Funk, Soul, & R&B

Back to Black is the second and final studio album by English singer and songwriter Amy Winehouse, released on 27 October 2006 by Island Records. The album spawned five singles: "Rehab", "You Know I'm No Good", "Back to Black", "Tears Dry on Their Own" and "Love Is a Losing Game". Back to Black was acclaimed by music critics, who praised Salaam Remi and Mark Ronson's production, as well as Winehouse's songwriting and emotive singing style.

At the 50th Annual Grammy Awards ceremony, Back to Black won Best Pop Vocal Album and was also nominated for Album of the Year. At the same ceremony, Winehouse won four additional awards meaning that she ties with five other artists as the second-most awarded female in a single ceremony. Back to Black sold 3.58 million copies in the UK alone, becoming the UK's second best-selling album of the 21st century. By 2013, the album had sold over 12 million copies worldwide.

Ctrl (pronounced "control") is the debut studio album by American singer and songwriter SZA. It was released on June 9, 2017, on Top Dawg Entertainment/RCA Records.

SZA wrote most of the album's lyrics and collaborated with producers including Craig Balmoris, Frank Dukes, Carter Lang, Scum and ThankGod4Cody to achieve its sound. The efforts resulted in a primarily neo-soul and R&B album, with elements of hip-hop, electronic, indie and soul. Lyrically the album has a confessional theme, which touch upon SZA's personal experiences and complexities of modern love; including desire, competition, jealousy, sexual politics, social media and low self-esteem.

The album was released to acclaim from music critics. It debuted at number three on the US Billboard 200, moving 60,000 equivalent-album units in its first full-tracking week. It generated the singles Drew Barrymore, Love Galore, The Weekend, and Broken Clocks. As of October 2017, the album has been certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America for accumulating over 500,000 in album-equivalent units and pure sales. The album and its songs were nominated for four Grammy Awards, while SZA was nominated for Best New Artist.

Limited vinyl LP repressing in gatefold jacket. Thriller is the sixth solo studio album by Michael Jackson. It was released by Epic Records on November 30, 1982, as the follow-up to Jackson's critically and commercially successful 1979 album Off The Wall. Thriller explores similar genres to those of Off The Wall, including pop, post-disco, rock and funk. Recording sessions took place on April to November 1982 at Westlake Recording Studios in Los Angeles with a production budget of $750, 000, assisted by producer Quincy Jones. Seven singles were released from the album, all of which reached the Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100. In just over a year, Thriller became-and currently remains-the best-selling album of all time, with estimated sales of 65 million copies worldwide. It has become the first album ever to be certified 32 times multi-platinum for U.S. sales, marking more than 32 million sales shipped. The album won a record-breaking eight Grammy Awards in 1984, including for Album of the Year.

"Tyler, the Creator’s sixth album is impressionistic and emotionally charged, the result of an auteur refining his style and baring more of his soul than ever before."

 

Vinyl LP pressing in gatefold jacket. 2019 release. Igor is the fifth studio album by rapper Tyler, The Creator. Produced entirely by Tyler, the album follows the 2017 release of Flower Boy. It features guest appearances from Playboi Carti, Lil Uzi Vert, Solange, Kanye West, and Jerrod Carmichael, along with backing vocals from Santigold, Jessy Wilson, La Roux, CeeLo Green, Charlie Wilson, Slowthai, and Pharrell, among others.

Limited 180gm vinyl LP pressing including d i g i t a l d o w n l o a d. 2018 release. The river of soul music flows on deep and strong, and 26-year-old Leon Bridges is immersed in it's life-giving current. The Forth Worth, Texas native and Grammy Award-nominated Columbia Records artist released his Gold-selling, debut album, Coming Home, in June of 2015 to critical and public acclaim. "I'm not saying I can hold a candle to any soul musician from the '50s and '60s," Bridges says, "but I want to carry the torch.". 2018 sees Bridges release his highly anticipated second album, Good Thing. Though Bridges has drawn comparisons to Marvin Gaye and Sam Cooke, the millennial artist has spent his time in between albums making surprising collaborations with those outside of his designated genre. Bridges has toured with pop dreamboat Harry Styles and has been featured on tracks with rapper Lecrae and EDM duo ODESZA.

2015 Paisley Park remastered edition overseen by Prince. Includes original 1984 packaging including poster and lyric sleeve. 180-gram vinyl.

Purple Rain is the sixth studio album by American recording artist Prince, the first to feature his band The Revolution, and is the soundtrack to the 1984 film of the same name. It was released on June 25, 1984 by Warner Bros. Records. To date, it has sold over 25 million copies worldwide, making it the third-best-selling soundtrack album of all time.

