Tems (1995- )

Subterms

    Latest story

    88 Shares157 Views

    9 Songs That Define R&B’s New Era

    by

    In my article on the renaissance of women in R&B, I write about a new generation of artists who are reshaping the genre, with some returning to the music’s gospel-based roots and others annexing fresh sonic territory — hybridizing with the latest hip-hop, grafting in global sounds and claiming R&B’s rightful stake in pop music today. That tells only part of the story, though, as many R&B artists resist the industry’s categorizations: While accepting the award for best country album at this year’s Grammys, Beyoncé, a 16-time winner as a solo artist in R&B categories, voiced an opinion shared by many Black artists: “I think sometimes ‘genre’ is a code word to keep us in our place.”What unites today’s R&B with music of the past is its celebration of voice. Fans don’t talk only about who can sing but about who can sang — enlisting their physical gifts and knowledge of tradition in performances that reach past exhaustion. Below is a playlist of nine songs, all released since 2020, by women artists who are extending and redefining R&B’s rich tradition.1. Muni Long’s “Make Me Forget” (2024)“Sometimes people just need to leave stuff alone when it comes to classics,” Long told me in an interview, recalling her hesitancy when the producer Tricky Stewart presented her with the instrumental for “Make Me Forget,” a spare interpolation of D’Angelo’s “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” (2000). But writing her own song on top of one of the most seductive songs (and music videos) in R&B history presented a welcome challenge. The verses tease out the terms of a fledgling relationship, working with and against old-school gender roles (“Know when to walk away / When I’d rather that you stay / Gently put me in my place / Leave when I need some space”). In the chorus, Long pleads three straight times for her new love to make her forget — the pain of her past relationship? The man before him? — only for the final line to reveal that she’s asking for him to make her forget “anything before you that didn’t feel like this.”2. Summer Walker’s “Session 33” (2021)On 2018’s “Session 32,” Walker sings about the messy process of moving on from a failed relationship (“Threw away your love letters / I thought it’d make me feel better”). The recording has all the qualities of a home demo, down to the sequenced title and the absence of the mixing and mastering of the modern studio — a conscious choice to underscore the song’s raw emotions. “Session 33” is its natural extension, but with a difference. Still an acoustic affair, featuring Walker’s voice and guitar, the recording now offers some studio sweeteners that “Session 32” lacked: echoed vocal effects, harmonic overdubs and Walker’s cleanly miked voice. “Session 33” shares with its predecessor the sense that the artist is letting us in on her creative process — as well as on her romantic life. “Should I move on since no one’s here?” she asks herself. The song never answers.3. Jazmine Sullivan’s “Pick Up Your Feelings” (2021)With her 2021 concept album, “Heaux Tales,” Sullivan gave voice to herself and many other women working against the sexist conceit, sometimes perpetuated in R&B, that women are conquests and men are conquerors. On songs like “Put It Down,” “Lost One” and, most powerfully, “Pick Up Your Feelings,” she renovates the tired theme of the no-good man by centering her own — and other women’s — empowerment. The whole album is an exercise in validating female sexual desire while also acknowledging women’s equal capacity to do dirt, all while condemning the societal double standard that lets men do the same without tarnishing their reputations. But Sullivan’s not writing an essay; she’s engaged in a vocal workout session. And her peers have taken notice: “I’ve literally watched Jazmine Sullivan videos hundreds of times, slowed them down to 0.25 speed and mapped out the note transitions on sheets of paper that end up looking like infinite stairs,” says the artist Jessie Reyez. “Hearing her sing is like watching someone make a joke out of gravity.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 113 Shares166 Views

      in Music

      Muni Long, Victoria Monét and Other Women Reinventing R&B

      by

      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.H.E.R., Coco Jones, Victoria Monét and Muni Long pay tribute to the women singer-songwriters of the 1990s and early 2000s.Megan LovalloBut 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.Coco Jones (left) and Victoria Monét were also photographed in Los Angeles on Dec. 16, 2024. Jones wears a Gucci dress, $6,900, bracelet, $1,300, bracelet, $1,150, and cuff, $920, gucci.com; Christian Louboutin shoes, $995, christianlouboutin.com; LO Collections earrings, $425, and ring, $300, dinosaurdesigns.com; and Dinosaur Designs ring, $235, dinosaurdesigns.com. Monét wears an Off-White dress, price on request, similar styles at off—white.com; Amina Muaddi shoes, $715, aminamuaddi.com; and LO Collections earrings, $280.Photograph by D’Angelo Lovell Williams. Styled by Milton David Dixon IIIWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      7 Deep Cuts From the 2025 Grammy Nominations

