Sixty-five tracks and the longest volume in the series — and the one most interested in singers who had not yet been discovered. Chilled Soul Vol. 10 The tenth volume is the point at which the series stops being a personal mixtape and starts behaving like an A&R department. Sixty-five tracks, assembled around 2018, and an unusually high proportion of them by artists who were either unsigned or on their first release. Several have since become significant, and a few have vanished entirely, which is exactly what an honest snapshot of a moment looks like. What to listen for WILLOW and SZA's "9" is the most prescient pairing here — both artists were at very different points in their visibility and the track treats them as equals. Jorja Smith's "February 3rd" is early and essential, and Lianne La Havas's "Empty" recorded in Paris is the best vocal performance on the list. JP Cooper's BBC session reading of "Ex-Factor...

Fourteen tracks from a band that was dismissed as a disco act and has turned out to be one of the most important groups in the history of recorded music. CHIC CHIC were not a studio project with session players; they were a band, and that distinction explains everything. Nile Rodgers on guitar and Bernard Edwards on bass had played jazz and rock before they played anything danceable, Tony Thompson was one of the great rock drummers of the era, and Alfa Anderson and Luci Martin sang the parts rather than merely delivering them. Rodgers and Edwards worked to a principle they called Deep Hidden Meaning — the idea that every record needed a concept underneath the groove, something being said that was not the same as the words. It is why their catalogue survives when so much disco does not: the songs are about something. The band's commercial life was brutally short. The backlash against disco in 1979 made the name unsellable almost overnight, and both men spent...

Sixty records that never got the radio play they deserved. The title is a complaint and the playlist is the evidence. Underlooked / Underplayed / Undercharted This is the companion piece to the Unheralded set, and it makes a slightly different argument. Where that one collected artists who were unknown, this one collects records that were available, professionally released, often by artists with real careers — and simply did not get played. The reason matters. By the late 2010s American R&B radio had narrowed to a very small number of formats, and a great deal of excellent music fell outside all of them. This playlist is what that music sounds like. What to listen for Sabrina Claudio appears four times, which makes the point efficiently: a singer with a completely distinctive sound and almost no radio presence. Cleo Sol's "Why Don't You" is the most important inclusion in hindsight. At the time she was a little-known British singer; she has since ...

Nine tracks from a Colombian-American singer who has spent her career refusing to pick a genre, a language or a decade. Kali Uchis Karly-Marina Loaiza grew up between Virginia and Pereira, Colombia, and that split is the organising fact of her music. She sings in English and Spanish, sometimes in the same verse, and her records draw on doo-wop, bolero, reggaeton, psychedelic soul and trap without ever settling into any of them. What holds it together is a consistent aesthetic rather than a consistent sound: a deliberately retro, slightly lurid glamour, and a voice that is small, high and used with real precision. She writes about money, ambition and self-possession far more than about romance, which makes her lyrics considerably tougher than the sweetness of the production implies. She also made the rare move of building a Spanish-language career in parallel rather than as an afterthought, and it worked. What to listen for "After The Storm" with Tyler, The Cre...

Ninety-five records in tribute to the radio host who invented an entire format by accident, at the age of twenty, on a station that had nothing else to play.   The Original Quiet Storm: a tribute to Melvin Lindsey Melvin Lindsey was a student intern at WHUR , Howard University's radio station in Washington DC, when in 1976 he was asked to fill an evening shift at short notice. He played slow records — soul ballads, jazz-inflected pop, quiet album tracks — and the show, named after a Smokey Robinson song, became the most influential programming idea in Black American radio. Within a decade, stations across the United States had a Quiet Storm slot. The format is now so established that people assume it was always a genre. It was not: it was one young man's late-night record selection. Lindsey died in 1992, aged thirty-six. A ninety-five track tribute is the appropriate scale, because the format was always about duration rather than highlights. What to listen for...

