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Chilled Soul Vol. 13: Underground Journeys

Thirty-seven tracks drawn from four continents, assembled at the point when soul music stopped having a single geographic centre.

Undergorundvibes

Chilled Soul Vol. 13: Underground Journeys

The most interesting thing about this volume is how casually international it is. British, Nigerian, South African, American, Swedish and Japanese-adjacent records sit next to each other without any framing device, and the sequencing never pauses to explain the transitions.

That was a genuinely new condition around 2018. Streaming had removed the distribution advantage that kept American R&B at the centre, and a set like this is the result: the best records, from wherever they happened to be made.

What to listen for

Masego's "Lady Lady" is the title track of his debut and the most joyful thing here — a saxophone-playing singer who invented his own genre name and mostly lives up to it.

Brent Faiyaz's "First World Problemz / Nobody Carez" is the two-part track that shows how the hazy, low-mixed sound of late-2010s R&B actually worked.

Jhelisa's "Friendly Pressure" is the deepest cut by two decades — a 1994 British record that sounds entirely at home among tracks made twenty-four years later, which is the point.

Supreme Jubilees' "It'll All Be Over" is the other archival inclusion, and it is a remarkable piece of curation: a privately pressed gospel-soul record from 1980 that almost nobody heard until it was reissued.

Billie Eilish's "bellyache" is here, which is a braver call than it now appears — at the time she was a teenager with a handful of tracks.

Emily King's "Remind Me" and Jordan Rakei's "Add the Bassline" are the musicians' picks, and Shekhinah's "Suited" is the South African one.

Santi's "Rapid Fire" with Amaarae and Shane Eagle is the alté-scene entry, and bLAck pARty's "Bloom" is the one most likely to become a favourite.

Go deeper

Masego's Lady Lady and Emily King's Scenery are the two albums to own from this set.

Supreme Jubilees' It'll All Be Over is worth seeking out in full — one of the great reissue discoveries of the last fifteen years — and Jhelisa's Galactica Rush is the British acid-jazz-era record most worth rediscovering.

Why the archival picks matter: dropping a 1980 gospel-soul private press and a 1994 British record into a set of 2018 releases is the boldest thing here, and neither sounds out of place. That is partly good curation and partly a real fact about the music: the production values that define this sound were available decades earlier to anyone with the right ear.

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