R&B Artists to Watch in 2026
The artists sprouting as we approach 2026 are not interested in providing background music for passive consumption. These twenty artists are building discographies meant to survive the skip button.
R&B keeps getting pronounced dead by people who aren’t paying attention. The artists on this list don’t have time for eulogies. They’re too busy working. Some came up through church choirs and learned to harmonize before they could drive. Others picked up a guitar during quarantine or started posting covers from a bedroom closet. A few have been grinding for a decade without the streaming numbers to show for it. What they share is a refusal to settle into the expected shapes. This isn’t a ranking. Nobody here is crowned “next” anything. We tried to avoid the language of coronation. Some will break through next year. Others will keep playing in smaller rooms and building at their own pace. Either way, the music justifies attention.
Twenty R&B artists about people making songs that stuck with us and think they should be on your radar. Not predictions. Just evidence.
Plus, we’re also keeping an eye on 2BYG, AKIA, alayna, Betty Brown, BOY SODA, Casper Sage, cortex, EJ Jones, ELSIE, FEYI, Finn Askew, Lily Massie, LUCIIA, Mantha, Merges, Nyan, Paradise, Rybe, rjtheweirdo, Sekou, Tamera, and Vikter.
Arno Sacco
It’s been a while since Arno Sacco downloaded Frank Ocean and SZA onto his “janky headphones” before a road trip to Slovenia—music the Belgian radio never played—and decided to quit school, work retail, and “try and make this thing work.” He grew up in a small Belgian town “far away from everything that’s lively,” where “there’s not a lot of creativity going on.” His path into songwriting came through theatre studies, which taught him how language could hold emotion in subtle, layered ways. “Blue Boy,” released in July via Au Contraire Recordings, was the first song he ever wrote.
The track is almost nothing. Just Sacco’s voice and a Spanish guitar, produced by Beni Giles (Lianne La Havas) and Joe Brown (Richard Russell/Everything is Recorded). His falsetto climbs without strain; you can hear the air between his words. In the music video, shot between his hometown and the Dutch coast, he runs through the dark into the ocean at sunrise and lets the waves crash around him. It’s about trying to escape a cycle but not fully being capable of breaking it just yet, so you end up in the same place again and again. Now he’s in London, opening for Brian Nasty, performing at BBC1Xtra host CassKid’s ChannelAlt nights, and moving in circles with Naomi Sharon and Rimon. “I wouldn’t say that I necessarily got that same vibe from Belgium,” he told Haste Magazine. “Everyone here has been very open and willing to see worth in the potential that I have.”
CARI
About two years ago, CARI was still working as an Apple technician. She had to beg for the day off when “Colder in June” dropped in June 2023—her debut single, written in her grandmother’s house in Grenada about her first heartbreak. The track approached a million Spotify streams and earned a co-sign from Kendrick Lamar. She’d been making music for nine years with producer Melo-Zed (Yazmin Lacey, Obongjayar) without releasing anything. Then she quit the Apple store and signed a deal the following week. The West London singer grew up crate-digging in her father’s record shop while her grandmother introduced her to gospel through Kirk Franklin and Marvin Sapp.
Those influences bleed into her last July debut EP Flux, which swings back and forth from the whimsical and delicate (“Creatures”) to sludgy, Prince-inspired funk that captures the tension of a situationship (“Phuckups”). She cites Brandy as “the blueprint” for how she stacks her vocals and believes artists “don’t pay homage as much as they should” to her. “Bleeding,” a collaboration with Tendai, unlocked residual resentment from her last relationship; the video finds her smearing red paint on cell walls. “When I was leaving and washing the red paint off my clothes, it felt like I embodied what I was singing about,” she told NME. She returns regularly to Grenada to write. “I feel like my nervous system resets. It’s like you’re stepping into a new dimension.”
Charity
Snoop Dogg posted a video of himself in his car, bumping “Cruel” by a Detroit singer named Charity. Someone had tagged him. Within 24 hours of her reaching out, he sent back a full “G-Mix” remix. That’s the kind of year it’s been—Charity Ward, a preacher’s daughter from Detroit’s west side who picked up guitar at 13 after a folk teacher handed her India Arie records, finally going full-time on music after years of balancing it with day jobs and depleted savings accounts. Her debut Tender Headed dropped in 2020, a 14-track examination of millennial drift and Black womanhood that she recorded after years of acoustic EPs that “didn’t feel reflective of my culture.”
