We assembled a list of what we’d consider the best neo soul albums, so come and join us in our urban hang suite.Ĭonsidering how controversial a term “neo-soul” has been over the years, there’s plenty of debate over where it started, artists such as Prince, Terence Trent D’Arby and Tony! Toni! Toné! often cited as progenitors of the sound. Paak (and, fingers crossed, Frank Ocean soon enough) keeping this eclectic spirit alive, it seemed like an opportune time to revisit some of our favorites. (And in many cases The Roots played some role in shaping those sounds, as it turns out.) With recent favorites by the likes of Anderson. Soul is, of course, the foundation, but artists such as Erykah Badu, D’Angelo and Maxwell took those classic R&B textures and fused them with rock, jazz, funk, hip-hop, Latin and African styles to create something less conventional, yet still deeply soulful.
What distinguishes neo-soul from, simply, soul is the broad palette of sounds that it incorporates. It’s a fair complaint, though while use of “neo soul” as a commonly accepted phrase has more or less fallen out of favor, the music certainly hasn’t. That something is only new for so long, and thus has no staying power. The common complaint with “neo-soul” as a descriptive phrase is that by calling something “neo” (or “new” or “nü”), it ironically becomes doomed to languish in a particular time and place.
Not that neo-soul sounds like shoegaze or goth, of course, but there’s one important distinction that these genres all share: The name of the style of the music has generated almost as much controversy as it has hype.
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