A Proposal and a Standing Reservation
6LACK brings 2 Chainz along for a Sunday reset, Queen Naija sings her actual proposal, plus new Teedra Moses, KIRBY and Natanya.
Welcome to the Soulpolitan weekly feature, where we highlight the R&B singles worth your time. As people who spend an unreasonable amount of time pressing play on things nobody asked us to press play on, this is our way of passing along the best of what we’re hearing—and occasionally arguing about, so you don’t have to sort through every New Music Friday playlist yourself. Some weeks the list assembles itself around a theme. This week it did that without our help.
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