This week, we’ve got summer-situationship ultimatums from the queen of R&B’s perfectionism, a UK girl’s night rescue operation, a love song about proximity, modern R&B’s laziest apology, and a self-produced burst of glee from a Brooklyn prodigy. Let’s get it!

Victoria Monét, “Reach Out”

When a situationship has been thriving on summer reruns for this many seasons, eventually someone’s got to deliver the script into a mic. Victoria Monét is the one that time—on “Reach Out” she launches into establishing the terms of the deal: “You live your life/And I am living mine.” She’s not bothered by the geographical divergence. What she can’t deal with is the lack of communication. This man imagines their worlds flooding together (we know, she knows), and he still refuses to call first. I forever wanna be your lover she offers, and then she clarifies she’s sick of waiting forever for him to think so. My jaw inched closer to the floor when I saw the credits. D’Mile, the architect behind Jaguar II, and KAYTRANADA, the king of the sweatiest nights of my adult life, worked on this together. Even the almost-touching-before-over-the-edge is accounted for, with Monét echoing her own anticipation “Its a rhythm, it’s a feelin’ you can’t deny/When you know that you’re supposed to be mine.” And then there’s the Dave Meyers video where she leads a legion of dancers through Sean Bankhead’s moves in pitch black, a one-woman deputization effort aimed squarely at one poor guy’s last nerve. I’ve been trying to replicate the moves in front of my bathroom mirror all week. If my own summer-of-me person happens to be reading this, you know what to do. —Jamila W.

FLO, “Remedied”

Perhaps one of the more brutally authentic brand deals of this, this song emerged in the form of a Liquid I.V. ad, the natural Hangover Co-Pilot to a night exactly like the one FLO sings about in “Remedied.” Jorja, Renée, and Stella trade lines to paint the picture, and the picture is dark. Someone’s been crying yourself to sleep while you keep your head downward when the phone rings at around 1 a.m. and the response to the beckonings is the best line I’ve heard in a pop tune this month: “It’s not yes, but it’s not no.” From that point we take the whooooooole crew on the seven-seater, the dress just back from the dry cleaners, the bottle chilling in the freezer, and the “Chasing that good medicine in the melody” refrain. (One line is her checking her face out in the toilet before it’s time for the DJ to hit all seven cylinders, and I can’t help but respect that almost as much as Jorja getting winded and caveman-groaning, “Oh God, I’m fuckin’ sweatin’ after the dancing has taken its course.”) Co-composer Amy Allen, a pop scribe as a day job, wrote the song alongside the group, and three writers are responsible for the accompaniment, Jayme Silverstein, Oak, and Oscar Linnander. The song, marketed to the weary, claims to be meant to address “that moment when you finally get up, get out, and remember who you are,” but my favorite statement about the intent outside an interview is so brutally succinct: “We be loving on the Grey Goose and not men.” As therapy, it’s far cheaper than my copay. —Charlotte Rochel

Q, “I wish you were here”

The producer-multi-instrumentalist eking out homespun soul in South Florida with the most incongruous stage name in pop—a situation so difficult that even Complex once ran an article centered on his obscurity. Q Marsden has managed to stay that way since Forest Green and The Shave Experiment, cementing him as a cult artist, and to appear again under the radar with 2023’s Soul,PRESENT, and last year’s 10 Songs mixtape. His latest track—co-written with Jacob Olofsson and former BROCKHAMPTON production-terror Romil Hemnani—relies on a paradox he proclaims straight at the song’s beginning: “I wish you were here/Even though you’re right there.” The room he describes couldn’t sound any more pleasing on paper. She rubs his shoulders, then he gives up the chance of a full-on passionate night: “I think I always want the stars but tonight it’s okay/Put your hands on my shoulders” he sings, only to make less attractive confessions. He asks her to stay as he slams his door shut. Until the final chorus pronoun has shifted again from “you” to “she” and an entire scene played out from the empty side of the bed with the woman in question sitting two feet away. —Phil

Fridayy, “Haiku”

But how much can a kid dump into a diplomatic apology before it’s still an apology? Friday, the Philadelphia singer whose voice you already recognize from the mountaintop hook of DJ Khaled’s “God Did,” has found the absolute least on “Haiku,” that declares his love to his girl in a 17-word text: “Five seven five, send my girl a haiku.” He knows exactly what he’s doing. “You said I been nonchalant, that’s true,” he confesses, hours before he promises to keep the remaining words sealed in his lips unless they are clearly justified. But she is up on the hook mocking him from across town (“Too thick, too fine, he want me/Too bad, I’m outside”) while he blows up her cell, and her dirtiest cut-down came early in the set: “Two fingers, who been teachin’ you sign language?” There’s a proud R&B begging tradition on trial here.

Keith Sweat built a whole career on it, and Jodeci did it shirtless in the rain.This patrician is counting syllables. But, I was amused by how utterly he is defeated by the reality of the situation. He claims he is fried. Then he reverses her slap by flipping her own taunt back, singing her hook in reverse, pronouns and all. He and producer Hossy Mombru and Xander are all (their names are in the credits to last year’s Some Days I’m Good, Some Days I’m Not) co-producers for this track, just so no one knows who to lay the blame on. If my girl ever aired me out this thoroughly on her own chorus, I hope I’d respond this gracefully. —Asa McKenzie

Laila!, “Anything Could Happen”

The last time I felt like 1995, it actually was 1995, so having someone sing “we never be this young again” should probably not have made me feel like I’d been hit by a truck in the middle of an ordinary Monday. And still, “Anything Could Happen,” the next outing from Laila!. The 20-year-old Brooklyn artist and producer who finished Gap Year! essentially alone in her bedroom, whose opening slot for Kali Uchis happened this spring, and who just launched her second phase last month with “Miss Mango.” As always, she did this one entirely by herself, lighting a spark of fresh infatuation pushing a freeway traffic jam. She’s leaning back on a cushions in a city she’s never seen, teeth pressing the middle of her lover’s mouth, telling us, “I was waiting to exhale,” just before the line I cannot release: “You make me feel like 1995/I ain’t never felt so alive.” What hits me in the gut next knocked me senseless. “For a girl that used to wanna die,: she adds, then cuts us off a second later, singing, “But let’s not go there/No one wants to hear that,: acknowledging the darkness but swiftly overriding it. Her joy outpaces her fear always, even as she sings, “We live in a world where everything’s collapsing.” We finally arrive at having the listener said to him or herself: “Anything could happen, just get up and dance/You don’t have to die.” Nearly around “It’s a relay race not a relapse,” I finally unlocked my age difference and fully believed her. —Esther Blake

R&B, Soul, or Blues Albums to Check Out

• Nick Hakim: I Can See

• Kenyon Dixon: Ego Ruins Everything

• Felix Ames: Did the Rain Stop?

• DAMEDAME*: DREAMS ON THE PASSENGER SEAT

• Adanna Duru: THE NAIJAMERICAN DREAM

• Bootsy Collins & Buckethead: Metal Health

• Chenayder: Outdated

• REMI: Fade to Blue (EP)

• Denise Julia: LOVE AGAIN (EP)

• Leah Writes: Soul Therapy (EP)

• THEHONESTGUY: DON’T DISTURB THE GROOVE: AFROSOUL (EP)

• Osé: Feels Like Home (EP)

• Tee Valentine: VALLY $UMMER (EP)

• pastels: Pastels World (EP)

• Ruby Wood: No Rain, No Flowers (EP)

• Ye Ali: interludes (EP)

• Point 5ve: Take a Look at Me Now (EP)

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Other Songs to Check Out

• Chaka Khan: Through the Fire (A COLORS Show)

• Lucky Daye: Nowhere Fast (Hunny Bee Remix)

• threetwenty: Could It Be Love

• Isaia Huron: no way!

• Sy’Rai: Bullseye (Nice Shot)

• JHart: BBY BLUE

• CamRus: Human Nature

• where.t.at: she goes by. Diamond (feat. Derrick Milano & Rojas On the Beat)

• LATENIGHTJIGGY: Generational Link Up

• Genia: Can’t Wait

• Abby Jasmine: 1942

• OVI WOOD: TOP TIER

• Joy Oladokun: Kind

• Dinner Party: Peace of Mind

• cortex: You’re Mine I Swear

• Bobby V: KiSS

• Mayer Hawthorne: Ice Water

• SunandMoon, Ogi & Anoop: In the Movies

• MOONGA K.: TIME TRAVELLIN’ LOVER

• CUBE: Ego Death

• VITA: PLEASER

• Lila Iké: What It Feels Like (feat. Protoje)

• Joël Lobban: QLV

• Jazlyn Martin & Jean Deaux: Girls Girl

• Gotts Street Park & Celeste: Easy

• Medhanit: etsy spells (feat. thatboykwame)

• 54 Ultra: Tell Me

• Misha, Relyae & Jussi Halme: Skyline

• JEDSOUL: FANTASY

• ALA.NI & Adrian Younge: Proud of Me

• Phil., King Noli & WESTSIDE BOOGIE: bb girl yes i do

• Intalekt & Shae Universe: IT’S OKAY

• the della kit & Junia-T: Goodness

• Ariel: CENTREFOLD

• Ruth B.: Best Days

• Iris Aeria: noodles n steak

• luvblue: excuse me

• Reuben Aziz: promised land [reimagined

• Marie Dahlstrom: Night & Day

• Ama Louise: Hindsight (GA Edition)

• Children of Zeus & Anieszka: Water & Vibes

• Michael Duke: More Than a Vision

• Kali Claire & Boj: Enemies Cry

• Devin Donnell: HONEY BROWN

• Nolais: man up

• HARUNA & Saïna: Summer Kind of Love

• Chrissi: THE SCARIEST PART !

• Ajia & Natra Average: L Shape

• NateTaylorr: mutuals

• Andrea Valle: 4 the streets

• Maurice Moore: Alaska

• ReleastK: Dream Girl

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This week is lighter: songs about seduction, songs about reunions, and even a song about a relationship that the woman who sings about it might not even want anymore. Five picks, five reasons, and one long exhale.

Masego, “Heaven”

Losing everything you own on TV while you’re watching it happen from halfway across the world is a scenario likely to send most people into a dark place. Instead, Masego processes the loss of his Los Angeles house during the January 2025 wildfires in the way he’s known for: by seducing. “Heaven” is the result, and the third studio album from the Kingston-born, Virginia-based saxophonist and producer. What keeps this track from feeling blasphemous is the tenderness of the lyrics. He remembers a lover “like books in the Bible” and describes her as his “revival”—a powerful description of what must be a very heavy burden. In this context, the church-girl fantasy plays through in everything from waiting for a Sunday best to turning her “letter S a god.” While the flirtation is a stand-in for something more basic, he wishes there was something to go back to besides the wreckage. —Nehemiah

B2K, “Mileage”

Imagine Omarion and the rest of B2K taking on the Verzuz stage against Pretty Ricky, twenty-five years removed from the teen idol screaming that made them, still able to move in a way that will remind you exactly why your cousin had the poster on his bedroom wall. This is the premise of the first release of new music in more than two decades from the band, which has announced a forthcoming album entitled Eclipse.

What’s smartest about the track is how well they recognize that they’re not seventeen anymore. When they sing, “Don’t care about your mileage/All over your body,” it’s a mature statement, and an appeal for remaining loyal to someone whose past you’ve decided to overlook. The structure is as pure early 2000s pop&B as can be, but the tone is something warmer than lust. On the track, there’s a verse in which he thanks a woman’s mother “for them big ole thighs that bring me back to life”—exactly the cornball devotion the genre used to be based on before everyone became too cool for it.

On “Mileage,” he’s “all in” over and over again, repeating the phrase until it begins to feel like something more mature than the boast it once was. B2K was created to be desired by the teens; “Mileage” is them learning how to do the desiring, and it works surprisingly well. —Jamila W.

Leon Bridges, “Light the Way”

The most exciting development in retro-soul music right now has to be that its artists keep leaving the country. The opening track from the fifth album from the Fort Worth native finds him handing over control of the song to J. Lloyd and Lydia Kitto, members of the British dance act Jungle, and the result sends his Sam Cooke sweetness out past the Gulf towards Lagos and Bahia.

Underneath the track “Light the Way” lurks an AfroBeat beat and the loose swing of Brazilian pop music, and Bridges rides it like a man finally free from the vintage microphone diorama that his early work built. He’s still writing summer-evening reveries, full of “Bulleit” whiskey and afternoon romance, but the setting has become tropical and sweaty, and better suited to his croon than the churchy austerity of the past. “Wanna riot/When you’re walking with me,” he sings on the chorus, and the word “riot” arrives relaxed and joyous, not political. The old Leon Bridges wanted to sound like 1962. This one sounds like a party that you can hear three streets away, getting louder with every step you take towards it. —Imani Raven

Tiana Major9, “MORE”

Each love song sung by a guarded individual has to solve the same problem: how do you sell surrender when your entire persona is based on not needing anyone else? For the British-Jamaican singer whose gospel-trained voice anchored the Queen & Slim soundtrack, that guarded persona has given her career longevity and a certain worldly untouchability—but it’s also what makes the exposure on “MORE” so compelling.

She starts by acknowledging the pattern that she’s breaking, “I used to run for the hills/Wear out the thrills,” describing a flight risk woman who’s going to agree to stay grounded this time. What follows is one of the most compelling accounts of falling that R&B has offered in a while, and it succeeds precisely because of its reluctance. In the pre-chorus, she keeps coming back to her history of fleeing, “Want all the feels/Something that’s real,” as if she’s trying to convince herself of it in real time. Then, suddenly, the dam breaks: “When it rains, it pours/There’s an overflow.” The song was written in a camp in St. Vincent and produced by Malik NinetyFive and Michael Baretz, and the arrangement leaves plenty of room for her to negotiate. By the time she’s pleading for more, you believe her because you’ve heard how hard it was to get there. —Ameenah Laquita

Syd, “Any Time” feat. James Fauntleroy

There’s a particular pleasure in recognizing a bassline you know anywhere, and this particular one from Raphael Saadiq sits right at the start of Syd’s new track. “Any Time” is the standout track from the third studio album from the neo-soul singer, and the bassline alone is enough to set the mood. This is a track about desire for someone who you know is bad for you, and Saadiq’s low-end groove gives the wrong idea a place to flourish. “Every time I’m runnin’ from you, I lose,” she admits, and James Fauntleroy responds with a verse about being unable to move on, “Too strong, can’t move it,” trading off positions in the same doomed circle. What makes the track stand out is the bridge, where Syd abandons the performance of cool in favor of honesty: “Maybe I’m numb or afraid of change/I wanna be done.” She admits that she would have ended things by now if she hadn’t fallen in love—and realized that “we know we don’t belong in love.” She’s newly sober and married and living her life tending to her garden and her dogs in Baldwin Hills, and this backward-looking song feels less like a self-indulgent wallow and more like a door she’s ready to close. —Miles Everette

R&B, Soul, or Blues Albums to Check Out

• Steve Lacy: Oh yeah?

• Masego: Fix Your Face

• Syd: Beard

• Kamal.: how the f*** does everybody else manage?

• Ambré: PEYOTE

• Nia Archives: Emotional Junglist

• Dame Atlas: If I’m Being Honest

• Nao Yoshioka: self

• Avara: why do women jump in the fire?

• Martin Luther McCoy: Welcome Back Love

• Ranky Tanky: This Village

• Zaytoven: Zaytoven’s Trail Ride

• Jamar Jones: Blue Oceans

• Steven G: R&G

• Peach Tree Rascals: Velvet

• Kadi Lee: Still the Same LVR Boy: Disc II (EP)

• Loo: Rien a Sauver (EP)

• Fantastic Negrito: Alive (Live)

• AKIA: DUMBCRAZYSTUPID (Deluxe)

• Soul In the Horn: Soul In the Horn (Act 4) [Deluxe Edition REMIXES AND BONUSES]

• _BY.ALEXANDER: MEMORIES FOR SALE ---AT---> 66 GREENE ST SOHO NY (DELUXE)

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Other Songs to Check Out

• AMAKA: Motion

• Luna Elle: Moment of Silence

• Sonny Tennet & Zak Abel: Make You Feel My Love

• Devvon Terrell: Crash

• Kalisway: I Like It (feat. LAYA)

• LÉA THE LEOX: LEMONS

• Davido & NO11: Gimme Dat Ting

• St. Paul & The Broken Bones: Mess I Made

• Dee Gatti: Tit 4 Tat

• ïnnü: DTN U (See Me Up)

• Jordan Rakei: Enemies

• Khal!l: COMMUNICATION

• MorMor: Don’t Need It

• Yazmin Lacey: Summer Haze

• Allyn: Pop It

• Jaymin: Proud

• Larissa Lambert: Tunnel Vision

• CANDIACE: Pretty Ain’t Perfect

• Jordan McCullough: See Me

• rache.: Let Me Know

• TEHYA: 4L

• Laura Mvula & Cynthia Erivo: It Would Be

• ((( O ))): Earth Octaves

• Tkay Maidza: Romanticize (feat. Jenevieve)

• Rebel Rae: Me and Your Ex

• b.kae: One & the Same

• ZADA: They’ll Never Find Us

• Alexia Jayy: One and Only (Cover)

• Thee Sinseers: How Lonely Is Lonely

• FromJerome: THE DISTANCE INTERLUDE

• Notifi: Level

• Quail P: Make My Love

• DAP the Contract & Bymaddz: House of Blue

• LAWSON: Ballerina Tea (feat. Ty Dolla $ign)

• Elijah Boothe: No Fear

• Neya: Prince Charming

• Essiyas: your prime

• Tora-i: Champagne & Lace

• Manana: Calendar

• Chitra: 808_Heartbeat

• Roy Woods: Brunch

• Ye Ali: Never Do That

• Naïka: ONE TRACK MIND (feat. Jessie Reyez) [Remix]

• Junetober: Same House New Color / It’s a Party / Fallen Angels Still Have Wings

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This week’s selections are full of R&B and largely lacking in tiers. We have a self-love track that packs no filler, a legendary bedroom crooner exploring the sensuality in soliciting permission, a password-only party, the love song that may well be a prayer, and a hook wide enough to draw all of North London in. Well, shall we?

Coco Jones, “Body So Tea”

Every woman I know follows this same post-breakup agenda, I am pretty sure. Nails, hair, skin, gym, block button, group chat extraction, again and again until entire. Coco Jones has obviously maintained one herself, and she is making it sound the most frisky it has sounded in her entire tenure so far; she lands in a year she already performed “Lift Every Voice and Sing” at the Super Bowl and closed out her tenure as Bel-Air’s Hilary Banks. She spends no time on the person who caused the maintenance regime and instead jumps right to the ante, intoning “Body so tea, hair, nails done, skin glowing” as if a motivational sticker.

She sneaks a surprising amount of therapy speak into that strut. “I don’t chase nothing, I attract, I set intention,” she sings over a Stargate co-production (yes, the same Norwegian duo behind Ne-Yo’s “So Sick” and Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable,” still out here crafting magic). I usually roll my eyes when fellow vessels of manifestation start spouting off, but Coco delivers “Blocking you was a blessing, baby” with the kind of motherly affection you give someone a plate, and suddenly the healing sounds not quite so dutiful and a little more Friday. She got her toes did. She tracked her diet. She cut off the chaos. In and out before the candle even melts. Will I ever want a song like this from Coco? No. —Jill Wannasa

Tank, “YES”

Back in March, just a few days before the Verzuz battle with Tyrese, a snippet of a song based around Floetry’s “Say Yes” made its way onto Instagram Live. Touching that song is a tightrope walk. Marsha Ambrosius’ performance in 2003 is scripture to a certain generation of slow-dancers, so revered that Floetry named their spring reunification tour after it. Well now the full song has arrived, and Tank, the artist who gave us “Maybe I Deserve” and “Please Don’t Go,” has done something more clever than a cover. He changed the vantage point. Floetry’s original was a woman reaching out, but Tank promises that he won’t take one step unless you say yes out loud.

“It felt like we was floating in the ocean/It felt like we touching in the open,” he opens, all warm water and memory, before setting up the actual conditions: “I’m just waiting on permission, I won’t fold without it/I just got one condition then I’m all about it.” I hollered. Two decades of R&B men have written desire as weather, something that just happens to everybody in the room, and here is a man twenty-five years deep in the bedroom-serenade game making some of the most uninspired music he’s created. Consent as foreplay, sung by a man who could bench-press the concept. Marsha walked so Tank could wait politely. —Jamila W.

Masego, “Recommend”

A location you stumble upon through a friend of a friend, a dark dingy basement where the coat check has been overrun by friends having sex with their underwear on, a dive that smells like everyone wearing the same shirt under four layers of clothing on the day there’s a snowstorm outside. This is the atmosphere Masego paints in “Recommend,” as the Virginia-born saxophonist and looper (the self-taught creative mind who birthed the phrase TrapHouseJazz and hammered out the casual DJ fusion of “Tadow” into a new international hit with FKJ) plays it like he is in the bottom of a review for a venue he plans to visit a second time. He is recommending a visit that hasn’t happened yet, in advance, would return, which is why the chorus stumbles “I would recommend-mend-mend”, back and forth like a happy noise bouncing off the basement walls.

In the second verse, I hear my favorite piece of humorous lyricism in an R&B song all year, a party checklist delivered as impatiently as if a man was double-parked. “First off, where’s the women? I’m wondering/I ain’t put on this cologne for nothing,” he makes his first proclamation to a crowd not even there yet, then moves down the planner: “Third off, take ya shirt off, I’m rushin’/It’ll get hot by midnight, just trust me,” he’s two steps ahead of the evening’s events. There is true Cab Calloway style showboating in the way he emcees his own expectation. —Esther Blake

Amaria, “‘Til We Meet Again”

An ‘80s-inspired love song appropriating funeral language must be a tough grab. Amaria has been self-producing and composing her own clear slow jams since she was a teenager; from 2020’s Morning to 2024’s Free Fallin’, this latest is her creepiest stunt yet. “I can’t help myself/Just look what we made”, she laments—and for a second it’s bliss. Is her beloved disappearing, dying or simply nodding off while they talk? “I get ahead of myself/Don’t wanna feel you fading,” she warns, delivering love songs about absence before it even comes; mourning someone just within reach. She’s advising a lover to keep still and squeeze tight ‘while you can’; these words could be taken from a wedding or a funeral. Who else is making love songs so ghostly? —Asa McKenzie

Nippa, “Homegrown” feat. Blxst

From Tottenham, the well-known musical exports have been grime titans, with Skepta, JME and Wretch 32 putting N17 on the global stage through bar pressure. Nippa, who from just off White Hart Lane watched his mum running community projects in Haringey Council (and the newest Warner Records signee), running carnival days and caring for the neighbors’ families, comes from his ends with a lot more tenderness. “Homegrown” is his ode to the postcode and he brings in Los Angeles’ Blxst, who has spent years penning love anthems to his city, for a transoceanic first bump over the beat of Camper.

