In 1982 Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force took Kraftwerk’s cold German melodies, ran them through a Roland TR-808, and gave the Bronx something new: electro. “Planet Rock” opens this set because the rest of it comes from that record. It’s machine funk that still makes bodies move.   The seven tracks cover a decade. Yarbrough & Peoples’ “Don’t Stop the Music” and The S.O.S. Band’s “Take Your Time (Do It Right)” were both 1980, and they show R&B already leaning toward the drum machine. They’re slow and patient, and the bass carries the whole song. The Gap Band’s “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” brings the explosive side of that sound. Planet Patrol’s “Play at Your Own Risk,” with the same Tommy Boy studio team behind it as “Planet Rock,” sits between doo-wop harmony and electro pulse. Club Nouveau’s “Rumors” takes the formula into 1986 and turns it into gossip and street commentary.   Then the set crosses the Atlantic. Soul II Soul’s “Back to Life,...

Thirty years after The Score, Wyclef Jean is releasing seven albums in seven genres, one after another. These are the first two, and they could hardly be further apart. That's the point.

  Theo Croker plays trumpet the way a good DJ plays records: he's always listening to what's underneath. [XX] tracks of a player who treats jazz as a living frequency, something to tune into rather than a museum to curate. The trumpeter who learned the lineage and then left the building Croker's credentials are almost too perfect. He took up the trumpet inspired by his grandfather, the Grammy-winning jazz trumpeter Doc Cheatham , then studied at Oberlin Conservatory under the mentorship of Donald Byrd . Most musicians with that pedigree spend their careers defending the tradition. Croker went to China instead. He spent seven years between Shanghai and New York, and his major-label debut AfroPhysicist , produced with Dee Dee Bridgewater , grew out of the collaborations from that period. From there the records kept getting more open. Escape Velocity followed in 2016, then Star People Nation in 2019, which earned a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Instrument...

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...

If you have danced to anything out of Accra in the last ten years, you have probably danced to GuiltyBeatz without knowing his name. Forty-seven tracks of a producer's fingerprints — and the fingerprints turn out to be the melody. The Ghanaian producer who made Afrobeats swing Ronald Banful, who records as GuiltyBeatz, is a Ghanaian producer and DJ whose sound sits at the crossroads where Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian Afrobeats, amapiano and UK dance music all meet. He came up producing for Mr Eazi — the Banku Music partnership is where a lot of listeners first heard him — and his breakout as a name in his own right came with "Akwaaba," the 2018 track with Mr Eazi, Patapaa and Pappy Kojo that spawned a dance craze and became one of the defining African club records of its year. His reputation went global when he worked on Beyoncé's The Lion King: The Gift , but the more interesting story is the consistency. A GuiltyBeatz beat is usually ide...

Twenty-five tracks, one mood, no wasted motion. RHYTHM & FORM make Afro house the way a good chef makes stock — slowly, with very few ingredients, until it tastes like more than it is. Heat, patience, and the long build This is a producer project rather than a personality project, and the track titles tell you everything about the intent: "COCOA BREEZE," "CARIBBEAN," "ISLAND," "JUNGLE," "AFRIKA," "TRINIDAD," "LAGOS," "WAKANDA," "RED EARTH PULSE." Place names and weather. Nobody is trying to sell you a persona here. The music is the whole pitch. What you get is Afro house in its most patient form — the strain that owes as much to the long, hypnotic builds of South African deep house as it does to the percussion traditions it borrows from. Tracks open with a single hand-drum figure, add a bass note, add a pad, and let the arrangement accumulate over four or five minutes ...

Olivia Dean writes the kind of songs that seem simple until you try to explain why they work. Forty-two tracks in, the answer is still: she means it, and she swings. The East London singer who made warmth a whole aesthetic Olivia Dean grew up in Walthamstow, east London, and came through the BRIT School — the same institution that produced Amy Winehouse, Adele and King Krule. What she took from it seems to be less a style than a work ethic. She released a run of EPs in the late 2010s, spent a stretch as a backing vocalist, and built an audience the slow way before her debut album Messy arrived in 2023 and earned a Mercury Prize nomination. Her music sits in a lineage that runs through 1960s soul and Motown pop, but she is not a revivalist. The arrangements are live and roomy — real strings, real backing vocals, a rhythm section that breathes — while the writing is entirely contemporary in its emotional register. She writes about ambivalence, about the ord...

