Human is such a different album that Rag’N’Bone Man almost needs a new name. (His earlier work, particularly Disfigured, suited it much better).

But all that withstanding, this new style suits Rory Graham so much better that it’s hard to complain. From the opening (titular) track, Graham totally dominates Human. In fact, his old style was so dominating musically that I had no idea Graham was this good of a singer!

Nearly every track is worth writing about. The afore-mentioned title track is a stunning opener that capitalizes on everything that Human is about: swaggering bass lines, blues influence, and a huge pop sheen overtop of everything. “Bitter End” is a track that simmers thanks to an incredible performance from Graham. “Be the Man” is incredibly pop-heavy, but Graham’s baritone voice carries it through the entire song.

There are some songs that are particularly strong. “Love You Any Less” is a song that will no doubt capture the radio the same way Sam Smith does. It’s an incredible, raw performance from Graham overtop of a remarkably bare backing track that lets his voice breathe.

“Die Easy” is an a cappella performance that simply captivates. There’s nobody with a voice like Graham’s on the market.

Even his older tracks, like “Wolves”, are given a bit of a sheen make-over here that put an extra focus on Graham’s voice. But “Wolves” doesn’t sit as well with this new, cotton candy style that Graham’s performing as now.

And the occasional track features a hip hop performance, which is something that Graham was doing in 2014 too (with a Vince Staples nod then). But these days, it doesn’t sit as well.

When the old Rag’n’Bone Man collides with the new one, there’s a slight disconnect.

But despite that, the debut record from one of the most intimidating voices in neo-blues is an astounding effort, and one that I’ve been listening to again and again over the past week. It’s easy to get into, and it sticks in your head. Rag’n’Bone Man is one of the most promising new performers of the past five years.

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And for good reason. Sampha is one of the most talented performers to come out of Britain in recent memory.

Process is his debut solo record. Unlike the music where he’s provided one voice among many, Process is a chance for Sampha to open up and get personal. And boy, does he get personal. Process sees Sampha dealing with the loss of his mother to cancer in 2015 — and consequently, reflecting on the death of his father from cancer in 1998. The songs are intensely emotional, occasionally dark, but almost always revelatory.

Like any good novel would, each track on Process reveals something new about its central character. And Sampha is one of the best storytellers in the business right now. The album’s lead single, “(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano” is one of the most beautiful ballads of the past five years, and it feels like you’re being given Sampha’s private diary.

It doesn’t hurt that his music is so good. While the emotions are raw, the production is anything but. Everything is smooth as butter. Sampha’s voice is amazing — velvety smooth, but rich and textured at the same time.

The album is also difficult to define. It’s one thing to call Process electronic music, but Sampha also frequently dabbles in R&B. Precisely labelling his music is like fitting a square peg into the hole of some complex, hard-to-recognize shape.

At his best, on tracks like “Kora Sings” or “Blood On Me”, Sampha channels the best in his genre. There are times when he sounds like Chet Faker, and others when he sounds like Frank Ocean’s more organic-sounding cousin. Each track is surprising and engrossing, and none of them overstay their welcome.

With unbridled creative enthusiasm, Sampha isn’t interested in defining a genre or fitting into one. He’s making R&B-influenced electronic that defies explanation, but that’s fitting for a clear first contender for Album of the Year.

What Sampha has done, beyond all that, is something tangibly more difficult: he’s captivated us. He’s earned our attention. In 2017, Sampha has made a forty-minute album feel ten minutes long. It’s over in a breeze, and it never feels like it’s repeating itself.

Without a doubt, Process is an incredible success.

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But to ignore Knxwledge, whose name is a big part of the NxWorries title, would be a major mistake. His production serves as the vehicle that .Paak hasn’t had yet in the hip hop world.

In short, Knxwledge is the reason that .Paak is about to explode from being an R&B saviour to a hip hop king.

It’s not that .Paak can rap (although he demonstrates some tenacity in that regard). It’s more that the beats on display here owe more to hip hop than most of the production on .Paak’s last record did.