Nippa writes the come-up in physical objects. “Funny I’m here, I’m looking way back/I was the needle in the haystack,” he remembers, running through the account from frontline to “the backseat of the Maybach” without pretending that the gap removes the city from him. The love extends uncategorized up through the bloodline (“This is for my mother and my granny”) before the hook addresses it to anyone within earshot: “What would you do/When you know you hungry, but you can’t eat nothin’?” Blxst matches him, slipping “out that pocket like a quarterback” and marveling at his own emergence: “Ain’t no wishing on a star, on the block we came from/Ain’t it funny? Look at God, baby, I became one.” Two humans from two hemispheres, identical block loyalty, and by the end of the chorus Nippa is threatening anyone who touches his dargs in the sweetest voice you will hear all week, a Sunday roast with the smoke alarm. —Ameenah Laquita

R&B, Soul, or Blues Albums to Check Out

• Kelela: new avatar

• Baby Rose: YEARNALISM

• Ne-Yo: Highway 79

• The-Dream: Love/Hate II

• Davion Farris: Alchemy

• Lance Skiiiwalker: #invite,sessions,only!!

• Magi Merlin: POWER HOUSE

• Zae France: Final Say

• NORSIDE: Coal & Soul

• Jesse Gold: Lucky Me

• Will Sheff: Extra Mile

• Soul Fever & Mohdalsoul: Camera Boys

• Jaz Karis: Twenty Something (EP)

• Anna Margo: Swings (EP)

• CANDIACE: Nenuphar (EP)

• KALLITECHNIS & mango heist: kosmos (EP)

• papaya noon: through the moods (EP)

• Orrin: Yours Truly (EP)

Other Songs to Check Out

• Ciara: Yes

• Dinner Party: If It Aint Broke (Love Wins)

• Felix Ames: Second Second Chances (feat. millkzy)

• nomi.: What U Want

• Grace Carter: Bittersweet Escape

• Nia Archives: Get Me Down (feat. Jorja Smith)

• SABRI: Voices In My Head

• The Womack Sisters: If I Let You

• Flwr Chyld: Moth 2 a Flame

• Marcus Harvey: Come to Me (feat. Mick Jenkins)

• Kelly Finnigan: The Hurting Truth

• Ezra Collective: Well Organised (feat. Lila Iké)

• R&B ONLY & rjtheweirdo: Tricks Are for Kids (R&B ONLY SESSIONS)

• pastels: Coconut Island

• Owen Saward: Not Mine

• Naomi Lareine: Hot Girl Summer

• JONES: When Life Calls

• Lucy Park: OUTLINE

• Byron Juane: Nobody But You

• cortex: Made Me

• Justin Nozuka: On Your Time (Hold You Like It’s Ice)

• Algee Smith: Otw

• Khari Isiah: What’s the WiFi?

• Devin Tracy: Nobody Nobody

• Gretchen Parlato: Never Come Down (feat. Meshell Ndegeocello & Mark Guiliana)

• Nick Hakim: Endlessly Waiting / The Reason

• Adam Ness: Gimme Some Mo

• Bobby V: Like That (feat. Silvastone)

• HUGEL & Bryson Tiller: Temptation

• Tyler Lewis: yesterday

• Nao Yoshioka: Shelter

• Autumn Paige: Cute Girl Weekend

• Olympia Vitalis & Maverick Sabre: Lady Luck

• anaiis: Sunshine / P4P

• Genia: Miss Your Touch (Garage Live Version)

• Dahi & Childish Gambino: Running

• Deb Fan: Angel(s)

• Mary Ann Alexander & Hunna G: NYC

• JACOTÉNE: Shut You Down

• Kareen Lomax: OFFLINE

• Taylor Contarino: Survivor’s Guilt

• Daley: Slide

• Aaron Taylor: Ask Twice

• Eldana: Is this what Saturday evening feels like?

• James Berkeley: sliding doors

• $yn: Overthink

• SHVVN: 2AM

• Zenesoul: Bad Timing

• 5an: ROCK WITH YOU

• Brenna Whitaker: A Song for You

• Myles Lloyd: One Sided

• Luh Kel: Wrong (Acoustic)

• Sophia Galaté: Just for a Moment (feat. Dende) [Acoustic]

• Sipprell: Energy

• Felix Hien & GINGE: Choirs

• DaVionne: All On My Own

• b.kae: Easy

• Tomi Thomas: How I Know

• Lazā: Kiss N Tell

• Ethan French: i would - day 48

• Miiles44: All 2 Myself

• Chenayder: DOOM

• Zeke Bleu: Did You Drop the Ball?

• Javán: Dare You/N2S

• María Isabel: 1-800

• Latanya Alberto & Andhim: Landing Soft

• Alice Aera: Searching for Love

• MILLENNIUM PARADE, Saya Gray, Daniel Caesar & Daiki Tsuneta: Blue

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This week, we have a load of R&B with absolutely none of the air con. You can expect a pair of first-time duet partners in a night shoot in Paris, a dancehall departure from a crooner who just snagged a Grammy nomination, a year’s worth of kissing off packed into one two-pronged takedown, an anthem for the smoke from a guy who subsequently stopped. Hit it.

Jorja Smith, “Alive” feat. Wizkid

About time Jorja Smith got something up her sleeve. Her third album, What Are the Odds, is a collaborative effort with P2J, who also produced 2023’s Falling or Flying. This upcoming project will highlight UK garage, 2-step, and Afro house. “Alive,” a duet with Wizkid, is the first song they’ve worked on together, written and recorded in London. It’s about the feeling of being at the start of something with someone. The chemistry between Smith and Wizkid is undeniable. They sound like the beginning of something special. Smith’s verse is all about closing the distance, singing “It’s late, I’m coming over/Can’t stay away for too long,” and then measuring out the wait. Wizkid responds in pidgin, promising a loving that will make her feel her best, and later, to take over the city and make others jealous. The Gabriel Trautmann-directed video exhibits Smith trailing through a summer night in Paris before Wizkid appears towards the end. They don’t share the frame until the song is nearly over, a move that adds to the anticipation. With “Alive,” Smith has finally created a song that’s getting people moving, and it’s a big change from her previous work. She’s decided it’s time to dance, and this album is the result. —Tori Hammond

Destin Conrad, “Nervous”

Destin Conrad’s next move after touring his alternative-jazz set wHIMSY! is a reggae album, set to drop next month. “Nervous” explores his Jamaican roots, with producer Louie Lastic handling the riddim. Conrad says his jazz experience pushed him to stretch, and now he’s honoring his roots while getting everyone else moving. Conrad jumps into patois right away: “Boy ah vex cause him girl want itch up.” Most of the song is about walking into rooms and making an impression. His girl walks in and “she do batty and breast/She say it with her chest, she nuh shield,” with every man watching and every woman annoyed, but they don’t care. Then he lists all the people he’s involved with, like one who’ll roll his trees, one he might see next week, “a blasian one weh speak Chinese,” and it’s like he’s counting his blessings. The hook tells you what to do: “If you bad, wave your hand inna the air.” The video is a block-party celebration of Jamaican fashion and dance, and everyone’s having a good time. Conrad’s music used to be soft and shy, but on “Nervous” he’s confident and swaggering, and it suits him well. —Jhanel

Fana Hues, “Sweet n’ Sour”

Fana Hues has a voice that’s appeared on records by Tyler, The Creator and Doechii, and her own music has been slowly gaining momentum since 2020’s Hues, through 2024’s Moth. Her upcoming EP Catch N’ Release, set for August 4, uses a fishing theme to inquire what sparks interest and what’s worth keeping. One song, “Sweet n’ Sour,” is about throwing back what’s not worth it, and she doesn’t do it gently. These verses are like the last conversation before a breakup, with “I’m not the one to hold it together/After all that shit you talking, now you can’t remember.” The forecast for the man in question is straightforward: “One day you sweet, then you flip like the weather,” which says a lot about his character. The chorus drops the metaphors and gets straight to the point: “Fuck you, fuck you/Guess it’s a bitter end”, followed by “Fuck you, fuck you/Now I can love again.” The profanity conveys grief and liberation, and eventually, it’s turned outward: “I’m fucking done/... You’re fucking dumb.” This song will surely resonate with someone who’s been through a similar experience, and maybe, just maybe, an ex will hear it and know it’s about him. —Mina Abdel

Children of Zeus, “Weed & Rum”

Manchester’s Children of Zeus had been quiet since 2021’s Balance, but both members have stayed active. Konny Kon got his start MCing with local trio Broke ‘n’ English. Tyler Daley, formerly known as Hoodman, has lent his voice to tracks by Goldie and Soul II Soul’s Caron Wheeler. Their new song, “Weed & Rum,” is out now on First Word, with production from Beat Butcha, Coop the Truth, and Justin Zim. It’s a smooth return, like they never left. The song is set backstage. Daley’s hook is all about contentment, love songs, and sunshine. Kon’s verse adds complexity, rapping about empty bottles of premium Bajan rum, fans taking pics with Tyler, and late nights. But the best line is him quitting weed and rum, despite having them specified on the Zeus rider (“Weed and rum specified on the Zeus rider/Truth is I quit both by this plane pilot”). He wrote this song from the sober side, making it the grown-up sequel to their 2013 song “Smoke With Me.” This is for everyone who’s cleaned up but still misses the old days. —Ameenah Laquita

Isabelle Mettle, “GOOD IN ME”

Isabelle Mettle is the sole name in the production credits for her single “GOOD IN ME” and its parent EP (CMD), which is set to be released in September. She built this project alone, and it’s a self-produced effort that she considers an important statement of authorship in a male-dominated production world. Mettle describes “GOOD IN ME” as a song that feels like coming home to yourself, and the verses support this idea. It’s a love song about feeling comfortable with who you’re when someone else is around. Mettle’s comfort is intentionally unglamorous. She feels brand new every morning, and she’s fine without makeup. The compliments she gives her partner are practical, like “You read between the lines I write/And shift my point of view.” One notable line is “And I’ll let you have the map of me/Let you read the roads like they are poetry.” Even the hook’s biggest moment, “You make me feel hotter than a third degree,” is part of a chorus that starts with “Baby I love your company,” a straightforward declaration of love. Mettle admits she’s used to hearing fake love, but now her partner’s voice is her favorite sound. —Charlotte Rochel

Bonus: Beyoncé, “MORNING DEW (DONK)”

Being half-asleep while scrolling, I took the push notification as a joke. The Hive has been trading the leaked track “Donk” like contraband for more than a decade since its leak around 2013. Pleading for its release which didn’t happen until now, and Beyoncé has just released “MORNING DEW (DONK)” on the Fourth of July. This song, her first piece since Cowboy Carter, has been produced by Beyoncé and Pharrell Williams (with DIXSON in the background vocals). There’s an album to celebrate the upcoming twentieth anniversary of B’Day scheduled to be released on the artist’s 45th birthday on September 4. My favorite of hers.

The plot revolves around a morning hangover nobody wishes to be over. She is drinking champagne and watching Purple Rain before dreaming about getting back into homeroom where she will be having her locker filled with the images of her lover who she hopes to get an A in biology: “I think I wanna go back to school and have my locker full of pictures of you”. About halfway through the pre-chorus, she says “and he said” and hands the song over to her man who then begs for the dew of the morning in the post-hook. Second verse brings the matured B’DAY heat into the equation. She is in “Forty one degree weather” with her mind faded out and establishing the house rules: “You can tap in but don’t, don’t tap out”. All the while, underneath, there’s a “donkey, donkey, donk’” chant which may be the goofiest thing she’s put her name on after making a banger out of a closet with “Freakum Dress.” The director of the lyric video, the one who captured Beyoncé on the cover of Sports Illustrated at her 25th birthday, has used decades-old clips from her for the video, sixty days away from her 45th birthday. —Jill Wannasa

R&B, Soul, or Blues Albums to Check Out

• SIENNA SPIRO: Visitor

• Bigg Robb: Mr. Southern Soul Music

• sahn: the garden

• Leo: STILL HERE (EP)

• Echo Huang: SELF-HELP TAPE (EP)

• Michi: Dirty Talk: Sunshine Hotline Mixes

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Other Songs to Check Out

• Maverick Sabre: Eleven

• Johnny Burgos: Right Here

• BJRNCK & G Herbo: Coming Home

• Adrian Younge: Shake Down

• FKJ: Changes Rising

• Lä’Myah: Just In Time

• Thee Sacred Souls & Victor Axelrod: Waiting on the Right Time

• Feux & Cassius Cherry: better

• Myshaan: Bless the Broken Road

• Soless: Jamais

• Naisha: so then (feat. Ty Dolla $ign)

• Orla Rae: So Loud

• 95ANTNY: CAN’T IGNORE

• Amelia Rose: more from you

• Jayo: I’ll Take Care of U (ITCOU)

• OVI WOOD: Expectations

• MALIA: Masquerade (feat. Homeboy Sandman)

• Adanna Duru: 2 Sweet

• Ferris Pier & Kyle Dion: Pink Lights

• EKENE: Relations (feat. Braye)

• Charlie Bereal: Out There for Me

• FrankHaveMercy & BJRNCK: IMY

• Gene Noble: Undertones

• Khari & Rexx Life Raj: ILY

• Ezra: Let Me Love U Better

• Quanie: Something (Stripped)

• Rowlene: Hurts 2b Reminded

• sunkis: Pretty Eyes (feat. FLO)

• Papa Jay: Work Dat

• CAIRO!: LET HER GO

• Sylo: Levitating

• Haley Bridge: Flying

• Rosado: Focus

• Drea Dominique: I’m Fine

• Mikey Jose: HOPE THIS FINDS U WELL

• Nasty C & Tellaman: T’s & C’s Apply (Maxi-Single)

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R&B had a seasonal accumulation of singles all dumped into a single release date this week, so we let it run the entire column. The immediate effect of seeing it all laid out together is how many of the artists present here have stalling songs. They’ve all sensed it, sense the moment, and keep finding the perfect justifications to kick the can, pass, change.

Of course, the singer actively in pursuit of this particular object is spending the duration of her song announcing how lost and confused she is about any and all of it. A good week then for feeling something keenly without making any actual move on it.

Lucky Daye, “Nowhere Fast”

The first warm night of the year always takes me back to the unhurried, windows-down, have-the-house-to-yourself R&B that I’ve been loving. It’s become a bit more R&B that mistakes the depths of a feeling for the mood of it. When I heard Lucky Daye was leaving RCA for Warner Records and teamed up with his go-to collaborator, D’Mile, again, I was ready for, say, a celebration of a “new label” single.

Instead, the New Orleans artist gave us nearly three minutes of him, intentionally doing nothing. What he wants is the woman on the other side of the table to completely decelerate, and he keeps on gently coaxing her in that direction. “Make ‘em wait/Make an extra stop here, it’s okay,” he starts, then glances at her vibrating phone and bursting schedule. “I know they gotchu rushin’/But it ain’t no race.” He’s got a D’Mile-built minimalist pace that’s taking zero breaks, and he uses the entirely of it to keep her grounded. He reveals just what the extra 24-7 will buy: “They wanna keep your foot on the gas/Foot on the gas/Goin’ nowhere fast.” The wooing is done by getting her to step off the speed others demand of her. Daye consistently reaches for patience in the way of manners.

He spells it out I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T behind the chorus like Webbie, urging her to seize what is hers, even if it means the sort of woman it’s worth waiting for is off to her own. A long era of R&B that conflated glum with mature had me worried this would be a fantasy of power. This is just a love fantasy, flirtatious by means of simply having and showing he’s in no hurry. —Asa McKenzie

Muni Long, “Richest”

There’s one brand of cowardice I’m intimately familiar with, the one in which you’ve somehow ended up loving someone for your deepest core but still are wholly incapable of getting the words to get out of your mouth. Muni Long’s “Richest,” however, is comprised of that. It initially came as the remarkably-and almost mundanely-effective execution of it—a glossy, platinum-and-diamonds version of the type of love ballad since 2021’s “Hrs & Hrs.” has set the standard for since becoming a monster. Then I read that she’d spent the back half of last year recovering from a double lung transplant she had kept secret, that she’d had to learn to breathe again, and the song rearranged itself in front of me.

Superficially, it is a new individual causing an old injury. She sings, “My last relationship was fuckin’ crazy and that’s why I’m so scared right now to say I love you, baby.” She repeatedly catches herself in the middle of confession: “Tryin’ not to blow it ‘cause I feel it, but I’m too afraid to show it.” The part that really impacts me is how physical she is about it. She sings, “I can’t go to sleep until you’ve closed your eyes, I can’t take a step without your hand in mine,” measuring love through respiration and movement, the same two factors she had to literally claw back at for months.

And then we have the chorus. She lists all the precious things she can think of, “You’re my platinum, my diamonds, my silver, my gold/My emeralds, my rubies, my heart and my soul,” and then puts it all under one kiss: “Every time you give me kisses, I feel like I’m the richest.” Out of almost any other mouth, that’s a cute flex. Out of a woman who said she spent the past year learning that “wealth looks different than I thought,” once she stopped counting what she’d lost, it plays like gratitude said aloud by someone who nearly didn’t get the chance. I keep meaning to send it to the person I can’t say it to yet. —Seraphina Joy Clarke

Kenyon Dixon, “No Jodeci”

One of the singers running a one-man restoration project on classic R&B is Kenyon Dixon. He started out stating the feeling of ‘90s and 2000s slow jams never actually died, and Dixon has chased it with the zeal of a convert. He once said cutting a Jodeci-style ballad let him live out a fantasy of fronting Jodeci, in his words one of the greatest male R&B groups ever. So a Dixon song titled “No Jodeci” shows up as a small act of self-sabotage, and it’s the most interesting thing he’s done in a minute.

That’s a promise he intends to keep for three minutes straight. Jodeci, and all the male R&B criers they spawned, turned the collapse of a man into a high, sweet, melismatic howl, a man begging and crying and literally dropping to his knees. Dijon Dixon has no interest in that. “Girl I can’t cry for you/This ain’t no Jodeci,” he sings on the chorus, then spells it out: “But you know my ego girl that’s my cheat code/And I only play for me to win every time.” This is a man who has made a cost-benefit analysis against raising his voice.

The braggadocio never really has a chance to hang in the air though. Dixon is there to immediately offset it with the truth. He’s practically spilled his guts before the first chorus: “Ain’t found what I been looking for been feeling worthless/Girl I been hurting/Been tryna find my healing in sections and churches.” Later, he exposes the front: “Meanwhile I’m feigning/Like I’m in the desert in some leather R&B shit.” Then he checks himself: “Can’t be acting like I miss you cuz I do.” It’s the funniest line on the track and the saddest. For someone who has essentially made it his mission to revive the vulnerable heart of ‘90s R&B, it turns out he’s the most resistant to keeping his own exposed. The tough guy and the tell are played by the same person in the same breath, and you’d be a fool not to believe the tell. —Jamila W.

Sinéad Harnett, “Foreign”

Most other R&B songs about exactly this treat it like a homecoming. You’ve been here... you know the moves... the body remembers. “Foreign” flips it, treats new love like a country where you don’t speak the language, which is a pretty solid frame for Harnett, who’s spent the better part of a decade writing some of the tenderest, most careful songs about just wanting to trust someone. She commits, all the way down.

“You’re something so foreign to me/Please teach/‘Cause this is ain’t a language I speak,” she sings, turning courtship into a beginner’s lesson she feels a little ashamed of having to take. She struggles to find the exact words: “Like a flower on Mars that keeps blooming/Like a sky full of stars in the morning,” it’s like a flower in a place where it shouldn’t exist, stars that appear when the sun is out. The section of “I’m tryna study you...” gets quite literal: “I’ll go over your books and your history/I’ll listen intently to your every speech/‘Till I memorize.” There’s something incredibly radical of an R&B singer confessing that she doesn’t really know how to love this person but that she’s willing to listen and learn. This music normally thrives on confidence, on taking what you want without hesitation. Harnett makes the inverse bet, and implies that fluency is only achieved one shared sentence at a time. I hope she passes the class. —Esther Blake

Khamari, “To Want Someone Badly”

A whole subgenre of modern R&B is about the unanswered text, the situationship that never quite becomes a relationship, the person who keeps you on read and on the hook. Khamari, the Boston singer who emerged a couple of years ago with rich, melodic soul, fits neatly into that category on “To Want Someone Badly.” Every second of it is him trying to leave and turning back before he reaches the door.

He spends the verses trying to convince himself it’s not worth it. “I know you won’t be good for my health,” he sings, knowing that he’s come crawling back on that score before. The push creates the pull and later in the song he’ll admit, “Your hot and cold play is doing me right.” The cycle is probably about to repeat itself. The verses are liquid, like all Khamari’s best work, and full of desire so easily turned against itself: “I might be selfish/But is it a crime/To want someone badly.”

The best bit is the one in which he shields himself through surreal specificity. “It’s so tempting/To show my hand/But I don’t wanna end up/Like an instrument/In a marching band, baby.” A funny, faintly wistful image of the terror of romantic vulnerability, there. Nobody wants to be that trombone, marching in formation, playing somebody else’s arrangement, locked into a routine they never wrote. But if you play your cards right and shuffle insouciantly away from the mat, you might get all that you desire, which is also money. He’ll take his fingertips off the Tarot cards but it’s too late: he’s already been written for. —Phil

R&B, Soul, or Blues Albums to Check Out

• kwn: and all pride aside

• Nectar Woode: Naturally

• Devon Gilfillian: Time Will Tell

• Naomi Sharon: No Sleep In Paradise

• Rico Love: 97 Bad Boy

• Joseph Solomon: TERRA COTTA

• Gwen Bunn: The Interim Vol. 1

• Capella Grey: ..Well Then.

