see the wound in real-time.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Giveon stated, “I was learning how to cope with heartbreak.”

Along with artists like Giveon, we have Brent Faiyaz and Bryson Tiller. Artists who’ve practically mastered the art of modern toxicity, but with a crucial twist: beneath all the slick talk and the player persona, there is a lingering sense of paranoia and isolation that feels incredibly honest.

But eventually, the facade cracks, and the cool-guy routine completely fails them.

On his 2026 album ‘Icon’, Brent Faiyaz sings “Maybe it’s a little bit rushed, but I’m falling in love. Hope that’s not too much, but this isn’t a crush,” Continuing to sing about the woman he’s with, even ‘fell down from heaven’. He’s dying to know how she feels and if it’s anything like how he does.

A complete surrender and a twist from ‘Gravity’ featuring Tyler, The Creator from his 2021 album WASTELAND. Here he sings, “Is you gon’ stress me out and cuss me out? I had my fair share of women; feelings don’t catch me now.”

It’s a beautiful moment of vulnerability from an artist who usually wouldn’t want to settle. It proves that no matter how hard you try to stay numb, feelings always find a way to force you back to your knees.

Screaming Into the Mic

We can’t talk about yearning without talking about SZA. SOS wasn’t a massive, record-breaking piece of art for nothing. It resonated because she was willing to scream her ugliest, most insecure thoughts directly into the microphone. When she sings about wanting to kill her ex, or admits that she’d touch fire for him three or four times, that’s a pure version of love.

Sometimes it feels good, sometimes it doesn’t. “You stay on my mind, I can’t regret any time spent with you. And I still wonder if you notice me, yes…I don’t wanna be your girlfriend. I’m just tryna be your person.” She sings on “Notice Me” from her 2022 hit album SOS.

Yearning isn’t dead, but it has definitely been hiding out in the shadows, waiting for us to get over our collective fear of looking stupid. Because at the end of the day, no matter how many protective walls we build around our hearts, nobody actually wants to live in a world where nobody cares.

That makes us feel like love is something worth falling apart over. And the moment more artists realize that vulnerability is a superpower, not a weakness, R&B is going to start feeling more like home again.

For more on yearning, read our Yearning Issue cover story with soul singer Baby Rose.

Jamari Shelton is a Chicago-based entertainment writer and pop culture enthusiast covering breaking celebrity news, television, film, reality TV, and the internet moments everyone can’t stop talking about. She recently graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a degree in Broadcast Journalism, and is passionate about telling stories that inform, entertain, and spark conversation.

“You who dwell in the gardens, the companions listen for your voice; let me hear it!” – Song Of Solomon 8:13

I. Da Faith

Can you hear it? This is the sound of a man playing an instrument that he’s mastered since he was sixteen years old; self-taught, a musical prodigy, the latest in a long line of artists involved in a practice that many have likened to heresy.

The Song Of Solomon is an outlier in the Bible. In a part of the text that is best known for its terrifying miracles and violent retribution, comes a section tailored with tenderness, an extended poem dipped in double entendre, blurring the line between the sacred and the sacrilegious, the profane and the profound, the ecstatic and the erotic.

It’s a tradition that has been carried into popular music for over a century. Think of Al Green and Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke and Whitney Houston, Tina Turner and Marvin Gaye, Prince: divided souls accused of having split loyalties between gospel and R&B.

This is the legacy that two sibling pairings fell into. The first pair (Donald “DeVante Swing” DeGrate Jr. and Dalvin “Mr. Dalvin” DeGrate) were a couple of preacher’s kids who went down a path that their father left behind. Meanwhile, the second pair (Cedric “K-Ci” Hailey and Joel “Jojo” Hailey) hailed from a tribe so talented that, outside of the Winans and the Clarks, could possibly be considered as the gospel equivalent of the Jackson family. Together, the world would come to know this band of brothers as Jodeci.

II. Da Fame

Following the release of their first album ‘Forever My Lady’ in 1991, Jodeci started touring all around the country, enjoying the perks of being newfound celebrities. However, after every performance, they would hang out backstage and hold auditions to invite equally-talented, like-minded individuals to their crew.

One of the first people to benefit from this initiative was a young Melissa “Missy Misdemeanor” Elliott as part of an all-girl group called Fayze (later renamed as Sista). Unwilling to leave her people behind, Missy brought Timbaland & Magoo along as a packaged deal.

After that was Ginuwine, Sugah (which consisted of Susan Weems, Rolita White, and a teenage Charlene Keys who would later be known as Tweet), as well as Stevie J and Playa (which consisted of Smoke E. Diggelera, Digital Black, and a gifted singer/songwriter in Static Major).

This would form the core of the “Swing Mob”, along with soulful singers such as Renee Anderson and Virginia Williams, plus underrated R&B producers like Chad “Dr. Ceuss” Elliott (no relation) and Darryl Pearson.

By 1993, you could already hear some of this creative collective’s contributions on Jodeci’s 1993 sophomore release ‘Diary Of A Mad Band’ with Chad and Darryl co-producing a few tracks while Missy and Timbaland occasionally operated as background features.

However, it wouldn’t be until 1994 that DeVante Swing would move his mob from a house in Teaneck, New Jersey, to a studio/apartment complex in Rochester, New York.

III. Da Funk

Similar to how The Dungeon Family was formed from the red clay of Rico Wade’s Georgia basement, the “Swing Mob” was christened underground as “Da Bassment Cru” by the bass of some thumping subwoofers installed inside a renovated church vault. A melodic crucible where its inhabitants did nothing but eat, drink, and sleep music.

With DeVante bankrolling this whole endeavor, his vision was to create a record label that was synonymous with a specific type of sound: Stax, Philadelphia International, Motown. If everybody played their cards right, then the basement of Dajhelon recording studio would be the modern R&B equivalent of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue.

From the little that (officially) came out of these sessions, you could see DeVante’s dream closely becoming a reality. Da Bassment is where Missy honed the skills that would carry her to both the Songwriters and Rock & Roll Halls of Fame. Da Bassment is where Timbaland refined his drum pattern and experimented with a variety of different sounds that would usher in a new sonic future. Da Bassment is where Ginuwine, Tweet, and Static Major would learn from the best on how to become their own stars.

H-Town’s “Part Time Lover” was made in Da Bassment. Jodeci’s “Freek’n You” was made in Da Bassment. Ginuwine’s all-time strip club and baby-making anthem “Pony” was made in Da Bassment. Although, it would be that song, in particular, which would lead several members of Da Bassment Cru to sprout up from the underground and discover a different route.

