Jorja Smith was nineteen when Drake put her on a record and twenty-one when she won the Brit Critics' Choice. Twenty-seven tracks of a singer who has spent since then declining to be rushed. Walsall, and a voice with a hard edge in it Jorja Smith grew up in Walsall in the West Midlands, the daughter of a Jamaican-English father who had been in a neo-soul group. She was working in a coffee shop in London when "Blue Lights" — her own song, built on a Dizzee Rascal sample and written about police harassment of young Black men — started circulating in 2016. What followed was a rapid ascent: features with Drake and Kendrick Lamar, the Brit Critics' Choice Award, and a debut album, Lost & Found , that arrived in 2018 to strong reviews. What is more interesting is what she has done since, which is largely to slow down — releasing at her own pace, working with British producers rather than American ones, and resisting the obvious pop trajec...

A Jamaican singer who plays guitar, bass, drums, trumpet, piano, saxophone, flute and harp, and whose greatest gift is still his voice. Eighteen tracks of Mikey Spice. The most musical man in reggae Michael Theophilus Johnson — Mikey Spice — was born in Kingston in 1965 and began singing in his father's church at seven. By adulthood he was proficient on an extraordinary range of instruments: guitar, bass, drums, trumpet, piano, saxophone, flute and harp. He turned professional in 1985 and has worked steadily since across VP, Jet Star and RAS Records. His territory is the meeting point of conscious roots reggae and lovers rock , with a strong streak of American soul running through it. That combination is not unusual in Jamaican music, but few singers have handled both ends as convincingly. Spice can deliver a Rasta devotional and a bedroom ballad on the same album without either sounding like a sideline. He has worked with Tony Rebel, Marcia Griffiths, Lu...

"Lost Boy" started as a six-second Vine and became a platinum single. Twenty tracks show that Ruth B. was never a one-song artist. Edmonton to everywhere, via a six-second video Ruth Berhe was born in Edmonton, Alberta, to Ethiopian parents, and became briefly famous in the strangest way available in 2015: she posted a few seconds of an improvised song about Peter Pan to Vine, and the response was large enough that she finished writing it. "Lost Boy" went multi-platinum. Then something more interesting happened. "Dandelions" — an album track from 2017 that nobody promoted — went viral on TikTok years after release and became by some measures her biggest song, a genuinely unusual second act. It has since accumulated the kind of streaming numbers most artists never see once. Her music is piano-led singer-songwriter pop with a strong melodic sense and a plainness of language that reads as sincerity rather than simplicity. She w...

Fifty-four tracks that treat Lagos, Johannesburg, Accra and Luanda as neighbourhoods in the same city. The tenth volume, and the formula still has not tired. The continent at cruising speed What a tenth volume tells you is that the selection method works. This is African pop chosen for mood rather than for chart position — melodic, mid-tempo, built to run for hours without demanding anything. Where a party mix front-loads the biggest records, this one distributes them, so the set never spikes and never sags. The geographic spread is wider than most: Nigeria and Ghana dominate, as they do commercially, but South Africa, Tanzania, Jamaica and the Lusophone world all appear, and the transitions between them are unforced. What to listen for Tyla and Ayra Starr on "Girl Next Door" is the marquee pairing — South Africa's biggest new pop export alongside Nigeria's, and a record that would have been unlikely five years earlier. Adekunle Gold appears...

The last album released in Bob Marley's lifetime, and the one that ends with a man alone with an acoustic guitar telling you to free your own mind. Ten tracks, and the weight of everything after. Uprising, 1980 Uprising arrived in June 1980. Marley had been diagnosed with melanoma in 1977 and had declined the amputation that might have stopped it. He toured Europe behind this record, collapsed while jogging in Central Park in September, and died the following May at thirty-six. Whether he knew how little time he had is a question the album makes almost unbearable. It is his most explicitly spiritual record — heavier on Rastafari devotion than on the romantic material that had widened his audience — and it closes with a song that reads, unavoidably, as a summing-up. What to listen for "Redemption Song" is the reason this album occupies the place it does. Just Marley and an acoustic guitar — no band, no Wailers, no I Threes — drawing ...

Fifty-two tracks for the specific state of mind where you want music that understands rather than music that cheers you up. Moody, not sad The distinction matters. A sad playlist wallows; a moody one holds a temperature. What is assembled here is a set of records that share a certain heaviness of atmosphere — slow-to-mid tempos, minor keys, a lot of low end, and vocals delivered with more restraint than the subject matter would suggest. The range is the interesting part. It moves from 1970s soul to contemporary R&B to a Kendrick Lamar album track without any sense of strain, because the organising principle is emotional rather than chronological. Fifty-two tracks is roughly three hours, which is about right for the mood it is built for. What to listen for Ms. Lauryn Hill's "Tell Him" opens the set, which is a statement — the closing track of The Miseducation , a setting of the passage from Corinthians on love, and one of the most beautiful t...

He arranged "I Want You Back," produced "I Will Survive," and wrote "It's So Hard To Say Goodbye To Yesterday." Freddie Perren's twenty tracks are a decade of American pop. The Corporation, and everything after Freddie Perren was a member of The Corporation — the Motown songwriting and production team assembled by Berry Gordy alongside Fonce Mizell and Deke Richards, and the unit responsible for the Jackson 5's first four singles. Gordy deliberately kept the members anonymous, crediting the collective rather than the individuals, which is why one of the most important pop production teams of the era is not a household name. Perren went on to a substantial independent career, producing across disco, soul and pop with a knack for the enormous, unstoppable chorus. He also arranged and produced much of the material that defined the late-1970s dancefloor without ever becoming a personality in the way Giorgio Moroder or Nile Rodger...

A drummer who sings, a singer who raps, and one of the last genuine bandleaders in popular music. Twenty-nine tracks of Anderson .Paak. Oxnard's finest Brandon Paak Anderson grew up in Oxnard, California, in circumstances he has been unusually candid about — a father imprisoned, a mother imprisoned, a period of homelessness with a young family while he was working on a marijuana farm. He played drums in church, which is where the whole thing starts. His breakthrough came through Dr. Dre , who put him on six tracks of Compton in 2015, immediately followed by Malibu , the album that established him. What made him distinctive was the combination: a rasping, joyful voice; a rapper's sense of rhythm; and the fact that he performs sitting behind a drum kit, which almost nobody in R&B does. Then came Silk Sonic with Bruno Mars — a full-scale 1970s soul revival project that won Record and Song of the Year at the Grammys and was, by any measure, a very large...

She was studying biology at St. John's when she quit to make records, which is where the name comes from. Eleven tracks of some of the most quietly vicious writing in modern R&B. Mariah the Scientist Mariah Amani Buckles is from Atlanta, and was on a pre-med track studying biology in New York when she abandoned it for music — hence the stage name, which reads as a joke until you notice how clinically she writes. Her records occupy an unusual space. The production is soft, atmospheric and rooted in Atlanta's trap-adjacent R&B, and her voice is light, breathy and almost conversational. The lyrics, however, are frequently brutal — songs about obsession, jealousy, revenge and violent intent, delivered in the same gentle register as a love song. The contrast is the entire effect, and she is one of very few artists working it deliberately. What to listen for "Church" and "Spread Thin" are the essential tracks — both deceptive...