• Keith Robinson: Love Episodic 2: The Algo-Rhythm

• Jeff Bernat: Luv Language

• Samiere: Melancholy

• Thando Zide: Ku Ngawe

• JRDN & Lane Hall: Lane Hall

• Dyllón Burnside: Sun Goes Down

• AMARIA BB: Comes to Light (EP)

• James Emmanuel: Good Man (EP)

• Nia Smith: Payback Is a Dog (EP)

• Africaine: For Me, This Time (EP)

• Omarion: O2 - Part 1 (EP)

• Sekou: In a World We Don’t Belong Pt. 2 (EP)

• Rodney Jerkins: Darkchild Sessions (EP)

• DUSTIN DAB BOWIE: PREEMINENT (EP)

• KINGH: DARE TO DREAM (EP)

• Lea Mondo: All the World’s a Stage (EP)

• Baby J: You Don’t Know My Name (EP)

• Miles MeCloud: Fun While It Lasted (EP)

• Stevan: DEMO TAPE 2 (EP)

• Aija Cymone: Where Does the Love Go (EP)

• Pino: ‘02 (Deluxe Edition)

• Omar: Brighter the Days (The Remixes)

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Other Songs to Check Out

• Steve Lacy: Is It Cool? (feat. SZA)

• Ravyn Lenae: Saturday Night

• Alina Baraz: Birds Eye View

• TeaMarrr: SHARK baIT (feat. Tommy Parker)

• Savannah Ré: Another Heartbreak

• Junetober: Thinking About You Heavy

• EMARÉ & Brandy Haze: INSIDE

• Raheem DeVaughn: THE PLEASURE WOULD BE MINE

• Ash Leone: Tell Me Why

• Tejy: Bigger Picture

• Manana: Don’t Say the Words

• Payton Moore: Crybaby

• Jordyn Simone: PushPlay

• Mega Simone: Last Dance

• Benny Sings: Parachute

• Bootsy Collins: Manic Depression (feat. Eric Gales)

• Brooke Valentine & Miles Minnick: Day Ones

• Genia: Miss Your Touch

• CVIRO & GXNXVS: Where You Belong (feat. Ye Ali & Amari Noelle)

• Ron E & Capella Grey: What’s the Vibez?

• Liza: Craving

• Larissa Lambert: So Close

• Misha & Nefertitti Avani: Bae-Cation

• Joelle James: My Girlies

• Cautious Clay: Ivy (2pm)

• Cassandra: HOURGLASS

• Nao Yoshioka: Changes (feat. Devin Morrison)

• Lex Hynes: nobody

• Khadi Lee: No Promises Tonight

• Olympia Vitalis: Baby Blues

• Luh Kel: Pull Up (Acoustic)

• Lu’: Vision

• MOONGA K.: BIG EGO

• Souly Had: no privacy

• J. Brown: Late

• Aja Marie: Hue

• Stefan Mahendra: Only Human

• Leila Dey: Like U Do

• b.kae: Daisy

• Brianna Castro: skin

• Allen McNeil: ALL THE WORLD

• stndrd & Myshaan: Get It Back

• Carvin Winans & Kevon Edmonds: Shining Star (Remix)

• Bobby V. & King Kanja: Closer

• Andy Z6: Omar Coming

• Neila: Glitter

• Chlöe: Worry About You

• Laila!: Miss Mango

• Eli Derby & Bri3: Pretty Girl Dangerous

• Angelica Vila: Damaged

• Jastin Martin: Dopamine

• Denise Julia: LOVE AGAIN

• Mai Anna: Sugar High

• Sydney Renae: I Like the Way (Kissing Game)

• TEEKS: My Boy

• Faiza: Suddenly

• Kyleigh: MAKE IT SO HARD

• Sean Leon & God’s ALGORITHM: 20,000 STEPS

• Devin Donnell: WHY

• ROZZZQWEEN: Praise Me

• Davido, JAZZWLRD & GL_Ceejay: I Know Who I Be

• F3miii: NOBLE (feat. The Kid LAROI)

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This week self-ordered into an R&B summit. Over the course of a seven day sprint, a saxophonist wrestled grief between soundchecks and tour stops; a New Orleans shape-shifter was left shamefacedly caught on tape; a Florida crooner confessed his inability to know if his emotions are valid; a Georgia contralto made a demand not to be fought against as she exited a relationship; and an R&B vet finally unleashed a track she’d been sitting on since 2016. Five personalities, five varying entities, they’re desperately seeking a stay of execution for. These are the tracks that’ve been running through the head this week.

And Happy Father’s Day to active and hard-working Dads out there!

Masego, “Breathe”

Grief was once associated with a release, a special arrangement for the bereaved who were free to disintegrate unhindered for a while of their own choosing. This arrangement is no longer available to the majority of us. “Breathe,” a song from Masego, who declares it sprung from a profound loss, a death in the family that landed in the middle of a calendar already stacked with art meeting, a studio session, a flight, has it that. Over the time-waltz track, a “Can I breathe? Can I live?” he sings, “Can I grieve? Get a minute?” The verses keep it from going downhill and exploding as they remain in control on the surface. “This is rebirth, I’m baptized,” he concludes, then admits he nearly drowned. He sings about shocking news he learned last night, how he was all good last week and now he is awake at night evaluating how to save someone. His complaint is that work is keeping him from the attempt of mourning, which is a point he has made else where that the industry is not unionized. It is when “I just can’t stop, the world won’t stop” is all he can manage to chant that he comes out as a man who has been put on hold by his own life, a hand covering the receiver, as he waits for someone to pick up. We need more songs like this. —Imani Raven

Dawn Richard, “baby, can we? (feat. Durand Bernarr)”

Falling deeply in love with one of these records has almost always required you to do some homework. The ex-Danity Kane singer, who recently changed her dynamo identity to a New Orleans art-pop polymath, has again built another new world in her solo flying out just released a pair of hushed orchestral collaborations with composer Spencer Zahn that you could practically frame and hang. To hear the Dawn Richard so relaxed is a tiny shock. “baby, can we?” is simply a love song, and an ecstatic one, with no concept to decode and nothing to prove. Over a flexible New Orleans soul groove from Katalyst that interpolates Aretha Franklin’s “Day Dreaming,” she just gushes: “Hey, baby, and I’m thinking of you.”

Her duet partner is Durand Bernarr, the Cleveland vocalist who won this year’s Grammy for progressive R&B, and he is equally as stylish as her. They exchange lines about keeping the relationship under wraps, then immediately blow their own cover. They are boasting all over the place. “I want him in the A.M. like breakfast at McDonald’s,” Dawn sings, and there’s a “Feeling good, it’s alright with me, Janet” a few bars later, not to mention a boast about a man he managed to sing “Stay” like his first name was Bono. What makes it fun is the sheer magic of informing your friend of the new crush, whom they never asked you about. Richard has done more complicated music art and she will again. At the moment, her cheeks hurt from constantly smiling, and she wants to show off. —Jamila W.

Q, “hey there [i have a compulsive complex]”

One specific type of love song that I have particularly favored is the one where the singer seems to be more puzzled than confident, awkwardly and hesitantly trying to get a feeling across that he cannot quite guarantee. South Florida’s Q embodies that lack of clarity throughout the track “hey there [i have a compulsive complex],” and he divulges the issue in the very first seconds. He could answer you, “I can’t tell you for sure if it’s real,” he sings. A less talented writer would refer to that as a red flag. Q simply states that is a regular day for him. He would prefer you not to believe him at all. “Destroy my words,” he insists, “The proofs are in my actions.”

The suspicion of his own tongue stands in his way, surprisingly, even when he is trying to be honest. He confesses that he was not the best at it, and he also mentions that he matured later than he should have, he still was not therefore a novice at it, making mistakes live. “Fear of trying was the downfall of my passion,” he sings. Although Romil Hemnani of BROCKHAMPTON is present among the board crew, the main attraction here is the writing. The highlight moment occurs when Q allows his partner to make him right during the sentence. “I dive into your ocean floor,” he sings, “You say, Q, just slow roll, but here we go.” Told to back off by his partner, he dives anyway, the man who ends up swimming to the ocean bed on a first date and calling that pacing. His forthcoming album, which is also a question, DO YOU SEE ME?, is based on his own doubts, and in this context, he seems to think he is incapable of replying that one as well. —Asa McKenzie

Baby Rose, “Let Me Go”

Almost all break-up songs require a baddie. Okay, a villain. A person who is deceptive, dishonest, or leaves the scene and the singer is the one who feels wrong-ed and sings better. Baby Rose is the one who has written a break-up song where she is okay with the other person. Despite being based in Atlanta, she has a contralto voice, which is so low that it is almost considered a cello, and she is coming strong on “Let Me Go” as she is attempting to leave someone she does not dislike at all. “I really like you,” she brings it out in the open directly in the very first verse, “but not this time.” By the second she has self-talked her into the exeunt, “Maybe this is where I begin/I’m letting go of you, I’ll take that chance.” The chorus puts the weight back on the other person, asking them to prove the feeling by releasing her: “If you really love me/Then let me go.” Is this a prequel to “Go” or something?

The kindness cuts with a blade. In the bridge, she confesses to having been partly responsible, which she is frightened to speak of, “Tired of being let down by the both of us.” Putting her own name in with the disappointment is the move that most kiss-off songs never make. By the last verse, she has moved on from talking about him. “Heartbreak is the negative spin,” she muses, and then, “Time I give myself back all the love I can.” Baby Rose, who technically has just won her first Grammy for her work on Leon Thomas’s Mutt, created her album YEARNALISM based on the idea of desiring in every direction and now that this track is where the wanting goes inward, Baby Rose shows us a different aspect of herself. She said that all endings do not have to be disastrous, and this is the place where she gives evidence of it. —Kevin Matthews

Kelela, “outta time (feat. A. K. Paul)”

In geographical time is how the Paul brothers work. Jai Paul took more than 10 years between his unwitting debut album and an official follow-up recognizably famous, while his older bro A. K. Paul, who is also a music artist, is putting out songs at a rate that leaves glaciers in a cloud. Thus, it looks entirely appropriate to see A.K Paul in a collaboration that was Kelela’s unutilized asset for 9 years. She once again stated that the song “outta time” was written by her in 2016, during the production of Take Me Apart. She left the song untouched, until the time she built around it, in her words, a house that sounded more detailed. The house is Kelela’s new avatar, which is her upcoming album. What she kept in that drawer is a clock winding down. Kelela spends the track practically begging an already halfway out the door lover to reconsider, the chorus a stark summary of their dilemma (“We’re runnin’ out of time”). In the verses, the cool entirely evaporates, as she melts into the pleading “Baby, don’t you do this, you’re killin’ me,” before calcifying into wounded accusation (“You think that I’m blind, I can see through your lies”). A. K. Paul contributes guitar and backing vocals to the track’s other side, sings the obverse, their two voices interlacing in a circle of common terror. She penned all the lyrics in 2016, the period she was conceiving of Take Me Apart; and then locked them away until this spring. Now, almost ten years later, the desperation she so clearly feels in this early 2010s panic now arrives undiluted, a woman pleading just to gain an inch of ground while, at last, a drawer begins to open. —Charlotte Rochel

R&B, Soul, or Blues Albums to Check Out

• The War and Treaty: The Story of Michael and Tanya

• PJ Morton: Saturday Night, Sunday Morning

• 4Fargo: 4Fargo

• Chlöe & Timbaland: Resurrection

• Devin Morrison: SAKURA

• Glenn Lewis: Overture

• Ama: AMA

• The Colleagues: Sincerely Yours: Songs in the Key of Love

• Dylan Sinclair: Make You Feel

• Kings Return: KRNB

• Dreamer Isioma: Quantum Entanglement

• Noxz: Safe to Be _

• Karencici: Ignore

• Lee Lewis: HOWL (EP)

• MADELEINE: Earth Cry (EP)

• Ruby Jackson: This Love Thing (EP)

• Kashus Culpepper: Act I: Summer Nights (EP)

• The 7:45s: Spin Off

• BOY SODA: SOULSTAR DELUXE

• Kyle Dion: SOULAR (Deluxe)

Other Songs to Check Out

• Chaka Khan & Snoop Dogg: Boogie’s in My Soul

• Syd: 2 Many Days

• Elmiene: Comets + Gold (feat. Fujii Kaze)

• Abby Jasmine: #NEEDTHAT

• Felix Ames: I Was Just a Child

• Eric Bellinger: Fatherhood

• Ruth B.: Didn’t I

• EJ Jones: Luh Mo’ Love

• McClenney: Self Control

• Durand Bernarr: You Gotta Be

• Jai’Len Josey: I Wish I Didn’t Miss You

• Tank: Daughter

• KIRBY: B.O.B (Bombs Over Baghdad)

• Nia Chennai: It’s Not Me (Don’t Worry, Darling)

• Madison Ryann Ward: GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!

• Dana Williams & sagun: Cycles / Old Friend

• I Am Roze: Redo

• Tniyah: Complicated

• Binta: Sweet Sensation

• Angelica Vila: Damaged

• Jamal Roberts: Girl Dad

• Kuzi Cee: GIA

• Wé Ani: Burn That Bridge

• Mamadou.: at peace with the mirror (demo)

• Rene Bonét: Act Like You know

• JANE HANDCOCK: Forgive Them (Live at Blue Note LA)

• Marcus Harvey: Mapula

• Lavils: XCITED

• Victor Ray: You & I (feat. Aiyana-Lee)

• Chrisette Michele: Flower Mamma

• Astels: Workin’ All Night

• NNAVY: Slowly Burning

• SABRI: With You

• Eric Penn: Horsepower

• Brady Turner: Don’t Wake Me Up

• Limage: Only With You

• Thee Sinseers: Let’s Fall In Love (Again)

• June Buggg & Qui: Red Wine

• Will Gittens: Certified

• Sam Pounds: I Got a Feeling (feat. Family Company)

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This week is definitely turning into an R&B showcase—a bit of a soul protest record for grown folk, a busking-bench intimacy, and two about the sort of love you just know you need to break free from, while still going back for more. Get into it.

Eric Benét, “Who’s Gonna Save Us?”

After ten minutes trawling Eric Benét’s social feeds, it becomes clear this four-time Grammy nominee with two recent No. 1 Adult R&B songs believes the only way to get ahead is to tell the people running the country what you really think of them. The posts are scathing. The food supply, the Epstein files, who the country gets to send to war and who doesn’t. “Who’s Gonna Save Us?”, produced by Camper and released by Benét’s own JBR Creative Group, translates that rage into a brand of slow-burning soul he’s been crafting since the late-90s, a kind of soul that’s as direct and church-bound as possible. He delivers the title question as one he’s already answered for himself.

The verses are where Benét really unnerves, in a satisfying way. “The people suffer from disease/You know it’s from the food they eat,” he begins, then lands a couplet the whole track rests on, “They found a cure for cancer/But that ain’t no good/Cause business won’t do well without sickness in the hood.” It’s a conspiracy theory that, delivered in the mellowest baritone in modern soul, makes you want to crawl under the covers. This isn’t a shouting match; this is a lullaby being sung toward your dread, as he explains it as gently as he can. The second verse focuses on recruiters: “The ones that sent them, they would never send their own.” The track turns again, mid-way through, into a near Curtis Mayfield call-and-response, the familiar call to arms of “people get ready” bubbling up through the chorus like a half-forgotten hymn. Benét’s answer is anything but warm. No one’s coming. “If we don’t, you know.” —Phil

Mai Anna, “Baby Blue”

There’s a specific genre of songs that psych you into being brave before you have decided that you’re brave, and I’ve had this one stuck in my head (since she teased it with a Tiny Desk submission years ago) trying to figure out exactly how it does it. Mai Anna and co-producer Solomon Fox create “Baby Blue” from a pile of clichés about seizing the day that should completely collapse under their own corniness and somehow do not. “You only live one time/You only live once so/Imma take my chances,” she says, and stacking the lines, “Not once but twice and three times,” somehow turns a Valentine’s Day slogan into a declaration of faith to herself.

Then she stops bluffing in the chorus: “Wake/Wake up and feel the love/Put on your favorite shoes/And dance all around your room,” she commands, and the direction to waltz alone in your bedroom is such a small and unglamorous thing that it somehow feels like the only true statement here. But I’m stuck on the next image: “Im in the rain in my church clothes/Got to breathe with my eyes closed/So wherever I go/I know I’ll be home.” This picture of a grown person standing in the rain in their church clothes and trying their best to get it together with their cap off, who then declares that home is a state of mind rather than a physical location. The title seems like a reference to the ache-baby blue is a fresh bruise-but Mai Anna sings like she’s already been over the hump and she’s just looking for company on the other side. —Mina Abdel

Lala, “Do Better”

Is there a theme in R&B that lasts longer than the lover you shouldn’t get back with, and Lala’s “Do Better,” produced by good.will, does nothing if not luxuriate in just how great it feels to make the bad choice. “My friends told me to do better/I should’ve known but you’re clever,” she starts, and she’s already lost the argument she’s pretending to have in that second line alone. The story of the whole train wreck can be told in just five words: “Not trusting/Just friends to/Good lovin’/To just fuckin’.” No lead-up, no apologies, just the simple, inevitable slide from one to the other, like naming the stages would stop her from having to go through them.

What’s truly appealing about this is how she’s not at all ashamed about being the instigator. “Have to admit, I like when you chase me,” she says, leaning into the part of herself that craves the danger. She collapses in the very act of talking about her commitment to the break up, “When you got me alone, I fold and I fold into your arms,” the double-fold says all a verse about self-control would. And the chorus is absolutely unconcerned with the glaringly obvious hypocrisy (“We can break up-up to make up-up/And then wake up and do it again”), before she seals it with the least innocent booty call-line of the year: “Let’s keep it simple/You got my location.” She knows this is a mistake. She’s telling you where to find her anyway. —Jamila W.

Debbie, “Weight On Me”

Two weeks ago, when south Londoner Debbie gave us “Weight On Me” on COLORS, in that stripped-down, pastel room in which any slight vocal vulnerability has nowhere to hide, she sang like the breakup had just happened that very morning. The song is the pure, unadorned physics of being rejected, “Look how you left me/Bags on the floor/I don’t sleep anymore/Living on empty,” she wails over Luis Navidad’s arrangement, each sentence heavier than the last, the title landing less like metaphor and more like flat fatigue.

What elevates this above the ten thousand other heartbreak tracks in the space is how honestly she copping to needing him back- “Push you away, need you again/Wearing your t-shirt,” and that detail is everything to the song: the object that grief holds onto, the souvenir of this thing at its worst. She takes one good swing at the most obvious piece of advice you get when you’re distraught: “They say time is a healer/It’s not healing me now, with my head to the ground/I go deeper and deeper,” she sing-screams, and frankly, not since Jorja Smith’s early singles have we heard a new UK voice make this much with so little. —Ameenah Laquita

Mychelle, “Sunday Afternoon”

Before a label took notice, Mychelle had been singing on the streets of London for four years, practicing a trick that all the good ones have figured out—how to be utterly vulnerable and yet seemingly pay it no mind. “Sunday Afternoon,” her new single out now on FAMM, is a song about realizing when you want something the trick fails completely. In her own words, the Stoke Newington singer, early in the track, bluntly lists her limitations: “Vulnerability doesn’t come easily to me/I can’t lie I’m scared/All my friends keep telling me/I really need to put myself out there.” It’s the oldest of the love song tropes, and she delivers it with the tone of a confession she’d rather not be performing on her record.

But what saves the track from being anything like an inspirational meme is that she names precisely the thing that frightens her. The reality she longs for, that she continues to outline here, is not spectacular. It is “to dance with someone on Sunday Afternoon,” it is “to tell someone how my day went so they can tell me how their day went too,” it’s mundanely domestic, and in that way is therefore more dangerous to risk than something extraordinary. Her self-awareness about her dodges, too, is clear. The people she holds close are “just a placeholder until it’s all worth it,” and she’s aware enough to understand that that’s really how she makes sure she’s not worth it to anyone. The core small heartbreak of this song comes at its end, with her retracting what she just put out: “Right now I don’t think I’m ready/Right now I know I’m not ready.” A busker learns to keep a crowd at arm’s length and calls it performance. Mychelle finds herself doing the same to the one person she may have truly wanted. —Imani Raven

R&B, Soul, or Blues Albums to Check Out

• Blxst: Labor of Love

• Jessie Reyez: A Little Vengeance

• Eloise: My Man & Me

• Melvin Riley: No AI

• KELS: Dirty Blues Princess (EP)

• Good Girl: Sugar Honey (EP)

• Luh Kel: Love Me, Love Me Not (EP)

• Claire Brooks: Book of the Cure (EP)

• Rebel Rae: Free the Girls (EP)

• Carla Prata: It All Leads Back South (EP)

• Elujay: A Constant Charade (Deluxe)

• 2BYG: The Yearbook: Second Semester

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Other Songs to Check Out

• The-Dream: Tampa (feat. Usher)

• Jacquees: Lick Back (feat. Juvenile)

• JHart: Memories

• Asha Banks: Come Down

• 4Fargo: Posted Alone (Remix) [feat. Ty Dolla $ign & Honey Bxby]

• Cheyanne: Angels

• Kaylee Ameri: Better Than Digital $ex

• Orrin: Pretend

• Dylan Chambers: I’m Already There

• Gnoir: Safety 1st

• Ama Louise: Love or War

• Khal!l: MY FEET

• Sonny Tennet: Innocence

• Indigo Mak: Truck Driver

• Pere Navarro: You Know (feat. Braxton Cook)

• Quinn Oulton: Circles

• Kalisway: Not So Sweet

• Cherrelle: This Time

• pastels: Pastels World

• Ryan Trey: Need You (feat. Lecrae)

• Zacari: Real Life

• H3rizon: Future Self

• Ambré: Go to Hell

• Yellow Shoots: WALL STREET

• PJ: To the Ones

• H3adband: Move Your Body

• MYST: Dynamite

• Justelle: Keep It from You

• Noah Guy: GREEN VOWS (A COLORS Show)

• Parisalexa: Wrong Generation

• Nick Hakim: I Can See

• Vandell Andrew, Jah Born & Jordache Grant: Tasty

• Kendra Morris: If I Called You (Acoustic Version)

• Roy Woods: Trust and Believe

• Yazmin Lacey: Sweetest Season

• Davion Farris: Frontin’

• Ash Minor: Okay With Me

• Ryael: Changes

• Biirthplace: LOST FAiTH

• Dave Hollister: Voodoo Magic

• Gemaine: Less of You

• DAMEDAME*: FIRE BURNIN’ THRU THE RAIN

• Oranj Goodman: Drama

• Jabriel: Wanna Be In Your Skin

• LARIICA & Isaiah Kaleo: kiss in public

• Flyy Armani & JULY: ti ti ti.