IV. Da Fall

Like several figures in the Bible, the fall of Da Bassment was precipitated by at least one of the three P’s: pride, power and paranoia.

While there have been interviews with several members of Da Bassment Cru talking about where it all went wrong, Sugah’s Susan Weems seems to provide the most detailed account during her conversation with Njs4ever.com.

It can, arguably, be traced to two events: (i) Jodeci’s tour with Bad Boy in 1995 and (ii) the arrival of Suge Knight.

Although everyone seemed to have a positive experience on the tour, the success of Bad Boy artists like The Notorious B.I.G. and Faith Evans made it starkly apparent to Da Bassment Cru that (outside of a couple placements on a few movie soundtracks) they had almost nothing to show for all their ingenuity and hard work. It was also the moment when other music industry executives took notice of the sheer amount of talent within the group and started picking their favorites (such as Ginuwine, who was able to sign a record deal with Sony/550 Music based off what they heard on “Pony”).

Simultaneously, the arrival of Suge Knight signaled a noticeable shift in DeVante’s behavior, as well as allegations of a hostile and toxic working environment (as colorfully described by Stevie J during an episode of Drink Champs). Others, however, would attribute the character change to a violent robbery DeVante experienced roughly around the same time.

Nonetheless, the camaraderie that once held the crew together gradually seemed to dissipate which led to several members disappearing one-by-one. First was Sista, who were said to have been dropped by DeVante after Elektra shelved their debut (4 All The Sistas Around Da World). Next was Ginuwine who, as mentioned above, left on his own accord. Then it was Timbaland & Magoo and Playa a few years after that (signing directly with Def Soul instead of through DeVante’s production company).

Sugah was one of the last original members to leave (around the year 2000), but their contributions would later prove to be the most consequential.

V. Da Friends

A demo tape. That was all that remained from Timbaland and Missy Elliott’s time in Da Bassment. However, that was all they would need to find the person who would change their lives: Aaliyah.

After the traumatic experience and ensuing scandal that arose from the creation of her first album, ‘Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number,’ Aaliyah was in search of a new direction. Something completely different, something that she could call her own.

In comes entertainment lawyer Louise West, who sent Aaliyah’s team a copy of Da Bassment’s demo tape with Sugah’s “Sugah & Spice” being the last track. When you hear the song, it’s easy to understand why Aaliyah gravitated towards it and how it became the template for her ground-breaking second album ‘One In A Million’: the laid-back, almost G-Funk-like beat; the playful innuendos that betray the inhibitions of an innocent heart.

Out of the ashes of Da Bassment came the rise of the “Superfriends” and the foundations of the modern R&B landscape. While we didn’t get the next Motown, we got something very close. We got Missy Elliott bringing in Afrofuturism with an inflatable black bodysuit. We got Timbaland populating tracks with cricket noises and baby coos. We got classic records from Tweet, Ginuwine, Playa and Magoo.

For almost a decade, the Superfriends ruled the airwaves, dominated the TV screen, and played a significant part in what many consider to be the last golden age of R&B.

Unfortunately, it felt all too brief with the sudden and tragic death of Aaliyah, the gradual decline of labels like Goldmind and Blackground, as well as the typical in-fighting that occurs after years working together in a highly stressful and volatile industry.

But, as the saying goes, “history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes”: the unique, unpredictable nature of time.

VI. Da Future

Can you hear it? Almost thirty years after its inception, it’s the sound of Da Bassment come alive again. Originator and innovator, finally collaborating together, the epitome of a full circle moment.

In a personal essay, I likened sampling to time traveling, calling it “an infinite feedback loop of inspiration and adaptation, generating something new with each iteration”. That’s how it felt when I listened to Sonder for the first time.

Similar to Da Bassment Cru, it wasn’t a specific song that introduced me to Sonder’s music; it was a curated compilation courtesy of Soulection Radio.

Over the course of two hours, I heard the past, present, and future of R&B, playing side-by-side. I heard familiar voices take on an ethereal quality as samples sustaining the soul of a sensational sound.

If Jodeci sang with the fire and brimstone of the Old Testament, threatening to bring the house down with their horny harmonies, then Sonder soothes with the cool, calm conviction of the New Testament, heralding in a new chapter in the gospel of R&B. That transition is Da Bassment’s legacy.

Without Da Bassment, T R A P S O U L, and the sub-genre that followed, does not exist. Without Da Bassment, OVO Sound and its resounding regional influence does not exist. Without Da Bassment, trailblazing artists like Kehlani, Syd, and Victoria Monét do not exist.

Like the best songs, one can look back at all of this and see nothing more than a series of coincidences but, if you read between the lines, you’ll find something more akin to divine design.

Further Listening

[1] Da Bassment Cru, Da Bassment Demo Tape (Discovered By Static Major Is Music & Curated By Confessions Of A Curly Mind)

[2] Sonder, Show #324, Soulection Radio

Further Reading

[1] Lauren Du Graf, The Gospel Of Jodeci, Oxford American

[2] Erin Scherer, The Show, The Afterparty, Da Bassment, 585 Magazine

[3] Natelegé Whaley, ‘Aaliyah’ 25: 14 Modern R&B Songs Inspired By Aaliyah And Static Major, Scene Serene

[4] Chris Williams, Origin Stories: Missy Elliott and Timbaland, Red Bull Music Academy

Frank Ocean changed everything with a Tumblr post.

But the music did the real heavy lifting. Just a boy, a car, and the internet that was heavily anchored to the ‘Tumblr’ aesthetic.

When channel ORANGE arrived in the heat of July 2012, I still remember where I was. I was 8, but I was old enough to understand what music meant to me. I had been diagnosed with depression, and music and writing were there to save me. Track 2 - Thinkin Bout You, was on my mind every day. I played it religiously. I remember one time I forgot the name of the song and went crazy trying to sing it to my cousin to help me find it.

But the album as a whole cracked open a door: for an album to be considered genre-bending and for Black artists to be open about their sexuality.

Just six days before channel ORANGE was set to drop, instead of a standard press release, Frank took to his Tumblr page on the Fourth of July and wrote a letter under a post titled “thank you’s.” The note wasn’t a calculated PR stunt. It was a beautifully written confession about falling in love with a man when he was between 19 and 20 years old.