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2JhwKYWfVj5YUJDsiZJYh7?si=7fe292a49b014fdc

Twenty-seven tracks from a rapper who called himself the Overweight Lover, meant it as a joke, and turned out to be one of the most consequential figures in hip-hop history. Heavy D (1967–2011) Dwight Arrington Myers was born in Jamaica, raised in Mount Vernon, New York, and was the first artist signed to Uptown Records — Andre Harrell's label, the institution that essentially invented the fusion of hip-hop and R&B that dominated the following two decades. That position matters more than his hit records. Heavy D was not just Uptown's first act; he later ran the label as its president, and he was the person who brought in a young intern named Sean Combs . A remarkable proportion of nineties Black music traces back through him. As an artist he was a genuine anomaly: a large man who danced superbly, a rapper whose records were unfailingly good-humoured at a moment when the genre was turning hard, and a Jamaican who kept dancehall audibly in his delivery. He di...

Fifty-six tracks with an unusually high proportion of singers who were, at the time, entirely unknown outside their own city. Chilled Soul Vol. 9 The ninth volume sits at the point where the series' taste crystallises. The production values are consistent — live-sounding, warm, uncluttered — and the selections come from an international spread of artists who had almost no commercial profile. What is notable in retrospect is the ratio. Roughly two-thirds of the artists here never became famous, and the set still holds up completely, which is the strongest possible argument for this kind of curation. What to listen for Thirdstory appears twice, and they are the discovery: a New York trio built on three-part harmony in a decade that had almost entirely abandoned it. "Only Love" is the pick. Seinabo Sey also appears twice — a Swedish-Gambian singer with an enormous, church-derived voice, and "I Owe You Nothing" is one of the best recor...

Fifty-two tracks that move between Lagos, London, Kingston, Tokyo and Los Angeles without ever flagging the border crossings. Chilled Soul Vol. 8 This is the most restless volume in the series and the one least concerned with being soul music. Electronic producers, Japanese beatmakers, Nigerian singers, South African rappers and American pop all appear, and the connective tissue is texture rather than genre. It is also the volume most rooted in a specific year. Almost everything here is from 2017, and hearing it now is a good reminder of how quickly the boundaries between these scenes were dissolving. What to listen for Uyama Hiroto's "Spektrum" with fat jon is the deepest cut here by some distance — Japanese instrumental hip-hop from the circle around Nujabes , and one of the most beautiful things on the list. 9th Wonder's "TheAnimalSoul!!!!!" is the American equivalent, and placing the two next to each other is a real piece of curation. C...

Thirty tracks from a Canadian singer who revived a format the industry had written off, and did it by taking it entirely seriously. Michael Bublé Michael Bublé is easy to patronise and hard to argue with. He arrived in the early 2000s singing standards with a full orchestra at a moment when that was commercially inexplicable, and he has sold tens of millions of records doing it. The reason he works, where most revivalists do not, is that he is a genuinely excellent singer with proper technique and an unusually good ear for a phrase. He does not imitate Sinatra; he uses the same tools. The other reason is that he understands the repertoire is not a museum — his best records mix Cole Porter with the Bee Gees, Van Morrison, the Beach Boys and George Michael, and treat all of them as songs rather than as artefacts. His arrangers deserve much of the credit, and the big-band charts on these records are played by first-rate musicians. What to listen for ...

Forty records from the decade when Black American music went almost entirely electronic and somehow got warmer in the process. '80s Jam Session The eighties are the most misrepresented decade in soul music. The received view is that the drum machine ruined it — that the warmth of the seventies gave way to something brittle and synthetic. This set is a straightforward refutation. The machines are everywhere, and the records are as full-blooded as anything from the previous decade. What actually changed was the division of labour. Where a seventies record was a band in a room, an eighties record was a producer building an arrangement piece by piece, and the best of them — Jam and Lewis, Leon Sylvers, Kashif, Nick Martinelli — used that control to make things a live band could not. What to listen for Luther Vandross's "Never Too Much" is the decade's opening statement — his first single as a leader after years of session work, and the basslin...

