20 Neo-Soul Records Everyone Should Own

As one of the first signees on Madonna‘s Maverick imprint, Berlin-born Michelle Lynn Johnson (best known as Meshell Ndegeocello) exhibited a brave Afrocentric worldview on her gripping 1993 debut, Plantation Lullabies. 

The album’s lead single and defining track, “If That’s Your Boyfriend (He Wasn’t Last Night),” found Ndegeocello laying down a sassy clapback to an angry girlfriend who confronts her for creeping around her man over a hard-hitting groove. Her sensual, androgynous voice and jazz sensibilities on “Dred Loc” and “Outside Your Door” cemented her as a master of seductive, free-flowing love songs.

This trailblazing landmark set a precedent for artists who drew from its rich music heritage and progressive themes that brought them fame during the mid-90s into the 2000s.

Following the breakout success of their second album, 1990’s The Revival, Oakland natives Tony! Toni! Toné! pursued greater artistic ambition on their third album, Sons of Soul.

Raphael Wiggins (best known as Raphael Saadiq), his brother D’Wayne Wiggins, and cousin Timothy Christian Riley became R&B’s defining revivalists, crafting a 13-song soul opus that melded vintage sounds with dancehall and hip-hop styles.

The Tonies raise their penchant for eclecticism to internationalist levels, embracing thumping dancehall flavors as well as delirium-charged London-reared acid jazz. The pillow talk of “Slow Wine” and “(Lay Your Head on My) Pillow” finds the band at their silkiest, evoking the best quiet storm jams that The Isley Brothers never wrote.  

Way before Erykah Badu, Kelis, Macy Gray, and Janelle Monáe arrived on the scene, there was 22-year-old Tennesse-born Joi Gilliam. Wise beyond her years and downright fearless, she shattered R&B’s glass ceiling like her pioneering heroes, Betty Davis, Labelle, and Chaka Khan, did two decades prior. A liberated spirit whose crystalline voice could be aggressive and coy, Joi enlisted Atlanta music wonder child Dallas Austin to helm her 1994 debut, The Pendulum Vibe.

Weaving industrial funk-rock, politically-charged feminist anthems, jazzy grooves, and even a Georgian chant into an atmospheric whole, The Pendulum Vibe proved too ahead of the curve to reach mainstream success. Madonna loved Joi’s innovative and bold sound on The Pendulum Vibe so much that she enlisted the production talents of Dallas Austin to produce material for her 1994 album, Bedtime Stories.

D’Angelo first splashed onto the music scene in 1994 when he co-wrote and produced “U Will Know” for the all-star supergroup Black Men United (B.M.U.) But he rewrote modern R&B’s game plan a year later with his debut album, Brown Sugar.

Countering sample-reliant R&B of the time, D’Angelo’s organic take on old-school soul combined his voice with the Hammond B-3 organ and Wurlitzer piano-driven melodies rooted in jazz, hip-hop, Delta blues, and gospel.

Not only did he handle production and play multiple instruments — including guitar, bass, drums, and keys — but he also teamed up with notable figures like A Tribe Called Quest’s Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Raphael Saadiq, and engineer Bob Power.

Three decades since its release, there’s no denying the power of classics like “Brown Sugar,” “Lady,” or “Me and Those Dreamin’ Eyes of Mine.” You can feel Prince‘s influence all over his vocal style on the album, particularly on the title track and “Alright” as well as in the rapturous nature of the gospel-rooted closer, “Higher.”

Concept albums seemed passé in contemporary R&B until 23-year-old Maxwell emerged. Taking cues from Marvin Gaye’s mid-’70s work, I Want You and Here, My Dear, as well as Prince’s peak-era classics, Maxwell championed ’70s soul and funk with the help of Sade alum, Stuart Matthewman, session guitarist Wah Wah Watson, and soul maestro, Leon Ware. 

The result was Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite, a romantic song cycle that traced the monogamous relationship between two young lovers, from their first meeting to matrimony. From the scratchy vinyl funk of “The Urban Suite” to the slow-build seduction of “The Suite Theme,” this is as much first-rate modern soul as it is dance-floor friendly.

Black-casted films were always crucial to the movies themselves. More often than not, they attracted chart-topping acts, garnered commercial hits, and stood as musical extensions of the film’s stories and themes. Among other major ‘90s soundtracks like New Jack City, Boomerang, Mo’ Money, Waiting to Exhale, and The Best Man, Love Jones is pure excellence.