In a hip-hop and R&B landscape that was still deeply uncomfortable with anything outside the heteronormative lines, that missive felt like an earthquake. The internet caught fire, but the reaction wasn’t the usual gossip—it was a massive wave of support that ended up giving a whole generation of people the courage to finally tell their own stories. By the time the physical CDs hit shelves through Def Jam a couple of weeks later, that letter was printed right there in the album booklet, making it a permanent part of the art.

I knew nothing about love at 8 years old, but hearing the album made me ecstatic about having a crush. It seemed like so much fun when you’re older and can relate.

What made the album a foundational pillar for LGBTQ+ visibility in Black music wasn’t that it was loud or preachy. It was the fact that Frank allowed queer romance to exist with the same cinematic, everyday beauty that straight artists had enjoyed for decades.

Before this moment, LGBTQ+ themes in mainstream urban music were often treated as a punchline, a taboo secret, or a tragedy. For example, Detroit rapper Eminem would often throw around offensive LGBTQ+ language in his music. Songs like ‘Criminal,’ to name one.

Frank completely flipped that script. He gave queer love a soundtrack that was undeniable, forcing a historically rigid industry to nod its head to stories it used to ignore.

LA Times music writer Gerrick D. Kennedy called it “the glass ceiling moment for music. Especially Black music, which has long been in desperate need of a voice like Ocean’s to break the layers of homophobia.” For ages, Hip-Hop and R&B operated under a strict code of hyper-masculinity and rigid heterosexuality.

You couldn’t say queer love stories wouldn’t sell, because channel ORANGE was a critical and commercial juggernaut. It debuted at number 2 on the US Billboard 200 chart, with 131,000 copies sold in its first week

Yet, despite the media trying to paint him as a political martyr or a neat little symbol for a movement, Frank resisted the easy labels. He didn’t want to be a talking point. He just wanted to write about his life, noting in his letter that he wrote the album simply “to keep myself busy and sane.” By refusing to let his identity be sensationalized, he did something even more radical: he made queer desire feel normal, everyday, and deeply human.

Love Without Posture

Take Durand Bernarr. If you’re like me and have been tracking him since he collabed with Kaytranada on “Freefall” (my plane take off anthem), and you already know he’s been in the music world for a minute. On that track, he sang about the terrifying, thrilling rush of letting your guard down and just dropping into love, but he did it with an effortless lightness that felt like a breath of fresh air.

What makes Durand such a massive force for LGBTQ+ representation in modern R&B is that he refuses to give you a sanitized, radio-friendly version of queer life. He even described himself as “the version of Little Richard that religion did not get to.” It’s a heavy statement, but when you think about it, it makes total sense.

For decades, Black queer pioneers had to tuck their identities away, camouflage their lyrics, or let the industry turn their flamboyance into a spectacle while stripping away their actual humanity.

Durand is avenging that history. On tracks like “Prepared,” he’s singing about “heated fellowship” between two men, casually debating who is going to submit to whom. He’s filling a void for a community that has spent years dancing and crying to love songs that weren’t actually written for them.

And the industry is finally forced to catch up to his fly. When he took home a Grammy this year for his album BLOOM, it wasn’t just a win for an independent artist who has been grinding on the road for over fourteen years; it was a massive moment of cultural visibility. Standing on that stage, he brought his full, unadulterated self into a room that historically didn’t know what to do with artists like him.

As he told Out Magazine afterward, it was about witnessing intersectionality being celebrated.

Pleasure on Our Own Terms

Victoria Monét, who has been holding down the foundations of modern R&B for years behind the scenes before stepping fully into her own spotlight. On tracks like “Touch Me,” she’s exploring the friction of attraction, the way a specific look from across the room can make everything else blur.

Her pen captures the nuance of bisexuality and fluid desire without making it a spectacle for the male gaze, which is a tightrope that Black women in music have had to walk for far too long.

During her JAGUAR II tour, I got to see her live at the Chicago House of Blues, where she performed one of my all-time favorites, ‘(F)riend (U) (C)an (K)eep’. Her performance included a deeply intimate and sensual moment between her and another Black female dancer.

What makes Victoria a vital anchor for representation in R&B is how beautifully normal she makes fluid love feel. When she officially came out as bisexual on X back in 2018 in a rant, she just let her fans in on her truth, later telling Gay Times, “If I should be successful, I don’t want to be successful based on someone’s imaginary view of me.”

She’s been extremely open about her bisexual identity through her music. In her 2019 song “Monopoly,” featuring Ariana Grande, she sings: “I like women and men.”

Historically, the music industry has treated bisexual women like an exotic fantasy tailored for straight men, but Victoria completely strips that toxic dynamic away. When she sings about wanting a woman, it’s not for the cameras. The identity belongs entirely to her.

Look at the remix of “Touch Me” with Kehlani, also her former partner. They mapped out the heat of a connection with a level of care and mutual respect that you only get when two women truly see each other.

Even with ‘Hate the Club’ from Kehlani’s 2020 album It Was Good Until It Wasn’t. While it was long after their relationship had ended, Kehlani sang “Drunk when I call you Monet, begging you to walk me out. Say you miss, well, I need proof. I came all this way to see you.”

By the time she swept the Grammys for Jaguar II, it felt like a massive victory for the community. She wasn’t just winning for her incredible pen or her live arrangements; she was winning as a fully visible, unapologetically bisexual Black mother who refused to compromise her identity to get to the top.

Jamari Shelton is a Chicago-based entertainment writer and pop culture enthusiast covering breaking celebrity news, television, film, reality TV, and the internet moments everyone can’t stop talking about. She recently graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a degree in Broadcast Journalism, and is passionate about telling stories that inform, entertain, and spark conversation.

Baby Rose painted it herself as a kid, because she loved Elton John and figured if she was going to fall in love with an instrument, it might as well have a personality. By then, she’d already been writing poems in composition books she’d hand to her aunts, who are English teachers. Her tight-knit family was the type that threw talent shows every Thanksgiving and Christmas and expected you to get up there. Her mother started as a songwriter and then, in what Rose calls “a random side quest,” managed a hip-hop artist, which meant there were producers in the living room and Triton keyboards within arm’s reach. Her dad promoted parties in Washington D.C. and played her Roy Ayers, house music, and acid jazz on the drive to school. Her great-aunt — who she counts as a grandmother — ushered at one of the biggest churches in New York, sang in the choir, and was always, always humming hymns.

