In 2015, Bryson Tiller reluctantly uploaded a song called “Don’t” to his SoundCloud and all but broke the internet, with millions of streams rolling in within just a few months for a single he’d made at home. That same year, he released his debut album, Trapsoul, making him one of …
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E rykah Badu and Summer Walker are used to long phone calls. In late October, in lieu of a planned BET Hip-Hop Awards performance, they had a private catch-up that ended up veering far off topic. “We talked about the cypher for five minutes,” says Badu, “and we talked about …
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With the power of their retro-tinged resistance funk, Los Angeles soul band Chicano Batman have carved a niche for themselves in the Latin indie-verse. On Tuesday morning, the bilingual four-piece announced their upcoming album, Invisible People, due out May 1st on ATO Records. “The goal was to make the best …
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Marsha Ambrosius, an R&B singer’s R&B singer, is responsible for co-writing one of pop’s most intoxicating odes to infatuation. That would be Michael Jackson‘s “Butterflies,” perhaps the star’s finest post-Bad single, where his inimitable vocal quavers slam home all the tingly, head-over-heels couplets. So it’s no surprise that Ambrosius excels …
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Arin Ray, a former X Factor contestant turned R&B songwriter turned frontman, gets caught in a dangerous love triangle in his new video for “Communication.” “Communication” is far and away the best song on Ray’s debut album, Platinum Fire, which came out in March. It’s minimal — little more than …
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Smokey Robinson joined Aretha Franklin for a stunning rendition of the Robinson-penned “Ooo Baby Baby” on Soul Train in 1979. At the time, Franklin was going through a commercial drought: Her last Top 20 crossover hit was released in 1974, and she hadn’t had much success with the disco wave …
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