To accompany this article, Adam Bradley created a playlist of the songs that define R&B’s new era.
THE R&B SINGER-SONGWRITER Muni Long has a voice that people say could sing the dictionary and they’d still listen. In 2007, as a teen growing up in Gifford, Fla., she put that claim to the test, recording a five-minute YouTube clip in which she sings from Webster’s II New Riverside Dictionary (“aardvark, aardwolf, Aaron …”) to the tune of Fergie’s “Glamorous” (2006). That playful stunt, along with a handful of covers, caught the attention of Capitol Records. Under her given name, Priscilla Renea, she recorded her 2009 debut, “Jukebox,” an album of pop originals that earned good reviews but modest sales. By her 22nd birthday, she no longer had a record deal. Reinventing herself as a songwriter, she spent the next decade building a chameleonic career, writing the 2013 global hit “Timber” for Pitbull and Kesha, as well as songs for Miranda Lambert, Rihanna, Madonna, Sabrina Carpenter and dozens of others.
But Long never gave up on her own voice. In 2018, she released a slept-on country album. Then, a couple of years later, she found her way to R&B. “I think it was the only genre I hadn’t explored,” says the artist, now 36. She devised a new stage name: Muni, from the Sanskrit for “sage,” a seeker of self-knowledge, filtered through a line from the rapper 2 Chainz’s 2012 song “I’m Different” — “hair long, money long.” That juxtaposition of spirituality and the streets animates the two albums that she’s released under her chosen name: “Public Display of Affection: The Album” (2022) and “Revenge” (2024). On songs like 2021’s “Hrs & Hrs,” her breakout hit, and 2023’s “Made for Me,” Long sings about love, sex and heartache with a passion reminiscent of 1990s slow jams. “R&B hasn’t been at the forefront in over 20 years,” she says. Now’s the time to “help mold a new era.”
That new R&B era is here, with women artists leading the way. Born between the late 1980s and the early 2000s, this generation of artists came of age when the music’s stars needed no last name: Whitney and Mariah, Brandy and Monica, Aaliyah and Beyoncé, all chart-topping performers with gifted, even generational, voices who steered R&B through a period defined by male-dominated rap. Today’s stars — SZA and Summer Walker, Normani and Arlo Parks, Raye and Tems, to name just a few, along with the women photographed here — are defying industry formats and fans’ expectations. Some are reviving R&B’s gospel roots, while others are claiming new sonic territory by hybridizing with hip-hop, curating global rhythms and securing the genre’s rightful claim to pop.
“R&B is pop music,” Long says — a necessary reminder, given that the music industry has co-opted R&B’s most appealing qualities while relegating the genre itself to the margins. “They took the sounds and they took the swag and they made it mainstream,” she adds. As a consequence, some of R&B’s brightest stars deny the label for fear that it might restrict their audience or, worse, suggest capitulation to de facto racial segregation. “Any music I do will easily and quickly be categorized as R&B because I’m a Black woman,” the 26-year-old singer and actress Chlöe Bailey told Nylon last year. Listen to her sophomore album, “Trouble in Paradise” (2024), and you’ll hear shimmering pop production, booming hip-hop bass lines and the syncopated log drums of Afrobeats. Above all, though, you’ll hear her powerful voice, heir to a distinct tradition that she’s hesitant to claim.
However, this resurgent moment in R&B may also be time for a reclamation. It doesn’t have to be “a punishment [for me] to be labeled R&B, because I understand what it is,” Long says. “It’s swag; it’s sexy. It’s the essence of who I am.” For others, it remains complicated. “It’s almost a reluctant badge of honor,” the Toronto-born singer-songwriter Jessie Reyez says. The hesitancy, she explains, comes from reasonable fears that it will limit what others understand her music to be. Reyez, 34, considers herself a musical “mutt,” citing influences from her Colombian parents’ native cumbia to the Destiny’s Child and Biggie Smalls CDs that she played as a kid. “But R&B has given me roots.”
Reyez’s own roots lie, in part, in the Black diaspora (her paternal grandfather is Black Colombian), though she is nonetheless deferential to what she considers a uniquely Black American form. “I always acknowledge myself as a guest in that world,” she says. That world is expanding, too, with artists across the globe offering up syncretic hybrids, like Tyla, who mixes R&B, pop and South Africa’s amapiano (a synth-driven style of house music that takes its name from the Zulu for “the pianos”) in a style she calls popiano.
