Genre
The song stays, the production wanders off on its own: slow tempos, voices multiplied, space where the full arrangement used to be.
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Selection R&B
New jack swing
Ten tracks
A screenwriter handed the genre its name, and the swing came from a hand: Teddy Riley didn't program his drums, he played them straight down with the quantise off. Ten records in release order, and in five years the sound travels from a bathroom used as a reverb chamber to an Epic album.
Genre R&B
Soulquarians
Electric Lady Studios
From 1996 the studio Jimi Hendrix had built for himself in the Village was occupied for years by a group of musicians who recorded to tape, did no mixing for twelve months, and passed songs from one album to another. How the work went inside those three rooms.
Artist pick R&B
Yaya Bey
Ten Fold
In May 2024 Bandcamp Daily asked Yaya Bey what she was listening to. The answer was six names who are all friends of hers, and she stated the criterion herself: her relationship with music is communal, not a matter of taste. Four of the picks, and two that are not on Spotify.
album R&B
Evenson
EVE
Ten tracks in thirty-five minutes, out on 21 July 2026 after four singles in four months. A record about identity, family and masculinity, and one that doubles back on itself at the centre.
Under rnb we file the part of contemporary rhythm and blues that stopped aiming at radio. The voice stays at the centre and stays the most carefully worked thing on the record, while the production around it borrows from electronic music: slowed tempos, long reverbs, silences left open.
It is a small territory crowded with self-released records, where the singer is often also the person mixing. We care about it for the same reason we care about dub: the work goes by subtraction, and what stays out of the mix counts as much as what gets in.