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My Chilled Soul Vol. 3

Thirty-three tracks from late 2016 and early 2017 — the volume where the series first sounds fully like itself.

My Chilled Soul Vol. 3

The third volume is where the curatorial identity locks into place. The earlier sets are broader and less certain; this one has a clear position: contemporary soul that values harmony, live playing and restraint, drawn from wherever it happens to be made.

It is also the volume with the highest proportion of tracks that turned out to matter. Several of these were career-defining records for the artists involved, and at the time they were mostly new.

What to listen for

Solange's "Cranes in the Sky" opens the set, which is the strongest possible statement of intent — a song about the failure of distraction, released on an album that was about to reorganise how people thought about her.

Daniel Caesar and Kali Uchis's "Get You" is here again, and its recurrence across these volumes is not an accident.

KAYTRANADA's "GOT IT GOOD" with Craig David is the best-produced track on the list — a Haitian-Canadian producer reviving a British garage singer's career, which nobody predicted.

Xavier Omär's "Blind Man" and Haux's "Caves" both recur elsewhere on this blog, and their presence this early shows how consistent the ear behind these sets is.

Victoria Monét's "Do You Like It" is the real find — years before the Grammy, when she was known mainly as a songwriter for other people.

Chloe x Halle's "Fall" is from their first mixtape, which they made as teenagers, and The Japanese House's "Face Like Thunder" is the indie-electronic entry.

Phil Collins' "If Leaving Me Is Easy" is the inclusion that stops people short, and in this company it sounds exactly right.

Alicia Keys' "Blended Family" with A$AP Rocky and Pharoahe Monch's "So Good" are the veterans' entries.

Go deeper

Solange's A Seat at the Table is the essential album from this moment and should be heard in full, interludes included.

KAYTRANADA's 99.9% is the other one — a producer's album that won the Polaris Prize and changed how a great many people thought about dance music's relationship to soul.

Why this is the turning point: the earlier volumes cast wider and less certainly; from here the series has a position — contemporary soul that values harmony, live playing and restraint, sourced from anywhere. Several of these records also turned out to be career-defining, which is the practical test of whether a curatorial position is worth holding.

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