R&B has died many hypothetical deaths, with just as many premortem autopsies. Every few years there is hemming and hawing about the state of things, and even the rebuttals have caveats: R&B isn't dead, but it is going through an identity crisis. R&B isn't dead, but it is just different now, something to be begrudgingly accepted. When Shannon Sharpe asked self-proclaimed King of R&B Jacquees for his assessment in 2023, the Hall of Famer turned podcaster stumbled over himself trying not to write a eulogy into the question: "I don't want to say it's not what it once was, but," Sharpe said, before spiraling into commentary on the cadre of "Lil" singsong rappers. As happens with most music genres, reports of R&B's demise have always been underconsidered and premature. Still, the question's recurrence lately has hinted at broader concerns about its evolutionary future. I never felt like R&B was dying," Usher told Billboard last year, just before headlining the Super Bowl. "I think it just needs expansion."
Ironic, then, that such a shift seems to have been ushered in by a death — not of R&B proper, mind you, but of one of its greatest modern pacesetters: The Weeknd. Since 2011, the persona inhabited by the singer Abel Tesfaye has defined a developmental period in R&B's history, one largely determined by its proximity to hip-hop, which has continued to gobble up market share and psychic space in the public consciousness. You could point to The Weeknd as the first R&B artist spliced with trap DNA, adopting its coldness, opacity and penchant for shadow. On his January album Hurry Up Tomorrow, Tesfaye killed The Weeknd, a creature of the night who used falsetto like a siren, drawing groupies to his murky backroom lair. Since then, as if on cue, it finally appears as if the sun is rising on R&B once again, its next pathfinders seeking a new vibe.
For at least the last decade, even the R&B that wasn't defined by its connections to rap culture has been critically measured by its juxtaposition, either hewing so close to rap that it was subsumed by it, or running in the opposite direction to seek refuge in the past. (There was a nebulous third option, but it tended to be otherized to the point of stripping its core R&B-ness away.) The dominant aesthetic of this time has been a gloomy one, veering away from the joyriding pop-R&B of the 2000s and toward the club of the rap imagination, its booming low end, chilly apathy and triflin' ways manifesting in a more indifferent, indulgent style for those leading the genre: the late nights of Jeremih, Bryson Tiller's trap soul, PARTYNEXTDOOR's playa's ball. There have been outliers along the way, of course — artists testing the limits of the rap-sung dichotomy (Ty Dolla $ign, Tink, Tory Lanez) or melding the sounds intentionally (Anderson .Paak, Doja Cat), and plenty of Brits reaffirming U.K. soul's commitment to a robust sunniness (Sault, Nao, Sasha Keable, Joy Crookes, all of whom released projects this year). But overall, the imprint of this era has been a fundamental darkening in R&B's atmosphere. In his capsule for Jhené Aiko's Chilombo, Billboard's No. 1 R&B album of 2020, Andrew Unterberger called her "a major force in popular R&B's shift towards nocturnal vibes."
2025 has proven load-lightening for the genre. While there has always been a grown-and-sexy corner of R&B, hermetically sealed to preserve its essence, the popular R&B that lives near the center of culture has had to actively unsnarl from hip-hop's grasp. Some of its threshold-crossing feels tied to how it rang in the new year: Drake, a crucial figure in the early 2010s merger, was deposed as rap-R&B intermediary by his nemesis Kendrick Lamar, who seemed hell-bent on unplugging the current paradigm and kicking off a new one. Meanwhile, the long tail of SOS and the subsequent Grand National Tour established SZA as a bellwether figure, a true R&B star — not an R&B-adjacent pop star like Beyoncé or Rihanna — who, despite her residency on powerhouse rap label TDE, has been planting flags for a more forward-looking R&B, one not constricted by the space of the slash.
But the most eye-opening change has been happening down-ballot, as enough rising R&B artists break free of twilight's call to amount to a soft reset. It isn't simply that the music released this year is less indebted to rap, or even to the run of '90s and '00s R&B that has prevailed as its most influential epoch. It's that detaching from those things has revealed a new sonic home base: a cloudless sound, lighter on beats and more open to the air, at odds with a decade of morose VIP lounge grooves and 808 intensity. Less locked-in songcraft, less self-serious energy, rootsier influences or just a more beaming style: Everywhere you looked, a tide seemed to be turning.
This isn't to say that a switch was flipped overnight. Tiller dropped twice in 2025 (though, notably, to the worst chart debut of his career). Summer Walker burrowed into the slow-jam repertoire of the past to evoke maturity on her trilogy-completing Finally Over It. There is still fascinating work being done at the rap-R&B intersection: Both Sudan Archives and KeiyaA tinkered with the formula toward very different ends, and Nourished by Time took rap sampling in a warped direction to create a new post-R&B benchmark. No artist should have to be too prescriptive about what their art invokes or how; '90s R&B is an eternal inflection point, and hip-hop's reach is everywhere. But there is definitely something in the air — an embrace of a light, low-key fortune. Even the big R&B-inflected pop records, like Olivia Dean's The Art of Loving and Justin Bieber's Swag, share this disposition. When rappers pop up on the latter, it has the guest-spot feel of a turn-of-the-millenium radio feature, rather than being the organizing principle for the song's creative direction. You can hear it in the differences between Changes songs like "Available" and "Come Around Me" and Swag's "Way It Is" and "Sweet Spot."