• Pino & ZaeFyeHunnit: Move

• Nanette: Ask for Nun (Freestyle)

• ZURI: Satisfied

• Ria Sean: You Want It

• SICKOFTHEINTERNET: H.I.M

• Reign Judge: Wouldn’t You Like to Know

• Andye: Centerfold

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Mýa, Smoove Jones

Some R&B lives after midnight—in the quiet-storm slot, where the DJ has a voice like warm bourbon and every record is built for two people and a dimmer switch. This is the room Mýa moved into on her seventh album. Built with her own cash on her own Planet 9 label and dropped Valentine’s Day 2016 with a 17-month zodiac calendar and a bottle of vegan wine with every direct order, Smoove Jones, which is named after an alter ego of hers that she described once as “Pam Grier with Billy Dee Williams’ flow”—a smooth operator working the late shift. She doesn’t break character even once. Welcome to My World is the mood and the instructions. Team You is a ride-or-die promise delivered at the speed of a 2003 morning radio record: devotion sans all the sarcasm. Coolin’ is the sonic representation of being completely relaxed with absolutely nowhere to be and all the time in the world. After 18 years that turned a teenage dancer from D.C. into a star with “It’s All About Me” and “Case of the Ex”—Mýa had plenty of opportunities to make a quick cash grab with a Nostalgia tour, but instead spent three years trying to find the sound the radio station no longer supports. So the Grammys put her indie, throwback album in the running for Best R&B Album along with a host of talented and established artists, including Lalah Hathaway, BJ the Chicago Kid and Mint Condition (none of whom had to create their own zodiac calendars for the occasion). It took her three years, a decade worth of unheard of, grown-up slow jams that Y2K left behind, and she created a whole album and even poured herself a glass to enjoy it. —Imani Raven

Anthony Hamilton, What I’m Feelin’

It was hard to hear a forty-something Charlotte soul man driving down to make a country-soul album about picking his life up again over some twenties rapping apologies over 808s. It was the sixth full-length LP from Anthony Hamilton, and the five years since the album Back to Love had thoroughly roughed him up—he and his wife Tarsha got a divorce, he gained three sons, he ended up with a DWI, and it all wound up in these songs. He found the man who built him, Mark Batson (whose earlier production includes “Charlene” and the title track from Comin’ from Where I’m From), in Mark Batson; who produced all but two of the dozen tracks. He recorded at Blackbird in Nashville with the intention of obtaining a country-soul feel that he could not find in NY or LA; there are gospel, church, and honky-tonk sounds interwoven throughout every single one of these songs- they’re all in the same pew. The first single, “Amen,” with production by Salaam Remi and James Poyser, is a direct reference to taking that instinct of praying and directing it towards a woman, not a deity, which is one of the oldest tricks in the soul music arsenal and one that still works. With a track that features the HamilTones (a trio of backup singers for his live show), he laments arriving at his middle age without having the faintest clue what true love feels like, which really resonates coming from a man who’d already addressed every other aspect of his life in song. Hamilton wasn’t going to reinvent the wheel, especially since 2016 wasn’t really asking him to; he’s standing in the ruins of his forties, singin’ it out just like soul singers of the past, like Bobby Womack and Bill Withers. Remove the year, and “Amen” is nothing but a grown man expressing gratitude for somebody who stayed around, straight up loud and clear. —Phil

TWENTY88, TWENTY88

Big Sean and Jhené Aiko lived out a short fling playing adult film stars. The short film (titled Out of Love) accompanying their joint debut as TWENTY88 also dictates the boundaries of all surrounding material: a collection of eight songs about a real-life couple playing fictional ones on the rocks, performance and intimacy blurred until it’s impossible to discern which is which. The real-life pair previously shared verses on “Beware” and “I Know” before solidifying themselves as a couple on record, with the Detroit rapper and Los Angeles singer charting the ebb and flow of their relationship from the wary push-pull of “Déjà Vu” and the self-serving swagger of “Selfish” to the painful, slow deterioration of “Memories Faded.” In the project, neither party is spared, and Jhené’s responses to every single line Sean utters are sharp, as in “2 Minute Warning,” the collection’s single guest spot where she ventures into a realm more explicitly carnal than what she’d put to tape prior to the legendary crooners K-Ci and JoJo of Jodeci stopping by for some ‘90s grown-folks blessings. The collection’s beats, crafted by a young roster including KeY Wane, Cam O’bi and a teenaged Steve Lacy, aim for the group’s described intent of ‘90s R&B and ‘70s soul run through trap drums.” They soon broke up (rekindled years later), leaving Jhené to process the rubble in Chilombo, which, given that the squabbling throughout feels like two people commenting on a car wreck from within the automobile, makes “Memories Faded” feel like more of an auto-crash tape on today. —Cierra Marcel

Gallant, Ology

A falsetto could be a hiding spot or a high wire, and for the entirety of his debut, the Maryland singer born Christopher Gallant sticks with the wire, hanging on notes that most of his contemporaries wouldn’t attempt in front of a microphone. He came up loving Stevie and D’Angelo and writes like the literature addict he seems to be, metaphors so elliptical they function as riddles that are both beautiful and partially unintelligible. “Weight in Gold” was the one that connected, a plea for the unburdening that Zane Lowe supported but which the chart otherwise mostly overlooked; it’s still the clearest look we get at what he does, which is to circle an emotion without quite naming it. Producer Stint built and co-wrote the majority of Ology, giving that falsetto an appropriate place to land, and the only other vocalist is singer Jhené Aiko, who shares “Skipping Stones,” which she joins on top of a slab of Adrian Younge psychedelia, turning a drying up creek into the vision of a love going stagnant. Every other song, he operates entirely alone and within his own private language. He called one song “Miyazaki” and another “Percogesic,” the names referencing the Japanese animator and the over-the-counter painkiller, respectively—the latter indicating the height of his despair, which resides somewhere between a children’s cartoon and a medicine cabinet. —Tabia N. Mullings

Ro James, ELDORADO

The quickest way to sex record status goes directly through a stern church. Ro James, born Ronnie Tucker on an Army base in Stuttgart and raised by a military father turned preacher on gospel, Donny Hathaway and Otis Redding, took the road right to the bedroom and kept his hymnal in his back pocket. His debut, ELDORADO, contains a song entitled “Holy Water,” which has both meanings at the same time, an organ-and-guitar benediction that would play fine as a Sunday service offering were its object not a woman, and the song “New Religion” carries the same duality. Even the song that established him as a performer, “Permission,” was based on a sample of Willie Hutch’s 1973 “Brother’s Gonna Work It Out,” and sexual desire becomes a request instead of an assertion, a civility that the genre typically forgoes. James himself believed that “Permission” was too simple a statement to be a single and fought the decision until he lost to his A&R, Mark Pitts, who correctly anticipated the Grammy nomination that the track received. Prince’s fingerprints are all over the electric guitar on most of the track, and he shares writing duties with Miguel (whom Prince has worked with). “A.D.I.D.A.S.” stands as the funniest track here, bringing to life the childhood acronym All Day I Dream About Sex, sung over a guitar solo; the minister’s son laughs out loud from the balcony. —Brandon O’Sullivan

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This week is filled with so much self-persuasion: Steve Lacy singing a love song that’s so self-aware that he has to talk himself through its own defenses, a Fana Hues song where he stops believing anything anyone is saying. Ama goes after somebody who really can’t believe he’s been asked out by her, a friendship anthem from FLO that’s also an intimidation to some girl’s boyfriend and finally BOY SODA and his break-up caused by an act of God. Five forms of love.

Steve Lacy, “The Feeling”

Whatever happened to the love song where the singer is totally aware of how pathetic they sound and cranks the emotions up higher anyway? “The Feeling,” the single Lacy wrote and produced himself, is entirely constructed out of just that; the entire thing exists because he understands how much of a fool he sounds. This particular verse is a standard trope: the plea toward the person whose body is halfway to out-the-door, except he keeps stammering over himself in embarrassment-he understands, and so he shouts it louder. The opening couplet (“Something’s burning, I smell fire/The devil’s working hard to keep me alone”) turns to the mundane, then at the next section where he actually becomes profound; catching himself in the act of emotional processing: “When you start writing songs just to stop thinking ‘bout him/Oh, then you start writing songs and you make ‘em about him,” and the name of the other person appears without decoration, the lust travels where lust goes. He follows it with a happy memory of that night that “Seemed it was some kind of dream but it happened,” on a AirBnB in 2019, when he kept stumbling, and they’re all just one movement. —Jhanel

Fana Hues, “Recognize”

After hearing “Recognize” so many times from people who are clearly on their way out anyway, you stop believing what they say and begin to count the escape routes. Fana Hues leaves “Recognize” anchored in that suspicion, and what’s brilliant about the track is that she allows herself to become the target of her own cynicism. Hues isn’t sure she would be able to recognize love if it landed on her doorstep. Its disappointment has already eaten away at her capacity for it.

The verses stack up received statements of “It ain’t hard to say it/Or to lie/I’ve heard it all before halfway out the door” that she’s no longer willing to consume. Her hesitation comes across less as woundedness and more as weary, self-acknowledging weariness: “Can you really blame me/For being tired?” (No, Hues. No, we can’t.) Mulherin and Mulherrin’s catchy production lets her stay in control of the conversation, interrupting suitors mid-spiel with her flat dismissal, “I won’t take the bait/That same old line.” It cuts deepest when she reveals that the scar may be imperishable: “Been looking/But I don’t think I’d recognize love/If it was close enough to hit me.” And “This ain’t high school anymore” decisively ends all the old approaches, the lines that used to lure her in. —Mina Abdel

Ama, “Holding Back”

With a seduction song, ownership of the flirt is normally with the desired. But on “Holding Back,” Ama owns all of it and is even on the offensive, trying to wear down a shy guy who just won’t budge. The serenade runs on her assurance versus his hesitant nature, a funnier take than the style’s often inclined to explore. Her certainty that she will get her man before he says hardly anything back drives it, where no time is lost for laying down the challenge: “Better take your clothes off, it’s getting hot in here” and immediately framing the appeal in the here-and-now: “Watch these hips rock TikTok type like that post you hearted.” Ama does all the walking with the Dpat production; in one moment she has the full movie mob swagger (”Come be my don and daughter, top shotta baby”), and the next she has an infomercial vibe (“I’m a pro, you’re my snow, I don’t waste time”). It’s on the bridge that the challenge gets a bluff call: “So we know that you big and bad/But I got things you’ve never had,” where even the neighborhood gossip is on her side: “A little birdie told me you want more than that.” In light of this, the title query is almost entirely genuine; it’s not that he shouldn’t be holding back, it’s why is he? —Jamila W.

FLO, “Don’t Break Her Heart”

If “Don’t Break Her Heart” was an earnest best-friend-pact, it would be cute. Instead, FLO have fashioned a thinly veiled protection racket. They skip the catharsis and head straight for the boyfriend, outlining what awaits him in advance, should things get out of hand. The love they’re protecting is the friendship and the boyfriend is a factor requiring a good talking to. The taunts are playful, the UK slang a fantastic detail, “Post up on you block, blow your spot/Send the mandem ‘round your way” is both aggressive and silly; or “Beep-beep, it’s me at your front door: after which, you disappear like “poof-poof.” Julian Bunetta produces it and keeps the cartoonish threats consistent throughout, “If you break her heart/I will break your face.” The genius line is obviously “You can break her bed but/If you break her heart,” the distinction is made perfectly clear. FLO would rather drag the culprit’s doorstep to his house, than dwell over the spilled tears. —Tori Hammond

BOY SODA, “Elements”

“Elements” has to be the most forgiving breakup song that has ever existed. No one is to blame in BOY SODA’s latest single. Instead, two people built from different climates are just unlucky. He can’t help but harp on the shorthand for the breakup: ground vs. Wind, something neither party can control nor have picked for themselves. As a breakup song that absolves both parties involved, perhaps that is why it works so well.

He even escalates it beyond a relationship toward cosmic forces: “You like the ground/I like the wind/Don’t start a war with elements,” and a search for explanations persists through verses. “It all comes down to fundamental difference,” “a Your normal natural disaster,” and even the date are called as witness. Produced by MXXWLL, the astrology and the elements exist as a pleasant distraction from the simple truth: “Said you need a change wanna be a new woman/And I could never be the one to hold you.” All of the elements are a gentler version of the underlying message. He bookends the song where he began: “I’m on the ground/You’re in the wind,” two people rooted in the same place facing in opposite directions, neither reaching the other. —Phil

R&B, Soul, or Blues Albums to Check Out

• Imani Imani: Papercut

• Jalen Ngonda: Doctrine of Love

• Latanya Alberto: SEEN

• Inayah: Therapy Wasn’t Enough

• sparklmami: in this body

• Mica Millar: A Little Bit of Me

• Lex Aura: see you never.

• Will Preston: Erratic Heartbeats

• Architects of Sound: Architects of Sound II

• okay coleman!: 001

• Chant God: Sable (EP)

• Mannywellz: Small Chops (EP)

• Pheelz: A Rii Set (EP)

• S!MONE: There Will Be Signs (EP)

• Kavi Synatra: Emotional Value Vol. 1 (EP)

• Dxtiny: Sweet Sins (EP)

• Viuta: Refer to Judgement (EP)

• IYAMAH: chapter five (EP)

• Ny’Aira: Melodramatic (EP)

• April + VISTA: April + VISTA on Audiotree Live (EP)

Other Songs to Check Out

• Prince: Stone

• Glenn Lewis: Impressions

• Natanya: CANDYLAND!

• Nina Sky & Statik Selektah: I’m Hot

• Jaz Karis: Faith

• Storm Reid: Clean Sweep

• Naomi Sharon: Weak

• Zenesoul: Summer Breeze

• The Colleagues & October London: Seduce Me

• Brenna Whitaker: Sunny

• Aaron Thomas: All I Need

• Joseph Solomon: HALF ON THE BLAME

• Bobby V: She Got It

• James Berkeley: my teenage dream (feat. J Warner)

• Dahi: Find Me (feat. Moses Sumney & Mez)

• Oscar Jerome: Everything In Between

• Nao Yoshioka: Safe Place (feat. Jamila Woods & Peter Cottontale)

• Sy’Rai: Late Night

• Jake&Papa: Don’t Hurt Nobody

• Sam Pounds: No Diggity

• Genia: Hot

• Kelela: point blank

• Blxst: Ruin (feat. Sasha Keable)

• FKJ: Soulmates

• Charlotte Dos Santos: Roses

• b.kae: snap ya fingers (jazzy)

• Alexia Jayy: Money

• Marie Dahlstrom: 1 Journey Away

• Michi & Mndsgn: Playing Pretend (Mndsgn RMX)

• Thelma Houston: Love is the Power

• Flwr Chyld: Squeeze

• Sipprell: Superstar

• Dreamer Isioma: On My Grind (feat. Vayda) / Love Me (feat. Dante Swan)

• Mai Mai: Why Me?

• Abrina: Gotta Get Home

• OVI WOOD: SHAKE THIS FEELING

• Richard Saunders: Bitter Honey

• Africaine: Whatever

• Chenayder, Vayda & Norah’s World: Solitude

• Chuka: Man on a Mission (feat. The Destroyer)

• Nectar Woode: Wine into Water (feat. Elton John)

• Qiuntellii: After Party

• cortex: Don’t Try

• Yo Trane: International Flavor

• Gerald Wicks: i get it, i get it

• twiin.: good life

• Monroe Jordan: freckles

• Cameron Wright: Hot and Heavy

• Ashya: Relapse

• sp84: Give It to Me (feat. Alexx Skyy)

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It’s obvious that negotiation is this week’s throughline: each and every one of these songs is a compromise. We get one who lays her terms out by the first chorus, one who dodges a want-to-be-commitment he sort of wants, and one who simply begs through a disconnected line. Ravyn Lenae provides a PSA set over a Dahi and Flanafi beat, one who turns a late-night encounter into a 911 emergency, while Jae Stephens comes to a success-or-else victory lap. Nia Smith gives us a relationship she throws away like a pair of old denim shorts; Saint Harison, the committed and apologetic, gives a stand your ground with a sorry plea. Five distinct and varied deals.

Ravyn Lenae, “Handle”

The time the count-in comes in, “Two, three, four” nestled beneath the hook, the you already locked in. “Oh my love is like a landslide, when it all comes down,” she opens, “only one way to find out.” This is Ravyn Lenae in full seductive, disclaimer fashion-the Chicagoan who perfected sounding weightless while being heavy on the Bird’s Eye run. Re-teaming with Dahi and Flanafi with a Pop sound, she’s constructing “Handle” as a proposition with all terms included. The thrill is in how calmly she lays out the terms: “Know I might be more than you could handle,” she coos over the keys, like she’s reading terms of service, before pulling the whole scheme under with: “hold on tight, one with me in the undertow.” Some of the finest pleasure lies on the fringe. After the third chorus, a voice is giving back in asides a voice would never use in a love song: “Look down beneath your fears.” “Your tail grew back, buddy.” “So what’s it going to be? Tell me.” It’s playful, a bit deranged, like this love came with a Greek chorus already knowing how it plays out. By the backstretch, she’s abandoned the pretense and only wants what she wants: “The more you think of me, the more you’ll want me calling your name.” “Can you handle me? You know I want you on the same page.” Lenae spends all of “Handle” telling you she’s too much; by the end of the song, that’s the appeal. The smart people just hold on and let it go under. —Jamila W.

Syd, “Callin’” feat. Blu June

Since when did the booty call develop an anxiety attack? Sometime between the read receipt and the rejected FaceTime, the midnight “come through”text developed a nervous system. “I’m callin’ 911 ‘cause I need your love, and you ain’t pickin’ up, I’m comin’ for your love,” Blu June wails at the very beginning of “Callin’.” For someone who’s fronted the Internet (Syd) for more than ten years and made being “too cool” an entire persona, that’s an almost alarming amount of want to begin with. The artistry is in the fine print. “I don’t really be out on the scene,” Syd confesses, “sittin’ in the section all night, that shit ain’t for me.” It’s a love song for a homebody, not a night out. Then comes the one bar that guarantees the song’s timelessness: “I know you got my messages ‘cause they ain’t turnin’ green.” She bubbles-redacted and unanswered. A generation’s worth of romantic anxieties in a single line. Syd comes back in the second verse, turning June’s anxiety into a game plan: “Take you out to brunch and get you T’d up, girl, put on that sundress that I like, I’m tryna see somethin’.” Blu June’s still calling; Syd’s already got the table reservation and a wardrobe consultation. —Jhanel

Jae Stephens, “Attaboy!”

“Good boy.” It’s two words, tossed out like a treat into a dog’s dish, and the song is in motion. The idea of “Attaboy!” is that the singer, has essentially taken a man of bad behavior, and, through what she refers to as her “unorthodox ways”,house-trained him. “I used to be a bad boy with a tail ‘tween his legs, couldn’t be fixed, that’s what all the girls said.” She fixed him. It’s Jae Stephens doing a full obedience school prime time on a Dallas Caton beat, and the joke is the lack of mercy she exhibits in it. She takes it all so seriously; there is no tongue-in-cheek wink with her, not once. The upgrades come via ad-libs that fill in details: “Now he calls on time (A miracle) and he’s so polite (And fragile).” Fragile! She trained this man and then ruined him a little, and this parenthetical doesn’t give us a chance to ignore it. “I only have to tell him once, then I’m quick to cut ‘em off if you make me wait.” By the bridge, he is furniture, and everything she has done in this song has built to this: “I got him trained, made him, taught him, raised and fixed that boy.” A long history of Pop/R&B women have sung about running their men and the interesting thing about Stephens is that it costs her nothing. She got what she wanted, and only the good boy is going to have any reason to be uncomfortable with it. Good for her. Debut on the way. —Charlotte Rochel

Nia Smith, “High”

Some breakup songs function as temperature changers, never raising their volume above conversation, and High functions in that quiet way. “High” starts almost too quiet to even be heard. “It’s only a feeling,” Nia Smith sings, “not a vibe. Used to make me feel alive.” By the fourth line, she has already categorized the relationship as a past tense phenomenon. Over production from Jack Rochon, she strings together small, mundane sentences that read like they’re only the equivalent of a shrugging shoulders until they don’t: “It’s over. Let it go. Don’t know how to let it go. But I will know soon.” The saddest metaphor is in the laundry section. “Like jeans that are faded, lost and frayed,” she sings, “it’s nothing worth saving, throw it away.”

Anyone who has clung onto a relationship long after it expired knows the specific embarrassment that comes with a comparison of worn-out, torn up jeans.The casual line cuts deeper: “I watered us so we could grow, but I know we’re dying.” This is the entire tragedy of attempting: the portion where one does everything right and the thing dies anyway.The most heartbreaking pun is in the title itself. “You don’t get me high high high, anymore.” The effect wears off, and there’s no anger involved. She just isn’t feeling it anymore, and she simply states it as she exits, the same detached tone a person might take in explaining that the milk is spoiled. “High” works by changing the temperature of whatever room it plays in, and then leaving. —Mina Abdel

Saint Harison, “minute”

The standout from the ghosted EP tries to decide between keeping someone in bed with him and needing them gone by morning. Saint Harison in “minute” can’t remain still, or in one position for longer than two lines. “Said you want forever, baby, now I need a minute,” he belts out in the chorus, “little time to lay up in this bed without you in it.” This is the entirety of the song’s machinery: a man who adores love right up to the point at which love requires any effort from him. He plays the commitment-phobe with a level of self-awareness that makes the entire persona nearly endearing.

The boasts continue to alternate with apologies. At one point he’s casual to the verge of rudeness: “And if you leave your t-shirt, I’m alright with that.” At another point he’s divulging the most inconvenient thing possible: “I admit I think about your ex, boo, a little more than maybe just a friend would do.” He lays out his deal while taking a glass of reposado: “I’m just being honest,” as though truth itself negates the hurt caused. Toward the end of the track, the swagger breaks completely. “I wish I was what you hoped I was. I’m sorry, really sorry.” He’s been wearing armor of chill the entire track, but his one genuine emotion breaks through. That leaves the question he’s been spending all his time dancing around: If you already know you’re not who she needs, what do you need her to stick around a minute for? —Imani Raven

R&B, Soul, or Blues Albums to Check Out

• Chxrry: U, Me & My Ego

• Brian Jackson: Now More Than Ever

• Skye Newman: SE9

• Cecily Wilborn: Soul Therapy

• Amani Burnham: Roots and Wings

• Joey Quiñones: Inna Soul Steady Situation

• Reuben Aziz: mind the gap

• Alicia Waller: Louder, Then

• Mitchum Yacoub: A Way In

• Kat Eaton: What Happens Now

• annonXL: PRINCESS OF CHAOS

• reggie: UNDRA

• Saint Harison: ghosted (EP)

• Jordan Jackson: Back to Basics (EP)

• Phoenix James: Teeth (EP)

• MALIA: If I’m Being Honest (EP)

• Ye Ali: AFTER U LEFT (EP)

• Stevan: DEMO TAPE 1 (EP)

• Kennedy Ryon: Can I Evolve? (EP)

• Ania Hoo: MORNING STAR: SIDE A (EP)

• The Philharmonik: Transcendentalism II (EP)

• KFMD & Qing Madi: Barely Legal (EP)

Other Songs to Check Out

• CARI: Crashing Out!