“Foundationally, all of these ingredients really formed my psyche around music,” she tells me. You can hear every one of them.

Her 10,000 Hours

When she moved to North Carolina at twelve, she brought the piano with her. Her mom started driving her to the studio to record the ideas she’d been writing in the foyer. She didn’t put anything out for the world until around 2017, on SoundCloud — but there were ten years before that. “Music the world will never hear,” she says, the stuff that got her over the fear of performing and made her fall in love with being in the room. “It’s been a long time coming, for real.”

I keep coming back to that, because that’s what separates good artists from great artists in my opinion. Some artists are cool. They make their music based on what’s trending, what’s being played on the radio or in the clubs. They are comfortable with letting a label exec or producer tell them what’s good and what’s not. But there are those who have done their research and studied the craft. They’ve got the references from the ‘60s and ‘70s and beyond in their bones — and that music is always ten times better.

Baby Rose is the second kind, and she’ll tell you who’s in her musical family tree if you ask. Donny Hathaway, Amy Winehouse, Tina Turner, Stevie Wonder, Janis Joplin, Marvin Gaye, Frankie Beverly, and “North Carolina’s own” Nina Simone. She doesn’t just love them, she studies them — where they were, the feeling tones, the pain. “There’s a lot of pain behind a lot of that music,” she says, “but there are also stories of people who have overcome.” She looks at the already-open doors and asks what she can take and bring forward.

And then she says the thing that makes everything else make sense:

She thinks a renaissance is coming to meet the moment — pointing to artists like Thee Sacred Souls, Olivia Dean, and a whole class of musicians doing it the long way. And she’s grateful to be putting out this new album, YEARNALISM, in 2026, in that company. “God’s timing is impeccable.”

The Art Of YEARNALISM

Here’s where it gets interesting. All of her releases before YEARNALISM (multiple EPs and two albums) were, by her own account, for her. “They were all about me, and if you like it, I love it.” This one is different. “It feels like more of an offering to the whole current state of what’s happening,” she says. “Let’s not numb ourselves. I know it feels hard. But you gotta feel through it.” She’s talking about vulnerability as a kind of strength, love as ammunition — all the things that sound like clichés until you’re the one who has to live by them. “Now I feel like, dang, this feels like a deeper meaning than I intended,” she admits, and she sounds a little surprised by it, which is the best part.

The album title YEARNALISM is, for my money, the best one I’ve heard in a long time, and the origin is perfectly of-the-internet. She saw a meme that said something along the lines of “I majored in yearnalism” and dropped it in as a placeholder on her working files for the album. Her manager KJ looked at it and said, "That’s the title.”

“Yearnalism” is a play on journalism: documenting desire in all its forms, using her platform to show what yearning actually looks like. “It’s cheeky and cute and great, and an entryway into something that has more depth.” Because the bigger point is real. “Everything right now reflects late-stage capitalism if we’re gonna be real. Every man for himself. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. We’re forgetting, inherently as humans, the need for community, the need for each other. For love. For our own sanity.”

And here’s the flex underneath it: these are some of the simplest, most direct, least metaphorical lyrics she’s ever written, and she’s proud of that. “When I pray, I ask God to make things extremely simple for me,” she says. “So now I’ve made things extremely simple for myself to understand. And, you know, giving that as an offering to others, too.”

Though it’s not being released until July 10, I’ve heard the entire project and can confidently say it’s one of the albums of the year. Remember that family tree I mentioned earlier? It’s a perfect concoction of those inspirations, coupled with Baby Rose’s one-of-one, smoky voice and tone. It’s bluesy, it’s funky, it’s soulful, and it’s very much needed right now. Songs like “Dressed In Metal” and “All My Love” are bound to become fan favorites upon release. This music is healing and encouraging and meant to be felt.

Analog Cousins

The two YEARNALISM features, Leon Thomas and Elmiene, weren’t random selections. They were kinship; two more people pulling live instrumentation and analog warmth back into the room. Rose and Leon first connected during a jam session for his album MUTT, and she didn’t even know the song was making the tracklist until he told her they were leaving it exactly as it was. That album went up for Best R&B Album at the GRAMMYs and won. “That’s when I really had to trust the process,” she says. “Leon is an instrumentalist, a producer, an arranger, a singer. He understands every side.” When “Friends Again” — now her biggest song to date — came back from him, she was floored. “He understood the assignment so well. The yearning, the adlibs, everything.”

She met Elmiene at Tom Brenneck’s studio, the producer behind “Friends Again.” Elmiene was working with Tom and needed help writing something. She jumped in on sight, told him to pull up the next day, and they cut music, just playing around. Months later, she asked him to try something over what became “Is This Love,” and he wrote it with her that same night. The funny part: his first instinct was to sing it as a guy defending himself, trying to end things — should it be this hard? Rose wasn’t having it. “I told him, think back…people crying in the rain…anything to save love.” Because the whole thesis of the song — of the album — is that it can’t be one-sided. “Both partners have to want love to happen, and to last, and to make it.” She laughs. “We’re trying to save some relationships here.”

That’s also why she’s created a communal safe space called Yearners Anonymous to coincide with this album rollout. A few cities, starting in London: she plays the record, opens the floor, and people just have real conversations. “A revolution isn’t started in a big wave,” she says. “It starts with small conversations and small gatherings.” She wants people to leave having made a friend, less alone than when they walked in. And the more you talk to her, the more you understand it’s not a campaign — it’s who she’s always been. “If you know my music, you know I’ve been radically vulnerable this whole time. Yearning is not a new thing for me.” Her fans aren’t just fans to her. “They’re really friends. I just haven’t met you in person yet.”

Black Soul Reigns Supreme

I asked her about something that’s constantly a topic of conversation online: the way Black singers get filed under R&B by default, no matter what music they’re actually making. She doesn’t flinch. She nods back to redlining. Then she flips it. “Soul music birthed most of these genres, rock and roll included. When you look at the origin of a lot of these genres, Black people have been the origin.” So the reclamation happening now — Beyoncé and Shaboozey in country music, Olivia Dean walking into pop like she owns the room — isn’t a stunt, isn’t a point being scored. “It’s not a thing of sticking it to anybody. We’re just fire like that. We’re boundless.”

She’s been bluesy and soulful since she was twelve, she says; she just “had to let that catch up.” Along the way, she made pop, country, rock, and R&B, and what she took from all of it was appreciation and energy.

