R&B's next vibe shift is here. These 2025 albums are proof

R&B's next vibe shift is here. These 2025 albums are proof After a decade of chilly trap beats and freaky club tales, the tide is turning on the genre's dominant sound Dijon Duenas, who performs mononymously as Dijon, was one of 2025's breakout voices, both as a collaborator for R&B-leaning pop stars and an artist in his own right. Yana Yatsuk hide caption toggle caption 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...

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