The album led to the Motown Musician Accelerator; “Cruel” led to Detroit radio rotation and a Snoop co-sign. At a Smirnoff-sponsored show in July, she closed the night in orange—her signature color—while fans in the same hue surrounded the stage, singing along to “Eclipse” and the new single “Uncomfortable,” an uptempo pivot from her usual pace. “I want to be the future of Black music,” she told the crowd, “because I see myself that way already.” Her sophomore album Warm and Soft arrived last year, and she plays guitar. She writes songs about being broke in your late twenties while transferring money from savings to checking. Detroit’s neo-soul siren entered the year with a plan to stop treating music as a part-time pursuit.
Dayo Bello
At the BRIT School, Dayo Bello watched classmates like Rex Orange County land deals while wondering when his own moment would arrive. Some of them had home studios and resources; his family didn’t have money like that. He’d been singing and playing drums in church since he was ten, grown up in a council flat in southeast London absorbing grime from the estate, Fuji music from his Nigerian household, Kirk Franklin from the choir. In 2017, still in his teens, he self-produced “Mine” in his bedroom—a song about the brief period when he and his girlfriend split and he knew they were meant to be together. (He got her back.)
The track caught the attention of Chance the Rapper’s manager Pat the Manager and put Bello in the ears of artists like Peter Cottontale and Raveena. His 2018 debut EP 360 showcased all six tracks he produced himself, followed five years later by Outside, which featured fellow southeast Londoner Odeal. Last August brought A Penny for Your Thoughts, his longest project yet—eight songs including “J’adore,” a collaboration with saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins. Last year, he performed at SXSW London and has already dropped singles “4ever” and “No Letting Go” from his incredible DB EP. He still lists D’Angelo’s “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” as the song he wishes he’d written.
EJ Ross
When Jay Versace—the two-time Grammy-winning producer behind SZA’s “Smokin on my Ex Pack” and tracks on Tyler, the Creator’s Call Me If You Get Lost—teases new music on TikTok, the comments section pays attention. In March 2025, he posted a snippet with a caption that read “me doing witchcraft so my music can blow up instead of my vines” over a track called “FOCUS” featuring EJ Ross, tagging it #neosoul and #soul. The video pulled 47,000 likes and over a thousand comments demanding release. A month later, their collaboration “BLIND” arrived—bossa nova-tinged, sun-drenched, the kind of thing Versace tagged #spring and #summer and #vacation alongside footage of islands and water. EJ Ross is a 21-year-old singer from Los Angeles who debuted with “YOU” in 2024 and followed it with “SUPERFICIAL” in early 2025. He’s young, barebones in catalogue, and tied to a producer who’s spent years pivoting from Vine stardom to crafting beats for Westside Gunn, JID, and Joey Bada$$. When Versace asks his 2.6 million TikTok followers “bop or flop?” over their latest snippet, the answer keeps coming back the same. The new EP is slated for release this year.
Felix Ames
Felix Ames built a studio in his mom’s basement in Milwaukee when he was still at a crossroads. He’d studied psychology and Pre-Med in college, but during the pandemic he taught himself music theory and recording instead, spending hours singing over YouTube beats. “7711” came out of that basement. So did “Shoestring,” which now has over three million Spotify streams. His father’s Stevie Wonder records had been playing since childhood—along with D’Angelo, Bobby Caldwell, and a blues band from Chicago called the Mighty Blue Kings whose CD stayed in the family boombox whenever anyone cooked. After signing with Def Jam in 2023, he released his debut album JENA, released that October, takes its name from the Louisiana town where his ancestors came from. The twelve tracks pull from jazz, gospel, and turn-of-the-century R&B without ever sounding like a nostalgia exercise—OnesToWatch called him “one of one” and noted his sound “cannot be packaged nor duplicated.” He now lives in Brooklyn and works primarily with producer Calvin Valentine, jamming until something clicks. In a 2024 interview, he described his process simply: “We just got in and jammed, made the best shit, and went home.” A second album, Cruel, Cruel World, arrived last year. Very slept-on.