“Take away the words, take away the melody — what kind of emotion is that bringing forward?” She’s in service of the song. If a song calls for agitation, she’ll lean into alt and rock. If it’s meant to be more sobering, she’ll lean into folk and just guitar, nothing else. She refuses the box outright: “I’m not looking at it like, ‘I’m a young Black girl, I gotta stay here.’ No. Life is short. I gotta go crazy — if not for me, for everybody before me.”

Then she runs the receipts, laughing the whole way through. Tina Turner won GRAMMYs for Best Rock Vocal Performance and Best Pop Vocal Performance in 1985, and was nominated in R&B categories that same year. “The doors have already been opened if you do your research.” But after Tina? “Brittany Howard, okay — but that’s twenty years later.” Beyoncé won Best Country Album in 2025, and the response by the Recording Academy was to invent a whole new category for “contemporary” country music. “They were like, never again.” She laughs because that’s the move. “I have to laugh at it, as most Black people do. We make jokes out of it.” When we do something, we tend to be the best in the world at it, she points out — golf, tennis, take your pick. “No shade. It just is what it is, historically.” And then, very calmly: “I gotta pay attention to what’s of service to me, not what’s gonna bring me down. God is bigger than all of that.”

Baby Rose and Olivia Dean

At this point in our conversation, Rose drops the news to me that she’ll be joining Olivia Dean’s The Art Of Loving arena tour across the United States, and we fan out for a cool 7 minutes.

I fell to my knees,” she says. “I was literally like, are you kidding me?”

Her mom saw it coming. She used to tell Rose she’d be playing arenas one day, and Rose would push back, “Mom, that is way too much pressure. People just wanna hear me in smaller rooms, more intimate.” Her mother didn’t budge: I get that, but this is what you’re gonna be doing.

What gets her isn’t its size, though. It’s how it happened. Olivia came to Rose’s show at London’s Jazz Cafe back in 2024 — by herself, as a fan — and bought a vinyl and took a picture, back when she was still playing smaller rooms, too. Two years later, she’s selling out Madison Square Garden four nights in a row, and she’s bringing Baby Rose along. “It feels historic,” Rose says. “Two Black women doing Madison Square Garden four nights in a row.” She sits with it for a second, then finds the word she wants: alignment.

She’s ready for the room this time. Giveon took her through European arenas earlier this year, so the scale is “out of my system,” and now she just wants to enjoy it. “I’m gonna go up there, be myself, and have a ball.” Thirty minutes a night. “We could do a lot with that.”

And the kinship is the whole point. Olivia is the kind of artist Rose recognizes on sight — someone who’s done the research, who gives credit where it’s due (they bond over Carole King), who leads with “pride to the side, be the man I need.” That’s the Renaissance she keeps pointing to, made literal. Two artists who care about the process, out here restoring, in her words, a little love in the chat.

Study Yourself

I asked what she hoped people would carry away from the record, and she gave me something closer to a sermon than a soundbite.

YEARNALISM, it turns out, is partly literal. She’s been studying herself: her triggers, what motivates her, the habits she’s keeping and the ones she’s letting go of, the relationships, the things worth holding on to. She’s even rebuilt her definition of success around it. “One of my markers of success is when I look at the fact that my mom is here, my brother’s here, everybody’s healthy, and I can go home to Atlanta, to Lilburn, and just be in the sunroom. I feel successful. I feel at peace. Peace is a marker of success for me.”

She wants you to study yourself, too. To question anything that makes you numb. “The opposite of love is not hate or anger. It’s apathy. When you give up, and you stop caring about things, that’s when you’re denying yourself of love.” Anger, at least, points somewhere. It means you still want something. You still yearn for more.

We don’t get a guide for any of this, she says. “We just have podcasts and TikToks, and everybody’s a therapist, and you’re like, OMG am I doing this all wrong?” So she’s offering the next best thing: a record that asks the questions out loud, and ends — like she ended our conversation — with all her love.

Credits:
Photographer: Louisa Meng
Writer: Dante Nicholas
Executive Producer: Dante Nicholas

On Tuesday, June 2, pgLang announced its first female signee. That’s Kendrick Lamar and Dave Free’s company, and the woman is Imani Imani, and the way they announced it was by just dropping her album. No rollout. Eleven tracks, called Papercut, were out on a Tuesday, which was a bold move. But it was a move that allowed the album three days of chatter and buzz before the rest of the week’s releases caught up.

For four years, the roster was basically two cousins (Kendrick and Baby Keem) and rapper Tanna Leone. So the first woman they sign, the first artist whose whole instrument is her voice, is someone no one saw coming. It’s the most interesting move I’ve seen in a while.

Try to look her up, and the trail goes cold fast. Her name is Imani Ram; she used to go by Imani Selina, and before this week, she had zero monthly listeners on Spotify. Not a few. Zero. Her Instagram technically existed since early 2024, but most of the grid was added in the last couple of days. According to what we could find online, she hails from a small town in the Netherlands, and at one point called Amsterdam home.

If the voice rings a bell, you’re either super into fashion or super into Kendrick Lamar. Back in January 2024, an unreleased Kendrick song called “I Feel Something” played at Chanel’s couture show in Paris, and that was her on it. One of her own songs, “Snatch,” also opened the presentation. So she was scoring Chanel more than two years before she had a single track on streaming under her own name. Build it in private, say nothing, wait until the work can talk – that’s a winning formula when the music is just as good as the company you keep.

“Snatch” is on Papercut. So is “Mindgames,” which got the debut music video, directed by Keanna Williams and Neal Farmer.

I’ve had the album the same number of hours you have, so this isn’t a verdict. But my early read is: this is a great alternative-leaning R&B project that slips into cool pop (“Slideee”) and electronic sounds (“Come Together”) without losing its center. Looking at the credits reveals that she's worked with people like James Fauntleroy and Sam Dew on a couple of songs. But every song lists two names as producers and writers: Imani and her close collaborator, Daan Zinkhaan.

She’ll get explained eventually. The interviews & performances & co-signs are coming. For now, R&B has something rare: a real cold intro. Papercut is out wherever you listen. Play it before everyone tells you how to hear it.

When you ask Saint Harison what makes a song good, he talks about the 20-minute ones, the ones that are easy to write because some part of him already knows what needs to be said. He talks about working alone in a room until the right feeling shows up. He talks about his grandfather, who was in a band in the 1960s called Bryan Fisher and the Radiers. He introduced Saint to music when Saint was 7 years old, and he loved Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, and Dean Martin — the kind of raw, storied voices that made you feel something before you understood the lyrics.

