These Five R&B Songs All Have Something to Confess
Miles Caton’s post-Sinners gut-punch, Coco Jones in lovergirl mode, a shameless anthem from FLO, Tank Ball joins Lucky, and 6LACK catches something he gave himself. We listened and have things to say.
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.
This week’s batch arrived all at once, as if the entire R&B release calendar conspired to drop on the first day of spring. Miles Caton, fresh off an Oscars performance and a $360 million movie, released a small, devastating acoustic confession about knowing you’re the problem and not fixing it. Coco Jones, coming off a Super Bowl gig, a Grammy-nominated debut album, and an engagement to Donovan Mitchell, dropped a love song so unguarded it almost doesn’t sound like the same woman who spent all of 2025 proving she belonged. FLO, the British trio who just earned the first Grammy nomination for a UK R&B group in twenty years, turned a selfie into a manifesto. Tank and the Bangas, Grammy winners out of New Orleans, recruited Lucky Daye for a duet that works like a slow pull across a room. And 6LACK, returning after a long silence, opened his new album campaign by admitting something most singers would rather keep to themselves: that the person he’d been lying to wasn’t just his partner—it was himself.
Five songs, five confessions of varying sizes, all worth your time.
Miles Caton, “Don’t Hate Me”
A year ago, Miles Caton was a 20-year-old Brooklyn kid who learned guitar in two months to play a preacher’s son possessed by the blues in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. The film banked over $360 million and put his baritone on an Oscars stage, flanked by Buddy Guy and Raphael Saadiq. That kind of coronation tends to swallow a young singer whole, to turn every subsequent release into an appendix of the thing that made them famous. “Don’t Hate Me,” produced by JT Daly, refuses the appendix. Caton drops the period-piece grandeur entirely and shows up with an acoustic pop-R&B confession about being the wrong person at the right time.
The premise is blunt. He knows the woman he’s with deserves better, and he can’t promise he’ll ever close the gap. “You want a promise, but I’m just a maybe/Your worst is twice the best that I can do” is an admission most 21-year-olds lack the vocabulary for, let alone the nerve to sing plainly over a clean guitar arrangement. Caton doesn’t dress it up with melisma or bury it under ad-libs. He parks himself in the discomfort and stays. The pre-chorus is where it really cuts.
“Old enough to know you’re good for me
And I’m young enough to never look back.”
Caton never once asks for sympathy, and that saves the song. He concedes every point his partner could raise and then asks only not to be hated for the wreckage. The bridge lays it flat: “Why are we even tryin’ to pretend?/Goodbye never really means the end.” He’s already rehearsed the breakup but can’t pull the trigger, locked in the gap between knowing and doing. A year removed from playing a character whose voice could pierce the boundary between the living and the dead, Caton admits he can’t even pierce his own indecision. That honesty, from a 21-year-old this newly famous, is harder to manufacture than any guitar part he learned for a movie. — Imani Raven
Coco Jones, “LUVAGIRL”
Coco Jones sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing” at the Super Bowl last month. Her Grammy-nominated debut album cracked the Top 20 on the US Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. She got engaged to Donovan Mitchell. The woman has been stacking proof of her legitimacy for a solid year, which makes “LUVAGIRL” such a left turn—her first single since Why Not More? ditches the proving ground entirely. She’s not here to convince anyone of anything. She’s here to be giddy about being in love, and the absence of armor is the whole point.
Shae Jacobs’ production lays a bed of regal horns and a rubber-band funk bassline that bounces without ever rushing, and Jones sprawls across it like she has all the time in the world. The opening verse sheds her old persona in real time: “I used to run in them streets/I did what I pleased/But you put a bad girl back to sleep/Woke up a new me.” There’s no mourning for the previous version, no dramatic pivot. She just moved on, and the casualness of it carries more confidence than any declaration would. By the second verse, she’s planning forever over satin sheets on a Wednesday, and it doesn’t sound like settling. It sounds like she’s bragging. — Jamila W.