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...

Twelve tracks, and at least four of them are load-bearing walls of the entire post-disco R&B canon. The S.O.S. Band did not make many albums. They did not need to. Atlanta, Minneapolis, and the sound of the eighties groove The S.O.S. Band came out of Atlanta at the end of the 1970s — the name stood for Sounds of Success — fronted by Mary Davis , whose voice had a cool, slightly withholding quality that turned out to be exactly right for what came next. Their 1980 debut single "Take Your Time (Do It Right)" was a straight-up post-disco smash, and it could easily have been the whole story. What changed everything was the arrival of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis . Fresh out of The Time and newly working as an independent production team, the pair began producing the band in 1983, and the S.O.S. Band became the laboratory where the Jam & Lewis sound was worked out — the spacious programmed drums, the icy synth stabs, the tempo pulled deliberatel...

Sevyn Streeter has written hits for other people that you already know by heart. Twelve tracks here make the case that she should have been keeping more of them. The writer's room's best-kept secret Amber Streeter, from Haines City, Florida, came up the hard way — first in the girl groups TG4 and RichGirl, then, when those didn't break, as a songwriter. That second career went extremely well. She has credits on Chris Brown's "Yeah 3x," Ariana Grande's "The Way," Alexandra Burke's "Let It Go" and material for Chrístina Milian and Kelly Rowland, among others. She was, for a stretch in the early 2010s, one of the reliable hands behind mainstream R&B's biggest choruses. Her own records carry that craft but point it somewhere more particular. Streeter writes about relationships with an unusual amount of legal precision — the terms, the conditions, the things not said. Her melodies tend to move in short, clipped phras...

Roots reggae with a conscience is easy to claim and hard to execute. Taj Weekes has been doing it for two decades from an island most reggae fans couldn't place on a map. St. Lucia's quiet radical Taj Weekes is a singer, songwriter and bandleader from St. Lucia — not Jamaica, which matters more than it might sound. Working outside the Kingston system, he and his band Adowa have built a catalogue that sits squarely in the roots reggae tradition while carrying a lyrical sensibility closer to folk songwriting: literate, specific, and unusually willing to name things. He is also, unusually for a musician of his profile, a working humanitarian. His foundation They Often Cry Outreach has run health, sport and youth programs across the Caribbean, and he has served as a UNICEF champion for children. The activism is not a press-release detail bolted onto the music — it is the same project. The songs and the fieldwork are pointed at the same problems. What to listen fo...

Sixty-one tracks built for a very specific floor: the steppers set. If you know, you know — and if you don't, this is the most enjoyable education available. The dance that kept a whole style of R&B alive Chicago stepping is a partner dance with roots running back through the city's bop and swing scenes, and it comes with a strict musical requirement: a smooth, mid-tempo groove, roughly 90 to 110 beats per minute, with a pocket steady enough that two people can hold a pattern and improvise inside it. That requirement created a whole parallel R&B economy — songs recorded, remixed and sometimes written specifically for steppers, circulating through Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta and the DMV largely outside mainstream radio. This mix is a working document of that world. It moves between certified classics, dedicated stepper remixes, and contemporary records that happen to sit in the pocket, which is exactly how a good steppers set is assembled. What to listen ...

Doechii spent years being called promising. Then she released a mixtape that made the word obsolete. The Tampa rapper who won by refusing to pick a lane Jaylah Hickmon, from Tampa, Florida, has one of the more instructive career arcs in recent rap. She built an early following on TikTok and SoundCloud, signed to Top Dawg Entertainment — the label that housed Kendrick Lamar and SZA — and then spent a stretch releasing singles that flirted with pop, house and viral rap without ever quite consolidating into an identity. "Yucky Blucky Fruitcake" and "Persuasive" with SZA got attention; the album didn't come. What broke it open was Alligator Bites Never Heal , the 2024 mixtape that abandoned the chase for a single and instead showcased what she actually does best: dense, technically ferocious rapping over live-sounding jazz and boom-bap production, with theatrical shifts in character mid-verse. It won the Grammy for Best Rap Album, making her onl...