Purple Rain is regularly ranked among the best albums in music history, and is widely regarded as Prince's magnum opus. Time magazine ranked it the 15th greatest album of all time in 1993, and it placed 18th on VH1's Greatest Rock and Roll Albums of All Time countdown. Rolling Stone ranked it the second-best album of the 1980s and 76th on their list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". The first two singles from Purple Rain, "When Doves Cry" and "Let's Go Crazy", topped the US singles charts, and were hits around the world, while the title track went to number two on the Billboard Hot 100. The album was certified thirteen-times platinum (diamond) by the RIAA.

Double vinyl LP pressing. 2012 release from the Compton-based Hip Hop artist. Currently signed to Top Dawg, Aftermath and lnterscope. Lamar is a member of Hip Hop supergroup Black Hippy, along with fellow West Coast rappers and label mates Jay Rock. Schoolboy Q and Ab-Soul. He first gained major attention after being mentioned by Dr. Dre resulting in a buzz for the, then upcoming. Release of his fourth mixtape. Early in his career, Lamar amassed a large internet following, and had already worked with Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Wiz Khalifa, Game, Drake, Rick Ross, Meek Mill, Talib Kweli, Lady Gaga, Kid Cudi, Busta Rhymes, E-40, Warren G, Bun B, Tech N9ne and Lil Wayne among other popular artists.

Double vinyl LP pressing. 2018 release, the fifth studio album by rapper Mac Miller. Includes the single "Self Care." Mac has accomplished every goal he ever set for himself. At least that's what the magazines say about the Pittsburgh kid, and they're right enough. With his first album, he became a grassroots rap megastar. With his second he bared his weird soul and was praised for it. His 11 mixtapes boast a couple bucket lists' worth of collaborators, from Bun B and Kendrick Lamar to Rick Ross and Juicy J. And in the same year that he toured the U.S. backed by a psychedelic soul band, he rapped all over Europe with Lil Wayne and 2 Chainz. He did indie. He's doing major. He even bought himself a ridiculous house in the Los Angeles hills and made a TV show about it. Hell, he made a jazz record.

The ten time Grammy Award winning musical phenomenon, rapper, producer and singer embarks on a new musical journey taking his audience to new heights. Kanye West returns with his fourth album 808s & Heartbreak. His highly anticipated 2008 album features the heart pounding first single, 'Love Lockdown' which premiered live for the first time on the 2008 MTV Video Music Awards.

Are You Experienced is the debut studio album by English-American rock band the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Released in 1967, the LP was an immediate critical and commercial success, and it is widely regarded as one of the greatest debuts in the history of rock music. The album features Jimi Hendrix's innovative approach to songwriting and electric guitar playing which soon established a new direction in psychedelic and hard rock music.

By mid-1966, Hendrix was struggling to earn a living playing the R&B circuit as a backing guitarist. After being referred to Chas Chandler, who was leaving the Animals and interested in managing and producing artists, Hendrix was signed to a management and production contract with Chandler and ex-Animals manager Michael Jeffery. Chandler brought Hendrix to London and began recruiting members for a band designed to showcase the guitarist's talents, the Jimi Hendrix Experience. In late October, after having been rejected by Decca Records, the Experience signed with Track, a new label formed by the Who's managers Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp.

Are You Experienced and its preceding singles were recorded over a five-month period from late October 1966 through early April 1967. The album was completed in sixteen recording sessions at three London locations, including De Lane Lea Studios, CBS, and Olympic. Released in the UK on May 12, 1967, Are You Experienced spent 33 weeks on the charts, peaking at number two. The album was issued in the US on August 23 by Reprise Records, where it reached number five on the Billboard 200, remaining on the chart for 106 weeks, 27 of those in the Top 40. The album also spent 70 weeks on the US Billboard R&B chart, where it peaked at #10. The US version contained some of Hendrix's best known songs, including the Experience's first three singles, which, though omitted from the British edition of the LP, were top ten hits in the UK: "Purple Haze", "Hey Joe", and "The Wind Cries Mary".

In 2005, Rolling Stone ranked Are You Experienced fifteenth on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. They placed four songs from the album on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time: "Purple Haze" (17), "Foxy Lady" (153), "Hey Joe" (201), and "The Wind Cries Mary" (379). That same year, the record was one of 50 recordings chosen by the Library of Congress in recognition of its cultural significance to be added to the National Recording Registry. Writer and archivist Rueben Jackson of the Smithsonian Institution wrote: "it's still a landmark recording because it is of the rock, R&B, blues ... musical tradition. It altered the syntax of the music ... in a way I compare to James Joyce's Ulysses."