      by

      Big names dominate the biggest categories, but lovely discoveries await on the ballot too. Hear tracks from Arooj Aftab, Sierra Ferrell, Tems, Idles and more.Grammy nominee Arooj Aftab.Luisa Opalesky for The New York TimesDear listeners,This morning, the nominees for the 67th annual Grammy Awards were revealed, and the names that appeared most often should be quite familiar: Beyoncé (leading the pack with 11 nominations), Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar, Post Malone and Charli XCX (all with seven nods apiece). The Grammys have rarely been so reflective of the top of the charts and the celebrity zeitgeist, and that can make the announcement feel anticlimactic. But if you dig a little deeper into the list — as I do on today’s playlist — plenty of surprises and discoveries await.All seven of the artists included below are nominated for Grammys next year, even if they’re not the marquee acts vying for the biggest, all-genre awards (record, album and song of the year). But the genre-specific categories are often the best places to find interesting music you might not have heard before: Today, I’m highlighting recent tunes from the Pakistani composer Arooj Aftab, the boisterous British band Idles and the Nigerian songwriter-turned-solo star Tems, to name a few. Plus, this collection of songs also features a certain Australian goth rock legend who has somehow never won a Grammy. Will 2025 be his year? We’ll find out on Feb. 2. Until then, here’s the full list of nominees, Ben Sisario’s roundup of all the story lines to watch and the pop team’s discussion of the year’s surprises and snubs.All the king’s horses and — oh, nevermind, nevermind,LindsayListen along while you read.1. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: “Song of the Lake”Let’s begin with this regal, oddly stirring opening track from Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ latest album, “Wild God.” Even though Cave may not leap to mind when you think of the Grammys, it’s still rather astonishing he’s never won one, given his deep, boundary-pushing discography and especially his late-career renaissance, which has included excellent recent albums like “Skeleton Tree” and “Ghosteen.” He and the Bad Seeds have two opportunities to finally take home a trophy next year: “Song of the Lake” is nominated for best alternative music performance and “Wild God” is nominated for best alternative album.▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube2. Arooj Aftab: “Raat Ki Rani”In 2022, the composer and vocalist Arooj Aftab became the first Pakistani woman ever to win a Grammy, when her incantatory “Mohabbat” was awarded best global music performance. She’s nominated again in that category, for this hypnotizing, appropriately nocturnal track named for a night-blooming flower. The LP on which it appears, the enchanting “Night Reign,” also received a nod for best alternative jazz album.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Plant and Krauss Cover a Led Zeppelin Classic, and 12 More New Songs

      by

      Hear tracks by Soccer Mommy, Tems, Floating Points and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, ‘When the Levee Breaks’No one is more entitled to cover Led Zeppelin than its singer, Robert Plant. His close-harmony duo with the singer and fiddler Alison Krauss excels at making songs sound far older than they are, and even in 1971, “When the Levee Breaks” harked back to a vintage blues by Memphis Minnie. This live recording is stark, resonant and rumbling, with a fiddle solo by Stuart Duncan that looks toward both Ireland and Morocco and a cranked-up guitar stomp that builds toward — alas! — a frustrating fade-out. JON PARELESCarly Pearce, ‘Truck on Fire’The spoiler is in the title of “Truck on Fire,” a swinging country revenge song from Carly Pearce’s new album, “Hummingbird.” Her voice seethes as she recalls “the way that you laughed it off when I was catching on/Said it was in my head,” and there’s a dark glee (and a product placement) while she watches the “flames rolling off of your Goodyear tires.” PARELESSabrina Carpenter, ‘Please Please Please’We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 75 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Tems, R&B’s Golden Child, Dials In