It's fitting that one of Swag's architects, the singer-producer Dijon Duenas, who performs mononymously as Dijon, was one of 2025's breakout stars, given how central he feels to this changeover. He has been on the scene for over a decade, making experimental music in the margins — first as part of the duo Abhi//Dijon, before releasing his solo debut, Absolutely, in 2021 — but his move to the center of discourse suggests R&B's Overton window is readjusting to his frequency. His sophomore album, Baby, is like the crack along the fault lines, while "Yamaha" feels representative of what has been broken open. The song is Prince-ish, with the sweeping kick of a power-pop ballad and less bassy drums — but more than anything, it's vaporous and opalescent, big and earnest, heart on its sleeve. "Big loving — that's my heart / And you own it," Dijon sings; Brent Faiyaz would bristle at the mere thought of bearing all in this way. Even the more beat-powered songs, like "FIRE!" and "(Freak It)," feel sheer and washed out.
You can see a similar phenomenon in the distance between Amber Mark's last two albums, Three Dimensions Deep and this fall's Pretty Idea. Released three years apart, the respective LPs indicate a push toward something weightless. Three Dimensions Deep is no one thing, venturing into Afro-pop and bossa nova, but songs like "Healing Hurts" and "One" answer the R&B mandates of their moment, the music full-bodied and thumping. Pretty Idea is under the thrall of a different ambience — subtly funky, often acoustic or effervescent. Even when she riffs on the Usher and Alicia Keys duet "My Boo" on the frothy, crush-confessing "Too Much," she subverts the spirit of the original's nighttime Broadway rendezvous. Her music sounds more suspended, its power in the delicacy of its arrangements and feathery vocals.
The same could be said of the Boston soul man Khamari and the Toronto singer Daniel Caesar. Khamari's voice has drawn comparisons to Frank Ocean, but he has settled into a softspun, guitar-driven sound that blends the hushed brushes of folk with R&B vibrancy. On To Dry a Tear, the rhythm is largely generated by his strumming, not the drums, which are sparse, when they're there. The blues evoked is eternal, familiar, that of a searing wound left by uncoupling souls. "Every now and then / I hear voices in the wind / Wooden floors creak / The death of what could've been," he sings on "Head in a Jar." Caesar is on a similar plane: In the run-up to Son of Spergy, he performed impromptu shows at local parks with nothing but an acoustic guitar. That intimacy charges through the album, but in the service of self-reflection. On "Moon," he coos, "I'm not who I wanna be at the moment — maybe soon," which is not something I can't imagine the R&B bros made in Drake's image ever admitting on the record.
At least one promising vision of a post-Drake future was actualized by Mariah the Scientist. Her album, Hearts Sold Separately, was largely produced by Nineteen85, the man behind Drake's most buoyant hits and the draftsman for dvsn, inheritors of OVO's night-owl sound. These songs harness the brightness of "Hold On, We're Going Home" and "Hotline Bling" but are equally indebted to '80s quiet storm, and exist in the SZA tradition of exasperated but clear-eyed assessment of situationships. The irreverent SAILORR also shares in this lineage, but the songs on her debut mixtape, From Florida's Finest, balance disappointment with humor. The music itself is also possessed by that levity; the snapping wit of "Sincerity," "Bitches Brew" and "Done Shaving 4 U" is matched by the twinkling, plucky production wafting through their backdrop. It is an entirely different aura than the one exuded by "Timeless," the trap hit by The Weeknd and Playboi Carti that topped the year-end R&B songs chart, or "Somebody Loves Me," a standout from $ome $exy $ongs 4 U, the collaboration between Drake and PARTYNEXTDOOR that served as a last call for their hookah-fied, neon-lit R&B.
The same day $ome $exy $ongs 4 U dropped, the singer Mereba released The Breeze Grew a Fire, a groovy, mature folk-R&B statement. I think of that day as a real point of divergence: $$$4U won on the charts that week, but Mereba won the R&B holy war. In The Breeze Grew a Fire, you can hear paths forward for the genre; it has a radiant yet muted soul sound, animated by faint flourishes and quiet gestures. Interestingly, Mereba is also a rapper, who has taken issue with R&B as a classification for what she does. She has spoken about folk music as the spur in her sound, feeling like there was no place for her in that scene, and seeing R&B as a stockade to which nonbelievers tried to shuttle her off, a box that was less "conscious, political, and rebellious." "I had to put my foot down because I knew we were moving towards a more genre-less place," she said in February. "I didn't want to chase what was already being done." Amber Mark echoed those sentiments last month, eager to remind people that it's not just R&B. Maybe part of the problem with the genre is that those with the power to change it are the most hesitant to claim it. But the music at hand seems to demonstrate that even its most reluctant practitioners inherently understand what Yaya Bey recently made clear in an interview with Brooklyn Magazine: "Soul music is at the core. You can never disregard R&B."
That truth, to me, is crucial to conversations about R&B's survival. The ways in which it is limited, or limiting, can never compare to the reach it already has, how central it remains, what can still be built around it. The music is foundational, and thus deathless — which means our task in the present is less to preserve what it has been, and more to embrace what it can become. In the range of albums released in 2025, I hear not just vitality but progression: music more about the future than the past, which feels as if it could, collectively, bring the genre into its next phase, an emergence from the cover of darkness into the light. With the warmth of a rising sun comes a new day.
Copyright 2025 NPR