The cult romantic drama and its soundtrack owed much of their success to neo-soul’s increasing appeal in the mainstream. Traversing original material from prominent acts in R&B, hip-hop, and contemporary jazz fields, such as Dionne Farris, Maxwell, Lauryn Hill, and Cassandra Wilson (“You Move Me,”) along with vintage jazz classics like Duke Ellington & John Coltrane’s “In a Sentimental Mood,” these eclectic selections drove the film’s love-filled arc while saluting the Black romantic music of the past and present.  

Donning an Afrocentric style and earthy demeanor, Dallas-born goddess Erykah Badu served Black bohemian realness on her landmark 1997 debut, Baduizm. Furthermore, her style evoked the spirit of Diana Ross, Sade, and Billie Holiday while maintaining her distinctive lyrical expression.

On the album’s lead single, “On & On,” her sharp, sultry rasp and use of repetitive lyrical motifs mixed Five-Percent Nation ideologies with be-bop jazz allure. Her heartfelt laments on complicated love on slow-burners like “Other Side of the Game” struck a profound chord with many. 

Amidst the turbulence unfurling with the Fugees and her personal life, Lauryn Hill poured herself into her solo debut, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. This introspective opus subverted plastic late-’90s hip-hop and R&B trends, weighing Hill’s striking rebukes on industry politics, materialism, society, and hip-hop, with personal insights on love, motherhood, and life.

Her fierce rapping style was never more visceral, but her singing broke new ground and gave these songs their emotional center. Its musical fabric branched out from the hip-hop of her Fugees days, blending classic soul, reggae, pop, gospel, and funk into a sound that took the world by storm.

Miseducation’s wide appeal and reach are evident in the use of Caribbean patois and religious texts in her lyricism and the diverse collaborations. Guitar god Carlos Santana, hip-hop soul queen Mary J. Blige, and soul giant D’Angelo all made guest appearances.

Three decades later, this earth-shattering debut still awaits a worthy follow-up.

On his second album, Embrya, Maxwell took his ’70s-styled bedroom soul into a free-form, outré direction. As its aquatic cover suggests, the trance-like, ambient funk grooves crash and fall like sea waves while Maxwell’s sexy, glowing vocals float and wander.

The record is largely a concept album about the self, being reborn in the newness of romance, and spirituality. Embrya‘s richly textured progressive sound alienated many critics and fans at the time. But history has shown that it set a sonic precedent for future left-field, alternative R&B endeavors.

Twenty years deep in the music game, Angie Stone’s road toward a viable solo career was long and hard. She was a hip-hop pioneer, fronting the first-ever female rap group signed on Sugar Hill Records, the Sequence.

As an in-demand singer, she performed on works by Lenny Kravitz and Mantronix, before becoming the lead singer of the trio Vertical Hold and co-writing material for Brown Sugar. But when her solo debut, Black Diamond, dropped in the summer of 1999, she put difficult life lessons on display.

Equipped with an expressive alto evoking the feistiness of Chaka Khan and Gladys Knight‘s warmth, Stone pulled no punches with her gripping tales of survival, salvation, and relationships over mellow funk grooves and old-school soul ballads. 

In the wake of Brown Sugar‘s success, D’Angelo decamped at Electric Lady Studios to deepen his soul and funk vocabulary with a motley crew of musicians. This five-year gestation spawned his long-awaited magnum opus, Voodoo. Honoring Black music’s past, D’Angelo went for a free-flowing jazz-funk style and flipped the R&B game upside down.

The spare, slow-burn grooves that D’Angelo and his Soulquarian comrades aimed for were no fluke. The atmosphere is brooding, sleazy, and impenetrably dense, but Voodoo‘s greatest charm is in the emotion. It distills the purest expression of D’Angelo’s personalities, anxieties, and idiosyncrasies—at their most fragile, socially conscious, transcendental, and righteous (“The Line.”)

The joys and fate of intimacy always weighed on D’Angelo’s mind, but he never revealed it so organically as he did here. Nearly a quarter-century later, it’s still hard to imagine what 21st-century R&B and soul would’ve been without its seductive allure, hypnotic atmosphere, and heady, laid-back grooves.

Cited by some as the sister album to D’Angelo’s Voodoo, Erykah Badu recorded her fully realized successor to Baduizm, Mama’s Gun, during the same span of other seminal albums from the Soulquarians crew at New York’s Electric Lady Studios.

Lyrically direct and musically eclectic, Badu wore her heart on her sleeve, tackling broader social commentary over brash Rufus & Chaka Khan funk, self-discovery on uptown hip-hop soul beats, and personal evolution in reflective ballads. Although it was a sleeper hit upon its November 2000 release, this masterpiece fortified Badu’s position as a prominent music figure.