      by

      When the ground began to shake, rocking her bed to-and-fro like a raft in a current, Temilade Openiyi briefly wondered if she was dreaming. It was a bright April morning and she was still jet lagged from a flight — 12 hours from Lagos, Nigeria, to New York. It seemed unlikely that her hotel could actually be vibrating. And yet there she was, eyes wide open, bobbing along with everything else in the room.Openiyi, better known as Tems, had stopped on the East Coast on her way to Los Angeles, where she would soon begin rehearsals for her debut appearance at the Coachella music festival. It would be one in a swiftly multiplying series of firsts for the singer, songwriter and producer, whose music slides between R&B, pop and Afrobeats: her first album, “Born in the Wild,” due June 7 from RCA; its first single, the blissful party starter “Love Me JeJe”; her first headlining world tour, kicking off June 11. As far as milestones are concerned, a first earthquake was just another line in the tally.Tems, a faithful Christian, believes none of it has been in her control. When the earthquake subsided (magnitude 4.8), she said a prayer thanking God for granting her another day.“You can be planning your whole life and then something happens and it’s just done,” she said dryly, in an interview later that day. “You can control what you do, but you can’t control how life lifes.”Tems said she has embraced life as a warrior. “Even if they cut your leg, you walk on your knees, you fight on your knees using what you have — and that’s good enough.”Erik Carter for The New York TimesIt would be easy to attribute Tems’s vertiginous career trajectory to divine intervention. Since her appearance on the Afrobeats star Wizkid’s summer-conquering single “Essence” in 2020, she has become the first African artist to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 (via “Wait for U,” a Future song also featuring Drake); won a Grammy for best melodic rap performance; and been nominated for an Oscar, for “Lift Me Up,” a song from the “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” soundtrack that she co-wrote for Rihanna after the singer messaged her on Instagram saying she was “obsessed.” In 2022, Tems was a writer and performer on “Move” — also featuring Grace Jones — from Beyoncé’s “Renaissance,” confirming her status as one of the most in-demand and closely watched young artists in the world.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Nicki Minaj and Drake Reunite, and 10 More New Songs