This makes for a beautiful record. For .Paak, it’s jubilant. His voice is impressive throughout, but he’s clearly having a ton of fun. Tracks like “Livvin” and “Get Better/Do U Luv” have qualities to them that wouldn’t have existed on Malibu, the .Paak record that came out in February. .Paak knows he’s rising in the ranks.

Knxwledge has found a natural complement to his rhythms and beats. His beats haven’t flowed this well or felt this natural in a long time. The vocals lend them some charm, even when they feel too old-school or offbeat for their own good (pardon the pun).

There have been a few people who have compared the partnership to Dilla and Madlib. To me, it’s more directly related to the partnership between Madlib and MF Doom that resulted in Madvillainy. (Coincidentally, or perhaps not, Yes Lawd! was released on the same label as Madvillainy was.) These are two seemingly disparate voices who are able to come together and create something better as a whole than they are apart.

With all that being said, the question I’m left with isn’t whether or not Yes Lawd! is a great album. It’s an impeccably made, joyful record. It’s the record you make when you know you’ve finally “made it.”

No, the question I have is this: is Yes Lawd! the best Anderson .Paak record of the year? Malibu, I think, edges it out only a little bit. But the fact that it’s such a close contest is a remarkable testament to both Knxwledge and .Paak.

Clearly, .Paak has arrived. With Yes Lawd!, he continues to surprise. Knxwledge’s role in the record is the cherry on top of the cake.

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For Solange, this groovy combination of R&B, pop, funk, and hip hop nearly outgrows her sister Beyoncé’s shadow. There are songs on here that will go down as some of the year’s best: “Cranes in the Sky”, “Mad” (which might be the best track Lil Wayne’s ever been on), and “Don’t Touch My Hair” — the album’s standout by far.

These songs are about being black, to be sure. After all, this is 2016. After To Pimp A Butterfly, it feels like every record from a figure in the black community is a statement about black realities. But more importantly, A Seat at the Table is about being a woman.

Because its tracks are mixed with spoken word interludes from important men and women in Solange’s life, A Seat at the Table feels authentic. This is a coming of age record that’s about being a woman, but it’s also about being Solange. While the record isn’t as incendiary as Lemonade, the songwriting here is intimate and the production is warm enough that it feels like Solange is sharing this with you in hopes you’ll empathize with her.

That’s what makes so many of these songs — even less noted tracks like “Where Do We Go” — work so well. I’m a white guy from Canada; I don’t know anything about the world Solange sings about. I can never claim to have recognized it. But A Seat at the Table makes me feel like I’ve experienced it, and I empathize with the plight of black womanhood in America in 2016.

“I’m weary of the ways of the world,” Solange sings on “Weary”. “Be weary of the ways of the world.” On my second play through of A Seat at the Table, I find myself nodding along. I empathize, but I’m also convicted in this. As a white man, I am part of the problem. Can I be part of the solution?

A Seat at the Table is a powerful record. I believe, and hope, it can create dialogue like this in our communities. So yes, this is Solange’s best record. She’s finally come into her own. The music is beautiful and her style is just right. She’s not trying to imitate anybody else (or if she is, she’s hiding it well). It’s a great record.

But it doesn’t matter that this is her best record. None of that matters. Solange wants our attention, and she’s got something to say. It’s time to listen.

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Wise talks about growing up in the church and later struggling with his faith and sexuality while experimenting with the occult. He talks about the confusion between the hurt of his soul and the gospel of the church.

But there’s more to the record, I think, than blending soul and gospel. Wise’s music is comfortable without labels or “comfortable” identities. “Blisters”, the opening track, takes a lot of cues from soul music, to be sure. But there’s also a lot of gospel — particularly in the hand-clapping and the choir (who appear throughout the record).

Yet there’s also something operatic about it. Wise’s voice flutters up and down notes and scales, unpredictably guiding listeners through tracks that often feel like the melodic equivalent of spoken word sections at open mic nights. There are moments when Baroque-flavoured instruments appear on the soundstage, but they blend into the background in favour of Wise’s voice.

