D'Angelo

About

Few artists reshaped R&B the way D'Angelo did. His 1995 debut Brown Sugar is widely credited with kicking off the neo soul movement, and it did so with a cover of Smokey Robinson's "Cruisin'", the top ten hit "Lady", and the title track becoming instant touchstones. Five years later, Voodoo landed at number one on the Billboard 200 and cemented his reputation with "Untitled (How Does It Feel)", a Grammy winning slow burn that came with a music video that made him an unwilling sex symbol. Rolling Stone eventually ranked Voodoo 28th on their list of the 500 greatest albums ever. The attention and the pressures that followed pushed D'Angelo into years of depression, drug addiction and alcoholism, and he largely vanished from public life. Then in 2014, without much fanfare, he dropped Black Messiah through D'Angelo and the Vanguard. It topped critics' polls, won Best R&B Album at the Grammys, and showed him completely reinventing his sound for a third time. He also contributed the haunting "Unshaken" to the Red Dead Redemption 2 soundtrack in 2018. He was working on a fourth album when he died in 2025.