FLO, “Leak It”
A potential pop crossover breakout. “Leak It” opens with a conversation that doubles as a thesis statement. “How can I not leak it?” Stella asks. “I look so good, you look so good. Maybe we should all leak it together.” FLO (Stella, Jorja, and Renée), the British trio whose debut Access All Areas earned a Grammy nomination last year, are done pretending vanity needs a justification. Their first new single starts from a gloriously petty premise. Post a fire selfie. Let the fallout sort itself. “This one’s gonna teach my ex a lesson/This one’s gonna get my boyfriend’s attention/This one’s just for me, myself and I” parcels out the exact same photo to three different audiences with three different motives, each one selfish in its own satisfying way.
The Boutin-and-Bunetta production clatters and thumps with choreography-ready percussion that 2000s girl groups would have killed for (The Pussycat Dolls, in particular), and the trio trades verses like relay sprinters: Renée’s breathless opener, Stella’s mirror-gazing swagger, Jorja’s cool-blooded “stay clogging up my DMs.” If there’s a limit to “Leak It,” it’s that the song is all surface by design. The trio described it as unlocking “a core memory of being a young girl, listening to girl group music and feeling empowered,” and that nostalgia trip is transparent in the construction. It’s a fun record built to move units and bodies, and it knows it. FLO are talented enough that you wish they’d smuggle in something messier—but sometimes a group of women posting thirst traps for sport and writing anthems about it is exactly enough. — Ameenah Laquita
Tank and the Bangas, “Move” feat. Lucky Daye
Tank and the Bangas won their first Grammy last year for The Heart, The Mind, The Soul. Now comes The Last Balloon, the final chapter of a trilogy that began with Red Balloon and Green Balloon, and “Move” is its first single. Featuring Lucky Daye, the track strips the New Orleans band’s usual genre-hopping restlessness down to a single physical request: come closer. Tarriona “Tank” Ball and Daye let the longing fill the rest. The first verse sounds like someone talking in their sleep, half-conscious and grabbing at whoever’s beside them (“Flowers in my garden/Bring toys to my room/Kids to jump, they robe it/Don’t you leave too soon.”). The domestic and the sensual keep bleeding into each other, and Tank doesn’t bother pulling them apart. She’s talking about wanting someone while the laundry piles up and the kids are in the next room, and neither cancels the other out. When Daye enters, the temperature shifts. “Imma water your power flower/I’m your chance at thunder showers/Tryna say it’s final hour” has a sweetness to it but also a clock ticking underneath; he’s not being smooth, he’s being urgent. And “tension leaving me so sweet and sour” is one of those lines that gets better the more you sit with it, the way it catches that particular feeling of being right next to somebody who still feels far away. — Jill Wannasa
6LACK, “Bird Flu”
Most R&B singers bury their worst confession in a bridge, somewhere the casual listener won’t catch it. Ricardo Valentine puts his in the first verse. “What goes around comes around, applies to me too/I know I hurt you, baby, but I lied to me too,” he sings on “Bird Flu,” the lead single from Love Is The New Gangsta, his forthcoming album on LVRN/Interscope. That second line is where the song lives. Hurting someone else is an old story. Admitting you were also running a con on yourself takes the floor out from under the apology.