To be clear, Wise’s voice is sensational. It carries the project on its own. Each song benefits from Wise’s performance, which gives the sometimes-vague lyrics serious emotional heft.

On “Four Ethers”, the force of an entire orchestra stands behind Wise. The song is beautiful, and the classical influence and operatic flair gives it the weight of a ten-ton truck. It’s my favourite track on the record. It’s dramatic, it’s emotional, and it’s the album’s darkest track.

Blisters is dark the way that D’Angelo and Kendrick are dark. It’s a reflection of confusing times. The album feels confused, despite that the blend of soul and classical sounds fresh. It’s odd to call an album neo-soul when it’s so clearly a mix of classical music and alt-‘90s soul, but there’s a lack of genre in Blisters. It doesn’t have a label. And like its performer, Blisters sounds completely comfortable with that.

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I think Endless purposely existed as a filler record to get Frank Ocean out of his contract so he could independently release Blonde. I think Endless is the mostly-empty commercial counterpart to the emotionally involved and far better record, Blonde.

There is so much to say about Blonde. Even its name bears discussion: at the last minute, the name was changed from Boys Don’t Cry, prompting much confusion about whether the title is spelled “Blonde” or “Blond” and launching the Internet into rife speculation. The answer is simple: it doesn’t matter how you spell it, because Frank doesn’t seem to care, and the name was changed because a certain portion of the population wouldn’t understand that Boys Don’t Cry was a lie.

If anything, Blonde is a love letter to empathetic people. It suggests that boys do cry, that the appropriate response to tragedy is to weep and to mourn, and that we’ve lost something with all of our male posturing. Many musicians have said this in their music, but Frank lives this.

On “Nikes”, a track that couldn’t be considered a protest song even by the staunchest abusers of the term, Frank mourns Travyon’s murder as a black man. Mourns is the appropriate record. “Nikes” sets the bar for the rest of the record to come: almost completely beat-less, with a focus on Frank’s voice, encouraging us to get better at living with each other.

Unlike Kendrick, and perhaps unlike Beyoncé, Frank Ocean isn’t writing protest songs about blackness. He’s writing sad songs about losing our humanity. He’s writing music about empathy.

As good as the music is, that’s what I missed the most about Frank’s musical silence over the past four years. I missed his empathetic perspective.

On “Futura Free”, Frank Ocean spends the last half of the track talking to people on the street. The first half of the song is beautiful, Frank’s voice clearly having grown in the past four years. But in the last four minutes, Frank goes vocal and asks people on the streets about their lives.

For most musicians, moments like that would be throwaways. They’d be there to engineer an emotional response. But with Frank, it’s somehow clear how much he loves people. How much empathy he has for their stories.

That seems to be the driving momentum throughout Frank’s new record: there’s a sadness to it that strikes a chord in so many of us. Every track that feels like it’s about Frank — like “Solo” or the sensational “Self Control” (my favourite track on the record) — also feels like it’s about all of us.

I watched a brief, thoughtful exchange on Twitter yesterday between people talking about the melancholic moods that Frank’s music inspires in them. And it fascinated me that every metaphor described a similar feeling: loneliness in a crowd, that of invisibility. My favourite description was “a beach party in the winter.”

It’s all emblematic of the sensational control Frank has over the listener. Blonde is perfectly paced, with no track that could justifiably be removed — even the vocal interludes have a purpose, although they may be less infinitely re-playable than the more vocally-driven tracks.

Channel ORANGE was a spectacular album, but on Blonde, Frank Ocean has mastered his craft as a songwriter and performer. He’s writing music so far above his peers that it defies genre classification. It’s emotionally charged, powerful music that confronts its listeners with the empathy of its performer. It’s quietly transformative. The message is clear.

Perhaps boys should cry. And maybe we’d be better off if they did.

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The lyrics here are romantic and smooth, echoing the best of what soul and R&B has to offer. Almost every song feels like something that would work well on a classy date night. It feels all too rare that a good album with an air of romance comes out, and this is one of them.