He grew up on those voices. He became one of them. And now, a couple of EPs and a few terrible boyfriends later, he’s still doing the same thing he decided to do as a kid: trying to have an impact on people’s lives the way a song once had on his.

Southampton Beginnings

Saint was 12 years old. He & his mother were sitting in the reception area of a safe house for women and children fleeing abusive homes when Adele’s “Chasing Pavements” came on.

“I just thought, Oh my God. I have to write songs. I have to have an impact on people’s lives in the way that this Adele song has had on my life.“

He says it quickly and matter-of-factly. The way people talk about things they’ve long since made peace with. But let’s sit with that for a second. Because that’s the story, really — the Saint Harison story — compressed into one waiting room moment: heartbreak, a voice cutting through, and a kid deciding that music was the only reasonable response.

Years later, that kid from Southampton (a port city on England’s south coast) is one of R&B’s most compelling new voices. His debut EP ‘Lost a Friend’ quietly crossed 170 million streams. His COLORS performance of “ego talkin’” sparked a TikTok challenge that racked up over 200 million views. SZA, Justin Bieber, H.E.R., and Elton John all stopped to take notice of him early on. He’s been named Apple Music’s global Up Next artist. Rolling Stone highlighted him on their Future of Music 2026 watchlist. Saint has been primed for this moment.

But before any of the music happened, he was a teacher.

After studying musical theatre as a teen — doing gigs at Ronnie Scott’s and Troy Bar on the side, half-committed to both paths — Saint moved back to Southampton with his mom when life in London got too expensive. He was 20. He started teaching, working with young people, and building a life that made sense even if it wasn’t the one he’d imagined.

“I kind of made peace with my life as a teacher,” he says. “I didn’t really think this was gonna be my reality.”

Then the COVID-19 lockdown happened. He posted a TikTok cover of Jazmine Sullivan’s “Pick Up Your Feelings.” Jazmine herself reposted it. And then Justin Bieber found him, among others. He wasn’t ready for that viral moment (who would be?). He didn’t even have an Instagram account at the time, as teachers at his school weren’t allowed to have one.

“I had to make an Instagram,” he laughs. “And then it kind of, you know, long story short, kind of led me to here.”

He says “long story short” as if it’s simple. Like going viral a few times, meeting managers on Zoom, flying to LA to write your debut project, and becoming one of the most talked-about voices in contemporary R&B is just a thing that happens. But that’s part of what makes Saint Harison so compelling to me — there’s an absence of performance around his own story. He’s not hyperbolizing. He’s just telling me what happened with a humbleness that we all love to see in our favorite singers.

Ego Talkin

The moment things truly started to break through for Saint was with the song “ego talkin’”, which wasn’t even supposed to be a single.

He wrote it on Zoom — still in the UK, still locked down — with producers Deputy and Boy Matthews. He liked it, but he was deep in making his debut EP and wasn’t treating it like anything special. Then COLORS called and asked him to perform on their platform. He chose to perform “ego talkin” because it was the most vocally demanding thing he had, and he wanted to show off his vocals. But the night before the performance dropped, he nearly killed off the whole thing himself.

“I got the video back, and I hated it. I thought I sounded so bad, and I was texting my managers — ‘I just can’t, I can’t do it.’ And they were like, ‘Well it’s already done.’”

He watches it now, three years later, and can’t figure out what he was so worried about. That’s the thing about Saint Harison and his voice — he treats it like something he’s still figuring out, while the rest of us have already decided it’s extraordinary. The riffs on “ego talkin’” aren’t just decoration; they carry weight. Every run is a feeling that couldn’t fit inside a regular lyric.

A few friends did a riff challenge to the song. Then Tori Kelly did it. Then it became a phenomenon. “It’s so random,” he says. “Ego talkin’ wasn’t even a single. I think that can give you an insight into how random it felt at the time.”

Random, yes. But also: earned. There’s something about Saint’s voice that stops people. It’s the combination of technical precision and the emotional rawness sitting right next to each other, neither one canceling out the other. When Jazmine Sullivan reposted his cover, it wasn’t by mistake. When Elton John called him one of his favorite new artists, it wasn’t hype. It was meant to be, and meant to happen for him.

Enter: Ghosted

Ghosted — the new EP that just dropped — is named after its opening track, which Saint wrote almost immediately after the ‘Lost a Friend’ EP came out. He knew sonically where he wanted to go: raw lyrics over ‘50s and ‘60s-inflected R&B sound. Less polished, less pop-leaning, more alternative. A little less structure. A little more honest.

“The songs I spend eight hours on are shit,” he says, with the certainty of someone who’s learned this the hard way. “The ones I spend 20 minutes on are the ones that wind up on the project.”

He wasn’t trying to write Ghosted the EP. He was trying to write an album. But over three years of what he describes, with a perfectly dry laugh, as having “apparently found the worst men on earth,” the project assembled itself. Eight songs that told a story. A complete chapter he didn’t plan to write, but couldn’t stop living.

The song “Panic Room” (his favorite on the project) is actually two one-minute pieces, born from a period when even writing a full song felt like too much pressure. He’d just write fragments. Release valves. “I was writing one-minute things,” he says. “I felt so pressured by the idea of trying to write a full song right then.” The fact that two of those fragments made it onto the project intact says something about what Ghosted is doing. It’s letting the shape of feelings determine the shape of the music, not the other way around.

He wrote more of this project alone and in small rooms than anything before it. No rooms with 30 people — just him, or maybe one other person, pouring it out.

“If I step into a room where there are more than five people, I want to cry. I feel more connected to it that way,” he says. “It feels more like a real child,” he says, referring to his music. And based on the results – his single “bad” just hit #1 on R&B Radio in the US – his approach works.

Queer Identity Within R&B

It’s the Pride Issue, so we talk about it. I ask, “Being a queer artist in R&B – how have you been able to navigate the industry as your most authentic self?”

Saint points to what’s happening around him. Victoria Monét being openly herself. Kehlani. Destin Conrad. There’s been a general shift in R&B over the past few years towards being more honest about who’s actually in the room, who’s actually writing these songs about love and heartbreak. He feels genuinely proud to be part of that.

