Eddie Rockerz VibeZ

The first woman signed to OVO Sound made a debut album with almost no drums on it. Thirteen tracks of deliberate, unhurried refusal to do the expected thing. Obsidian Released in October 2023, Obsidian was Naomi Sharon's first album and an unusual calling card for a label built on Drake's brand of glossy, competitive R&B. The Rotterdam singer — Aruban and Dutch heritage, trained at the Academy of Theatre and Dance, a former musical theatre performer — arrived with something closer to an art record: long, slow, harmonically ambiguous, and built around a low alto that never once raises itself for effect. The title is well chosen. Obsidian is volcanic glass: black, reflective, formed under enormous heat and pressure. The record has exactly that quality — a smooth, dark surface with a great deal of force behind it. What to listen for "Definition of Love" opens the album and remains the track that converts people. Listen to how long she holds ...

A drummer from South East London titles his debut album Black Classical Music and then spends nineteen tracks proving the phrase is not a provocation but a description. Yussef Dayes and the argument in the title Yussef Dayes came up in London's extraordinary young jazz scene, first widely heard in the duo Yussef Kamaal with keyboardist Kamaal Williams, whose Black Focus (2016) was one of the records that announced the whole movement. He then made What Kinda Music with Tom Misch , and in 2023 delivered this — his first solo album, and the fullest statement of what he actually does. The title is the thesis. "Classical music" as a term has always quietly meant European art music, with everything else filed as folk, popular or ethnic. Dayes' point is that jazz, and the wider Black musical tradition it belongs to, is classical music by every meaningful definition: formally sophisticated, technically demanding, built on a canon, and passed between generati...