Every great production partnership has a quieter half. Twenty-five tracks arguing that Daryl Simmons was as responsible for the sound of 1990s R&B as anyone with a bigger name. The third man at LaFace Daryl Simmons is an Indianapolis-born songwriter and producer who came up alongside Babyface and L.A. Reid and became the essential third element in the operation that produced a decade of R&B. He co-wrote and co-produced across the LaFace roster and beyond, and his fingerprints are on a startling number of records people assume were purely Babyface's work. His specialty was the mid-tempo relationship song — not the enormous ballad and not the club record, but the one in between, with a groove you could move to and a lyric that actually described something. That is the hardest kind of R&B record to write and the one that ages best. What to listen for TLC's "Baby-Baby-Baby" is the biggest thing here — a number two hit that spent weeks nea...

A queer Nigerian-American folk singer from Arizona, writing about faith, race and doubt over acoustic guitar. Joy Oladokun does not fit any available box, which is precisely the point. The songwriter working in the gaps Joy Oladokun grew up in Casa Grande, Arizona, the child of Nigerian immigrants, and has described picking up the guitar after seeing footage of Tracy Chapman — a specific and revealing origin story, since Chapman is the obvious precedent for a Black woman writing serious folk songs and being told there was no audience for it. She spent years as a worship leader in evangelical churches before leaving, and that history sits underneath everything she writes. Her songs deal with faith without either defending or attacking it, and with queerness, race and depression in the same unadorned register. She is now based in Nashville, which puts her inside a genre establishment that has historically had very little room for anyone like her. What to listen for ...

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...

He produced Amy Winehouse's Frank , Nas's Stillmatic , and the Fugees' first album. Thirty-six tracks of a producer whose range is genuinely absurd. Salaam Remi, connector Salaam Remi is a New York producer, the son of session guitarist Van Gibbs, and one of the most quietly consequential figures in the last thirty years of Black music. He started young — remixing for Zhané and the Fugees in the early 1990s — and never settled into a single lane. His two defining relationships tell the story. With Nas , he produced across Stillmatic , God's Son , Hip Hop Is Dead and Life Is Good , providing the warm, sample-based, live-instrument sound that anchored Nas's later career. With Amy Winehouse , he produced most of Frank and a substantial part of Back to Black — and it was Remi who first understood that her voice belonged over jazz and soul arrangements rather than contemporary pop. He is also deeply rooted in Caribbean music, having worked exten...

Kelela makes R&B for a club that does not exist yet. Eighteen tracks from an artist who has spent a decade dismantling the genre and putting it back together wrong on purpose. The most formally adventurous singer in R&B Kelela Mizanekristos was born in Washington D.C. to Ethiopian parents, sang in jazz and progressive metal contexts before finding her lane, and emerged in 2013 with Cut 4 Me — a mixtape made with producers from the Night Slugs and Fade to Mind labels, the London and Los Angeles scenes then building a violent, metallic strain of club music out of grime, ballroom and UK funky. Putting a genuinely soulful R&B voice over that production was the whole innovation, and it has shaped a great deal of what followed. Her albums — Take Me Apart (2017) and Raven (2023) — extend the idea, with Raven in particular functioning as a treatise on Black women's relationship to dance music, whose history runs through house and techno and ...

Seventy-eight tracks aimed with real precision at 2am in 1997. This is not a nostalgia playlist so much as a working reconstruction of a specific feeling. The decade R&B got its own architecture The 1990s were when R&B stopped borrowing its production language from pop and built its own. Hip-hop drum programming, sung-through harmonies stacked six deep, basslines with actual movement, and an unembarrassed commitment to slow tempos. Radio supported it, labels invested in it, and singers were allowed to be album artists. What this mix captures specifically is the late-night end of that — not the singles that defined the era but the album tracks, the quiet storm cuts, the ones that came on after midnight. Seventy-eight tracks is four hours, and the sequencing holds a single mood across all of it. What to listen for Maxwell appears twice, including "Drowndeep: Hula" — from Embrya , the album critics disliked and time has vindicated — ...