The duo that makes this work is neo-soul singer Eric Roberson and rapper Phonte. It’s a surprisingly potent mix: while the backing tracks are decidedly R&B, Roberson is able to elevate his parts to feel like soul. Phonte’s raps make the album feel like classic hip hop, but he’s never abrasive. His vocals are as smooth as Roberson’s.

It’s astonishing how well these two voices work together. You needn’t look further than the first track, “It’s so Easy.” The second verse sees the duo swapping vocal parts, with Roberson rhythmically singing his part and Phonte joining in halfway through. When they swap, you might not even notice it because it’s so smooth.

It’s not a trick that gets old. “My Kinda Lady” has a similar feel, with the swap handled well. It’s a poor word because it’s so vague, but “classy” is the only word I have to describe music like this. It’s clear that Roberson and Phonte have a rapport here, and that the two have left their egos at the door.

Some tracks, like “My Kinda Lady” and “It’s so Easy” feel led by Roberson, but others swap the roles. I love “Lie to Me,” which feels like a Phonte-led track despite Roberson’s heavy presence. On others, they share the lead: “Grow This Love” features Phonte carrying the chorus’s backbone while Roberson sings the lead. It makes the duo sound bigger than they are.

Roberson’s vocals largely dominate the record, which is an important note because it speaks to what Tigallero is supposed to be: a modern neo-soul record with elements of hip hop. Fans of Phonte might find him under-utilized, but it feels like the record has exactly enough of him.

For me, Tigallero is a breath of fresh air: it’s got the soul of a vintage R&B record, but the modern approach of two masters at the top of their game. It’s fresh, despite some of the trappings of yesteryear, and the vocal performances are fantastic. More than once, Tigallero reminded me of a classier Justin Timberlake at his prime (and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible).

Compared to some of this year’s other standout releases, Tigallero’s release is rather quiet. But the songwriting is quality, and the performances are excellent. Phonte & Roberson call Tigallero a “project,” which implies — at least to me — that this could be a one-off record.

I hope that’s not the case, because this is the sort of collaboration that I’d like to see continue. Both artists leave their egos at the door and focus on putting out great, fresh music. It’s the rare musical partnership that works because the artists complement each other — it’s not a competition. And I’ve lot to hear more from them.

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“Living in that 80s song,” he half-raps, half-sings, in what sounds like a drug-induced state. His music captures nostalgia for a period his target demographic was never alive in, mixing R&B with hip hop in a way not dissimilar from Drake — but with a lot more soul.

That soul emphasis is what separates Berhana from all the Drake soundalikes who are veering away from auto-tune and towards R&B’s smooth rhythms and flows. It’s like Berhana spent a lot of time absorbing Drake and Chance the Rapper’s understanding of the world, and channeled that style intro a fresh take on his favourite genre: soul.

Berhana sounds like he’s been educated in soul music his whole life. “You used to love me; I used to love you,” he crones on “Janet.” It’s a stand-out track — because it’s both steeped in soul’s mythology and drenched in an 80s vibe that’s incredibly believable. The woman Berhana idolizes could very well be Janet Jackson or Janet Hubert — we don’t know, and we don’t need to know, because there’s an emotional connection to the referenced time period that’s authentic either way. (To be frank, he uses Fresh Prince clips throughout, so I’m pretty sure it’s an ode to Janet Hubert, but the point is that it doesn’t matter because he’s harnessing nostalgia to make us feel something.)

In short, Berhana’s stylings and ethos are familiar, but more effective, than many of his peers.

But then there’s that production: it’s incredible. Something about Berhana’s debut feels magical, from the opening moment to the album’s closing. “Brooklyn Drugs” opens with what I think might be a gunshot, which catches me off guard every time, but when the music finally comes, the synth sounds perfect and the kick is meticulous.

The slick production and fresh mix of emotionalism and nostalgia make Berhana’s EP far more effective than it has any right to be. The six tracks don’t overstay their welcome — and while I wonder how well-paced his eventual full-length record might be, Berhana’s debut EP stands out from the rest of the pack. It’s a fine first release from an artist I’m looking forward to hearing more from in the future.