Gabriel Jacoby
Gabriel Jacoby started uploading rap tracks to SoundCloud as a teenager in Tampa, and by 2016 his song “Mr. Poet” had cracked six figures in streams. Then he spent more than half a year behind bars. He doesn’t talk about why, but he talks about who he met there—people who may never leave—and how it rewired his sense of purpose. Born the oldest of seven in rural Anderson, South Carolina, he’d grown up watching his mother work as a photographer and his father bounce between day jobs and art projects. The family moved to Tampa when he was young, and he picked up bass, drums, guitar, and production in quick succession, building out a home studio where he could disappear for hours.
His 2022 single “As You Stand Next to Me” marked his return, pivoting from the rap-first approach of his SoundCloud days into something softer and more Southern—guitar plucks, funky vocal inflections, the kind of falsetto that recalls Miguel on his most D’Angelo-indebted nights. Last year he co-wrote Shaboozey’s “Chrome,” got named a Shazam Fast Forward Artist, and dropped “The One,” which Billboard called “a breath of fresh air that picks up on the undercurrent of funk that’s coursed through contemporary R&B all year.” His debut EP Gutta Child arrived almost two months ago on PULSE Records—eight tracks with Tampa rapper Tom G aboard—while he was crisscrossing the country as sole opener on Khamari’s sold-out To Dry a Tear Tour.
GIGI
In sixth grade, a YouTube cover earned GIGI her first 10,000 views. But before the internet found her, there were the Thanksgiving talent shows—her family’s annual tradition where she’d perform Michael Jackson routines for aunts and uncles who’d spent the rest of the year playing Bobby Womack, Atlantic Starr, and the Four Tops in rotation. The Detroit native discovered she could sing at eight years old. What took longer was figuring out what to do with it. She moved to Atlanta, linked up with Veeze’s manager Terrence “Snake” Hawkins, and signed with Marki Records/Warner Records. In January, she dropped “Diamonds Dancing,” a post-breakup anthem built on early 2000s R&B production that Billboard, VIBE, and BET all picked up. Her debut EP Waves of It followed in last April—five tracks that move from the heartbreak of “Fumbled Me” to the softer devotion of “My Muse,” which she wrote reflecting on the moments love actually felt safe. By October, she’d already released a second EP: Between Us, seven songs produced by Tricky Stewart, OG Parker, Romano, and Bizness Boi, with “Exception” as the centerpiece. When asked for the soundtrack to her WOI chapter, she answered without hesitation: Jill Scott’s “Golden.”
Girlfriend
In seventh grade (I promise this wasn’t intentional), Kenya Edwards’s English teacher offered the class an option: submit a song for a final grade. She played it at school and everyone loved it—the first moment she understood music might be her path. She’d grown up in Mississippi with her dad’s record collection spinning daily: reggae one moment, R&B the next, then jazz, then instrumentals with no structure at all. “I grew up knowing music was limitless,” she told Hype Off Life. Before Los Angeles, before viral TikToks, before Encore Recordings, there was psychology. Edwards went to school thinking she’d be a therapist. Even while working at Dollar General, strangers would walk up and start telling her their life stories. “I realized I was already holding space for people,” she said.
That instinct carried into her stage name: Girlfriend was meant to evoke someone who gives love, affection, laughter—a safe space. Her April EP It’s Complicated works like a sonic diary for overthinkers, feelers, and people who love too hard. “Bon Voyage” with Tierra Whack opened the project; “Obsessive” captured wanting more from a situation than she could ask for out loud. The path from Mississippi wound through Tennessee for college, then Orlando, then LA at 20, where management connections and a viral performance put her on the map. Her 10-track follow-up Honey Water arrives on the 16th of this month.
JACOTÉNE
Triple J hosts snuck confetti cannons into Star of the Sea College in Melbourne and surprised a 16-year-old mid-assembly with news she’d won Australia’s Unearthed High competition. JACOTÉNE (pronounced “jack-oh-teen”) had uploaded “I Need Therapy” in the final days of the contest—a demo she’d written after fleeing a brutal math class for the school music room—and Triple J’s Music Director called her “a one-in-a-million talent.” An Epic Records deal followed, then sold-out headline shows at Sydney Opera House, tour support slots for Tems and G Flip, and a spot on NME’s 100 for 2025. When a teacher asked why she kept arriving late to English class, she snapped: “I’m living in two worlds right now, school is one of them. Give me a fucking break.” She moved to London—her first time anywhere alone—and wrote “Leave Me” the day she landed. Her June debut EP Untitled (Read My Mind) closes with “What Did I Do?,” recorded with the Czech Film Orchestra. She wants Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage. “No one can get to me on the stage,” she told NME. “It’s the most untouched version of Jacoténe that’s just my purest self.”