A soulful, forthright poet in Philadelphia’s spoken-word circuit, Jill Scott already made her musical mark, penning fellow Philadelphian hip-hop band, the Roots‘ 1999 Grammy-winning single, “You Got Me.” The stirring realism she poured into that song bled into her sensational 19-song debut, Who is Jill Scott? – Words and Sounds Vol. 1.

Drawn upon her experiences and Philadelphia’s rich musical heritage, Scott swerved from lush soul on romance and intimacy to beat poetry on everything from intimacy to government surveillance. Scott’s boundless voice and relatability impacted Black communities near and far, particularly young women in the new millennium.

As the former one-half of New York duo Groove Theory, Amel Larrieux‘s jazz-trained voice left a spellbinding impression. Sensuous and angelic, her scats and knack for fusing African and spiritual Middle Eastern stylings in her vocal approach stood out as a distinct sound.

Imbuing the spirit of an obscure late-70s soul-jazz record, her long-awaited solo debut, Infinite Possibilities showcased themes of personal growth and emotional depth over a sea of jazzed-out ethereal grooves, courtesy of producer-husband Laru Larrieux. While the album wasn’t a massive commercial success, it garnered critical acclaim, securing Larrieux’s place as one of the most versatile artists in R&B music. 

For many, the weepy James Brown-sampled ballad “Fallin’” was their formal introduction to the prodigious talents of 20-year-old Alicia Keys. Sincere and street-smart without being mawkish, Keys’ breathy voice and piano prowess set the course for this career-defining debut, Songs in A Minor, packing in old-school R&B, classical flourishes, and cool hip-hop swagger with ease. Tipping her hat to pioneers Isaac Hayes and Prince on “Rock wit U,” she claimed her place as one of R&B’s gifted torchbearers.

Singer-songwriter India.Arie‘s self-assurance was a refreshing rarity among other young R&B starlets. Her first single, “Video,” doubled as a self-love manifesto and a rebuttal of hypersexed, image-conscious ideals fueling the music industry. Its low-key, intimate parent album, Acoustic Soul, offered Arie’s timely food for thoughts on Black relationships, womanhood, and self-acceptance over an organic blending of ’70s R&B, folk, gospel, and hip-hop rhythms.

Dubbed “gospeldelic” to avert from the neo-soul label he loathed, Raphael Saadiq’s long-awaited 2002 solo debut, Instant Vintage, is a first-rate demonstration of his incomparable talents as a musical polymath. Saadiq sets his true-to-life messages on Oakland life, fame, post-9/11 society, spirituality, and love against lush Philly soul-esque orchestrations, intricately crafted melodies, and tight bass grooves. As if its music wasn’t impressive enough, Saadiq brought a few diverse guests onboard, like D’Angelo, TLC‘s T-Boz, Angie Stone, and New Birth singer Leslie Wilson.

Stevie Wonder’s influence is felt in much of contemporary R&B, but his closest musical heir is Atlanta native Donnie Johnson. Brimming with warm grooves evoking Wonder’s classic ’70s period, it wouldn’t be a stretch to cite his stunning 2002 debut, The Colored Section as a modern-day equivalent to Innervisions.

Fiercely reflective and conscious, Donnie followed the path of Wonder, his second cousin, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, Donny Hathaway, and other socially conscious giants with his progressive social critiques on Jim Crow, Black pride, sexism, identity, and homophobia.

Great wife and husband duos are a true rarity in contemporary R&B. Following Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson‘s elegant romantic soul legacy, Philadelphia’s Aja Graydon and Fatin Dantzler filled a major void.

Across the dazzling selections of their 2003 Hidden Beach debut, Surrender to Love, the soulful duo taps into their everyday realities as a working-class Black couple, covering the varied aspects of love, social issues, and family. Equally impressive is their skilled backing band, adept at melding a rich variety of styles — classic soul, earthy jazz-funk, soft rock, and hip-hop-infected R&B.

While he backed D’Angelo on his Voodoo tour and co-wrote a hit for Donnell Jones, singer-songwriter Anthony Hamilton’s solo career took a while to gain momentum. But he rose to full prominence in 2003 with his So So Def debut, Comin’ From Where I’m From.

Despite its contemporary flourishes, the album’s down-home southern aura mostly sounds like Hamilton recorded it at a Memphis recording studio in 1973 rather than 2002. His gritty baritone evokes Bill Withers, Al Green, and Bobby Womack, conveying deep passion and well-lived pain across a mix of love songs and political statements.