      by

      Hear tracks by Tems, Idles, Adrianne Lenker and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Nicki Minaj featuring Drake, ‘Needle’Thirteen years ago, on her debut studio album “Pink Friday,” Nicki Minaj recruited her Young Money labelmate and fellow rising star Drake for the galvanizing hit “Moment 4 Life.” They join forces once again on “Needle,” a noticeably more laid-back and atmospheric track from Minaj’s long-teased “Pink Friday 2,” which demonstrates how both of these rappers — and the sound of rap music itself — have changed in the intervening years. Drake calls back to the island cadences of his “Views” era, lilting a somewhat strained metaphor: “You’re like a needle, life’s a haystack.” Minaj raps as if on cruise control, characteristically dexterous (“Poppin’ out like a cork/duckin’ ’em like Björk”) if zoologically confused; Nicki, it was a swan dress! LINDSAY ZOLADZTems, ‘Not an Angel’Afrobeats turns inward in the Nigerian songwriter Tems’s “Not an Angel” — an emphatic good-riddance song with lines like, “I was alone when I was with you,” “All you did was give me nothing” and “Right now it’s going nowhere but the graveyard.” Programmed percussion and a moody guitar lick carry her rising resentment and self-realization: “I’m not an angel — I’m just a girl that knows the truth,” she sings, moving into sync with the beat as she pulls away from her ex. JON PARELESWishy, ‘Spinning’Can a band be classified as shoegaze if its head is in the clouds? Such is the delightful paradox posed by Wishy, a promising new group from Indiana releasing its debut EP “Paradise” next Friday. Echoing the spirit of millennial dream-pop acts like the Pains of Being Pure at Heart and A Sunny Day in Glasgow, Wishy’s latest single “Spinning” layers textured guitar, a driving breakbeat and Nina Pitchkites’s airy vocals to create a sumptuous sound. “Spinning around on the kitchen floor,” she sings. “I don’t know what I’m dancing for.” Prepare to do the same. ZOLADZIdles, ‘Grace’The British band Idles generally play sinewy, irascible post-punk songs, but every so often the singer Joe Talbot confesses to vulnerability, as he does in “Grace.” It’s a secular prayer: “No God, no king/I said love is the thing,” Talbot sings. He both longs for and offers refuge and compassion; behind him, the band gnashes and clatters and eventually erupts, but his determined humility lingers. PARELESElephant Gym featuring Yile Lin, ‘Happy Prince’Elephant Gym, a bass-guitar-drums trio from Taiwan, plays a nimble, jazzy kind of math-rock, paced by the hopscotching bass lines of KT Chang and the guitar counterpoint of her brother Tell Chang. “Happy Prince” is loosely based on a children’s story by Oscar Wilde. With bright-eyed guest vocals by Yile Lin, from the band Freckles, “Happy Prince” breezes along, shifting meters and taking chromatic turns; every so often, it explodes. PARELESNnamdi, ‘Going Crazy’A snippet of children singing “We’re all going crazy” led the Chicago pop experimentalist Nnamdi to come up with “Going Crazy.” It appears at assorted speeds, over assorted chords and drum-machine beats, as he croons in falsetto about how “I been up working harder every night” and “I just want to have a little fun” — a workaholic’s jovial complaints. PARELESUsher and H.E.R., ‘Risk It All’It hardly gets more old-school than “Risk It All,” a duet from Usher and H.E.R. — from the soundtrack to “The Color Purple” — that’s happy to risk vocal close-ups: call-and-response, tag-teaming, overlapping, sharing. Little more than piano chords accompany the duo, who sound like they were singing to each other in real time throughout the song, though they couldn’t resist overdubbing some extra harmony vocals. Even so, there’s an unadorned, intimate physicality to the romantic sentiments. PARELESAdrianne Lenker, ‘Ruined’This sparse, movingly fragile song from the Big Thief frontwoman Adrianne Lenker is a dispatch from the most devastating kind of obsession: “Can’t get enough of you,” Lenker sings in a warbled falsetto. “You come around, I’m ruined.” Accompanied by just a haunting piano and eerie, echoing effects, Lenker’s plain-spoken vulnerability becomes, by the end of the song, a kind of strength. ZOLADZEliza McLamb, ‘16’Eliza McLamb, a songwriter who’s also a podcaster, revisits a period of severe teenage trauma — her mother’s mental illness, her own self-destructive compulsions — in “16”; it’s from her album due in January, “Going Through It.” Deep, sustained synthesizer tones accompany her breathy voice, offering the stability — or numbness — she longs for. PARELESKaren Vogt, ‘We Coalesce’Layers of wordless, echoey vocal loops, with hints of modal melody, are the makings of “We Coalesce,” one of the eerie, undulating pieces Karen Vogt recorded while mourning her cat. PARELESVijay Iyer Trio, ‘Prelude: Orison’If Vijay Iyer’s music was big for you this year, it was probably thanks to “Love in Exile,” the much-beloved album he released with Arooj Aftab and Shahzad Ismaily. Though cool-blooded and almost ambient, that LP was swept by an undercurrent of disquiet — a feeling the pianist embraces even further in his other working trio, with the bassist Linda Oh and the drummer Tyshawn Sorey. Their 2021 debut, “Uneasy,” was an itchy and stimulating affair inspired, as Iyer said ahead of its release, by the awareness “that this thing Americans love to call freedom is not what it appears to be.” Well, wait. Is there some paradox lurking here? How is instrumental music that sounds so elevated and indirect supposed to upend our most basic assumptions? To which another question might provide the response: Processing the news these days, have you felt angry, frustrated or helpless? If that resonates, this trio’s music would like to help you make some sense of that sensation — and maybe even sidestep it, pushing toward some kind of confrontation. (“Uneasy” includes “Combat Breathing,” a rhythmic call-to-action inspired by Black Lives Matter organizers.) The new, tempo-slurring “Prelude: Orison,” is languid, diaphanous, harmonically canted. Whenever it briefly resolves, it starts the cycle over again. It’s as if this band wants to both seduce you and discomfit you, stripping you of everything but the ability to think and see for yourself. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO More