In many ways, R&B music is like reggae or other highly specialized genres of music that are ultimately more about feeling than technique, which is why novices and dilletantes fall so hard when they try and fail.
That’s also a reason why an album by an artist like Brent Faiyaz, hailed by many as a leading light for R&B, crushes so many of the other hopeful entries into the genre: The man is such a gifted singer and songwriter that he could probably sneeze and it would sound soulful.
The sound of “Icon,” his second and latest full-length (amid multiple EPs, a mixtape, singles and features with Drake, Alicia Keys, 21 Savage and more), is fully forward looking while acknowledging and building on the foundation of multiple influences and forebears. There’s the innovation of Prince, Lauryn Hill, D’Angelo and Frank Ocean (Faiyaz’s voice is sped-up or slowed-down in many places on this album) but also flashes of more mainstream precedents like Luther Vandross, Jodeci and Usher.
The arrangements are largely electronic, particularly the beats, but the most vivid instrument is his versatile, multi-tracked voice, which recalls the best work of Mary J. Blige, Beyonce and of course Prince in making one voice sound like many. His voice(s) take on the supporting melodic role ordinarily played by keyboards, guitars and horns, making for a sound that your ears know is different, but it’s done so skillfully that you don’t immediately realize why it’s different.
Yet even when he’s not laying it on thick, his voice is a marvel, flipping into a loverman or yearning falsetto (especially on “World Is Yours”), Michael Jackson bite or Motown playfulness with ease.
The album is barely a half hour long — that’s including a two-minute orchestral intro track — but covers loads of territory. The mid-tempo, sultry R&B grooves of the aforementioned artists is the main course, but there are ballads, pop songs and even a semi-acoustic track.
A key to the album’s soulfulness and consistency is executive producer Rafael Saadiq, who has added that refinement to albums and songs by D’Angelo, Solange, Mary J. Blige, Erykah Badu and many others.
And a key to Faiyaz’s slightly under-the-radar profile, even though he’s been releasing music for a dozen years, is the fact that he is a fully independent artist, releasing this album under ISO Supremacy, the label and creative agency he co-founded in 2023.
At 31 minutes, “Icon” is over much too soon — we kinda wish he’d gone full Summer Walker on it — but the album is so musically versatile and multifaceted that you can play it over and over without getting tired of it.