• Noxz & Shae Universe: Can’t Phase Me

• Camper: MISSIN / NEXT TO ME (feat. RAHSAAN)

• Patchwork Inc. & Lynda Dawn: Anyone

• MIRIAH.: BLUE FACES

• YalaBear: $HOW U OFF (feat. Rakiyah)

• Arima Ederra: You’re My (A COLORS Show)

• H.LLS & Mahalia: FCUK

• Gotts Street Park & Matt Maltese: Some Birds Don’t Fly

• Samant & Barney Bones: BENJAMINS

• Olivia Escuyos: GET RIGHT!

• The Erikson Project & Odoneila: Camisole

• Aaron Taylor: Lifeline

• Jessie Reyez: UR HEARTBEAT (WHO DO U THINK ABOUT AT 2AM)

• Rory, BLK ODYSSY & Lucky Daye: Still Be Mine

• AJ McLean & Ty Dolla $ign: Flowers

• Baby J: Fallen Angel

• Blood Orange: Essex_Honey.mp3

• Khadi Lee: DON’T

• BLKPRL: Art of Desire

• Kareen Lomax: AOTW

• Jazlyn Martin: Germy

• PJ Morton: Close Enough

• Cautious Clay: Green Screen (1pm)

• Lex Aura: Denicia

• Dylan Sinclair: On Cam

• Brianna Castro: shot in the dark!

• Aaron Page: Mine

• Low.bō: Spine

• Flozigg: A Thousand Degrees

• Makindé: thrudavine (feat. Niko Noir)

• CANDIACE, Tamar Braxton & Darrel Walls: If Only…. (The Conversation)

• Guordan Banks: Alright

• Sylo: How Sweet

• WILLOW: Talk On the Hill

• BenjiFlow & Haile: Standing Here

• Faye Meana: The Way I Love

• Misha, Phil Beaudreau & cocobona: Dream of Summer

• Mia Lailani: EBB & FLOW

• Jacob Sigman: X OVER ZERO

• Echo Huang: PRAY FOR ME

• Arlissa: A Girl Just Wants to Be…

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These are songs we keep reaching for—on the morning commute, in the kitchen, late at night when the phone is charging and nobody’s texting back This batch leans hard into R&B’s most tender corner: desire without shame, reunion without guarantee, and the kind of self-worth that refuses to negotiate. From an East London singer-songwriter-producer who self-produces her own longing to a Manchester vocalist painting entire moods in purple, here are five songs that had us reaching for the replay button all week.

kwn, “Touch Myself”

In recent years, many younger R&B vocalists have adopted a very specific style (which I hate): a muffled, half-whispered vocal that prioritizes texture over technique, hiding behind the production until you aren’t quite sure who the vocalist is. But East London’s Khyra Wilson, who writes, produces and records under the name kwn, turns that on its head. On “Touch Myself,” the producer-singer sits right at the front of the record, close enough that you can hear her take a breath between lines, and lets her voice do the sweating.

Backed by swishy percussion and slick synthesizers from producers FAXONLY and Zeek, kwn’s track is a slow-jam reminiscent of SWV that maintains a slow tempo but keeps the intensity building as it goes. kwn herself matches the pace perfectly. Lines like “I touch myself just thinking about you” can be heard as boastful or a confession, depending on who delivers it, but with a raspy, breathy delivery, it can come off as both, as if the singer is revealing something they didn’t plan to say. Things get a little looser and sweeter in the second verse (“I’m sexually frustrated/And I can demonstrate it if you like”) as if she is grinning through the lines as the drums close in on her. She has clearly written this line for herself, as the delivery is very personal (“I nominate myself tonight”), almost like it’s not that unusual to hear those words spoken outside of a song.

Last June, kwn released her debut EP, With All Due Respect, on RCA and featured a collaboration with Kehlani, “Worst Behaviour,” for which she earned a BET nomination, alongside a sold-out headline tour last summer. kwn’s sophomore EP, And All Pride Aside, will release on June 26, and if there is one thing her latest release shows, she certainly knows not to ask for permission to get the job done. The Walthamstow native, who grew up Nigerian and Irish, learned to play the piano from a young age and started making music on SoundCloud at 11 years old, has spent more than a year making music she has produced herself. On “Touch Myself,” she makes you feel like you’re not going to get the chance to wait any longer. — Jamila W.

Glenn Lewis, “G.Y.A.M.L. (My Love)”

It’s been 24 years since people were comparing Glenn Lewis to Stevie Wonder. Glen Ricketts, who released the album World Outside My Window in 2002, got the comparisons early, as he was a singing competition winner back in high school, and he didn’t have the “thug” or “preacher” vibe that was in demand for R&B singers back then. Then, like many artists whose sounds didn’t fit neatly into a category, he dropped off. He released the Moment of Truth album on an indie imprint in 2013, and a concept album with DJ Jazzy Jeff followed in 2017.

“G.Y.A.M.L. (My Love)” will be on the upcoming album Overture, and you can tell Lewis has been honing his craft in the background. “Giving You All My Love” originally was an instrumental released last year by Seige Monstracity. It featured drums, piano, and horns, and the instrumental itself created a groove that made you want to nod your head. It wasn’t trying to sound like a specific period. So, it’s very easy for Lewis to just slot in his voice like he’s been listening to this track for months.

“Crazy seeing ya
Was wondering how you been
You stayed on my mind
Swear it’s like fate brought us back again.”

It’s a classic romcom theme, seeing someone you once dated, and rekindling a flame, and Lewis sings it all with so much control that it doesn’t sound needy at all. He plays with phrasing so much that it makes you think he’s singing “questioning” for a few beats while you really only hear it once. His father was a part of the Canadian funk band, Crack of Dawn, so it’s easy to notice that the rhythm is driving the music, not the voice. The voice is just comping to the rhythm. “Zimbabwe to Kenya/Sun kissed ‘cause she African/You been stole my heart but you caught/Ain’t need to I’m giving in.” It’s a song about reconnecting with someone, with the smoothness and lack of urgency in Lewis’ voice helping sell the idea of being out of touch for the past decade-plus of years. — Phil

Tiffany, “Treat Me Like a Princess”

Somewhere in a box or on a hard drive is a clip of eleven-year-old Tiffany Evans competing on Star Search and receiving perfect scores from every judge. She was the only contestant in the show’s history to ever do that. Fast-forward three years and she had a Columbia Records deal and a Ciara feature on the smash “Promise Ring,” the track for which sounded out a summer of MySpace profile pages and Limited Too shopping bags. She was in two of Tyler Perry’s films. She worked with Timbaland, too. Eventually, the phone stopped ringing, as it would for many young Black women who grew out of whatever it was that was profitable.

The time gap that occurred between 2015’s All Me EP and now has been spent doing things that don’t make for press releases: writing, strengthening her vocal skills, and determining what it is that she really wants to say, without the involvement of a major label. “Treat Me Like a Princess” is Tiffany’s first release in almost a year. It’s the first track off of a new chapter called Tiffany, and its release reveals that entire period of resetting herself in all its entirety. Produced by Dwayne “Toruxd” McPherson, Michael “Raz” Melvin and Prince Happoldt, the track wraps a diamond-filled request in a soft, smooth vocal delivery. She sounds more loving than forceful on this track, as if she’s wondering whether it would be easier on her part to ask nicely than to demand.

“Diamonds on me dancing/I like when I’m your main attraction/I don’t really like when you miss the vision/If you can’t do nothing else, just treat me like a princess,” the lyrics are clever in their construction. She sets the tone by stating something she does enjoy, then negates something that’s not quite right; thus, when she gets to her demands, it’s not so much of an ultimatum as it is a correction. On the second verse she gets even more direct, like she’s leaning in closer to the microphone: “I can be subtle about what I need from you/But it’s so exciting when you’re doing things that I teach you to do.” The wisdom gained over the last two decades of industry experience seeps through that line; she was teaching people how to be to her at age fourteen. The song was written by her, and the VVS reference continues for the entirety of the track, seamlessly transitioning from jewelry to clarity to self-realization. By the bridge, you want to be ice-ing her up to your core. She’s earned that right. — Imani Raven

Blxst, “Just My Type”

You might say Blxst’s self-produced drums sit just past where you’d expect them. Not lazy or dragging, but a beat upbeat that your body instinctively leans forward to catch it. “Just My Type,” which is Blxst’s latest single and the first lead from his upcoming album Labor of Love (June 12), rides that pocket like a weapon. It begins with a guitar loop from Sam Wun so rich it feels like the warm glow of a space heater in a small one-bedroom apartment, and when Blxst comes in, it’s almost as if he’s starting mid-sentence, “You can’t take me nowhere/I don’t care nothin’ ‘bout no time and place, I want you here.” It feels like he is telling us something, like he’s speaking it as he goes. And that is a trick. One day, all we have left are the memories we made. On paper, it’s just Hallmark fluff, but here it is like a man who knows how to count down his life and chooses to count recklessly.

“How many risks did we take? (Too much)
How many rules did we break? (Too much).”

These are questions he answers himself before you can get a word in edgewise. Like he’s already having this conversation in his mind. — Randy

Daley, “Lavender”

Here he is. Daley has taken the best part of a decade and a great deal of labor to build up a global career on such vocally striking tracks that he risks sounding too smooth a song, the kind of glossy delivery that is easy to tune out. He’s performed alongside such luminaries as Pharrell Williams, Stevie Wonder, Robert Glasper and Jill Scott. His most recent single, a collaborative piece with UK producer Swindle titled “Lavender,” finally allows all that prowess to find a space worthy of its potential. “Is there any way/We could lose this crowd?/Make a getaway/Up to a distant cloud,” and you know where this song is heading: “Lavender” is about escapism. But it’s not about tucking yourself in bed and singing a soothing song; it’s about placing yourself in a highly controlled state of mind in order to escape to the heavens. Swindle’s sound, which sits somewhere between the realms of jazz, neo-soul and UK bass, isn’t something you want to get lost in, because you want to be able to keep track of yourself, given the track is so leisurely and relaxed. The walls are coming down and the ceiling is levitating and your home is increasing until it’s just you and one other individual. You can only imagine the presence of the other person speaking to you while you float in the clouds. “There are new colors that appear/When you’re here with me,” Daley raptures. — Nehemiah

R&B, Soul, or Blues Albums to Check Out

• 6LACK: Love Is the New Gangsta

• Moses Sumney: Is God Is (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

• Thee Marloes: Di Hotel Malibu

• Patrick Paige II: Love You, Mean It

• CJ Monét: Confessions of a People Pleaser

• Willie Clayton: Evolution

• Bri Babineaux: Briana

• Keenan TreVon: Buy Me Flowers

• We the Band: 911!

• REMI: Left On RED (EP)

• Anaïs Cardot: Map of Her Shadow (EP)

• SIPHO.: YEARN (EP)

• Ooma: A Timeless Echo (EP)

• Deliverie: From Deliverie with Love (EP)

• Rebel Rae: Typewriter (EP)

• BVNGS: Only Cause I’m Drunk Too (EP)

• Justin Garner: songs you can feel (EP)

• Yoko Gold: Gemini Moon (EP)

• Suzanne Sheer: Voices (EP)

• Konyikeh: Cincere (EP)

• DAMOYEE: Not My Place (EP)

• CARMIT: CARMIT (EP)

• Kali Sade: Take XXI (EP)

• Qui: Cold Summer (EP)

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Other Songs to Check Out

• Ro James: 5th Gear

• Arno Sacco: Bridges

• Adrian Younge: Feel the High Life

• NappyHIGH: Angel (kp) [feat. Devin Morrison & Brad Bellard]

• Jesse Gold, Jesse Barrera & Gabe Bondoc: Date Night

• DVYN: In My Face

• Charlotte Dowsson: Please

• Olympia Vitalis: Money Tree

• Vedo: Oooh (V-Mix)

• JACOTÉNE: Tell Me (I Heard It from My Father)

• Pimmie: Call Me When You Can (Live Sessions)

• The Crank Crusaders (Raheem DeVaughn, YahZarah & Bootsy Vegas): Tambourine

• Stefan Mahendra: Too Late

• r.em.edy: leaving with my lipgloss on

• Bobby V: Easy to Love

• I Am Roze: With You

• Lu’: MME

• Orla Rae: M25

• SemajB: Love Ain’t Fair

• Jimmie Allen: Shaking In My Boots

• THEHONESTGUY: WAHALA RIDDIM

• Devon Culture: HOW DO YOU SLEEP

• Johnny Gill: A Dance, A Kiss

• Heartbreak Alumni: Can’t Help Myself

• Felix Ames: I Don’t Wanna Die

• TA Thomas: I Found You

• 2BYG: I Want You

• Ne-Yo: Ms. Tundra

• Sean Leon & God’s ALGORITHM: MET SOMEONE ELSE

• Roses Gabor: RAINBOWS IN SPRINGTIME

• Jason Dhakal: Play

• Gayathri Krishnan: Self Esteem

• Lost Girl: Wild

• Stevan: Wishing That We Met

• Samba Jean-Baptiste & Rockie Rode: January Sweetheart

• Courtnie, Mad Keys & Phoelix: Commas

• Eric Penn: Hit & Run

• Zeke Bleu: Under Your Spell

• Avara: what did you think love would be

• Maleigh Zan: Bad Bunny

• KAYAM: Guilty Pleasure

• pacificjoshua.: luv u right

• Majid Jordan: Cold

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This week’s picks: a Jezebel, a therapist cameo, a runway strut, and two breakups going in opposite directions. All in one week.

Giveon, “JEZEBEL”

“Tonight, you’re mine, Jezebel, mine” uses a thumping swing that evokes a bar scene. The choruses created a build-up for a big note on the bar, but here, his baritone rests under live instrumentation, and this is Giveon’s best hook in a few cycles. BELOVED. Act II gives Giveon’s baritone a brief spot for “JEZEBEL,” the biggest of five new tracks. Giveon fulfills a brief seven-person production team contract with, from within the team—Jahaan Sweet, Jeff “Gitty” Gitelman, Kemy Siala, Los Hendrix, Matthew Burnett, Peter Lee Johnson, and Sevn Thomas—with a swing that refuses the brooding that BELOVED is known for. He keeps this brief contract for “JEZEBEL” with the best admission in Giveon’s discography. AD “He had you in him too/More than just a kiss or two/There’s no need to introduce/I know just what you are” is a baritone, and it is all four declaratives. The baritone refuses a plea.

Baby Rose, “But, Nvm”

Before her two albums and a Grammy, Jasmine Rose Wilson was the next Billie Holiday. Her press kit has had its elements removed since 2024. The song “But, Nvm,” from July’s album YEARNALISM, is her best single yet. “But, Nvm” opens with “Waiting on a train,” expressing her desire to take a train “somewhere you won’t call my name,” or “where every summer doesn’t feel like rain,” or “I just need a little sun.” Her contralto is still a contralto, as staging has flipped. “But, Nvm” was co-produced by Wilson with Joe Harrison and Ryan James Carr; the arrangement gets handed an acoustic guitar, a small horn section, and almost no room for the kind of wallowing the Holiday-comparison crowd has been waiting for. A verse’s worth of work is being carried by one syllable. Her Materialists soundtrack work and the Leon Thomas record Mutt were rest stops, but the press kit was being cleared all along. Streams were earned by “Friends Again,” yet the actual exit from the Holiday comparison was being saved for “But, Nvm.” Press kit cleared.

Tone Stith, “Pageant Stage”

Brass enters early on “Pageant Stage.” Three horn stabs that escort, not accompany, even before Stith opens his mouth. Strongest stretch on The Edge. Christopher “Brody” Brown and Kenneth “KP” Paige stack a runway-strut snare under those horns, but the tempo still pulls in by one beat so Stith can narrate his own entrance. “Straight from the pageant stage/There you are/Lookin’ like a star.” His vocal stays loose throughout, almost spoken in spots; the lift is saved for the punchline at the top of each refrain. “Lil Miss Expensive, she got good taste,” snaps the diction from the MC of the evening to a guy at the bar.

Within the song’s midpoint the swerve has arrived. Stith opens the script.

“You the definition of a perfect ten
Lighter, action, cameras flashin’, you the main event.”

Two lines later it detonates to the “Type to make me take it off of safety/And fire in it, fire in it/Fuck around and die in it, die in it.”

Jaz Karis, “Life Is Unfair”

Karis’s 2018 COLORS performance of “Petty Lover” pulled sixteen million views. Her first album took six more years. During that gap the songwriter who once wrote songs on a Barbie tape recorder in South London commuted between London and Los Angeles, dropped Safe Flight in September 2024, dropped the Loud in the Water EP a year later, yet watched the U.K. R&B discourse pass her by twice anyway. “Life Is Unfair” is the song the wait built. Prodigal Sons on Rhodes and brushed kit. Her first line on “Life Is Unfair” is an apology for ghosting. “It’s been a while, I probably should’ve text you something.” The apology gets replaced with a hum—”Life is, mmm/Not fair.”

Bryant Barnes, “Apollo”

“Apollo” opens with three images and no melody (“TV lights/In your eyes/Shine till I’m blue.”). Yet Barnes has already locked his cadence inside the first six lines. Short phrases stacked into a confession throughout the record. Each “maybe” line gets withheld until its closing word slams the verdict shut: “Maybe I’m helplessly in love with you/Maybe I’m desperate/For your attention/Maybe there’s nothing that I wouldn’t do.” It’s the opener Barnes wasted on a closer slot.

R&B, Soul, or Blues Albums to Check Out

• Mýa: Retrospect

• Giveon: Beloved: Act II

• Tank and the Bangas: The Last Balloon

• Dua Saleh: Of Earth & Wires

• Tone Stith: The Edge

• Adria Kain: This Feels Like Home

• Karen Bernod: IRIS

• The Elovaters: Shark Belly Motel

• Ras-I: Heart of Love

• Brooklyn Funk Essentials: Black Butterfly

• Stella Heath: For Billie

• Bobbi Stella: Risk It All

• Down to the Bone: This Way Forward

• Randy Brecker: Espirito

• James Savage: PINE

• Tayc: JOŸA

• Johnny Drille: Before the Morning Light

• PawPaw Rod: Picture Day: A PawPaw Rod Album

• BNXN & Sarz: The Game Needs Us (EP)

• M’elle: Stages (EP)

• Maya J’an: Blindfaith County (EP)

• Shaylin B: Brand New (EP)

• Malaya: April Showers (EP)

• Zilo: Ready to Bloom (EP)

Other Songs to Check Out

• Jorja Smith: What’s Done Is Done

• Nao Yoshioka & My Anh: Pieces of Me

• Quanie: Right There

• Thee Marloes: 6 Years

• kwn: idea of love (A COLORS SHOW)

• Victoria Monét: Let Me (Live Rendition)

• Lee Lewis: The Long Way

• Michi & Mndsgn: Are You Lonesome?

• Iris Aeria: lavender

• Black Atlass: Yours and Mine

• Nick Hakim: Real Here Now / Water

• OVI WOOD: Playing Games In My Face

• Cerrone & Adi Oasis: New Highs

• Autumn Paige: Money Money Money

• LIZ: Juicy Sweet

• Leven & Flow Clark: how dare you

• Danny Singh: HONEYBBY

• Quail P: Happy Tears

• point 5ve & October London: Grown Man Business (Remix)

• Larissa Lambert: Blood On the Strings

• The Colleagues & Kevin Ross: A Little

• Owen Saward: Hard to Get

• Lex Aura: Delusion

• Courtney Bell & Ron E: He Don’t Know

• Latanya Alberto: Window to the Soul

• Adanna Duru & Bas: One on One

• MorMor & Celeste: Like Heaven

• Devon Gilfillian: Moonflower

• Devin Morrison & Seafood Sam: ZODIAC SINE

• Thutmose: PRADA YOU

• AMARIA BB: Break Me Off

• tg.blk: So Bad

• The Philharmonik & Jakhari Smith: I Might as Well

• ROME & Prod. Dior: Figure It Out

• Marley Bleu: Missin You

• Nezi: Waiting

• twin.: vibrations

• Paris Rabone: BIRDS

• Haley Smalls: Don’t Touch

• Angel: Call Me

• Shelby Ruger: nintendo switch

• VARTIDA: Slow Burner

• Ishmael Nehemiah: Bout It (feat. Natalie Chludz)

• Nectar Woode: Rivers End

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This week’s picks: a soulful piano confession from a British girl group chasing catharsis on the dance floor. One of electronic R&B’s most exacting architects delivering a wiry guitar manifesto. A veteran balladeer staring down temptation on both sides of Saturday. The Mother’s Day song that shouldn’t work but does. And a Fort Lauderdale falsetto making the case that nobody in R&B is giving the pillow-talk song enough reverence. We got into it.

FLO, “Therapy at the Club”

Before FLO’s voices even arrive, the piano has already done its job. Built around a single repeating chord progression that never resolves where you expect, the arrangement from Lostboy and Leroy Clampitt alongside Lauren “Amma” Keen gives FLO’s stacked three-part harmonies room to breathe in the gaps. Most piano-led R&B ballads in 2026 are drowning their singers in reverb and string pads, afraid of silence; “Therapy at the Club,” the title track from the British trio’s sophomore album (due July 24 on Republic), kills that instinct dead. Through the verses, Jorja and Renee and Stella trade the lead until the lines blur, and when they land together on “go run your mouth to a stranger ‘cause their arms feel safer/Than telling the man that you love he’s not enough,” the harmonies thin to near-solo before catching each other again. Given its weight by being almost unaccompanied, that second phrase changes the whole song. Girl-group records have always been about women holding each other steady when everyone else fumbles the job. This one knows it. Sneaky devastating. — Jamila W.

