Nobody’s Rushing to Say I Love You
Daye stretches a come-on, Muni can’t get the words out, and Dixon would rather lose than cry. Plus, Harnett learns love like a second language, and Khamari stuck to a magnet he keeps trying to leave.
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.
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)
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
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)