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ChilledSoul 26: Underground SoulFlow

Forty-four tracks of soul from well below the radar. Volume twenty-six of a long series, and still mostly artists you will not have heard.

Underground SoulFlow

The subtitle is the brief. This is a set built almost entirely from the independent and internationally-sourced end of contemporary soul — artists with modest streaming numbers, small labels or no label, and production values that would not disgrace anything on a major.

What it documents is a structural fact about music now: the gap between the quality of what is being made and the visibility it receives has never been wider. A mix like this is one of the few mechanisms that closes it.

What to listen for

Aaliyah's "Poison" with The Weeknd is the historical curiosity — a posthumous release built from unreleased material, and a genuinely contested one given the long dispute over her catalogue.

Little Simz's "I See You" is the most significant name here — the north London rapper whose Sometimes I Might Be Introvert won the Mercury Prize and is one of the best British albums of the century.

Bonobo and Jordan Rakei's "Shadows" is the most beautifully produced thing on the list.

Tiwa Savage and Tay Iwar's "Special Kinda" is the Nigerian entry and shows how naturally that scene sits alongside British soul.

Scribz Riley with 6LACK on "Dim My Light" is worth flagging — Riley is a British producer and songwriter with credits across Cardi B, H.E.R. and Khalid, stepping out as an artist.

Shae Universe, Tamera, Cleo Sol (twice) and Jaz Karis-adjacent material map the London scene, and Phebe Edwards, Vague Detail and Nakeyo are the genuine deep cuts.

Alicia Keys' "Come For Me" with Khalid and Lucky Daye is the biggest record here and the only one that sounds like a major-label production, which is instructive.

Go deeper

Little Simz first — Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, produced entirely by Inflo, is a genuine masterpiece.

Bonobo's Migration and Fragments are the albums from a producer who has quietly been making excellent records for twenty years.

And the practical note that applies to every mix like this: the artists here are largely unsigned or independently signed, which means streams are worth very little to them. Buying something is the difference between a second record and no second record.

One last observation about the word underground. It used to describe an aesthetic choice; now it mostly describes an economic position. Almost every artist here would have been on a major label in 1998, and the quality of the recordings makes that obvious. What has changed is the distribution, not the music, and a mix like this is the closest thing the scene has to a radio station.

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