JayDon
The videos from 2016 are still on YouTube: a nine-year-old in a Jackson 5 t-shirt covering “Who’s Loving You” with the kind of phrasing most adult singers never learn. Childish Gambino saw it, brought him into the studio, and put him on “Terrified”—then took him to the 60th Grammy Awards to perform the song live. By ten, JayDon McCrary had signed with Disney’s Hollywood Records as their youngest male solo artist ever. At eleven, he was voicing Young Simba in The Lion King. For most child performers, that’s the peak. Instead, he spent his teenage years writing his own material, waiting for the right moment to come back as something more than a former prodigy. That moment arrived in November 2024 when he dropped “Ah! Ah!” featuring 310babii—his first single under his birth name, no more JD McCrary.
Three months later, Usher and L.A. Reid signed him to their new label mega. “Lullaby,” his Valentine’s Day single featuring Paradise (Reid’s son, also on the roster), topped Spotify’s Viral 50 in South Korea and spread across China and Taiwan before a K-pop remix with Jay Park and LOUIS of LNGSHOT extended its reach further. His October debut Me My Songs & I peaked at number eight on Apple Music’s R&B chart and includes “I’ll Be Good,” which samples Usher’s 2001 deep cut “How Do I Say”—the kind of nostalgic mid-tempo throwback that could’ve slotted onto Ne-Yo’s In My Own Words. He sold out his first headlining show at The Echo in L.A. on October 21st. Billboard named him their June R&B Rookie of the Month. The Usher remix of “Lullaby” dropped in December.
Kee’ahn
The name translates to “dance and play” in the Wik language—a mandate that stands in stark contrast to her naturally anxious disposition. A proud Kuku Yalanji, Jirrbal, and Zenadth Kes artist who views creativity as a generational gift passed down from matriarchs who were denied the right to practice their culture. Kee’ahn almost didn’t make music their life. They were a junior basketball star from Townsville who represented Australia in the US and enrolled at university to become a physiotherapist. But in 2018, at twenty years old, they packed into a van with a partner and drove from Far North Queensland through Mossman Gorge and Port Douglas all the way down to Melbourne, and stayed. No plan. Just a guitar and a name that their parents—a father who sang Boyz II Men covers at weddings and did musical theatre, a mother who danced in a Townsville hip-hop crew—had drawn from the language.
The debut single “Better Things” arrived in May 2020, right when lockdowns were hitting Melbourne hardest—a song about hope produced by Pataphysics, who had worked on Speech Debelle’s Mercury Prize-winning album. It won them the Archie Roach Foundation Award at the National Indigenous Music Awards and Best Emerging Artist from Music Victoria. Since then, they’ve sung backup for Sampa The Great’s Sunburnt Soul Choir, appeared on Dallas Woods’ “Stranger” and his Triple J Like a Version cover of Fat Joe’s “What’s Luv,” and collaborated with Emma Donovan on “Take No More,” which they wrote together on January 26, 2022, asking themselves: how do we make an anthem for our community on a day that is so traumatic? They landed on a phrase Donovan came up with—”our existence is resistance.” Their debut EP for me, for you x dropped months ago, five tracks drawing from ‘60s jazz-soul and ‘90s neo-soul, anchored by “At Least for Now,” written after a breakup with Lauryn Hill’s MTV Unplugged on repeat.
Lizzie Berchie
Growing up in Newham—birthplace of grime—Lizzie Berchie learned harmonies before she learned to stop being shy. Her older sister would force her to sing backup on Destiny’s Child songs, her parents would request India Arie’s “Get It Together” in the living room, and her dad’s highlife records (Ebo Taylor, Fela Kuti) turned Christmas into a West African soundtrack. She studied songwriting at Leeds Conservatoire and treated her 2022 debut Under the Sun like a dissertation, recording between campus studios and home in East London. It featured “Nsala,” a track that tells the story of an enslaved woman without flinching. Then she quit her job. “I’m not the kind of person to do things out of the ordinary,” she told The Culture Crypt, “so it was the first time in my life that I really felt like taking a leap of faith.” The gamble paid off: her sophomore EP Am I an Adult Yet? cleared ten million streams, she headlined Omeara in October 2023, and spent 2024 opening for Noname across the UK and Europe. In March, she played SXSW in Austin. Her third EP, Night Shift, dropped in May—seven tracks that include “Love Deep,” a collaboration with South African singer Filah Lah Lah that Berchie co-produced herself. On June 6th, she plays St. Pancras Old Church in London.