Kelela, “linknb”

A Three 6 Mafia that could belong on a mixtape opens “linknb” and plays the entire song without stopping. Oscar Scheller produced the track—Kelela’s second single from new avatar, her third album, out July 10 on Warp—and the drums underneath are metallic and heavy, closer to post-punk than anything she’s done before, or maybe closer to shoegaze--hard to place exactly. The sub-bass landscapes that made 2023’s Raven feel like it was recorded inside a submarine are gone. In their place: a coiling six-string figure and a beat that clangs. Kelela started the song during a stretch when she couldn’t write, and it sounds like one—the lyrics circle back on themselves, “Seed to a star/New avatar,” each pass adding force. The mantra origin bleeds into the structure. Lines loop, gain weight, refuse to land. Halfway through the second verse, “all I know is that I paved the way, underpaid”—the melody drops out of its register, drops to speech for a beat and a half, and the guitar drags it back. A labor complaint about the economics of being a Black woman building experimental music at pop’s edges, dropped into a dance track the way an overdue bill gets dropped into dinner conversation. — Phil

PJ Morton, “Sell My Soul”

PJ Morton plays keys for Maroon 5. Six Grammys. A Disney songwriting credit for Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. He is also a New Orleans soul singer whose solo records operate on a completely different schedule, and his upcoming double album Saturday Night, Sunday Morning makes the split literal—R&B tracks and gospel tracks, divided by a comma and a conviction. “Sell My Soul” lives on the Saturday half. The piano and the organ underneath it could’ve come from Greater St. Stephen Baptist Church, where Morton’s father Bishop Paul Morton Sr. pastored for decades. The refusal—you can’t have control, I will never sell my soul—names no addressee. The industry, temptation, the devil. Morton never picks one. Then he breaks:

“I admit sometimes
It gets so rough
And I feel like I had enough.”

Four bars where the whole posture falls apart and the vocal wobbles. Fifteen years in a pop-rock arena band, a Disney ride, and the realest four bars Morton has put on tape all year are about being tired. — Imani Raven

Eric Bellinger, “Just Like You”

In 1958, Bobby Day sang “Rockin’ Robin.” His grandson Eric Bellinger, raised in Compton, co-wrote for Usher and Chris Brown before building a solo R&B catalog starting in 2014. “Just Like You” is a Mother’s Day song. Troy Oliver and Troy Taylor produced it—both quiet-storm architects—and the arrangement—not sure what else to call it—sits on brushed drums and a keyboard bed that sounds like somebody’s house on a Sunday. In the first verse the wedding ring stays on. Adversity goes unnamed. Bellinger sings about a woman who held her head up through whatever it was, never told him what it was, and quoted Philippians 4:13 enough that he eventually got it inked across his sternum.

“Told me I could do all things through Christ who strengthens me
Now it’s tatted on my chest.”

Second verse hands over a teaching method. “You taught me everything without sayin’ a word.” He’s been writing R&B since the early 2010s. Usher records. Chris Brown records. His own catalog starting in 2014. None of the catalog work prepares you for a Mother’s Day song with a sternum tattoo, a wedding ring she never took off, an adversity she never named, and a Compton address. — Randy

Kyle Dion, “Nature’s Perfume”

Anton Goransson, a Swedish beatmaker, produced “Nature’s Perfume” with Blake Straus. The synths underneath drip and pool, wet enough to feel humid. Over them, Goransson dropped a kick and snare so dry they could’ve been recorded in a closet, no reverb anywhere to soften the edges. Kyle Dion, the Fort Lauderdale singer who’s been working a breathy falsetto since SUGA in 2019 and through SASSY, If My Jeans Could Talk, and last year’s SOULAR, floats above the contrast. He opens: “Dripping nature’s perfume/Under pressure, babe/Lemme press you out.” Halfway through he sings “Perfect syncopation, no interludes,” and the song does exactly that. One pulse from bar one through bar last. No breakdown, no key change. Near the end Dion drops out of falsetto into a spoken register, asks his partner to undress, and the three minutes of held tension finally lets go. Ay dios mio. — F. Qureshi

R&B, Soul, or Blues Albums to Check Out

• Mack Keane: Wide Eyed

• Slowe: In Moments

• Blue Lab Beats: The Blue Lab Beats Show

• Navah Sea, Braxton Cook & Saxton Chef: What Do I Know Now?

• Szymon Justyński: Last Romantic Warrior

• Hil St. Soul: Nasilyfa

• Brother Wallace: Electric Love

• Token Honey: Token Honey

• Matthew Stevens: Matthew Stevens

• Stix Hooper: Cookin’ Up the Groove

• Isaiah Kaleo: icymi (EP)

• Tia Gordon: i asked the stars for this x (EP)

• Toulouse: Blue On Blue (EP)

• Jenevieve: CRYSALIS (CODA)

• Janine: Pain and Paradise Deluxe

• Chris Brown: BROWN (Optional)

Other Songs to Check Out

• 6LACK: Ashin the Blunt (feat. Young Thug)

• Tank and the Bangas: Nighttime (feat. David Shaw & Austin Brown)

• Tiffany: Treat Me Like a Princess (Even.biz Exclusive)

• Karri: Charge It to the Game

• Kevon Edmonds: No Ordinary Love

• Aaron Frazer: It’s a Shame

• ROE: Body

• Yaya: That Girl

• New Edition: Im Feeling You

• Ojerime: 4ME

• H3rizon: Certified Lover Girl

• MALIA: Shallow

• Lizzen, Vedo & Jacquees: Work It Out (Can We)

• TA Thomas: You Got Your Wings

• Sonny Tennet: Call Her Home

• Teyana Taylor & Wale: Bed of Roses

• IYAMAH: sehuli

• Iris Aeria: lavender

• Sean Gibbs & Frida Touray: Wounded Healers

• Annie Tracy: Moment

• Tamera: Undeniable (feat. Aitch)

• reggie: 2b

• HXRY: ALL THE WAY THROUGH

• Jawan: Always On My Mind (feat. Sis) [Cover]

• Rebel Rae: Baby We Made It

• Amari Noelle: GOTTA KNOW

• REMI: I Tried

• Paradise & Sweata: Predictable (Remix)

• Brenna Whitaker: Purple Rain

• Tay Iwar: Say My Name

• Kuzi Cee: Shot In the Dark

• Nic Dean: Sirens

• Khalil, Snooze God & Delia Li: So What

• Naomi Sharon: Better Days

• Flwr Chyld: Wrapped Around

• Ambré: Laugh Later, Cry Now (feat. CARI)

• Tasha: Spring (feat. Jamila Woods & L’Rain)

• The Womack Sisters: Chauffeur

• October London: Tik Tok Shop

• Lu’: ESCAPE / Back Road Blues’

• Qendresa: Rain in July / Be the One

• Dreamer Isioma & The Celestials!: Life Isn’t Fair

• Phil.: make it right / luv you all night

• Mega Simone: Is This Empathy

• Elujay: Bomo

• 95ANTNY: SLiDE

• Cedric Brazle: mine.

• Denisa Julia: CHANGES

• JacQuar 937: TTM

• SiMaya: when i’m mad

• Coline Creuzot: Should’ve Thought About It

• Jon Lampley, Lawrence & Louis Cato: Dock of the Bay

• Eloise: How Lucky

• NIKEE MUZE: care less

• okay coleman!: Let Me Go

• James Blake: Trying Times (A COLORS Show)

• Dionne Warwick & John Legend: Where Is Your Heart

• Che Ecru: 1:11

• Chezile: Mr. Man (feat. Dominique Da Silva)

• Carter Ace: phase 3.1*

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This week’s five R&B songs range from the confessional to the confrontational. Chris Brown drops to his knees over a blues-soaked groove with Leon Thomas, Joyce Wrice surrenders to something she doesn’t fully trust, and Chxrry and Mariah the Scientist trade venom and war paint over Believve’s tinted-window production. Mýa links with Too $hort for a synth-heavy late-night flirtation ahead of her first album in eight years, and The-Dream—freshly anointed one of America’s greatest living songwriters—returns to the thing he’s always done best: steal somebody’s girl and laugh about it.

Chris Brown, “Fallin’” feat. Leon Thomas

Tank’s background vocals land first, low and churchy, humming underneath as though an organ got left droning in a church basement. The bassline follows, a thick pulse that Antonio Moses and Roccstar built around what amounts to a late-night confession booth, and Brown leans all the way in. His 12th album, BROWN, drops this Friday, and “Fallin’” is the final single before it arrives, but the song feels unencumbered, already loose. The music video steals, oops, borrows its warm-toned cinematography and suited-up aesthetic from Sinners. Brown occupies that second category here with zero irony. He pleads on his knees, and I mean he is begging: “Tryna plant my feet on the floor/Can’t believe how I’m fallin’.” His melisma curls around the chorus as though he’s gripping a doorframe, trying not to slide further.

Leon Thomas takes the verse that shifts the song from a plea into something heavier. Brown is spiraling; Thomas walks through the wreckage with his eyes open. A gorgeous double meaning is buried in “Fell in love when you land here/Didn’t even know you had wings”: she arrived as grace, and she also might fly away. He goes to “I loved you until the casket/I just wish we could get past it/Burnin’ bridges ‘til our paths meet again,” and those three lines reshape the entire song. Brown can’t find his footing. Thomas already sees where the freefall ends and has accepted it. With writing partner Clifton Haralson, they’ve put together the kind of blues-soaked R&B duet that used to anchor whole eras of radio, a song about two men fluent in loss who still show up to the session to sing about it. It’s a step in the right direction, but let’s not get carried away. Will that be enough for a 27-track upcoming bloated album?

Joyce Wrice, “Crack the Code”

Four years after Overgrown and its KAYTRANADA-blessed standout “Iced Tea” put her name in rotation, and a handful of guest features later (Jordan Ward, Mahalia, Jaz Karis), Joyce Wrice hasn’t rushed toward a sophomore album. Since dropping singles through her own imprint via BMG, “Break Me In” in January ran hotter, Amerie-era percussion and a frank demand for physical release: “I need you to break me in/Don’t make me wait.” On “Crack the Code,” produced again by Malik Ninety Five, the heat has lowered to a simmer. Wrice described the song as written from the perspective of her own guarded instincts meeting the one who makes guarding yourself nearly impossible, “exciting, but there’s tension underneath it all.” That tug lives in the phrasing. “The way ya killing me softly, so gently/Oh, it got me weak, I don’t understand” sounds a little spooked by how good surrender actually is. Wrice hovers just above the beat, and the pull between wanting to fold and wanting to bolt is the whole engine.

Chxrry, “Bottles & Lights” feat. Mariah the Scientist

A Nextel chirp opens the track, a direct line, no middleman, and Believve’s production glides in behind it with tinted-window patience. Chxrry became the first woman XO Records ever signed. Her debut album U, Me & My Ego arrives later this spring, and “Bottles & Lights” is the single that clarifies what kind of record she wants to make: one where getting your heart smashed and going out with your girls aren’t separate moods but the same night. She opens venomously:

“You was eating me for dinner back in the Maldives
Thought I was the one when you had me down on my knees
Met my family in December, thought I would get a ring
Whole time you was fuckin’ these bitches in Sandy Springs.”

Mariah the Scientist picks up the thread from the other side of that same betrayal, her tone running at a lower temperature than Chxrry’s, bruised and slow-burning where Chxrry was sharp. “Said I want a winner, but not the kind that would cheat/Not the kind bringing bitches back up to the Four Seasons.” She names the hotel, the behavior, the type, and flips the gaze outward: “If y’all got so much to say then why y’all ain’t been stop me?” It’s a dare aimed at gossip commenters and concerned DMs alike. Between them, Chxrry and Mariah built a song that moves from wound to war paint in three minutes, and the recurring mantra, “real bitches back in style,” stings more for how unbothered they both sound delivering it. They already got dressed and left.

Mýa, “Just a Little Bit” feat. Too $hort

The intro plays out as a 2 a.m. phone call that both parties hoped for. Mýa picks up: “It’s 2am, now you wanna call somebody back?” Too $hort, casual as a Cadillac idle: “I ain’t never too busy for you.” Grown-folk flirtation with no pretense of coyness and zero interest in playing it cool. Mýa hasn’t put out a studio album in eight years; Retrospect, her tenth, lands May 15 on Planet 9, the independent label she founded long before artist ownership became an industry talking point. She toured with Brandy and Monica last year on The Boy Is Mine Tour, celebrated Fear of Flying’s 25th anniversary with a vinyl reissue and a BET Awards performance of “Case of the Ex” that went viral, and was named by Billboard one of the Top Female Artists of the 21st Century.

LaMar Edwards’s production on “Just a Little Bit” is rooted in the late-’80s Minneapolis funk that anchors the album, synths pulsing with that Rick James-adjacent heat that Mýa has called “a bridge between the past and the future.” The drums stay crisp and the bass runs warm enough to sit in your ribs. She hits the pre-chorus (“Heartbreakers break hearts/Love makers make life/But you’ll never feel real love, unless you’re willin’ to try”) and sings it the way you deliver advice you figured out decades ago and haven’t had to revisit. Too $hort’s verse is a full-tilt cameo; he’s in the Cadillac with vogues and wires, top down, talking about “Put this thang on your mind/Make you drop it to the floor.” Classic $hort Dog. Mýa has always had a gift for making features sound as if they wandered into her living room and decided to stay, and by the bridge she’s hosting a party for two: “We can get this started/Baby we can have our own party.” She’s not asking.

The-Dream, “Bring That Body”

Four words into the lead single from LoveHate 2, The-Dream reopens a book he first cracked in 2007: “Previously on Love/Hate.” His debut album landed in 2007, when ringtone rap and watered-down R&B hybrids dominated the radio, and he and Tricky Stewart answered by writing hits that bent pop into alien shapes: Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies,” Mariah Carey’s “Touch My Body.” As a solo artist, The-Dream always kept the stranger, dirtier versions of those ideas for himself (we know), and Love/Hate was the proof, an album about desire that never cleaned up after itself. Nineteen years later, LoveHate 2 marks his first commercial release through a major label since 2013’s IV Play, arriving via his Dreamboy Records partnership with Republic. The New York Times just named him one of the 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters, a designation that was earned largely through other people’s hit records. He could come back sober and reflective. He chooses to come back macking.

Stewart co-produced both “Bring That Body” and its spiritual ancestor “I Luv Your Girl,” and the blueprint hasn’t budged: locate the girl whose man ain’t shit and pitch an alternative with zero subtlety. “Heard he didn’t love you/Tell me where to kiss it, tell me how to fix it/Call it hatin’, but he ain’t shit” has The-Dream at full cheerful ruthlessness, delivering a home-wrecking bid dressed in falsetto silk. In the second verse, he drops the pretense: “I ain’t judgin’/I’m just a messenger here to undress you/Maybe I shouldn’t address you like that.” That last line, the flicker of self-awareness that he immediately ignores, is funnier than any written punchline. The bridge goes fully unhinged:

She belong to you, my nigga, we gon’ see
We’re just friends/But I got keys
Let myself in, then I’m on ski’s
Like, “‘Wee.’”

I haven’t heard a grown man giggle through an infidelity metaphor with this much joy since the original Love/Hate. “I want to make a record about where love is now,” he told the press. “Relationships became cheapened. People used to fight for their love.” He went and made a song about stealing somebody’s girl and laughing about it on the way out.

R&B, Soul, or Blues Albums to Check Out

• Durand Bernarr: BERNARR.

• Jarrod Lawson: Just Let It

• Taj Mahal & Phantom Blues Band: Time

• Oteil Burbridge & Lamar Williams Jr.: The Offering

• The Nth Power: Never Alone

• duendita: existential thottie

• Traetwothree & OG Parker: Sorry, I’m Not Sorry

• Mellissa: Diamond Baby (EP)

• India Shawn: Subject to Change (EP)

• Jahson Paynter: is anybody home! (EP)

• Tiara Thomas: Make It Make Sense (EP)

• Essosa: Crush! (EP)

• Canti: Citrus (EP)

• Maya Law & Freya Ray: Tall Tales (EP)

• Kehlani: Kehlani (Uncut Edition)

Other Songs to Check Out

• Alina Baraz: Take Care of You

• Jon Onabowu: The Emergence

• Bryson Tiller: IT’S OK

• Chenayder: Wonder

• Calvin Richardson: Radio Rodeo

• Mack Keane: Cherry Red (A COLORS Show)

• Charlie Bereal: When You’re Around

• Rio Sterling: Die On Me

• Lucy Park: BLUE SASHIKO

• Dayo Bello: Stand Still

• Bobby V: Both Ways

• Cory Henry & Rafael Labate: Dance (Remix)

• Lex Aura: Gravity

• KAYAM: Deja Vu

• Kid Travis: Diamonds On Your Neck

• Moio: Just a Man

• Odessa A’zion: Maybe I’m Not What You Need

• GAWD: GTA

• Ama: So…

• Kelsey Lu: Better Than That

• Talia Goddess: WE COME AGAIN

• Shann Aberdeen: State of Flow

• ARYIEL: No More

• Jeff Bernat: Whatever Goes

• Pan Tèrra: Quit My Job

• Zenesoul: Heart on Fire

• MAKALM: Choose

• Sarah Defne Gray: That Girl.

• Saint Demarcus: Lifeline

• Echo Huang: YOUR GIRL

• MOIO: Just a Man

• Tyree Thomas: Safe Place

• Aiyana-Lee: Pretty Picture

• Claire Brooks: LIKE LOVERS DO

• James Berkeley: back again

• Maz B: Running Out

• Isaiah Kaleo & ROME: lead me on

• Tama Gucci: My Body Is Your Wonderland

• Jaz Elise: Move Mountain

• Anna Margo: Brainrot

• Kavi Synatra: Calling for You

• BJ Swayed: Downtown

• Ariel J.: Forever

• Tyler Watts: Number One (#1)

• Mike Teezy & Kierra Sheard: TIME4U

• Jessica Tori: Curious

• Pan Tèrra: Quit My Job

• ace hashimoto & kenya fujita: TOP NOTCH (Japanese Version)

• Jessie Reyez & Muni Long: AIN’T U TIRED

• The-Dream: Bring That Body

• Felix Ames: Crack a Smile

• Jamal Roberts: Perfect for Me

• James Savage: Higher Power

• Phoenix James: Company

• CTLN: Headspace

• Anjali Asha & Khrysis: Big Deal

• Patrick Paige II: Let Me Down Easy

• Roberta Flack: I’d Like to Be Baby to You (Live at Montreux, 1990)

• Zae France: Said Summ (feat. K Camp)

• Roderick Porter: Roll the Dice

• Elmiene: Honour (feat. Baby Rose)

• Junetober: Like You Need It

• FIG: Day One

• S!MONE: The Worst Part

• H33RA: SHOOK

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Kehlani dropped her self-titled fifth album on her 31st birthday this week, and the deep cut “Ooh,” co-written by Keri Hilson and Tank, is one of the best things on it. Durand Bernarr, fresh off his Grammy win for BLOOM, released “AM I OKAY?!” and traded every costume and punchline for a question he keeps asking without ever getting an answer. Jai’Len Josey, the songwriter who co-wrote Ari Lennox’s “Pressure,” closed her own debut album, Serial Romantic, with the only track she produced by herself. Isaiah Falls abandoned the Florida bass-culture collision that made him and went full slow jam. And Dani Offline, the Oakland poet-producer who studied comparative literature at UC Berkeley, dropped “Angel,” a love song that borrows its imagery from the Book of Revelation.

Kehlani, “Oooh”

Keri Hilson and Tank wrote on this, and the melodic phrasing curls the way mid-2000s R&B used to, when a slow jam could ride one syllable for a full four bars. “Oooh” arrives deep into Kehlani, the self-titled fifth album she dropped on her 31st birthday, well past the Brandy duet and the Lil Wayne feature and the Missy Elliott link-up. All those collaborations could swallow a lesser singer, but “Oooh” clears the room: Kehlani, Antonio Dixon and Khris Riddick-Tynes’s guitar-threaded production, and a lyric built entirely around a single word substituting for every act she wants performed. “Open up that window/‘Cause I feel so ooh/I don’t care about the neighbors/Let ‘em hear us, ooh,” she sings, swapping the explicit for the suggestive and landing somewhere dirtier than either. Kehlani told Vibe she wanted this record to prove that good R&B is genius and deserves respect without modification. On “Oooh,” the talking point evaporates and the proof starts humming in your molars. — Osei Addae

Durand Bernarr, “AM I OKAY?!”

Durand Bernarr has built his career on helping you forget that you are watching a performance. He pays tribute to The Proud Family in the Tiny Desk series, he opened up his Erykah Badu-backed mixtape called 8ight: The Stepson of Erykah Badu, and he gives shout-outs to Rick James and Kirk Franklin in interviews; whenever he performs or talks about performing, he always uses theatricality at full throttle. “AM I OKAY?!” takes the air out of the house. The second single from Durand’s self-titled fourth album. BERNARR. (named after his father, Bernarr Ferebee Senior), the opening line does not resemble a punchline.

“For a small piece of your time, I’ll pay a fee
Just to sit here on this couch and bare my soul.”

Jahi Sundance and Donnie Scantz’s production hums low and warm underneath him, never rushing toward resolution. Bernarr has searched high and low yet found nothing. The choruses ask the same question over and over eight times with not one response to be had, eventually walking the line from being defiant to saying, “Might just figure it out, wanna figure it out/Could you figure it out with me?” Yes, Miguel (who also did backgrounds) and Sevyn Streeter were among the songwriters on the track and their influence comes from the balance of swagger and collapse; two writers who have spent years developing that distance between confidence and pleading. Bernarr received the Grammy award for Best Progressive R&B Album at time of this release; “AM I OKAY?!” has a vibe of a morning after the awards show. — Jamila W.

Jai’Len Josey, “I Believe (Selfish)”

Tricky Stewart executive-produced Serial Romantic, and The-Dream, Leon Thomas, and Noah Ehler were producers on its 1st 12 tracks. Jai’Len Josey sat with herself alone on the 13th and produced it herself as a statement, like the lyrics: “I could give you the moon/I could even bring the stars down, too, but how silly would I be if I had none left for me?” There is purpose behind extending this line; through stacking the giving, Josey can make the turn hit. She was raised in Atlanta, went to Tri-Cities High School—the same performing arts high school that has provided talent to Atlanta’s Music and Stage/Film industry for many decades—and played the role of Pearl in *The SpongeBob Musical* on Broadway before returning to songwriting. She co-penned Ari Lennox’s gold-selling single “Pressure,” telling SHIFTER that she knocked out the demo in 30 minutes after Lennox called her at 2 in the morning with Jermaine Dupri on turntables and Bryan-Michael Cox sitting at the piano. She can write fast for other artists; “I Believe (Selfish)” is what happens when she has sat with her own material long enough to mean it. Originally, the title “Selfish” was changed to reflect how the original box of each person was no longer the complete love they’ve given to others; it had become an ever-evolving outpouring of love that should now return (with the understanding) to each individual. — Imani Raven

Isaiah Falls, “Back in My Arms”

The percussion element of “Back in My Arms” does not exist. This tune is produced solely with layered keyboard chords to support an acoustic richness, achieved through the collaborative efforts of Benson Bazilme, Gabriel Blizman, and Isaiah Falls himself. The singing also includes an element of falsetto. Every instrument (including the vocals) creates ambient sound; therefore, listeners may miss the fact that the lyrics incorporate a plea. Having grown up in Orlando, Florida, where he participated in church choirs and listened to trunk, waist-rattling hip-hop music (his father played drums, while his mother sang), Isaiah’s single, “FLORIDA BABY,” accumulated 27 million streams on Spotify during the 2024 period through the assistance of TikTok users sharing the song on that platform by creating a musical based on the hybrid between the culture of hip-hop and the sensual nature of R&B created from the same area. The composition of “Back In My Arms” does not showcase these two genres at all. “We deserve another chance/Faith can’t be taught” is repeated so that it becomes somewhat ambiguous until a member of the faith-based background determines that the lyric does make sense except that the lyrics do apply only to faith-based writers. These last two statements indicate the meaning of the song “Back In My Arms” is conveyed by the faith of someone who prays. — Tabia N. Mullings

Dani Offline, “Angel”

Dani Offline derived her stage name from an Instagram handle, which was rejected in 2020, where her previous page was removed due to a deletion (the last name offline). Dani Offline grew up with and without access to the internet, which enabled her to have access to how a computer can create content, but this desire was present after her departure from Birmingham, AL to pursue an education at UC Berkeley, through a graduate program that studied comparative literature, which is where Dani Offline became increasingly familiarized with jazz via listening to NPR as well as through her parents buying compact discs (that were chosen based upon hot women being pictured on them) who would participate in this act. “Angel” is Dani’s first single from her debut LP (Lover’s Discourse, named after Roland Barthes’s text that describes how lovers have borrowed from different cultures their methods by which they create love), which begins with a theological concept opposed to erotic notions:

“My man, my man calls me an angel
He says, he says I’m divine in disguise
Reality’s chasing me so I got to be careful
‘Cause he can’t, he can’t see my seven eyes.”

