Each day you wake up, another 100,000 tracks have been uploaded. With that many songs landing on the internet every day it’s easy to miss something. Most streaming platforms like Spotify reward what’s popular. That’s why you tend to see multiple songs from the same artists repeated on the top playlists.
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Maybe you’ve heard of the artists below in passing. But they deserve more than a passive listen. R&B is a genre that’s constantly evolving and the artists on this list are each shaping the scene in new ways.
Some of them have used SoundCloud to bypass record labels and take their music directly to the fans. The world is full of barriers that artists have to overcome, and bloated algorithms are another kind of barrier keeping some artists in the underground.
Consider this a spotlight on 5 underrated R&B artists you should be listening to.
1. Uwade
The first voice you hear on Fleet Foxes’ album Shore is Uwade. What you hear in her singing is a sound that exists beyond time. A voice that cannot be constrained by what’s old or new because it encompasses both. Uwade was born in Nigeria and studied at Columbia and Oxford. She grew up listening to choral music and her singing sounds like a prayer. Uwade is only 22 years old and has released 3 singles so far. On her latest single, “The Man Who Sees Tomorrow,” Uwade reckons with the ephemeral nature of time. She sings, If time is all we have, I promise not to waste it. It sounds like a kind of spiritual where the pang of loss meets hope.
Cannot find it in myself
To write or even call
And I just miss the mornings in
The meadow that we saw
2. Baby Rose
The ghosts of Nina Simone and Billie Holiday echo on “Go,” the opening track on Baby Rose’s new album Through and Through. She pulls pain and anguish from the lower register of her voice, lifting the heaviness of heartbreak and loss into something like healing. “Fight Club” is the sound of electro-soul being performed at a smoke-filled Harlem cabaret in the 1930s. Baby Rose connects the past with the present to create a future sound.
My heart can confide in itself
No I don’t need no one else
To show me the way
I wait (for months)
Debate (and years)
What it takes (for decades)
For the words to be uncaged
3. Mereba
Mereba plays guitar as expressively as she sings. The two instruments are one body. A folk-soul Los Angeles-based singer and guitarist, Mereba’s latest album, The Jungle Is the Only Way Out, was released on Interscope Records in 2019. You can hear Mereba’s voice and guitar playing on the Queen & Slim soundtrack, collaborating with Vince Staples and 6LACK on “Yo Love.” The track opens with a mantra from Mereba, Ride for you, I. Ride for you, I.
Dirty speakers scream in your face
And the teachers keeping some secrets safe
That’s why we read between the pages
I’ve been chillin’ with my kinfolk
We’ve been puffin’ on the blunt smoke
Diggin’ for our hidden treasures
4. Jean Deaux
Ms. Deaux, from Chicago, has appeared as a featured artist on tracks by Mykki Blanco and Saba. Her sound blends R&B with laid-back house music on features taking her from Chicago hip-hop to the UK with Glass Animals. Ms. Deaux’s speak-singing voice zigs and zags in a frantic staccato, interspersed with breathy melodies that sound like they’ve been transmitted from somewhere not quite like Earth.
Remember to keep on your headlights, ten-two, four drive
Thinkin’ about bringin’ the snow back, thinkin’ about bringin’ the go black
Think I can do it before I even take all the top off and go back
I cannot put on the old news, we do not need any throwbacks
5. Saba
Chicago indie artist Saba released Few Good Things in 2022. The sound of the album isn’t lo-fi but it does sound lived in. There’s a natural authenticity to Saba’s music that other artists work hard to recreate. He plays most of the instruments alongside his co-producers, Daoud and daedaePIVOT. Few Good Things looks back without staying too long in the past. Saba channels Kendrick Lamar but sounds more like Kendrick without the edges.
Is a peace of mind worth leaving everything you knew behind
Move another town and
Hope the trauma don’t amount to what you do in life
Yea, my people need vacation on an island
All the people say we made it sorta lying
I got no alliance to no corporate buyers
Raise the mortgage higher
I’ma stand my ground like a f*cking squatter
Photo by Aaron J. Thornton/WireImage