6LACK has always favored a monotone stigma, but here he’s rapping. The lines about procrastination and blacking out “at the time I needed help” don’t scan as moody posturing; they scan as a man naming specific failures without giving himself an out. “Resentment, self-inflicted from the things I never said/The story grew some legs, then it really got ahead.” That’s what happens when you stay quiet long enough that the silence writes its own version of events, and everyone else fills in the blanks for you. The “bird flu” conceit folds cleanly into this. He’s sick from his own carelessness, contagious to the people closest to him, and only now bothering to take the temperature. By verse two, the cost sharpens. “An open ear can make a stranger feel like she’s somebody to me/Why I did it wouldn’t make no sense to nobody but me” is as close to a direct answer as 6LACK has ever given for the emotional infidelity that runs through so many of his songs, and he delivers it without dumbing it down. — Tori Hammond
Read the Album Reviews from This Past Week
R&B, Soul, or Blues Albums to Check Out
Alex Isley: When the City Sleeps
Ego Ella May: Good Intentions
Terrace Martin: Perspective
MT Jones: Joy
S. Fidelity: I Guess I’ll Never Learn
T.K. Soul: Mind of an Urban Legend
Selah Sue & The Gallands: Movin’
Mark Adams: This Is Neo-Soul
Mali Wilson: Retro In Real Time
Nubiyan Twist: Chasing Shadows
Sharon Marley: Firebird
Champagne Bubblebath: Mixtape: Volume One
Norman Brown: Authentically Norman
Son Little: Cityfolk
Ye Ali: Private Suite 6
Witch Prophet: Words Are Spells, Thoughts Are Magic
Buttered: Tiny Deck
NateTaylorr: sensitive gangsta V2
Keri Hilson: We Need to Talk: Redemption (EP)
Mary Ann Alexander: Love or a Lesson (EP)
TyFontaine: A L T (EP)
ZENA: TEMESGEN (EP)
Kealeboga: A Love That Made Me Hate U (EP)
GIOVANNA: Heaven is Here: PAIN (EP)
Insightful: RABBIT (Deluxe)
Other Songs to Check Out
Dionne Warwick & Cynthia Erivo: Ocean in the Desert
Durand Bernarr & James Fauntleroy: Wild Ride
Arin Ray & Paperboy Fabe: Both of Us
Devin Morrison & CUBE: KAZUYA
Mack Keane Bloodshot
threetwenty: Such Is Life
Yaya Bey: Egyptian Musk (feat. NESTA)
Jorja Smith: Price of It All
Elmiene: Saviour
Tink: Overrated
Vedo: Little Things (V-Mix)
Kelsey Lu: Running to Pain
Ebony Riley: Honest
Justin Garner: Feels
N’shai Iman: Okay!
April + VISTA: Standing In Piece
Khal!l: The Danger
Thutmose: PUZZLE PIECE
Lee Lewis: Your Love (What I’m Dying From)
Twelve’len, Walshy Fire & Ash-B: How Deep It Go
Markus & The Outskrt: We’re Losing Recipes
Marvin Gaye: Soon I’ll Be Loving You Again (Salaam Remi Remix)
Liam Bailey: A Perfect Release
EAST WEST HONEY, Lyric Jones & Wake the Wild: Spend the Night
KELS: 6ft Under
WESLEYFRANKLIN: Racing
Rebel Rae: Worth It
Tia Gordon: should i give it up
Pino, Fern. & kyleaux: I Don’t Wanna Lose (Palagi)
Miraa May & Sons of Sonix: Good Advice
Goldiie Lux: Be
Lex Aura: Always
Suzi: All My Love
Claire Brooks: HEELCATCHER
duendita: super sad!
PawPaw Rod: Bettin on Me
Indigo Mak: Closure
Jastin Martin: flow state
greek: PATIENCE
D’Mott: I Do
Zacari: JINX
Goldiie Lux: Be
Che Ecru: Imagine
Nao Yoshioka & Braxton Cook: You Got to Feel It (feat. Bnnyhunna)
Montell Fish: Love You Right (feat. Clara La San)
PaBrymo: My Type (feat. Eric IV)
Stalk Ashley: On the Boulevard
Finn Askew: Distance
Jahson Paynter: draggin’ my feet!
Latanya Alberto: Humble
CAIRO!: Love or Sum Shit
spaceluvrrr: 500 DEGREE$
Adria Kain: So Bad
papa mbye: SOME OTHER TIME
EightyEight: COINCIDENCE
Beau Diako, Ben Esser & enawk: river you are
Arlissa: NOW!!
Dylan Williams: Out My Way
Ania Hoo: Make Me Up
Good Girl & Fana Hues: Heart Like Mine
Parris Goebel & Destin Conrad: DONT BREAK MY HEART BABY REMIX