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Much of the record is surprisingly different from what we’ve heard so far from Fantastic Negrito’s EPs. The song that will likely be most familiar to you is Lost in a Crowd, which was his previous single and a song that epitomized the style he’s already become known for: working man old-school roots rock.

The rest of the album is surprising, though. Working Poor is a fantastic introduction: Fantastic Negrito has always felt like blues rock for the under-privileged, but throughout The Last Days of Oakland, he elevates himself to singing songs about the black man’s plight. Working Poor fits that description perfectly.

The style is epitomized with The N***a Song and its prelude, What Do You Do (Interlude 1). Not unlike Kendrick Lamar, Fantastic Negrito is making music that is unaware of the injustice and violence towards black men. It’s stark, striking music that is as difficult to listen to as it is easy to enjoy.

In that sense, Fantastic Negrito feels like the Kendrick of blues rock and soul. He’s a black man who’s incredibly aware of the role race plays in his life and his music. Consequently, his music feels more important, essential even — and I think it is. The Last Days of Oakland is smart, meaningful, and important.

That’s not to say that Fantastic Negrito doesn’t have fun with his music. Hump Thru the Winter and Scary Woman both feel like lively music perfect for performance, particularly with Scary Woman’s impressive piano solo. It’s a contrast to his more politically aware work, but Fantastic Negrito pulls it off.

Nothing Without You is the most clichéd R&B track on the whole record, and it appears as the last song. It feels like the closest thing to a love song on the record, and after an album that feels both politically aware and nearly violent, it doesn’t fit. It’s a beautiful, tender song, but it sticks out like a sore thumb.

Perhaps it should be telling that Fantastic Negrito can ape so many styles. I can’t decide if he’s blues rock, R&B, or soul rock. But I know that his version of In the Pines is one of the blackest songs I’ve ever heard. It feels like slave music.

On Fantastic Negrito’s website, he shares his phenomenal story about a major label deal, a near fatal car accident, and a mangled hand. But he also calls himself “a man’s truth told in the form of black roots music” and “uncut realness.” Whatever genre you want to label it as, that’s an approach I can get behind. The Last Days of Oakland is absolutely essential listening.

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And he doesn’t need to: on Juice, he’s told that he needs the help of the label’s biggest hitmakers. But it seems pretty clear to me that all he really needs is a bit of radio play. Songs like the aforementioned Funk Outta Here, or Be a Man, just need a little bit of support from the local R&B radio stations to pick up the steam they need to succeed.

What makes JMSN work so well is a combination of a unique voice and a total disregard for genre conventions. While it’s clear that JMSN knows exactly what R&B should sound like, he seems more interested in writing his own style of record that bridges the gap between the neo-soul of people like Gallant with the pop sensibilities of Justin Timberlake.

While he’s not writing songs like Mirrors, JMSN is clearly self-aware. I can’t tell for sure, but it sounds like he’s doing all of his own backing choir parts. His music isn’t mixed well enough to be coming from one of the big labels. So when he sings “nobody’s going to understand,” I believe him, because he’s doing this all on his own — unlike most of the current prodigies in his genre. And on the last track, when he asks what you’ll gain “by pretending to be something you’re not,” it feels like he’s been real with you for the past 50 minutes. With JMSN, It’s not about a polished presentation, or stunning production.

What JMSN lacks in polish he makes up for in raw power and authenticity. The kick-off title track feels like one of the most vulnerable R&B tracks released this year. It’s a great way to start the record: like almost every other track, it’s a slow burner. Slow burners are great for JMSN, because they allow him to really show off his powerful presence.

What I like about JMSN isn’t that individual tracks are solid, though. It Is. is one of those rare albums that feels like the whole is greater than the sum of its part. On its own, the songs are successful, but taken as a whole, the album is more powerful than the songs alone. JMSN isn’t the world’s best singer (and I suspect he knows that), but he has a powerful sense of emotion and presence in his voice that sells him really well. Fans of carefully crafted R&B are going to love him.

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