Nali
The music discovery account @IBreatheMusicAllDay posted a snippet of an unreleased song called “4U” to his 340,000 followers. The voice belonged to a 21-year-old from Brooklyn named Nali who hadn’t even set up a proper music account yet—she’d been uploading loosies to SoundCloud since 2020, starting with “POV” at nineteen, but hadn’t expected anyone to pay attention. The snippet went viral. By early 2024, she’d released the finished track, and it landed on Spotify’s Fresh Finds R&B of the Year playlist, where it’s since crossed 900,000 streams. Born to a musical family—Puerto Rican and Jamaican roots, Brooklyn upbringing—Nali fell in love with piano as a child but didn’t take recording seriously until lockdown gave her nothing else to do. Her signature move is the Stoop Session: she performs live from apartment steps in the city, raw and close, like a neighbor who happens to have a voice that stops foot traffic.
Her “No Spaces Live” performance has pulled over 125,000 YouTube views. In August 2025, she released I Love Nali, which drifts from hip-hop percussion through jazz improvisation to Latin-flavored neo-soul. Closer “procrastinating” is an impressionistic vocal piece, half-composed in the moment. The listening party—hosted by Power 105.1’s Nyla Symone—hit over capacity, with Coi Leray, wolfacejoeyy, and Cisco Swank in the crowd. When Okayplayer asked whether she writes to remember or forget, Nali didn’t hesitate: “To forget... sometimes both—but mostly to forget.”
Novine
In summer 2017, Novine recorded an acoustic Bob Marley cover at home in Heidelberg, Germany, styled in her own way. The Official Bob Marley Instagram account picked it up and posted it. She was still a student then, years away from finishing her music degree in Berlin, but the co-sign hinted at what her Jamaican mother’s record collection had already planted: a voice built for warm, unhurried soul that knew its way around a reggae inflection. Raised by a Jamaican mother and German father in southwest Germany, Novine relocated to Berlin to study, finished her Bachelor’s, and started carving out a lane somewhere between Prince’s sensuality and Sade’s composure—both artists she cites constantly. Her 2024 EP Daydreaming leaned into that blend. “Hold On” worked to break down walls around a guarded heart, while the acoustic “Thinking About You” stripped production back to let the vocal carry grief over losing someone close. She records much of her material at home with her guitarist boyfriend, who handles mixing, then sends it off for mastering. Last year brought “Therapy” featuring Braxton Cook, the Emmy-winning saxophonist fresh off an NPR Tiny Desk performance, plus “Shot Me Down” and “Green Roses”—a steady release pace for someone who told Fuzzer her best advice is to stay true and wait for the right people to hear it.
SHERIE
Before SHERIE ever stepped behind a microphone to track her own vocals, she was already on stages most artists spend careers chasing. The Haitian-American violinist has played the Oscars alongside H.E.R., toured as an opener for Alicia Keys, and appeared at the Grammys and ESPYs as part of the string section. She picked up the violin at ten in Atlanta, earned a social work degree from Georgia State, and spent years running with bands before learning the studio process from the inside out. Then came a session for Ariana Grande where she’d been brought in as a violinist—she left with a co-writing credit on “Positions,” which went to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and changed her trajectory overnight. That placement opened doors at Warner Chappell Music and nudged her toward building a solo catalog.
In February 2023, she dropped “Candlelight” with D Smoke, her partner and the two-time Grammy-nominated Inglewood rapper she’d met on the road. The following year, the “ETA” video cracked a million views in two weeks, with Lauren Hashian of Seven Bucks Productions directing three distinct visual worlds: classical violinist, dancer, vulnerable narrator. By March 2025, her debut EP Yours Deeply arrived—with songs that had already pushed past 100,000 streams, anchored by “Truth Is,” whose video sits at a quarter-million views. Jean-Luc Ponty taught her how to solo; Minnie Ripperton showed her what the upper register could hold.
