Album Review: ElectroSoul by DJ Harrison
A medication reaction puts the Richmond multi-instrumentalist in the hospital longer than expected. He calls his community in and makes a record that swings between discipline and release.
A medication reaction keeps you stuck in a hospital bed, and all you can think about is the work you’re missing. Devonne Harris (known as DJ Harrison) got home in 2024 and went straight to Jellowstone, his Richmond studio, to make the first thing he could finish—“NeverFold,” a mantra about not breaking under pressure. He started alone because that’s how the hands work after years of session playing and producing: you get an idea down before it leaves. But sitting alone in the studio after a health scare that reminds you your time is finite? That started feeling like the wrong move. So he opened the door.
Harris is a two-time Grammy-nominated producer and multi-instrumentalist who plays everything himself when he wants to. ElectroSoul, his first fully collaborative record, proves he knows when not to want to. He pulled in Yaya Bey, Pink Siifu, Fly Anakin, Yazmin Lacey, Angélica Garcia, and a grip of players from Butcher Brown, the jazz-funk band he’s been grinding with for years. The album runs deep, split roughly in half between instrumentals and vocal collaborations, which means this record is a recovery document that knows it’s working through modes, not building toward a thesis. Some days you need the room to yourself to work something out. Other days you need somebody else’s voice in there to tell you what you can’t hear on your own.
The instrumental tracks do heavy lifting. “Fresh Squeezed Drums” and “OG Players” open the album with muscle and pocket, the kind of playing that comes from decades in the studio knowing where the groove lives. These aren’t interludes or filler—they’re full songs, Harris showing what his hands can do when nobody’s singing over them. “Sepia Visions,” “Ballade de Vixen,” “Curtis Joint,” “The Floyd”—the instrumentals keep appearing throughout the album, holding space and creating breathing room between the vocal tracks. When you’ve got Butcher Brown players in the room, these sections groove like a band rather than loop like beats. That’s Richmond running through the music. The feel of people who’ve played together long enough that they don’t need to talk through the changes.
But the vocal tracks are where the album declares what it’s about. Yaya Bey shows up on “Stay Ready” asking the question the whole record hinges on: “Hey Slim, tell me where you’re going/Hey Slim, is it where the wind is blowing.” She’s not asking for information, she’s checking alignment—are you moving with purpose or just drifting with momentum? When she pushes further, “Are you standing ten toes down on that shit you said?,” the album’s ethics snap into place. This is the self-check record, the one that asks if you’re still doing the work or just saying you are. Bey delivers it without preaching, her voice carrying the weight of someone who’s asked herself the same question enough times to know how it sounds when you mean it.
With Pink Siifu on “Y’all Good?,” he brings a completely different pressure. He’s rapping about bills, cribs, niggas testing him, the circus of trying to make it while everybody’s watching. “Fuck all the suggestions from niggas that never had no intention/It’s like walking around in the trenches with nobody,” he spits, and suddenly the album’s in a different room. This is Richmond street reality entering the record, the weight of trying to build something while carrying where you’re from. The production shifts too—drums hit harder here than anywhere else on the album, the whole track tightening up like the walls are closing in. That gear change is jarring on purpose. The album isn’t trying to smooth over the fact that Harris lives in multiple modes at once: the Grammy-nominated session player, the band member, the guy from Richmond who knows what street pressure feels like.
Nigel Hall on “Can’t Go Back” is just refusal, sung over and over until it becomes real. No drama, no second-guessing, just the line drawn and the decision made. Fly Anakin on “Seek God” brings the kind of technical ease that makes rapping sound like conversation—he’s moving between bravado and searching without settling on either, which is honest about what doubt actually sounds like when you’re trying to stay upright. Angélica Garcia on “Turn Away” delivers the hook about witnessing and refusing to look away with enough insistence that it lands as the album’s most direct moral statement. These are the moments where the guests bring something Harris couldn’t have said himself, where collaboration proves its worth beyond just having names on the tracklist.
Other vocals track includes the lovely Yazmin Lacey on “It’s All Love,” singing about love making her whole, love being all she's meant to be—phrasing that's been in R&B songs for decades. However, what makes it enjoyable is that the delivery keeps it from floating away completely. Grebes on “End of Time” sings about love being hard to make, easy to break, something you can’t fake, which is serviceable but doesn’t stand out from the others. Kiefer on "Beginning Again" brings gentle keys and soft momentum that sounds like talking to a friend, with the album’s swing between uplift and weight is built into its structure.
Richmond isn’t backdrop here. It’s in the room between the Butcher Brown players bringing that band feel, the guest rappers bringing that street pressure, the whole album moving with the discipline and warmth of somebody who knows where home is and what it costs to maintain it. Harris has been making music in Richmond for decades, working with everybody from Jack White to Kurt Elling, but ElectroSoul is the first time he's made an album that sounds like it's specifically for and about his community. Not in a tourism way, not in a “let me show you my city” way, but in the way that people who've been working in the same rooms with the same folks for years finally decide to make something that documents what that feels like.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Can’t Go Back,” “Y’all Good?,” “Stay Ready”