The 7 eyes of the heavenly beings, as detailed in the Book of Revelation, i.e., Seraphim of God, are 7 heavenly beings—seraphim—who surround God, and each seraph has an infinite number of eyes surrounding them. Dani said during an interview with that she thinks of herself primarily as a writer, and that the way she writes her songs is by writing out the verse first, before composing the music. The lyric arrived before the chords, and the melody Offline, Omari Jazz Addae, and Will Henley-Dias shaped underneath it drifts the way weather forms over a fixed point, jazz-soul that swells while the words hold still. The whole song pivots on one couplet: “I wanna be cool when I’m next to you, but I’m hot to the touch/I wanna be sweet when you think of me, something soft you can hold.” Love as a thermal problem. — Brandon O’Sullivan

R&B, Soul, or Blues Albums to Check Out

• Kehlani: Kehlani

• Lolo Zouaï: Reverie

• Gareth Donkin: Extraordinary

• Jai’Len Josey: Serial Romantic

• Angélique Kidjo: HOPE!!

• Eboni Riley: Beautiful Tragedy

• April + VISTA: Traditional Noise

• Liam Bailey: Shadow Town

• Esa Williams: Dala What We Must

• Norah Jane & MOR.LOV: Godspeed

• VINSON: Raw Honey

• Tom Funk: What’s It Gonna Be?

• Adam Hawley: Electric

• Dianne Reeves: Star Child

• Jordan Rakei: Between Us (EP)

• Yuna: The Valour Hour (EP)

• Miyah: Miyah (EP)

• ADÉ: Always Love (EP)

• Joya Mooi: All the Things (EP)

• Molly Johnson: Long Time Running (EP)

• Bel Cobain: Kizzy (EP)

• LEÁ THE LEOX: FatalAttraction (EP)

Other Songs to Check Out

• Prince: With This Tear

• Omarion: The One

• Tank & the Bangas: No Invite

• Jamilah Barry: All My Love

• Girlfriend & Jaymin: All U Need

• FOLA: Fine $hit

• Limage: Dig Me

• Candice Le: Catch a Flight

• Adrian Marcel: Run It Back (feat. Sonny B.)

• BENNI: STAYED UP

• Wax Motif, Maeta: You Forget (feat. Maeta)

• Luh Kel: Grinding

• I Am Roze: Where the Wind Blows

• Paradise: Predictable

• Brianna Castro: rolling stone

• Drea Dominique: Lue Viton

• Renee Harmoni: Single for Life

• Otis Kane: Heaven

• Misha: Ordinary Low (feat. Jessica Jolia)

• Infinity Song: One Foot Out

• Gabrielle Lovelace: No Pay

• Bri Babineaux: Grace

• Kennedy Ryon: Favorite

• Genia: Doomsday

• THEHONESTGUY: SUGAR WATER

• Bella Alubo: Abo Le (How are you)

• TA Thomas: I Found You

• FEYI: Have You Ever

• Viuta: Eyes Are Everything

• OVI WOOD: 365

• Byron Juane: I Hate Luving U

• cinquemani: Cosmic Connection

• Janine: Reset

• Aaron Taylor: Reach Heaven

• Adanna Duru: I’m Every Woman

• Zeddy Will & Janelle Monáe: Party at the Beach

• Q Parker & Jai Vaughn: Get Better

• Sophia Galaté: Please Don’t Talk to Me (R&B ONLY SESSIONS)

• Breez Kennedy: Taste

• NOTEP: Radio

• Sipprell: Conversation

• KELS: Daddy’s Not the One

• Tyree Thomas: Most Days

• nomi.: sweet talk

• spaceluvrrr: TYM

• PAGEFOURR: Something Different

• Domenic Haynes: C’EST LA VIE

• Anaïs Cardot: Second Hand

• Vitua: Eyes Are Everything

• cikho: Fell Again / Stranger What’s Your Name?

• Taylor Williams: For the First Time

• fika & Eddy Luna: Cyandide

• Stefan Mahendra: Home Sweet Home

• 8RO8 & Karri: Sarah

• twiin.: all

• Malaya: Figure it out

• Saburnia: April Shower

• SALOMEA: sandcastle

• Keenan TreVon: She Goes By Denver

• Mikhalé Jones: Morals (feat. Kashept)

• NEVRMIND: Eyes on You

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This week we’ve got 6LACK handing the second verse of a contrition record to a 2 Chainz who has no interest in apologizing for anything; Queen Naija turning a real proposal into a ballad on the day it happens; a decade-away Teedra Moses returning with PJ Morton and an eviction notice for bad conversation; KIRBY accruing what writing “FourFiveSeconds” actually cost her; and Natanya, a year into her SZA-reposted Spotify surge, declining to ask for the minimum.

6LACK, “Sunday Again” feat. 2 Chainz

For the last decade, Atlanta singer 6LACK has essentially been the genre’s in-house laureate of late-night regret records (honestly, it is a sturdy niche). From East Atlanta Love Letter onward, almost the whole catalog runs on the guy calling at a bad hour to apologize. On “Sunday Again” he brings company. It’s his second single from Love Is the New Gangsta, after “Bird Flu,” and Childish Major, Jesse Tyler, Justin Cho, and Trey Lander built him a bedroom-warm, slightly worn late-morning track. He opens with a line that is an apology in advance. But 2 Chainz then enters with none of 6LACK’s penance available to him.

“You say it’s Sunday morning, I say it’s Saturday night
Because I still ain’t sleepin’.”

6LACK wants Sunday back as a reset, but 2 Chainz is extending Saturday. He’s eating shrimp and grits at noon with somebody he is in no hurry to apologize to. And the line he drops (honestly, one of the most 2 Chainz lines he has ever written), “If sex is a weapon, they gon’ get me,” has zero interest in rewriting himself. 6LACK wrote a contrition record and handed the second verse to the friend who was going to puncture the whole premise. Love Is the New Gangsta, as an album title, is the kind of contradiction this song starts to test. — Imani Raven

Queen Naija, “Ring”

For the better part of eight years, Queen Naija and Clarence White have been the internet’s longest-running referendum on whether a man should propose. The speculation never stopped. She divorced YouTuber Chris Sails in 2017, started a joint channel with Clarence a year later, had a son with him in 2020, and has fielded every variant of the when-is-he-going-to-propose question from a fanbase that watched her raise two kids and grow into an R&B career in plain sight. “Ring,” the Theevoni and Troy Taylor-produced ballad she dropped the day she made the engagement official, is a journal entry sung back in real time.

“I won’t forget the night you made my dream come true
It was just me and you in our New York hotel room.”

She is narrating something that occurred last week, and the microphone is where she gets to admit it. Clarence’s entrance lands next.

“With tears in your eyes you professed your love
You said that you always knew I was the one
You told me you’re sorry it took you so long.”

Her response settles the question she has been asked from every comments section under every photo she has ever posted with him: “What matters to me is you did on your own.” — Murffey Zavier

Teedra Moses, “Single”

Teedra Moses has not released an album of new material since Obama’s second term. Her 2004 debut Complex Simplicity is a proper cult classic, the record R&B connoisseurs hand you as a test. If you understand what a slept-on singer-songwriter can do with the major-label machinery off her back, you pass. She signed to Rick Ross’s Maybach Music Group in 2011, released Cognac & Conversation through Raphael Saadiq’s orbit in 2015, and then kept her name alive through mixtapes, guest features, and KAYTRANADA’s 2018 remix of “Be Your Girl” that briefly introduced her to a streaming-native audience that had not done the homework. Announced as the first release from her fifth studio album, “Single” arrives with PJ Morton producing and co-writing. His piano-forward solo work (gospel-grown, filler-averse) lines up exactly with a Moses song about why she would rather be alone than mildly entertained. Her central claim is a counter-move against every man who has ever asked, and she lets it sit before the beat fully settles. She wants what she has always wanted, which is stimulation over small talk. Six phrases, each its own line, spell out the demand. — Kendra Vale

KIRBY, “Lose Myself”

Kirby Lauryen Dockery’s last name connects her to the Dockery Plantation in Mississippi, where her enslaved ancestors worked cotton on the same land where Charley Patton and Howlin’ Wolf invented the Delta blues (all of them underpaid by the same country). She has built her adult career around that lineage while writing hits for other people. Her name is on Rihanna, Kanye West, and Paul McCartney’s “FourFiveSeconds,” on Beyoncé’s “Die With You,” on Ariana Grande’s “Break Your Heart Right Back.” She voiced the Beyoncé stand-in Ni’jah on Donald Glover and Janine Nabers’s Swarm. Last August she released her own debut, Miss Black America, and “Lose Myself,” produced by Jeff City, is its newest single, a receipt for what the pop-songwriter arrangement cost her while the blues sat in her bloodline the whole time. She opens with a hymnal cadence that cues up before the beat does, counting every piece she has staked on her ambition, “My selfish ambition My self my sense and my religion/I would’ve sold my soul But that I didn’t even own,” then the second verse moves home: “And my family ain’t speaking/Same folks that used to call me every weekend.” — Tai Lawson

Natanya, “DON’T ASK!”

Natanya Popoola is having the twelve months every North West London singer-producer in her cohort wishes they had. SZA reposted her after finding “On Ur Time,” the song where Natanya name-drops Solana by her government, and Tyler, The Creator and Doechii followed (her Spotify numbers have more than doubled since). She closed 2025 with a two-part EP, Feline’s Return, that ran jazz harmony through indie-rock guitars and came out sounding like something Aaliyah might have co-signed. “DON’T ASK!” is her first new 2026 release, co-produced with longtime collaborator Oscar Scheller, and the whole song is about not asking anymore. She lays out the rule over drums that knock without hurrying (“You really don’t ask, you really don’t get/You really don’t guess or you can get stressed.”).

Speaking to The FADER days before release, she described the song as the first time she had written from a place that was not trying to make a guy like her: “It’s his turn to come to me this time.” You can hear the shift in the “I’ll give it to you”s she keeps repeating. They arrive without coaxing in them, the offer made from the other side of a decision already settled. “Can I take it downtown right now?” she ad-libs, asking with the confidence of someone who already has her answer. — Lillian Sharpe

R&B, Soul, or Blues Albums to Check Out

• Yaya Bey: Fidelity

• Adrian Younge: Younge

• rjtheweirdo: At Least She’s Beautiful

• cortex: For What It’s Worth

• BombayMami: Peaceful Attitude

• MarcLo: 11 Days

• pastels & Jessica Domingo: Blue Fantasy

• Marc Broussard: Chance Worth Taking

• lovetempo: There Is a Light

• Dan Penn: Smoke Filled Room

• Beau Diako, Ben Esser & emawk: klei (EP)

• Sidney Gilliam: NASCENCE OF THE NU BOOK I (EP)

• Finn Askew: BLUEBOY (EP)

• Naji: The Realist (EP)

• MAYIA WARREN: Take Me Back

• Zach Zoya & High Klassified: Misstape 2 (EP)

Other Songs to Check Out

• Nao Yoshioka: Shadow (feat. Bilal)

• Jenevieve, Freddie Gibbs & SALIMATA: Flight Risqué

• Inayah: Outside

• Annie Tracy: Catching Feelings (feat. Leon Thomas) [Remix]

• Madison Ryann Ward & Bianca Silver: At Your Side

• Desmond Parson & Laia: Me and You Can Do

• ace hashimoto: TOP NOTCH (feat. 3ee)

• Lakecia Benjamin & Tarriona ‘Tank’ Ball: We Dream

• Blue Lab Beats & Jamila Woods: Slow Heart / Fire Up (with SANITY & Blackout)

• HILLARI: How Does It Feel

• K, Le Maestro & Rae Khalil: BOUNCE OUT

• Nemchel: Avanse

• ((( O ))): Evolve

• F3miii: SPLINTER

• Sofia Ly: Block Party

• Africaine: Burn

• KAYAM & ARCHIVED: Spend It

• Annalise Azadian: Switching Sides

• EIVIND: How Hard I Tried (feat. Mike Terrell)

• Konyikeh: Blackthorne

• MALIA: Getaway Driver

• NNAVY: Give U My Love

• Lex Aura: Conniving

• CVIRO & GXNXVS: Body (feat. July 7)

• Chrissi: HEARTLESS DARLIN’!

• Jessie Reyez: N.Y.F.F

• MXKA: Fantasmas

• PawPaw Rod: Lights Down Low (feat. Sherwyn)

• Marques Anthony: Twin

• BINA.: Zombies

• SAFE: 5AM

• Tiana Blake: Smoke

• Flozigg: ICFAI

• Noxz & Berhana: Everybody Knows

• Jalen Ngonda: Hang It On the Shelf

• Devon Gilfillian: IRL (feat. Cory Wong)

• Chris Patrick: Run It Back (feat. Mack Keane)

• duendita: beach

• Alexia Jayy: Rent Free (feat. Eric Gales)

• Keith Sweat, King George, Calvin Richardson, Cupid & Ron Chip Anthony: Still Got That Good Love

• Stokley: Needs Love

• Mike Clark Jr: Straddle Me

• JEDSOUL: RERUN

• RYBE: Jerry Springer

• LoSmoothe: In This Lifetime

• Austin Rogers: The Beginning

• Justin Garner: A Girl’s Girl

• Nani Goins: Keep It to Ourselves

• Marie Dalhstrom: Alive (feat. Jords)

• Dorian Electra: Scarborough Fair

• Tora-i: Girl

• M!les Ave: R&B Night

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Five new R&B records from artists who have decided they’re done waiting on someone else to figure it out. Kehlani drops a self-titled album on her birthday in two weeks and spends her latest single telling her partner to save the interrogation for somebody else. Kelela makes her first proper release since 2023’s Raven and the first thing you notice is that it has no drums. Momo Boyd steps off the Infinity Song tour bus and onto her own marquee with a debut solo EP whose closing cut is a serial-heartbreaker anthem delivered entirely in the cadence of yikes. Kenyon Dixon, two Grammy nominations deep and cosigned by Anita Baker, teaches a masterclass on how to make a sex-coach song without tipping into parody. And Saint Harison, the Southampton singer-songwriter who built his career on honest heartbreak, puts out a track whose honest part turns out to be the exhaustion.

They mostly landed the same day this week, and the best of them already have that thing where you keep cueing the track up before the last one finishes.

Kehlani, “Back and Forth” feat. Missy Elliott

On a REVOLT red carpet at the Grammys earlier this year, Kehlani brought up a Missy Elliott interview she’d been thinking about, the one where Missy said labels stopped hiring her to executive-produce R&B albums because the industry didn’t want too much singing anymore. The anecdote stung. Missy’s whole production career (Supa Dupa Fly, Aaliyah’s One in a Million, half the Missy-Timbaland axis that made late-‘90s R&B strange and weightless) was built on pushing R&B singers into wilder, more ambitious territory with their voices, and now here was the business telling her what she was best at was no longer on the shopping list. Putting Missy on “Back and Forth” reads as a correction to that, a deliberate invitation back into the room, not a guest spot engineered to juice a press cycle.

Khris Riddick-Tynes and the Stereotypes build a beat that glides the way early-2000s R&B glided, all rounded low end and unhurried hi-hats, the sound Aaliyah made her signature and that Kehlani has been circling her entire career. She spells that lineage out in the spoken skit that closes “Back and Forth,” where her partner peppers her with Where you goin’? With who? And you wearing that? Misdemeanor shrugs off every question before landing on the line that anchors the track:

“All that back—, back and forth got me feeling like Aaliyah.”

Claiming that lineage in 2026 is a bigger flex than it looks. Kehlani’s fifth studio album, self-titled and dropping April 24 on her 31st birthday, is executive-produced by the same Khris Riddick-Tynes who helped her Grammy-winning “Folded” cross 800 million streams last year. Missy opens the record with When I say new Kehlani, you know it’s some hot shit, and nothing that follows contradicts her. Kehlani sings “Back and Forth” calmly, like she already walked out of the argument twenty minutes earlier and is now texting her friends from the car. — LeMarcus

Kelela, “Idea 1”

There are no drums on “Idea 1,” which is the first thing you notice and the last thing you stop thinking about. Kelela wrote it while reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and you can feel the book’s paranoia in its bones. This is not the club-adjacent Kelela of Raven or the ambient drift of last year’s In the Blue Light. Oscar Scheller’s arrangement rests on distorted guitars and drones, closer to shoegaze than to any R&B she’s ever made, and Kelela has described the song as being about how it feels to be alive now, a particular kind of burden she’s said Black women know intimately.

Knowing that turns lyrics that could scan as relationship wreckage into something wider. Bearing your cross/It’s your loss, now I’m jaded/Know it ain’t right/Don’t you look away reads on its surface as a woman confronting a checked-out partner, but the repeated Are you alive? opens out, toward the question of whether anyone is paying attention to what’s happening around them. She co-wrote it with her best friend, the painter Janiva Ellis, and the collaboration pulls her away from melody-first writing toward something built out of accumulated image-fragments. Cloud and the crater/Scorch every acre arrives in short-breath couplets, each one another piece of evidence, until the closing image (“So we decay [somehow we stayed alone]”).

Kelela has never sounded this exposed. The shoegaze textures leave her nowhere to retreat, and she doesn’t try to find somewhere. — Imani Raven

Momo Boyd, “Oops”

If you know Momo Boyd’s name at all, it’s probably from “Good Flirts,” the Baby Keem number with Kendrick Lamar where her hook turned a simmering slow-burn into one of this year’s stickiest R&B moments. Before that, she put in a decade as the youngest sibling in Infinity Song, the family band that JAŸ-Z signed to Roc Nation in 2016 after seeing them busk in Central Park. Her debut solo EP Miss Michigan dropped two days ago, and most of it leans alt-rock and folk; The FADER compared her to Dido and Dolores O’Riordan. “Oops” is the outlier, a bouncy R&B number produced by Antonio Dixon, Ashton Norful, and Khris Riddick-Tynes that sounds nothing like the other six tracks.

And the contrast is part of the joke. “Oops” plays as a serial-heartbreaker anthem from a singer whose other material is full of melancholy guitar and grown-up heartbreak-processing, and Boyd commits to the bit completely. She opens each verse with Yikes, followed by a tiny uh-oh from the background, and spends the rest of the cut offering non-apologies for things she clearly isn’t sorry about. I think I’m in love again, she coos, then admits in the next breath that she said the same about a different guy a week ago. She tosses off the title line as a shrug, a faux-confession that won’t break a sweat:

“Don’t try selling me no sentiments
It is what it is, and I’m over it.”

Boyd explained to Rolling Stone that she writes from wherever she is at the time, and “Oops” catches her in a mood entirely different from the longing on “Cold Hands” or the country-folk twang of “American Love Song.” The girl who stood on a Central Park bandstand harmonizing with her siblings for a decade has developed a mean streak. She uses it on the EP’s closing number to tell a guy the affection is not, in fact, mutual. — L. Ari James

Kenyon Dixon, “Talk You Through It”

Two Grammy nominations deep for Best Traditional R&B Performance, with a joint LP alongside Terrace Martin rooted in South LA jazz and soul, Kenyon Dixon has been building the kind of quiet, credentialed career that doesn’t generate headlines but racks up cosigns. Anita Baker herself tweeted that he was proof R&B was alive and well, a high compliment from the woman whose entire catalog defined the genre for a generation. Dixon has written for Justin Timberlake and handled vocal production for Coco Jones, and that studio fluency shows up all over his own work.

The first single from his upcoming LP Ego Ruins Everything is a bedroom number with a specific conceit. Dixon narrates the act in real time on “Talk You Through It,” coaching his partner through it in a low, polite tone. Frank Rose’s beat clears space for him with a padded bassline and drums that barely shift, letting Dixon’s vocal be the entire environment. He half-whispers lay back, relax, let me be your guide without mugging or winking, and when he voices in sync and release they land as actual check-ins, not bravado.

Plenty of R&B men have made a career out of the sex-coach number and tipped into corny territory doing it. Dixon sounds like he’s actually been in the room with another person before. His lyric writing here is weirdly attentive to the mechanics of what’s happening, with lines about temperature rising, about giving his partner permission to hit her limit, about through it, through it as literal coaching, not a lyrical flourish. That attention is the exact quality Anita Baker was clocking when she cosigned him. — Phil

Saint Harison, “Stuck”

As a kid in Southampton, Saint Harison heard Adele’s “Chasing Pavements” in the lobby of a women’s shelter where he’d gone with his mother and siblings after leaving an abusive household. He has said in interviews that he dates his life as a songwriter to that memory. The biographical detail matters for “Stuck,” which is about a different kind of entrapment, the inability to leave someone who’s already left you. Harison carries it with a tired voice that knows the difference between needing to escape a situation and choosing to stay frozen inside one. Jazmine Sullivan reposted one of his early covers and triggered a chain of cosigns from Justin Bieber, SZA, Elton John, and Kehlani. He has shared with Rolling Stone that love, in his view, cannot save anyone, and “Stuck” sits inside that realization without trying to turn it into advice.