“In R&B especially, we’re seeing so many more artists just be themselves. And I feel very proud to be a queer artist in R&B. It’s something that — as you said — 10, 20 years ago we wouldn’t be talking about. So it feels very special.”

When I mention that, looking at the R&B landscape right now — Saint, Sasha Keable, Kehlani, Destin Conrad, Kwn, Durand Bernarr, etc. — the queer artists are genuinely making some of the best R&B on the planet, he says something that makes us both laugh. “It’s because gay relationships are terrible. We’re horrible people.”

He means it affectionately, the way you can only mean something like that when you’ve lived it and written about it and somehow turned the wreckage into something people across the world can relate to and laugh about later.

What’s In The UK Water?

The UK R&B thing is real. Saint knows it. He’s careful, though, not to make it sound like a new discovery. Because it isn’t.

“The UK has always had fucking incredible people. Jaz Karis, Mahalia. Even before that, there were so many people. The UK’s always had incredible R&B acts.”

What’s different now, he thinks, is recognition. And also a specific absence of it back home. “The UK has some catching up to do with recognizing R&B in general — and awarding it. I think that’s why so many UK artists move out here [to the U.S.], because people out here get it.”

He singles out Sasha Keable approximately 5 times throughout the interview, each time catching himself and moving on, before eventually admitting he’d love to work with her and is a huge fan. Also on Saint’s collaborator wishlist is Lola Young — a close friend — and RAYE, who we both agree is insanely talented.

What’s next for Saint? A fall US tour is incoming. On his vision board is a Grammy or two. He’s also thinking about acting — specifically the dark, twisted, Ryan Murphy/Donald Glover lane. ”Obviously, you probably guessed from Ghosted that I love a dark, twisted sort of show.” He notes, with a kind of gleeful self-awareness, that British actors are always the villains in American productions. He seems genuinely fine with this. I, too, am here for it.

What I hear from Saint Harison – both in his music, how he talks about the greats, and in his future aspirations – is somebody who is prepared to be around for a good time and a long time. He’s only just scratching the surface. And that makes me super excited.

Credits:
Photographer: Quieto Carlos
Executive Producer: Dante Nicholas
Writer: Dante Nicholas

India Shawn says that she keeps coming back to this particular Rick Rubin quote: “Don’t play to win, play to play.” She drops it mid-conversation, in the way you mention something that has rearranged a thought you’ve been carrying for years. It stuck with her because she’d been doing the opposite for so long — grinding towards a goal, trying to break through, measuring the music against the moment it was supposed to produce. Subject To Change, her new EP via VANTA Music, is what happened when she started playing to play.

She’s unhurried when we talk, leaning back like someone who stopped checking the clock a while ago. There’s a specific kind of ease that comes from having nothing to prove to anyone – and India has that. And it makes sense once you know the road she’s traveled to get here. Writing songs for artists like Chris Brown, Monica, and Keri Hilson. Singing background for Anderson .Paak on the Best Teef In The Game tour. Working as a vocalist with Harry Styles during his Harry’s House era. The resumé goes on.

India’s voice has threaded into the mix so naturally that you may not have caught it unless you already knew to listen for her. She has been, for a long time, one of those artists that the music industry and R&B fans love quietly — the kind they keep calling “an artist’s artist” or a “slept on fave.” IYKYK. And it’s true, but it also doesn’t pay nearly enough.

Her latest project, ‘Subject To Change,’  is out now, and it hits hard. Six tracks. Every one of them sounds like an intentional decision she made for herself. The quiet chapter is over.

India’s Origin Story

She grew up in Los Angeles, with her mother as the praise and worship leader at their church. That’s where she learned to sing — not just the technical part, but the part that matters: how to mean it. When her family moved to Atlanta during high school, she carried that foundation into a city that was on its way to becoming the center of the musical universe. Atlanta gave her the work ethic, the network, and a new community of writers and producers. Everybody was figuring it out at the same time. She talks about that era with a warmth that means it impacted her greatly. “I feel like I really became a musical professional in Atlanta,” she says. “And now I’ve taken everything I’ve learned, and I’m back in LA. The environment of LA is felt in my music.”

Before Origin, her debut project, she wrote for others as part of a collective called Full Circle. She was good at it — placing plenty of songs and building a real working reputation in the industry. But writing for someone else means learning to disappear into their vision, and after long enough, that starts to feel like a trade that you didn’t fully agree to.

“Writing for others just affirmed that I wanted to write for myself,” she says. “I was providing a service in that era, and I just wanted to love what I was making. I wanted it to mean something to me. And then when I wrote those songs that meant something to me, I wanted to keep them for myself.”

So in 2012, she did. Origin arrived independently — ten tracks, with star musicians like Hit-Boy and James Fauntleroy in her corner. So if you were paying attention from jump, you know India was somebody to take seriously. The project found its people the slow way, through word of mouth and genuine feeling. Songs like “All I Have” and “Neither Do We” have that quality that the best early records have: they sound like someone telling you the truth before they knew anyone was listening. Her day ones have held those records close for over a decade. They bring them up unprompted – feeling personally responsible for introducing them and India to the world.

“That’s one of my favorite albums of mine. I think it’s a classic. I think it is me at the core.” She pauses. “If [fans] have been with me from the beginning, they see the growth. They also see that I’m the same girl in a lot of ways.”

She is. That’s the thing you notice sitting across from her. Whatever India Shawn has been becoming, she has been becoming it for a long time.

Playing The Long Game

In 2013, Solange put India’s “I’m Alive” on her Saint Heron compilation project — a co-sign from someone who appreciated the interesting thing before the interesting thing had a name. In 2015, she released ‘Outer Limits,’ her collaborative EP with James Fauntleroy. The EP mapped out a cosmic, unhurried version of alternative R&B that made it feel like trends didn’t matter. There was touring with Free Nationals, a Grammy performance with Harry Styles, and Anderson .Paak’s whole tour circuit…India was, and still is, booked and busy. She was everywhere serious music was happening, even when her name wasn’t the one on the marquee.

What kept her going, she says, was the people.

She mentions 6LACK, Anderson .Paak, and then arrives at the name that changes the whole shape of the convo: D’Mile. “D’Mile has been everything. He’s such a creative support in helping me to shape my sound and discover new sounds I want to explore.” She says working with D’Mile has been a safe space for her: to experiment, to fail, to have fun. And that’s rare for women in the industry.

“I always tell him – if it wasn’t for him, I probably wouldn’t still be singing.”