R&B IS ESSENTIALLY Black, specifically Black American, though it comprises a set of musical practices that anyone can master. Roughly defined, the genre celebrates rhythm, sincerity and virtuosity. It centers vocalists, who make songs their own through melisma (the microtonal movement of voice across a single syllable), vibrato (the oscillation of pitch while holding a note) and other adornments on the melody as composed. That kind of singing demands technique: range, projection, breath control, harmonics. R&B is an abbreviation of “rhythm and blues,” a term popularized in the late 1940s by Jerry Wexler, a young white journalist at Billboard magazine who hoped to modernize the antiquated category of “race records.” Wexler went on to become one of the defining producers of the 20th century, working with Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and other Black artists who gave shape to the style he championed. By the 1960s, R&B — sometimes called soul, that most elusive quality of metaphysicality and cool — had come to define both a music and an identity. As Amiri Baraka writes in his essay “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music),” published in 1967, the year that Aretha Franklin recorded “Respect,” “R&B is straight on and from straight back out of traditional Black spirit feeling.”
That feeling gained definition during the Great Migration, in which millions of rural Southern Black folks made their way to the urban North, carrying song practices honed at Saturday juke joints and Sunday amen corners. The music was political, too, featuring anthems of activism, from Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” (1964) to Roberta Flack’s “Go Up Moses” (1971), co-written with Jesse Jackson. A more subterranean subversion of white supremacy found expression in songs that celebrated Black people’s complex interior lives and romantic relationships, such as Betty Everett and Jerry Butler’s “Ain’t That Loving You Baby” (1964) and Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” (1967). In the 1970s, that seductive sound took to the dance floor with disco; Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” (1978) and Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” (1978) coupled hip-shaking beats with bravura vocal performances. R&B committed itself to love in the 1980s, with plaintive ballads by Patti LaBelle, Anita Baker, Luther Vandross, James Ingram and many more. They ushered in a golden age of R&B, beginning in the late ’80s and lasting close to a decade, centered on three era-defining divas: Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and Mary J. Blige. Blige’s career, in particular, would prove indicative of the direction that R&B would follow into the new century. A traditionalist by inclination (she was signed on the strength of a cover of Baker’s “Caught Up in the Rapture,” recorded in a mall karaoke booth in White Plains, N.Y.), she embraced the sonic innovation that would soon reshape R&B: the beats and rhymes of hip-hop.
R&B’s relationship to hip-hop dates to the beginning of recorded rap, when the Sugarhill Gang interpolated Chic’s “Good Times” (1979) on their genre-defining “Rapper’s Delight” (1979). In the 1990s, hip-hop and R&B collaborations had become an urban radio mainstay, best exemplified by Blige — the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul — and Method Man’s 1995 duet, “I’ll Be There for You/You’re All I Need to Get By.” Blige sang the hook and Meth rapped the verses, establishing a separation of duties along gender lines. By the early 2000s, R&B was helping rap music top the charts, with Billboard Number 1s by Ashanti and Ja Rule (2001’s “Always on Time”), Kelly Rowland and Nelly (2002’s “Dilemma”) and Beyoncé and Jay-Z (2003’s “Crazy in Love”).
“I relate to hip-hop in so many ways, especially from a dance perspective,” says the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Tinashe, 32. She broke through as a solo artist with “2 On” (2014), an R&B/hip-hop banger featuring a raw verse from the Los Angeles rapper Schoolboy Q. Strong albums followed, but no more breakout hits — until last summer, when her song “Nasty” took over TikTok and, soon after, the charts. “Nasty” epitomizes the evolution of hip-hop/R&B fusion; rather than just singing the hook, Tinashe sings, raps and chants the whole song. Extending a tradition best exemplified by Janet Jackson (who paid tribute to Tinashe on tour last year by interpolating “Nasty” into her 1986 hit “Nasty”), Tinashe celebrates rhythm, dance and performance as much as voice.