Eight tracks recorded in a converted church in Amsterdam. Naomi Sharon's voice was built for a room like that, and the recording knows it. A Rotterdam voice in a room that suits it Naomi Sharon Webster was born in Rotterdam in 1995 to Aruban and Dutch parents, in a house where her father DJ'd and her mother sang. She trained at the Academy of Theatre and Dance and worked in musical theatre, which explains a great deal about the control in her phrasing — she can hold a note dead still for a very long time and make the stillness feel like an event. In 2023 she became the first woman signed to Drake's OVO Sound , after the single "Breeze" reached the label. Her debut album Obsidian followed that October to strong reviews, and she has continued with The Only Love We Know and subsequent work. The comparisons to Sade are unavoidable and, for once, roughly accurate: the low register, the restraint, the refusal to oversing. What to listen for The Paradis...

"Boo'd Up" was the record that reminded a whole industry that R&B could still go to number one on its own terms. Ten tracks trace where Ella Mai went next. The London singer who reset the American R&B chart Ella Mai Howell grew up between London and New York, auditioned for The X Factor as part of a group, and then did something more sensible: she started posting covers and originals to Instagram. Producer DJ Mustard found her there and signed her to his 10 Summers label, and the pairing turned out to be one of the more productive odd couples in modern R&B — a West Coast producer known for spare, bouncy rap beats working with a British singer steeped in 1990s soul. The result was a run of EPs and then "Boo'd Up" in 2017, a slow-burning, almost weightless record that took the better part of a year to climb the charts before peaking at number five on the Billboard Hot 100 and winning the Grammy for Best R&B Song. It arrived at a...

There is a reason no cookout, wedding reception or family reunion in Black America ends without "Before I Let Go." Fourteen tracks of the most beloved band in soul music. Frankie Beverly and the sound of belonging Maze featuring Frankie Beverly is one of the strangest success stories in American music: a band with almost no crossover pop hits, minimal radio play outside Black stations, and a catalogue that has nevertheless functioned as communal scripture for half a century. Beverly formed the group in Philadelphia in the early 1970s as Raw Soul, moved to the Bay Area, and got his break when Marvin Gaye took the band on tour and suggested the name change. Their self-titled debut landed in 1977. From there they built their following the old way — relentless touring, word of mouth, and a live show that people describe less as a concert than as a gathering. Beverly's trademark white outfit, the call and response, the sense that the audience is part of the arra...

Heavy-K calls himself the Drum Boss, which sounds like bravado until the first sixteen bars. Then it just sounds like an accurate job title. The Drum Boss and the rise of South African house Mkhululi Siqula, from Port Elizabeth (Gqeberha) in South Africa's Eastern Cape, has spent well over a decade as one of the defining producers of Afro house and its South African cousins — the strain that runs from kwaito through 3-step and into amapiano. His signature is exactly what the nickname advertises: drums that are dense, live-feeling and mixed forward, with the kick and the percussion doing the emotional work rather than sitting under it. What separates him from producers with a similar palette is his instinct for vocalists. Heavy-K records are almost always built around a singer, and usually a singer with a serious tone — gospel-adjacent, full-throated, unafraid of the high notes. The result is dance music with the emotional weight of soul music, which is a fair d...

Fireboy DML sings Afrobeats like a soul singer who wandered into the wrong studio and decided to stay. Twenty-two tracks of a writer who takes melody seriously. The Nigerian songwriter's songwriter Adedamola Adefolahan, from Abeokuta in Ogun State, studied English literature at Obafemi Awolowo University before signing to Olamide's YBNL Nation — and the literature degree is not incidental. In a genre where the groove usually carries the record, Fireboy built his reputation on writing: full verses, developed melodies, songs that hold up when you strip the percussion away. His 2019 debut Laughter, Tears & Goosebumps established him as an album artist rather than a singles artist, unusual at the time. Then "Peru" happened. Released in 2021 and later remixed with Ed Sheeran , it became one of the biggest African records of its era and pulled him fully onto the global stage — a stage he has since shared with Madonna, Jax Jones and others. What to lis...