Pulled from Ghosted, an eight-song EP due May 29, “Stuck” is constructed on a contradiction Harison never bothers to resolve:

“No matter what I do I’m stuck
Between I hate you and need your love.”

Akeel Henry, D’Mile, and Ilsey Juber strip the arrangement down to a guitar figure and a low haze. The room has the lights off. Harison sings I miss you good, miss you bad, miss you nasty and you believe all three at once. The desire and the resentment and the physical memory all arrive in the same breath, tangled in a way he can’t untangle. He rolls himself a morning blunt and asks for a hit of ignorance, and neither one helps. Every British R&B vocalist with a range this big draws an Adele comparison eventually. But Harison approaches “Stuck” as someone who ran out of dramatic energy three arguments ago; now reading the damage report to himself from under the covers. — Tai Lawson

R&B, Soul, or Blues Albums to Check Out

• Isaia Huron: Mr. Lovebomb

• Wesley Joseph: Forever Ends Someday

• Jacob Banks: Limerence

• Mamas Gun: DIG!

• Tiwayo: Outsider

• Parlor Greens: Emeralds

• Tink: Fuck, Marry, Kill

• Kumail: Mudbrown

• Buddy: Simmie Sims III

• Chicago Soul Jazz Collective: No Wind & No Rain

• Les Imprimés: Fading Forward

• Momo Boyd: Miss Michigan (EP)

• Ali Caldwell: Episode One (EP)

• Destin Conrad: wHIMSY!

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Other Songs to Check Out

• Blxst & Big Bad 1900: Day After Day (feat. Lori Perry)

• Davion Farris: Good Girl

• Casper Sage: Change Your Mind

• TYLER LEWIS: til’ death do us part

• Eboni Riley: Through the Motions (Interlude)

• IYAMAH: off grid

• Kenny Sharp & DALONA: Limbo

• Jazlyn Martin: Goodbye

• Niko Ramos: Away

• Gabriel & CUBE: FLOWERS

• Brandy Haze: If You See Me Out In Public Then It Might Be A.I.

• PJ Morton: Mercy

• Alice: 3AM

• Thee Sacred Souls: Any Old Fool

• TÖME & Alpha P: CC

• Lolo Zouaï & disiz: Coquelicot

• REMI: Let’s Talk

• Avara: levitate

• SNCR & Zae France: Love Seat

• Nic Dean: Loving Me Hurts You

• Brenna Whitaker: Praying for Time

• Qiuntellii: Shotgun

• Felix Ames: Fell Short, Spun Round

• Naomi Sharon & Marten Lou: Miss That (Marten Lou Remix)

• Dua Saleh: Cállate

• Osé: Bother Me (feat. Victony)

• 54 Ultra: Turnaround / I’m Hooked

• James Savage: 100 Years

• Junetober: Would You

• Reuben Aziz: promise land

• thatboykwame: LET ME BE!

• Claudi-Mariee: Ransom

• Debbie: House of Cards (feat. Victor Ray)

• Skye Newman: Woman I Am

• Joseph Solomon: Unbroken Heart

• Denise Julia: 2GOOD4U

• Chuka & The Destroyer: Endure

• Jahson Paynter: tangerine!

• Nate Curry: Doomsday (feat. ClayDough & Hokage Simon)

• Jaylon Ashaun: Note to Self (Rough Draft)

• Carla Prata: Like I Do

• Dayor: No Morning After

• Tyree Thomas: On Time

• Nectar Woode: Naturally

• Kaleb Mitchell: SUPERHERO

• SIPHO.: THE FEELING

• 7AM: Let It Be

• Sparklmami: no te vayas

• Perri Jones: Out of Touch

• Sammy Atlas: Serpent

• Erykah Officer: Hate 2 Say

• Kayla Blackmon, Kingdom & Krysh: PURE LEAF

• Camdyn: Obsessed with You

• Diamond Cafe: No Wonder

• Chris Brown: Obvious

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This week’s picks are all about people who know what they want and aren’t being cute about it. Mary J. Blige is two singles deep into her latest run with producer Camper, and “Want Love” is her at peak don’t-waste-my-time energy—calm, certain, not negotiating. Johnny Venus, the EarthGang rapper building a solo R&B catalog, goes the opposite direction on “I Want You Back,” a groveling, guitar-laced plea written for him by Baby Tate that might be the most desperate love song of the spring. LAYA turns a rideshare into a booty call metaphor on the sly, bouncy “LUber,” as this Staten Island kid raised on Destiny’s Child and 702. PJ Morton, fresh off his sixth Grammy and a new distribution deal, strips everything to the studs on “Mutual,” a reassurance song so patient it barely feels written. And India Shawn reunites with D’Mile for “Rain On Me,” a spoil-me anthem where the luxury and the desire bleed into each other until they’re the same thing.

Mary J. Blige, “Want Love”

Less than two months after dropping “More Than a Lover” on Valentine’s Day, Mary J. Blige is back with Camper, her longest-running production partner, for another single about being in love and refusing to settle for less. Blige and Camper have been locking in together since 2017’s “Thick of It,” and this latest stretch has the pair cooking on autopilot, the good kind, where the chemistry is muscle memory. “Want Love” sits in a warm, patient groove, and Blige rides it with the sureness of someone who has already lived through enough bad love to spot the real thing from across a room. She’s not chasing anybody, as she lays that out early:

“I’m too grown to play them kid games
‘Cause when it’s all said and done, I got me
I’m too focused.”

Blige wants committed, adult partnership, the kind where both parties are reading the same page and neither one flinches when it gets real. She’s offering herself as someone worth the effort (“I’m a good time on a rainy day, summertime, or a winter day”), but she’s not bargaining. If the other person’s happiness is wrapped in heartbreak, she’ll walk. While her voice is not what it once was, the nine-time Grammy winner has spent three decades singing about love in every possible condition (wrecked, mended, furious, tender, etc.) and “Want Love” lands in a place that’s temperate and uncompromising, a woman who has stopped negotiating with people who aren’t indispensable. — Terryl Jameson

Johnny Venus, “I Want You Back”

Baby Tate wrote this one for Johnny Venus, and it fits him congenitally. Venus is half of EarthGang, the Atlanta duo signed to Dreamville whose records have always bent toward funk, Southern psychedelia, and big conceptual swings. His solo material, starting with the Shooter EP and the 6LACK-featuring “So Beautiful,” drops almost all of that armor in favor of bare, risky R&B sung by a rapper who might actually cry. “I Want You Back” is a begging song. She caught him, packed his bags, and put them at the door, and now he’s on his knees fully aware that dignity left the building. The second verse ratchets up the hurt until it buckles under its own weight (“I look at our pictures and cry tears like funerals/I don’t know what to do no more/I feel like I used up all my sorrys.”). Dom Sanders’s production keeps the guitar warm and the drums easygoing, which only makes the desperation louder. Venus has said he wanted his solo work to show “the rough edges I have, the tenderness I protect.” On “I Want You Back,” the protecting part is over. — Imani Raven

LAYA, “LUber”

The conceit is an Uber, or a booty call donned up in rideshare language. LAYA, the Staten Island singer who spent the early pandemic years teaching herself videography and graphic design while building a catalog on Warner Records with the debut EP “R&B fans” slept in 2022, structures the whole song around pickups, ETAs, and GPS coordinates, and the metaphor is slippery enough to work on two levels without collapsing under its own cuteness. “When you’re ready to breeze, and you’ve had a few drinks, and your cab is buggin’, don’t budge it/When you’re feelin’ low-key, and the crib is too bleak, and you hit that button, I’m comin’.” The verses heap internal rhymes in threes and fours, packed tight, with a cadence pulled straight from the late-90s girl group playbook she grew up on (Destiny’s Child, 702, Aaliyah, all cited by name). She then flips from seductive to possessive. She already knows where you are, she doesn’t need the app to confirm it. “Can you wait all night long just to be with me?” sounds like a question, but LAYA sings it like she already has the answer. The production, from Chad Paul, Dante Carter, and Quincy Riley, bounces between a percussion-forward groove and a softer cushion on the pre-chorus, funky and minimal, with room for LAYA’s stacked harmonies to fill the gaps. — Jamila W.

PJ Morton, “Mutual”

A few weeks after winning his sixth Grammy and announcing a new distribution deal between Morton Records and SRG-ILS, PJ Morton put out a song about the simplest, rarest feeling in the world: two people falling at the same speed. “Mutual” doesn’t have a clever angle or a narrative twist. Morton senses the other person’s hesitation, names it gently, and offers reassurance—“You don’t have to be afraid/Whatever you’re feeling, I’m feeling the same way.” He sings it in a clear, mid-register voice without overselling a plosive, letting “mutual, baby” build its own warmth through sheer patience. Morton is the son of a bishop, the longtime keyboardist for Maroon 5, and the first Black composer to write an original song for a Disney theme park ride, but none of that extra context is necessary to hear what “Mutual” does. It’s a love song for the moment right before two people stop hedging and admit they’re antecedently together. — Phil

India Shawn, “Rain On Me”

India Shawn has been working with D’Mile for years now. The Oscar and Grammy-winning producer handled most of her 2022 debut Before We Go (Deeper) and her 2025 singles “Kill Switch,” Lucky Daye-featuring “Cotton Candy Blvd,” and the Outlaw-inspired “Gone.” Their partnership keeps yielding songs where Shawn sits completely at ease inside her own desire, and “Rain On Me” is the most direct version of that instinct. She wants to be spoiled, and she says so without apology: “Just keep loving me with a purpose/Spoil me ‘cause you know I’m worth it.” The Shawn who once wrote for Chris Brown and Monica and Keri Hilson behind the scenes, years of devising other people’s internal language, shows up here in the economy of the verses. “Keep me looking sharp like switched blade/Hand all on my thigh while we switch lanes” burns through two images in a single couplet, each one physical and precise. “Tropical water/This the kinda torment I could get used to” pushes the luxury and the intimacy into the same breath, indulgence and affection fused. Spencer Stewart co-produces alongside D’Mile, and together they give the track a breezy, assured feel, with just enough give in the beat for Shawn to lean into her phrasing. — Kendra Vale

R&B, Soul, or Blues Albums to Check Out

• Thundercat: Distracted

• Omah Lay: Clarity of Mind

• Market East: French Street

• JNBO: JNBO & Friends

• Lekan: For All the Right Reasons, Vol. 1

• Sean Leon & God’s ALGORITHM: GOD’S ALGORITHM_PATCH_001

• Lubiana: Terre Rouge (Mother Earth)

• TheARTI$T: DND (EP)

• Kwncy: St Lucie Drive (EP)

• Michael Francix & IX WULF: A.L.T.T.A (EP)

• Sunny Miles: G2 (EP)

• Ms. Thandi: Soft Like Fire (EP)

Other Songs to Check Out

• Tank: Turtleneck

• 2BYG: Be Mine

• Jacob Banks: Little Me

• Guordan Banks: Hard Day’s Night

• Allyn: Whatever You Say

• Quail P: Wouldn’t Try Again

• rjtheweirdo: At Least She’s Beautiful

• Dave Hollister: Thought You Knew

• Zae France & R&B ONLY: RAX (R&B ONLY SESSIONS)

• OLA: EXCHANGE

• Sonny Tennet: Cut In Half

• Estelle: Live, Love, Learn

• Arianna Marie: know dat (feat. Abby Jasmine)

• Sal Ly: Off Days

• Bōlají: break it down

• Devon Gilfillian: IRL

• Blue Lab Beats: Find Your Way (feat. Essosa) / Sunset and Memories (feat. Kaidi Akinnibi)

• Lex Aura: Starfire

• Sekou: Dangerous Lover

• Guordan Banks: Hard Day’s Night

• CHOSZN: The One That Got Away

• REMI: Your Loss

• MarcLo: Haze

• Chxrry: Hall of Fame

• Puma Blue: (Fool) / Sweet Belief / Fester

• Brik.Liam: Whiiiplash!

• Ragz Originale: Live at Round Chapel (Maxi-Single)

• ADÉ & The Amours: still in LOVE

• Tama Gucci: Lights Camera Action

• Manny Norté: Can We Make It Real?

• Taleen: Pure

• Bobby V.: Go Girl

• Marvin Gaye & Blonde Maze: Distant Lover (Blonde Maze Remix)

• S!MONE: Do It

• Jarrod Lawson: If We Pretend

• LALA: Winners (feat. Marnz Malone)

• KAMAUU & Coastyn: USTILLDERE

• Zeke Pujols: Remind Me You Exist

• Pat Williams: LANDMARKS (feat. Eric Ryan)

• Josh Tenor: I Like What I Like

• Bel Cobain: Change

• Yo Trane: Do You Miss Me ?

• Devin Donnell: SNOWBALL

• Gemaine: Stuck With Me

• DeCarlo: Paid My Dues

• Tyler Watts: Check On Me

• Echo Huang: YOKOYAMA

• Akina Eman: Gravity

• RM47, MAAD & Releigh: S.E.X.

• Norah’s World: shake it up

• Larissa Lambert: I Love You Out Loud

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Three debut albums dropped this past Friday, and each one carries real weight. Elmiene’s sounds for someone, dedicated to his late father, arrives on Def Jam after years of EPs that earned him a BRIT Rising Star nod and a Raphael Saadiq studio invitation. Noah Guy’s MEMORIA, in blue lands as a ten-track reckoning with grief and growth from a Philly film-school dropout who self-produced the whole thing in Los Angeles. And rum.gold’s Is There Anybody Home?, a two-disc concept record split between childhood and adulthood, tries to answer one question: what in his past broke his capacity to keep a relationship alive. Alongside those three records, Jenevieve follows up her sold-out CRYSALIS world tour with a collaboration with Jordan Ward that pins the specific, familiar discomfort of being stood up by someone you’d cleared your whole day for. And Isaia Huron, fresh off staging his debut album as a three-act play, delivers a loose single about the arithmetic of loving someone who handles devotion as a credit line. Every track this week runs the same math from a different angle: what did I put in, what did I get back, and when did the answer stop adding up?

Elmiene, “Light by the Window” feat. Raphael Saadiq

Elmiene’s debut album sounds for someone arrived today on Def Jam, dedicated to his late father, and that dedication reframes even the gentlest track here as an act of reckoning. The British-Sudanese singer, born in Frankfurt and raised in Oxford, studied poetry in university before pivoting to music after a D’Angelo cover went viral in 2021. He earned a BRIT Rising Star nomination, performed alongside Stevie Wonder at BST Hyde Park, and drew co-signs from Missy Elliott and Questlove, all before putting out a proper LP. “Light by the Window” is the clearest distillation of what all those years of EPs were circling: a man stuck in a room he locked himself into, unable to leave, unable to be alone. The bridge concedes even further: “Detrimental to my vision/Without my glasses and you’re far away with no precision.” His own perception has failed him, and he knows it. He can’t trust what he sees from where he’s planted himself. And then, “I doubt that if I leave this room it will be any different,” which isn’t hope but resignation dressed in self-awareness, delivered without pressing the note into a plea. Saadiq told him in the studio once, “You’re one of them ones.” On “Light by the Window,” you hear why he said it. — Marjani Fields

Jenevieve, “Waiting Room” feat. Jordan Ward

Everyone has sat in a chair checking their phone one too many times, knowing the person they’re waiting for isn’t coming but staying anyway because leaving would mean admitting what just happened. That quiet ego damage, the indignity of being stood up by someone you’d cleared your schedule for, is what Jenevieve and Jordan Ward pin to the wall on “Waiting Room.” The Los Angeles singer dropped this fresh off a sold-out European run for her CRYSALIS tour, and it continues that record’s commitment to saying sharp things softly. Producers Tommy Parker and Elijah Gabor lay down a midtempo groove with enough warmth in the low end to trick you into thinking the track is comfortable, but it isn’t. “Was I too good for you?” Jenevieve asks, and the line scans differently than standard romantic disappointment because she’s moved past hurt into cost-benefit analysis, pricing the loss. Ward flips the perspective. He cleared his calendar (“Damn, I cleared it all”), got stood up, and now he’s sulking alone at a bar behind a random star he followed for no reason. His Issa Rae reference, “Now you makin’ me feel insecure like Issa Rae,” is funny to snap the track out of any drift toward abstraction. The visual, directed by Yanchi, pulls from The Pharcyde’s reverse-shot “Drop” video, which dovetails with Ward’s own BACKWARD album themes. — Jamila W.

Noah Guy, “Green Vows”

Noah Guy dropped out of film school, couch-surfed through his first year in Los Angeles, and self-produced every track he released along the way. The Philly-born singer calls his sound “crunchy soul,” and on “Green Vows,” from his debut album MEMORIA, in blue (also out today), you can hear what he means: there’s grit in the vocal grain, dirt left in the bass, and no impulse to sand anything smooth. He opens blunt (“You brought me to the fire/You dampened my desire”), and that pair of lines covers the entire emotional territory. Someone he trusted took something green and growing (vows, money, innocence, all three folded into one word) and set it on fire. The pre-chorus amounts the damage in real time: “While you’re burning up all my green vows, burning all my sin now/You turned up with violence, making me feel something better off than nothing.” Guy’s Philly roots run deep (he spent months crate-digging through the city’s record shops, studying Jim Croce and Motown), and MEMORIA, in blue moves through grief, growth, and acceptance across ten tracks in a brisk twenty-six minutes. — Danica Ford

rum.gold, “Friend of a Friend”

Delonte Drumgold grew up in D.C. playing jazz trumpet, listening to Chet Baker and Usher’s Confessions in the same afternoon, and absorbing the go-go music that rattled out of every car window. He started making tracks in Brooklyn under the name Anon because he didn’t believe his voice was worth hearing. Seven years and three albums later, rum.gold’s Is There Anybody Home?, a two-disc concept record about childhood trauma colliding with adult heartbreak (including his own divorce), arrives today on Independent Co. “Friend of a Friend,” from the album’s first half, doesn’t narrate the end of a relationship so much as measure how far backward it’s traveled. “I never wanted it to end this way/With you and I right back to where we began,” he sings. — Jhanel

Isaia Huron, “This Girl Wants Everything”

Before Isaia Huron sang a note on a record, he was a drummer in his father’s church in Greenville, South Carolina, where his mother directed the choir and music was closer to obligation than ambition. He moved to Nashville, worked as a touring drummer, and started dropping EPs in 2020 that got early co-signs from 6lack and Drake. His 2025 debut CONCUBANIA, a fictional-but-autobiographical breakup album staged as a three-act play, established him as someone willing to build entire worlds around the messiest parts of being in love. “This Girl Wants Everything” is a loose single that shows Huron working a simpler problem, and working it honestly. The premise is old, a man pouring everything into a woman who treats his devotion as a deposit. The second verse grants her perspective without softening his: she’s beautiful in every lifetime, she handles attention with ease, and she figured out long ago how to get what she wants from anyone. He produced it himself, and the arrangement stays minimal enough to let the words carry the weight. — Jill Wannasa

R&B, Soul, or Blues Albums to Check Out

• RAYE: This Music May Contain Hope.

• Noah Guy: MEMORIA, in blue

• Elmiene: Sounds for Someone

• Tom Misch: Full Circle

• Victory: Confessions of a Lonely Girl

• chromonicci: Days of You.

• rum.gold: Is There Anybody Home?

• IAMNOBODI: Duality & Devotion

• Selwyn Birchwood: Electric Swamp Funkin’ Blues

• bnnyhunna: PSALM FUNK

• RnBoi: My Eyes Only - Flashback

• RUSSELL!: FLOWERS

• Joshua Showtime Williams: This Is Me

• Eliza Neals: Thunder in the House

• Mz Dels: With Intention

• Justine Skye: Candy (EP)

• Jessie Reyez: $TILL PAID (EP)

• Bellah: State of Emergency (EP)

• Olivia Escuyos: Yours Truly (EP)

• BODHI: Be My Guest (EP)

• Jordan Ariel: UNSERIOUS (EP)

• Kennedy Ryon: Can I Evolve? (EP)

• Juls: Jigi Jigi Vol. 2 (EP)

• Jocelyn Brown: Live in Amsterdam

Other Songs to Check Out

• Jessie Ware: Automatic

• Eric Bellinger: Cry In Front of You

• Jungle: Carry On

• André Mego & : Heart of the Matter

• Davion Farris: Good Girl

• August Charles: Fight for You

• Robyn Florence & DAVIES: So Bad

• KAIRO: HALO

• Mychelle: Personal Attack

• Homer: The Tall Green (feat. Kendra McKinley)

• MILES.: Castle On the Moon

• JuJu Rogers & Jamila Woods: Elohim

• Khalea Lynee: Don’t Tell Me No

• Mayah Dyson: Hold Me Down

• Levina: Back In My Body

• BaggE: Devil In Disguise

• Maya Jade: Why Why (feat. Dilly Cooner)

• Mega Simone: Breathing

• Dreamer Isioma: Smile

• MALIA: Touch

• Tamera: Sinner

• Etta Bond & Raf Riley: Only Human

• Kaelin Ellis, Madison McFerrin & Sweata: Hello.Morning

• CANDIACE & Tamar Braxton: If Only... (Remix)

• Mariah Carey: Volare / Nothing Is Impossible (Live from the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games)

• B5: ETA

• H3rizon: WHERE IS MY HUSBAND! (from the Netflix Series Star Search)

• Jordan Rakei & Nubya Garcia: Monsters

• Brianna Castro: don’t take it personal

• ROSEYE: Fallen Angels

• Devon Culture: DND

• Zenesoul: Better Off Alone

• Stefan Mahendra: Better Man

• Genia: BABY IMA STAR

• Luna Elle & Foggieraw: AMPM (Remix)

• Eloise: My Man & Me

• Chikoruss: So Scandalous

• Yuna: wasteland

• BLKWTR & Jalisa Rey: Waves

• Tami Neilson: Are You Sure

• Wax Motif & Ty Dolla $ign: Bad & U Know It

• KYANTII: Five

• Essosa: He’s Not All That

• MIRIAH: IRRESPONSIBLE

• Jacob Banks & NESTA: Love Like This (Flip)

• mike: north star

• Nic Hanson: Persist, Proceed

• Binta: Siren

• Nic Dean: Three Am

• Neema Nekesa & Blue Lab Beats: Tomorrow

• Ne-Yo: Up Out & Gone

• Aaron Page: Waiting Room

• Eloise: My Man & E

• Honey Bxby & Queen Naija: Shame (feat. Bunna B)

• Jeff Bernat: Worth the Wait

• Gareth Donkin: Running Away

• Phoenix James: Hold On

• Devin Tracy: Fantasy

• Troy Javelona: DARLING

• Tommy Saint: relocate

• Flyy Armani & JLLY: drunk & faded.

• LATE NIGHT RICKY & SAFE: My Friends