Fifteen tracks from a band-and-singer project that produced one of the most overlooked soul albums of the last decade. The PLAYlist featuring Glenn Lewis Glenn Lewis is a Toronto singer whose 2002 single "Don't You Forget It" made him briefly one of the most promising voices in R&B, and whose career thereafter was derailed by the usual combination of label politics and bad timing. He has one of the most agile high tenors in the music, and for fifteen years it went mostly unused. The PLAYlist is the project that changed that: a musicians' collective who built a full album of live-instrument soul around him, released in 2017 as Chasing Goosebumps . It is exactly the record his voice deserved and almost nobody heard it. The playing is the point. This is a band record in the seventies sense — real bass, real drums, horn arrangements, and a singer given room to do what he does rather than a track to fit into. What to listen for "CHASING GOOSEBUMPS...

Eleven tracks from the record where a cartoon band made their strangest and least commercial album, and got it right. Gorillaz: Humanz-era selections Gorillaz began as a joke about manufactured pop — Damon Albarn and the illustrator Jamie Hewlett inventing an animated band so that the music could be anything without a frontman's biography getting in the way. Twenty-five years on, the joke has produced one of the most interesting bodies of work in British pop, largely because the conceit removed every constraint about genre. These selections come mostly from Humanz (2017), which is the least loved of their major albums and in some ways the most interesting. It was built as a party record for a catastrophe — Albarn has described the brief as imagining a specific dark political event — and it is deliberately fragmented, with interludes, abrupt transitions and a guest list that never lets any one voice dominate. What to listen for "Submission" w...

Twenty-five records by an arranger who shaped the sound of Chicago soul, died at forty-five, and is still not nearly as famous as his work. Charles Stepney (1931–1976) Charles Stepney is the most important figure in this blog's producer series that most listeners will never have heard of. A Chicago arranger, composer and producer who worked at Chess Records in the sixties, he brought a formal musical education — vibraphone, orchestration, an ear trained on Ravel and Ellington as much as on blues — into the middle of a soul label. What he did with it was extraordinary. His arrangements are harmonically adventurous in ways that pop records of the period simply were not, using string and woodwind voicings that come from art music and placing them under grooves that are entirely funk. He co-produced and arranged the run of Earth, Wind & Fire albums that made them the biggest band in America, produced The Emotions , Deniece Williams and Rotary Connection...

Twenty-seven tracks from a Scottish-Zambian songwriter who was studying medicine when the music took over, and who writes hooks that other people's careers get built on. Emeli Sandé Emeli Sandé grew up in Aberdeenshire, the daughter of a Zambian father and an English mother, and was several years into a medical degree in Glasgow before she committed to music. That is not a detail for colour: the discipline shows in how her records are built. She arrived as a writer first, supplying songs and hooks to British rappers and producers, and the crossover to her own records happened almost by accident. Our Version of Events (2012) became one of the biggest-selling British albums of its decade, and she then spent years being marketed as an inspirational balladeer, which flattened a considerably more interesting artist. The later work is where she gets interesting. The gospel influence moves to the front, the arrangements get sparser, and the writing becomes more poli...

Twenty-nine tracks from the singer who led a generation of Jamaican musicians back towards roots reggae when the industry had written it off entirely. Chronixx Jamar McNaughton is the central figure in what became known as the reggae revival — a loose movement of Jamaican artists who emerged in the early 2010s playing roots reggae with live instruments and Rastafarian themes at a moment when dancehall had dominated the island's output for two decades. His father is the singer Chronicle, so the name is a deliberate lineage joke. What made Chronixx more than a revivalist is that he never pretended it was 1977: his records use contemporary production values, and his writing engages directly with present-day Jamaican politics, policing and class rather than with an inherited iconography. The voice is the other thing. It is high, slightly nasal and enormously expressive, and he phrases like a singer rather than a chanter, which is part of why the music travelled so far ou...

