Welcome back to our R&B Season playlist, whose latest update is a brief but nonetheless compelling collection of the best genre-adjacent jams to drop this week. Once again, Summer Walker is amping up her credentials for best single releases of 2025 with a brand new sultry soother, "Spend It."
As expected, Summer vocally takes over this song's appeal with some gorgeous harmonies and the ability to make the most out of every syllable. Warm guitars, bass, and light drums boost the different melodic refrains and embellishments with a lot of woozy atmosphere.
But if you're looking for something even slower and more steady, Mariah the Scientist has you covered on R&B Season with the new track "Burning Blue." This one owes its sonic background to dreamy synth pads and swelling bass and string-like tones, plus a simple contrast between a dry kick, a crashing snare, and minimal additional percussion.
The Scientist also does a great job of injecting charisma into her performance thanks to buried vocal additions and unassuming harmonies. It may not be the most revolutionary thing you'll hear all week, but it scratches the itch you come back to this playlist for with a lot of grace.
HNHH R&B Season Playlist
Finally on R&B Season, we wanted to highlight the big genre fuser of this week, that being Jorja Smith with her new single "The Way I Love You." These R&B-style vocals with an unsurprisingly wonderful showing from the singer blend perfectly with a nasty bassline and electrifying drums.
This evokes some heavy vibes from UK garage, speed house, and other styles of electronic dance music. Considering Jorja's other work and her amazing crossovers into a lot of different sub-genres, the only thing surprising about this banger is that we don't have more of them by now.
That's it for R&B Season this week, but don't forget about the rap world. We had some big releases to cover on our Fire Emoji playlist update this week, especially with the summer season rolling around.
In addition to a new Drake cover from one of his more recent collaborators Yeat, we got some official collaborations. Quavo and Takeoff, Lil Tjay and 42 Dugg, and Westside Gunn and Doechii brought the heat in spades.