Limited picture disc vinyl LP pressing features the original album art plus an iconic image from the Bad cover photo shoot. Bad is the seventh studio album by Michael Jackson, originally released on August 31, 1987. It was released nearly five years after Jackson's previous solo studio album, Thriller (1982). The album continued Jackson's commercial success in the late 1980s, and garnered six Grammy Award nominations, winning two. The album produced a record five Billboard Hot 100 #1 singles. Bad was ranked #43 in the 100 Greatest Albums of All Time of the MTV Generation in 2009 by VH1 and number 202 in Rolling Stone magazine's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Bad has sold an estimated 35 million copies worldwide and has been cited as one of the best-selling albums of all time.

Double vinyl pressing, vinyl album 12" & 45 rpm disc(s). 2011 posthumous release, a collection of previously unreleased tracks, alternate versions of existing classics, as well as a couple of brand new Amy compositions. Following her tragic passing, some of the producers and musicians who worked closely with Amy Winehouse, among them Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi, spent time listening over the many recordings that Amy had made, before, during, and after the release of Frank and Back to Black. It was said by all who worked with Amy that she never sang or played a song the same way twice. It quickly became apparent to Salaam and Mark that they had a collection of songs that deserved to be heard, a collection of songs that were a fitting treatment to Amy the artist and, as importantly, Amy the friend.

Indie version colored vinyl ! Pre-order! Available 6/26.  Mordechai is a story of finding yourself in unexpected places. Travel weary and without a home after 24 itinerant months of travel and touring, Laura Lee went on a hike with a family of strangers, led by a father named Mordechai. Here, on this least expected journey after so many others, she found spiritual awakening and rebirth. Known already for drawing on the music of locales like Thailand and Iran, Khruangbin found their most diverse and global influence by looking inward, returning to their hometown and America's most diverse city: Houston, TX. With Laura Lee's voice now clear and centered amid a glossolalia of musical influence and 14 languages, Khruangbin have found singularity in multiplicity.

"The dancer wants to get in a groove and stay there until he has exhausted his invention or his body. The timescale and momentum of any physical activity is vastly different from the attention span of listening."

Albert Goldman "A good remix is when the remixer's sonic fingerprint is present, without sounding forced. It should feel like it's own story, with at least some of the same characters as the original." Khruangbin The art of the remix has been around for several decades, from the fervid imaginations of JA pioneers like Coxsone Dodd, Duke Reid or King Tubby to the disco enthusiasts of New York, such as Tom Moulton, who bequeathed us the modern iteration of the remix and provided a template from which most remixers still work. Moulton's first commercial remix, a reworking of BT Express' appropriately-named 'Do It 'Till You're Satisfied', which stretched it from three minutes to a luxurious five, assisted the band in securing it's first Billboard R&B Number One, as well as providing a pathway for remixers like Walter Gibbons, Larry Levan, Richie Rivera and Tee Scott, to completely reinvent the concept of a remix (and in some instances, deconstructing the idea of what comprised a song). It has subsequently been used as a marketing tool, a dancefloor-devastator, a gimmick (both cheap and expensive) or even as a way of reaching a different audience (think Tori Amos' 'Professional Widow'). Khruangbin are no slouches when it comes to the remix themselves. They've been reworked before, in 2016, with the highly collectible EP on Boogiefuturo. But this time, they're taking it a step further with an album dedicated to the art. Entering the tight-knit world of a Khruangbin song can be a little daunting. They have created this entire universe in which the trio seem to function telepathically in the way the music is composed, arranged and played. To mess with their delicate eco-system can invoke feelings similar to that of an unwanted guest crashing a good-time party. "We write our music to be interpreted; this is another wonderful interpretation of the music," reassure Khruangbin. "There is something very vulnerable about letting others work on your music. But through the correspondence with the different artists, we gained a bigger connection to the songs themselves." The choice of remixers for this album is neither arbitrary nor accidental. They're not names picked randomly out of a hat or chosen via a throw of the dice. All have some connection to the band, sometimes personal friendships, musical connections, or simply mutual musical appreciation. Harvey Sutherland and Ginger Roots have both toured with the band, Kadhja Bonet and Ron Trent had their own mutual fan club going on, Knxwledge sampled 'White Gloves' on a recent mixtape, Natasha Diggs and Soul Clap's Eli's are recent buddy-ups, Quantic is a mutual friend of Bonobo (crucial in the KB origin story), while I've known Laura for number of years; plus she is also godmother to one of Felix Dickinson's kids. Doesn't get much more intimate than that, right? Some of these remixes were specifically made so you can dance your ass off while getting down to the Khruangbin sound, while some might better be appreciated horizontally with headphones on, wearing fashionably loose clothes. The choice is yours. But all were made with love and respect for Khruangbin. "A good remix deconstructs, recontextualizes, or simply extends a good time," say the band. Amen and out. Bill Brewster

2022 release. Dawn FM is the fifth studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter The Weeknd. The album is narrated by Jim Carrey, and features guest appearances from Tyler, the Creator and Lil Wayne. The production was handled by The Weeknd himself alongside Oneohtrix Point Never-who produced the majority of the tracks-as well as Max Martin, Oscar Holter, Calvin Harris, and Swedish House Mafia, among others. The album serves as a follow-up to The Weeknd's fourth studio album, After Hours (2020).