Fifty-nine tracks and an early snapshot of the years when West African pop stopped asking permission and simply became global. Soundz of Africa Assembled around 2018, this set catches afrobeats at the precise moment before the international breakthrough — when the records were already enormous across Africa and in London, and still largely invisible to American radio. What is striking now is how complete the sound already was. The production, the mixing and the songwriting on these tracks are not the work of a scene finding itself; they are the work of an industry operating at full capacity, entirely outside the structures that usually decide what the world hears. What to listen for Wizkid's "Ojuelegba" is the historical pivot — a song named after the Lagos neighbourhood he grew up in, which Drake and Skepta later remixed, and which arguably opened the door for everything that followed. Yvonne Chaka Chaka's "Umqombothi" is the oldest recor...

Forty-nine records about love in its least commercial sense — devotion, grief, repair, and the kind of affection that has survived something. DeepLove VibeZ Most love-song playlists are really about desire. This one is about the other thing: the slower, less photogenic version that shows up after the drama, and the set is assembled accordingly. There is almost no seduction here at all. The range is deliberately wide — soul, gospel, folk, ambient, Brazilian jazz, a talent-show performance and a charity single all appear — and it holds together because the emotional register never breaks. What to listen for Artists for Grenfell's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" is the most context-dependent inclusion here. It was recorded in 2017 in response to the Grenfell Tower fire in London, which killed seventy-two people, and knowing that changes what the performance is doing entirely. Commodores' "Sweet Love" and O'Bryan's "Still Water (Love)...

Fifty-eight pieces of gospel, jazz, classical and devotional music assembled as a memorial. This is a playlist made for grieving, and it should be approached that way. Sunday Meditation The dedication in the title gives the set its purpose, and it is worth taking seriously. This is not a Sunday-morning mood playlist; it is a memorial, assembled in response to the deaths of children and young people, and its fifty-eight tracks are sequenced as a service rather than as a selection. What makes it work is that it does not resolve. A lesser set would have moved from grief to comfort in an orderly way. This one holds both at once for nearly four hours, and it draws on several traditions rather than one because no single tradition has a sufficient answer. What to listen for Bobby McFerrin's "The 23rd Psalm" opens the set, and the choice matters: McFerrin's setting addresses God as female throughout, a version he wrote for his mother. It reframes the most famili...

Thirty-two tracks from a Toronto duo who took gospel-trained singing, put it over the coldest production in R&B, and made the contrast the whole point.   dvsn dvsn are the singer Daniel Daley and the producer Nineteen85 , and they arrived on OVO Sound in 2015 with no photographs, no interviews and no explanation — just the music, which was an unusually disciplined way to start. Nineteen85 was already one of the most successful producers in pop, having made "Hotline Bling" and "Hold On, We're Going Home" for Drake. What he does in dvsn is stranger: enormous amounts of empty space, drums that arrive late or not at all, and long instrumental passages that leave a listener waiting. Daley's voice is the counterweight. He sings with genuine church technique — runs, held notes, real falsetto control — and putting that instrument into so cold an arrangement produces the tension the whole project runs on. What to listen for "Too ...

Seventeen tracks from a Chicago poet's first album — a record that treats self-preservation as a political act and Chicago as a character. Jamila Woods: HEAVN (2016) Jamila Woods came to music through poetry and through teaching: she was closely involved with Young Chicago Authors , the organisation behind the youth open-mic scene that also produced Chance the Rapper, Noname and Saba. HEAVN is her first album and it is unmistakably the work of a writer. The record's subject is Black women's interiority and survival, and its method is to build songs out of borrowed fragments — playground rhymes, hymns, a Paula Cole hook, the Cure — reassembled so that familiar material carries entirely new weight. It is also a Chicago record in the most specific way. Streets, lake water, neighbourhood names and local organisations appear throughout, and the album functions partly as a map. What to listen for "Blk Girl Soldier" is the centrepiece and the best p...