The album that closed out the greatest R&B band of its generation, made by three people who were barely speaking. Eleven tracks, and not a wasted second. House of Music, 1996 Tony! Toni! Toné! — brothers Raphael Saadiq and D'wayne Wiggins with cousin Timothy Christian Riley — came out of Oakland and spent the early 1990s doing something almost nobody else in R&B was doing: playing their own instruments, writing their own songs, and treating the album as the unit of work. House of Music was their fourth and final album, released in 1996 amid the tensions that would break the group up shortly afterward. It is also comfortably their best — a record that moves between gospel, funk, doo-wop, hip-hop and straight soul without ever sounding like a genre exercise, because the band could actually play all of it. Its influence is out of proportion to its sales. A great deal of what neo-soul became was worked out here first. What to listen f...

Eight songs, five hit singles, and roughly twenty million copies sold. Can't Slow Down is the sound of a man who had already conquered country radio deciding to take everything else. Can't Slow Down, 1983 Lionel Richie had spent the 1970s as the frontman and principal songwriter of The Commodores , writing "Easy," "Three Times a Lady" and "Sail On" — ballads so successful that they arguably obscured how good a funk band the Commodores actually were. He went solo in 1982, and in 1983 released this. Can't Slow Down won the Grammy for Album of the Year and sold on a scale that puts it among the biggest records of the decade. What is striking about it now is the range: eight tracks that take in Caribbean-influenced pop, a country-leaning ballad, a synth-driven rocker and one of the most-played love songs ever written, all in under forty minutes. Richie's particular gift was writing songs that sounded like standards on first...

He invented the sound of 1990s R&B, ran a house full of teenage artists, and then largely vanished. Twenty-one tracks of DeVante Swing's strange, brilliant, difficult legacy. The architect of the bad-boy R&B group Donald DeGrate Jr. — DeVante Swing — was the producer, multi-instrumentalist and creative director of Jodeci , the group that arrived in 1991 and immediately made every other R&B act look overdressed. Where Boyz II Men wore matching suits and sang about commitment, Jodeci wore leather and combat boots and sang about everything else, and the production underneath was harder, sparser and more gospel-derived than anything else on radio. DeVante's influence runs much wider than his own group. His Swing Mob collective — the artists living and working in his New York house, sometimes called Da Bassment — included Timbaland , Missy Elliott , Ginuwine , Static Major and Playa . Essentially every major innovation in late-1990s R&B ...

Cleo Sol does not do interviews, rarely tours, and has made some of the most beautiful soul records of the last decade. Sixteen tracks of an artist who lets the music do all of it. The quietest great singer in Britain Cleo Sol — Cleopatra Nikolic — is from north-west London, of Serbian, Spanish and Jamaican heritage. Her career has been built almost entirely without conventional promotion: minimal press, few live shows, no attempt to construct a persona. She is central to SAULT , the anonymous collective whose albums arrived without warning, without artist photographs, and occasionally with a limited window before being withdrawn from streaming. SAULT's records — produced by Inflo , Sol's frequent collaborator and partner — are among the most acclaimed and least explained bodies of work in recent music. Her own albums, Rose in the Dark , Mother , Heaven and Gold , are gentler and more direct: warm, gospel-inflected soul about motherhood, grief...

Yebba sings like the last thirty years of R&B did not happen and she is still working from the source material. Eighteen tracks of a genuinely extraordinary instrument. West Memphis to everywhere Abbey Smith — Yebba, her first name reversed — is from West Memphis, Arkansas, and came up singing in church. She became known through a live performance of "My Mind" at Sofar Sounds in 2016: an entirely improvised, unaccompanied song, recorded on a phone camera, that circulated among musicians until essentially everyone in the industry had seen it. What people responded to was not just the range, considerable as it is, but the control — the ability to move between a whisper and a full belt within a phrase, and to place notes with the precision of a jazz singer. Her mother died by suicide shortly before that period, and a great deal of her subsequent work has dealt with grief directly. Her debut album Dawn arrived in 2021, produced largely wi...