https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3P4L9c3W0GEVKQMkSr9WmE?si=1bbdcbbb721a4b64

A voice that arrives like a weather front, and songs built to be shouted from a hilltop. Iniko made two of the most arresting viral records of recent years, and neither sounds like anything else. Brooklyn, Jamaica, and a voice with no obvious peer Iniko is a singer-songwriter from Brooklyn, born in 1996 to Afro-Jamaican heritage — their father, Max Dixon, was a reggae musician. Iniko identifies as genderless and uses they/them pronouns, and has spoken openly about growing up in an Independent Fundamental Baptist environment and the religious trauma that followed. That history is not incidental to the music; a great deal of it is about escape, defiance and self-authorship. Their rise came through TikTok, where "The King's Affirmation" went viral in 2021, followed by "Jericho" — which debuted at number 11 on Billboard's R&B Digital Song Sales chart and earned Gold certification in the US and Silver in the UK. A 2024 GLAAD Media Award nom...

Forty-two tracks from the Toronto producer who half-built the sound the entire 2010s copied. If a record between 2013 and 2020 made you feel expensive and slightly sad, he may well be why. Nineteen85 and the Toronto blueprint Paul Jefferies , who produces as Nineteen85 , is a Canadian producer of Filipino descent who became one of the central architects of the OVO sound. His breakthrough was Drake's "Hold On, We're Going Home," and he went on to produce "Hotline Bling," "One Dance" and a substantial chunk of the material that made Drake the defining pop figure of his decade. He is also half of dvsn , the duo with singer Daniel Daley, which is where his own aesthetic is clearest: gospel-scale vocal arrangements over sparse, cavernous production, with lyrics considerably more explicit than the churchy setting suggests. It is a genuinely strange and effective combination. What to listen for The dvsn tracks are the place to start. ...

Two boys from Queens who harmonised like brothers and wrote like short-story authors. Thirteen tracks that have not aged a day in sixty years. The most literary songwriting in American pop Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel met in a school production of Alice in Wonderland in Forest Hills, Queens, and had a minor hit as teenagers under the name Tom & Jerry. Their real career began when "The Sound of Silence" — originally a quiet acoustic track that went nowhere — was overdubbed with electric instruments by a producer without their involvement and went to number one in 1965. What followed was five years of extraordinary output. Simon wrote the songs; Garfunkel's high, pure tenor gave them a quality of consolation that Simon's own voice never quite had. The combination produced music that was commercially enormous and genuinely literary — observational, ironic, frequently sad, and unusually interested in loneliness as a subject. What to listen for...

Twenty-eight tracks proving reggae did not stop in 1981. This is the music as a living, arguing, evolving thing — roots discipline with modern production and a new generation doing the singing. The reggae revival, still going For a long stretch, international audiences treated reggae as a closed catalogue — Marley, a handful of roots classics, and then dancehall as a separate concern. What this playlist documents is the reggae revival : a movement that emerged in Jamaica in the 2010s around artists who deliberately went back to the roots template — live instrumentation, Rastafari themes, sung rather than chatted vocals — and updated the production rather than the philosophy. It sits alongside contemporary dancehall and a strong international scene, and the mix moves between all three without treating any as more legitimate. What to listen for YG Marley's "Praise Jah In The Moonlight" is the headline — the son of Lauryn Hill and Roh...

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In her stunning Tiny Desk, the artist Brandee Younger demonstrates her ability to showcase all sides of the harp, from an instrument in classical music to contemporary pop.

Victoria Monét wrote hits for other people for a decade before anyone let her have her own. Twenty-five tracks of the most satisfying delayed arrival in recent R&B. The songwriter who finally took the microphone Victoria Monét McCants, from Sacramento, spent years as one of the most reliable writers in pop — most visibly as Ariana Grande's long-term collaborator, with credits across "thank u, next," "7 rings," "Break Up with Your Girlfriend, I'm Bored" and much of Grande's best material. She also wrote for Fifth Harmony, Nas and Chris Brown. Her own releases came out steadily and quietly through the 2010s, and the industry treated her as a writer who sang rather than a singer. That changed with Jaguar (2020) and then decisively with Jaguar II (2023), which won three Grammys including Best New Artist — an award for someone with fifteen years in the business, which says more about the industry than about her. The...