SiMaya
The title says it all. SiMaya’s debut album (Shut Up, I’m Healing) is the kind of project that demands space for the mess of becoming whole. The North Carolina native started writing songs in her mother’s garage with an acoustic guitar she never actually learned to play, using the silence as a blank canvas for whatever her heart needed to hear most. That origin story explains everything about her approach: instinct over technique, emotional truth over polish, the song itself as the instrument that matters. She moved to Atlanta at eighteen and started making music around nineteen or twenty, navigating an independent path through an industry that routinely tests women’s resolve. “R&B is my first music love and that’s where I feel most alive,” she told Shoutout Atlanta. “But I love hip-hop too—the cadence, flow, and execution of rap songs always pulls me in. That’s the kind of music I create: R&B meets hip-hop.” Her philosophy centers on ownership—of her masters, yes, but more fundamentally of herself.
Storm Ford
The singer-songwriter released her first EP, Highest Mountain, on Valentine’s Day 2018 as a high school graduation requirement. She’d been writing the title track since age fifteen, the same year her mother left her life for good. She recorded those early songs at New Urban Arts, a community arts studio in Providence where local kids could access equipment and mentorship, then spent years playing small rooms around Rhode Island until an Instagram Live talent show changed everything. LVRN founder Justice Baiden was hosting songwriter searches during the pandemic, and Ford hopped on one night from her grandmother’s kitchen, singing her own acoustic songs. She signed a publishing deal with LVRN and Warner Chappell in 2021. Since then, she’s placed records with Mary J. Blige (“Here I Am”), Ari Lennox (”Queen Space”), Alex Vaughn (”So Be It”), and Baby Rose (”At Your Best”), all while splitting time between New York and Atlanta. Born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, she proudly identifies as one of the first outwardly Indigenous R&B singers—a member of the Narragansett Indian Tribe who also carries Nigerian and Laotian heritage. Her new EP Down Payment, released in November 2025, outlines relationships as emotional investments across eight tracks that sound like journal entries set to music, which is exactly what they are.
Yaya
Songs that feel like longing wrapped in bright tempos run in Yaya’s blood. The New Jersey vocalist grew up on her Puerto Rican and Dominican family’s playlist of dramatic heartbreak records—ballads disguised in uptempo arrangements that made devastation sound like celebration. Her mother started managing her at twelve, shuffling her through local stage contests and talent showcases until college interrupted the momentum. Then an open mic night reshuffled everything: she performed backed by a live band, another artist in the audience approached her afterward asking if she had original music, and the question itself became the answer.
That inquiry led her to LA sessions with producers whose work she’d already been streaming without knowing their names, resulting in 2023’s single “Ready for It”—a record she co-wrote with friend and fellow vocalist Nachi during a session that started with half a day of conversation before anyone touched a microphone. “I’ve discovered that I think a bit too much, especially when it comes to writing,” she told Finessed Media. “I discovered that I need to be easier on myself and just trust the process.” She describes her sound as unexpected and calming, a synthesis that makes more sense when you hear how her melodies settle into pockets between grooves rather than fighting against them. Last year brought There’s Always Tomorrow, a debut EP that petrifies what those early singles promised. Her advice to emerging artists—“Don’t let the internet rush you... quality over quantity”—explains the patience behind the project. Press play and understand you’re witnessing someone building her catalog with intention rather than urgency.
Zyah Belle
Before she moved to Portland in November 2020, Zyah Belle was in Los Angeles working with Snoop Dogg, writing and vocal producing for Terrace Martin and Freddie Gibbs, and touring with Ye’s Sunday Service—not just singing but creative directing movement, choreography, and stage direction for the choir. She’s credited as a vocalist on Jesus Is King. All of that, and she still felt stuck. The Bay Area native—born in Vallejo, raised between there and Sacramento, where she went to Sac State after graduating high school in 2009—needed a reset. So she packed up and headed north. Her 2022 album Yam Grier came out of that relocation, followed by the Electric Honey tour in 2024. Then Rihanna slid into her DMs. Belle had been sitting on a track called “Lyin’,” a confrontational diss song for anyone who’s ever been cheated on, complete with the line “Yo mama still wishin’ I had yo ugly kids.” Rihanna told her to drop it. The song went viral. This past August she released Are You Still Listening?, an eight-track EP on Third & Hayden that opens with that same scorched-earth energy before softening into collaborations with JANE HANDCOCK, Ben Reilly, and Rexx Life Raj. She’s traded her golden locs for a blonde fade, a visual marker of the shift. She’s finally stepping out from behind the sessions and onto center stage.