Tinashe and many of her peers also draw inspiration from hip-hop in their songwriting, freestyling lyrics in the studio from catchy words and scraps of melody. “Hip-hop’s given me inspiration and education to have more liquidity with my language,” says Reyez, who has collaborated with the rappers Lil Wayne, Eminem, Rico Nasty and others. Rap makes her more aware, she says, of alliteration and rhyme, and of the multiplicity of meanings that can live in a single line. On the 2019 remix of “Imported,” a duet with the male R&B singer 6lack, Reyez plays on the permutations of the phrase “I’ve been lying here” — lying to listeners and to herself with the bravado of the lines that precede it (“I drink liquor like it’s water”) and, later, lying in bed with someone she just met. The song is explicit, with lyrics that can’t be reprinted here — yet another sign of rap’s influence. Historically, R&B employed decorous euphemism. But many of today’s R&B artists lace their lyrics with both garden-variety curse words and terms of more specific offense. “It’s almost like, if you don’t do it, it ages you within this genre specifically,” Long says. “You have to say something that’s real slick mouth to get [listeners’] attention.”
GETTING — AND KEEPING — attention also means writing shorter songs. Among the 30 or so contemporary artists whose work informed this story, the average song is just over three minutes, a full minute shorter than R&B songs from a comparable list of 1990s artists. The songs are more groove driven, too, with less of the traditional structure that defined R&B of the past. Part of that might have to do with who’s writing them. After decades in which the leading voices — from Aretha to Whitney — mostly sang other people’s lyrics, the majority of today’s artists write their own, in whole or in part. Even accounting for the industrywide trend toward liberally awarding writing credits, the songs themselves, in structure and content, are evidence enough of a shift.
This shift is not unique to women artists, of course; a number of the genre’s male singer-songwriters — among them Sampha, Khalid, Moses Sumney and Bryson Tiller — are crafting challenging, captivating music. But something specific is at work among this emergent community of female performers: R&B, long a space for women to explore the emotional exposure of love from a position of strength, has taken an inward turn, engaging mental health, particularly in the years during and after the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic. SZA’s “Kill Bill” (2022) was so ubiquitous that its strangeness largely escaped notice. It is, after all, a murder ballad, whose evolving chorus (“I might kill my ex” to “I just killed my ex”) marks the mental dissolution of the artist’s imagined speaker, who is “so mature, I got me a therapist to tell me there’s other men.” By contrast, “Oscar Winning Tears,” from Raye’s 2023 debut, “My 21st Century Blues,” is an exercise in recovery: “Truly I’m vulnerable, I love a sentiment / Quickly I opened up, I learned my lesson then.” The song enacts her process of finding power, as her voice moves from rapid-fire chants in the verses to soaring melodies in the chorus. These are songs not of isolation but of self-reflection, self-protection and self-care, whatever the cost.
R&B in 2025 sounds like this: the past working in the present, shaping a future for the music. Long has some ideas about what that future might hold — more industry respect and attention. More creativity, too. “I want to hear people exploring sounds and getting vulnerable,” she says. “Let’s make some wedding songs. Some party songs would be fun, you know, things that they would play in the club.” She recalls a recent visit to a strip club in Atlanta where the D.J. was spinning nothing but hip-hop: Sexyy Red, BossMan Dlow. Then the D.J. dropped in Long’s steamy ballad “Hrs & Hrs.” The whole club started singing. “Everybody,” she says, “including the men — thugged out, I’m talking about all types of chains and gold teeth and all that. Everyone was singing my song.”
Muni Long: Hair: Tamika Gibson. Makeup: Denise Camacho. Kehlani: Hair: Quran Smith. Makeup: Troye Batiste. H.E.R.: Hair: Nina Burnett. Makeup: Rebekah Aladdin. Manicurist: Misheelt Khosbayar. Coco Jones: Hair: Kaleel Joy. Makeup: Kenya Alexis. Victoria Monét: Hair: JStayReady. Makeup: Ernesto Casillas. Jazmine Sullivan: Hair: Christopher Kyle. Makeup: Marita Salmon. Jessie Reyez: her own hair and makeup. New York shoot photo assistants: Rashad Royal, Clifford Prince King. Tailor: Zunyda Watson. Set designer’s assistant: Rachel Mannello. Stylist’s assistants: Olaoluwa Olajide, Rashied Black. Los Angeles shoot photo assistant: Rashad Royal. Tailor: Hasmik Kourinian. Set designer’s assistant: Betsy Costello. Stylist’s assistants: Olaoluwa Olajide, Frankie Benkovic
