The R&B of April 2026 Already Knows How the Conversation Ends
Kehlani hands Missy Elliott a room the business had closed, Kelela makes her first drumless song, and three more new releases refuse to perform permission.
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.
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!
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