Hot Pink is the second studio album by American singer and rapper Doja Cat. The album was released on November 7, 2019, by Kemosabe.A departure from the dancehall and psychedelic style of her debut album Amala (2018), it is a pop, R&B and funk record containing elements from soul. Doja Cat wrote all of the tracks alongside its songwriters and producers. It features production from Doja Cat, Yeti Beats and Tyson Trax, among others.

The album received generally favorable reviews from music critics. It debuted at number 93 on the US Billboard 200, after one day of tracking. The next week, Hot Pink rose to number 19. Later, the album reached a new peak of number 17 on the chart. It produced six singles, including "Juicy", featuring Tyga, "Bottom Bitch","Rules", "Cyber Sex", "Say So", and "Like That". "Say So" became Doja Cat's first top ten single on the Billboard Hot 100, reaching number 7.The album features guest appearances from Smino, Tyga and Gucci Mane.According to Rolling Stone, Hot Pink has sold 365,100 album-equivalent units in the US during its chart run with 10,283 of those units being pure sales. Doja will embark on the Hot Pink Tour to promote the album.

Vinyl LP pressing of the mono edition of this classic Rock album. The sensational sophomore release of the Jimi Hendrix Experience highlights Hendrix's own evolving musical experimentalism and acknowledges his early musical influences of soul and R&B. Remastered from the original two-track mix-down master tapes, Axis: Bold As Love's 13-songs show the evolving trio as they neared the height of their career. Features the seminal classics "Spanish Castle Magic," "Little Wing," "Castles Made of Sand," and the classic Easy Rider anthem, "If 6 Was 9." the original monophonic mixes have been transferred from the original master tapes using Grundman's all analog mono mastering process.

The Weeknd -"After Hours" - LP Vinyl - EXPLICIT - The Weeknd's latest chapter via XO/Republic Records, After Hours, features global hits like "Heartless" and "Blinding Lights". Filtering R&B, pop, and hip-hop through an ambitious widescreen lens, quietly took over popular music and culture on his own terms. As a result, the multi-platinum two-time GRAMMY® Award winner has emerged as one of the most successful and significant artists of the 21st century. Double LP Set housed in gatefold jacket packaging.

Vinyl LP pressing. Gemini Rights is the second studio album by musician Steve Lacy. It follows Lacy's debut album Apollo XXI (2019), and was preceded by the singles "Mercury", "Bad Habit" and "Sunshine". The album includes guest appearances from Fousheé, and Lacy's The Internet bandmate, keyboardist Matt Martians. Incorporating a variety of genres, the album has been described as an amalgamation of indie rock and alternative R&B, with elements of funk, jazz, and psychedelia.

Speakerboxxx/The Love Below is the fifth studio album by American hip hop duo Outkast. It was released on September 23, 2003, by LaFace Records. Issued as a double album, its playtime of more than two hours is distributed over solo albums from both of the group's members. Big Boi's Speakerboxxx is a Southern hip hop album with a P-Funk influence, while André 3000's The Love Below features psychedelic, pop, funk, electro, and jazz styles.

Dangerous is the eighth studio album by Michael Jackson. It was released on November 26, 1991 by Epic Records. His first album under his new contract with Sony Music, it was also Jackson's first album since 1975's Forever, Michael not to be produced by longtime collaborator Quincy Jones, who had agreed to split after the final recording sessions for Jackson's 1987 album, Bad. Dangerous has sold over 35 million copies worldwide, 7 million albums were shipped in the United States alone, and has been cited as one of the best-selling albums of all time. The album produced four Top Ten singles on the Billboard Hot 100 including one number-one. Similar to the musician's previous material, the album's music features elements of R&B, pop and rock while also incorporating a newer genre, new jack swing, after the inclusion of producer Teddy Riley to the project in a bid to present Jackson to a younger urban audience. Jackson earned writing credits on all but two tracks on the album. Dangerous received several Grammy nominations, winning only one for Best Engineered Album. In addition to commercial success, the album received critical acclaim from contemporary critics.

Double vinyl LP pressing. 2021 release, a career-spanning album from The Weeknd pulling together a collection of his biggest songs from the last ten years.

Black Pumas have unveiled a deluxe edition of their Grammy-nominated self-titled debut album via ATO Records. Features original album plus 11 bonus tracks, three new original songs and four cover tracks, plus unreleased live material. Double LP pressed on one gold vinyl and one red/black splattered vinyl. Packaging has new artwork, contains unpublished studio & live photographs. Includes a bonus 7" Single LP.