She lets that sit. It’s not a dramatic statement — it’s a practical one. What D’Mile, whose VANTA Music label she is now signed to, has built with India isn’t just a production partnership. It’s a room where she could fail without it costing anything, where the work could be fun again. “It’s been the perfect situation,” she says. “He just makes it so easy to show up.”

D’Mile describes his approach simply: he listens. “Even before we start working, if we’re in the room just talking, I’m starting to think — is that a song?” he says to me in a conversation via Google Meet. “I try to really get to know whoever it is I’m working with.” With India, that familiarity has compounded over the years. “In some ways, it gets easier and easier to hear the music in her personality.”

To me, there are certain artists that I know instantly after hearing for the first time that they belong at the upper echelons of the “industry.” They deserve the budgets, the visuals, the awards, the fanfare. India Shawn has always been one of those people to me, though it’s been a long grind to get to the moment we’re at now.

I asked D’Mile why he thinks that is.

“I think for a while, timing wasn’t fair for Black artists doing R&B unless you were also doing EDM or pop,” he says. “People were also just set on who they loved at that time.” We both agree that the streaming era has allowed consumers to expand their palates and not rely on being told who’s hot by radio DJs or popular figureheads (like we’ve seen in decades past).

But something was shifting underneath all of it. D’Mile points to a specific moment he felt the ground move. “One of the things that started making me realize it was time for real music to come back was Childish Gambino’s ‘Redbone,” he says. That was a moment where R&B and soul music weren’t just being accepted again — they felt needed. The window that India had been patient enough to wait for had finally started to open.

Before We Go (Deeper), her 2022 project on Epic Records, was a full expression of that — with Anderson .Paak, 6LACK, Ambré, Cory Henry, and Unknown Mortal Orchestra as features, with India’s voice at the center of it all. The album got the attention it deserved from the people who knew.

She’s not bitter about the time it took. She’s also not going to pretend it didn’t sting. She made great music. The moment wasn’t ready. She kept making great music anyway.

Everything Is Subject To Change

The new EP Subject To Change started with a playlist. India sat down and pulled together everything she actually loved, and listened until she could hear what was missing from her own music. Then she brought it to D’Mile and the label. “This is what I’m chasing.”

“I wasn’t hearing it in my music,” she says. “Because I was still very much doing what people expected of me, or just what was easy to do.”

“Kill Switch” came out of that session of honesty — though not without some coaxing. D’Mile had brought in two members of Mamalarky, an alternative band whose sound he’d been drawn to, and when he walked into the studio, they were already noodling with an idea. “I think India that day kind of didn’t even want to go there,” D’Mile recalls. “She wanted to do something different. But I think she just couldn’t hear it yet.” He heard it. They stayed with it. India came back the next day with her collaborator Varren Wade, and the first lyric that came to her mind (the chorus) told them exactly what the song should be about.

“It just flowed,” D’Mile says. “Whether it took a day or two, it felt easy throughout.” The final record has D’Mile on drums, Livvy from Marmalarky on guitars, and Michael on keys — a full live session that you can feel in how the song breathes.

The song opens on acoustic guitar before dropping into a psychedelic soul-rock pocket. A groove that doesn’t announce itself, it just arrives, builds, and crashes into greatness. India’s voice sits in the center of immediately amazing lyrics. It’s about the moment before something changes between two people — recognizing the pull and choosing not to cross the line, protecting what’s real over what’s possible. A specific feeling rendered with great care. Exactly what India Shawn has always been best at.

“Kill Switch is definitely probably my favorite on the project,” she says — and the “definitely probably” is worth noting. It’s exactly how she talks; loose and precise at the same time. D’Mile agrees. I agree. “It was one of the first ones we finished and felt really, really good about.”

“Cotton Candy Blvd.” is an instant standout for its slow-burning, groovy nature. India and Lucky Daye trade verses and vocals like they’ve been doing this for years. Fans have been asking for this collaboration out loud for a while, and the record rewards their wait. You can hear the pleasure and the fun in it.

“The song is sweet, but it’s got depth. It’s the tension before the kiss, the invitation and the promise.”

The rest of the EP earns its range. “Marmalade” kicks things off as Track #1, and it’s the one that gets bodies moving — 70s warmth and dancefloor intimacy. “Til Infinity” makes me feel like I’m driving through California on a 75-degree day with blue skies and birds chirping. “Multiplicity” closes the project on a more complicated note, a sharper accounting of what it costs when someone wants too much of you. The EP covers real emotional ground without rushing any of it.

“I have been so hard on myself,” she says, “pushing toward a goal, wanting to win, wanting to break through — that I haven’t really had as much fun as I wanted to have.” Something lands in her face when she says it, less like a confession and more like a fact she’s done fighting. “Subject To Change is a lot of different sounds and emotions. It’s an experiment. And it is the first time I really played.”

She’s not playing to win. She’s playing to play. Word to Rick Rubin.

And that’s the thing about this EP that I love — you can actually hear someone who’s just making something they loved. It’s a different sound. Looser. More alive. Groovy, for lack of better adjectives.

Let The Groove Get In

Near the end of our conversation, I tell India that we’re calling this The Groove Issue. “I love that,” she says immediately. Then, after a beat: “First of all, I hear groovy music. Bops and jams.” She smiles. “But also, it feels like I’ve found this comfortable place in my career. And we’re definitely giving ‘70s, so — it’s groovy.”

D’Mile, for his part as label exec-producer-friend, wants people to see what he’s watched happen up close. “For the fans from day one, I want them to see the growth she’s had over the years,” he says. “The fact that she is still doing it. She’s not quitting.” He pauses. “She’s different from the person I knew, but in the best way!”

India Shawn has never been a mystery. The same artist who made “Be Myself” in 2012 made “Kill Switch” in 2025 — same instincts, same honesty, same refusal to make music that doesn’t mean something to her first. What changed isn’t who she is. It’s that she stopped leaving room for anyone else’s version of that.

On our way out, she mentions offhandedly that she’s been listening to a lot of 1970s soul lately — Minnie Riperton, Syreeta, the stuff that takes its time. “Music that trusts you to stay with it,” she says. So with that being said, let the groove get in.

Credits:
Writer + Creative Director – Dante Nicholas
Photographer – Breyona Holt
Stylist – Cedes Sanders
Hair – thedimeeffect_
Makeup – CHERIEBEAUTY
Video Director – Jai Casso