Randijah Simmons

Seasoned as a songwriter, for years sharing a gift for storytelling prowess and emotionally evocative oomph with his generation of R&B and Neo-Soul top shelfers ranging from Kyle Dion to Kehlani, Phabo has spent the last few years instead much more immersed in the construction of his own fluid R&B jelly-verse. It was Soulquarius in 2021 that really cemented his name as a solo force of post-genre sonic experimentation. His debut album is one that still breathes as the most low-key, fun-loving West Coast collection of soul-adjacent exploration at any point through the last few years. A track like Palm Trees shined a light on the LA artist’s transcendent ability to seamlessly merge his hip-hop, soul, and R&B nuances, effortlessly pulling high-speed verses into frame with an addicting chorus and further runs that defy the rapped-sung spectrum for an anthemic beach-drive grey area. Fans of rangy modern names like SiR will find themselves touched by his attention to detail, artistic breadth, and sensitivities to hip-hop and R&B’s deepest roots. At the other end of his sonic space, a cut like Jelly puts on display Phabo’s keen sense to create sultry, cyber-soul baby-makers, steeped in the blue light of cinema references and good-intentioned sweat. Listeners of any 90’s and 00’s R&B will be gladly immersed in his oft-outlandish infusions of romantic detail, slippery synths, and glass-shattering high-notes. It’s in the space between these two book-ending reaches of his auditory aesthetic where Phabo would ultimately, and continues to, carve out the uniqueness and ubiquity of his one-of-a-kind addition to modern R&B in particular.

It’s within the book-ending structure of eighteen tracks that now, in 2023, with his sophomore album, Don’t Get Too Cozy, he expands and evolves what it is that Phabo is bringing to a spectrum in need of his indefinable sonic seamlessness and tangible emotionality leaning heavily on a sensual sense of storyline and self-aware poetics between a 90’s Golden Era and the technological influences on R&B all the way to the early 2010’s. A barrage of leading singles and features from this year so far built an early foundation of where it was that he would eventually take Don’t Get Too Cozy. But now that the near-hour-in-length marathon of twisting, future R&B bliss with a tinge of rapped poeticism and glimmering with digital production, is here, it’s even more in depth, dynamically structured, and yet so unapologetically true to a sense of Phabo, than even his prior work.

Treated with an omnipresence of subtle instrumentation - melancholy piano chords open the project’s Intro alongside snaps and some breezy Phabo melodies, summoning reminiscence on Soulquarius’s softer aesthetic - Don’t Get Too Cozy at large is still much more a digitally-entrenched album than its 2021 predecessor. With it, Phabo rekindles a certain nostalgia for the self-made R&B pillars that breathed new life into the scene via SoundCloud at the beginning of the 2010’s. Modern production, high-fidelity keystrokes, unapologetically brash chord progressions, all to underline and make prominent the intensity of its protagonist’s register, and the emotionality and sensuality that it tends to lean on. And yet, Phabo’s new album - as has all his solo work to date - is a work of boundary-defying modernity, experimentally crafted to push R&B, Neo-Soul, and Hip-Hop into a hi-fi transcendentalism self-aware of its roots, but unavoidably distinct through its future-sex tinted glasses.

From the very jump of Don’t Get Too Cozy, Phabo’s recklessness with romantic relationships tends to make for great storyline. But just as it is an exploration of staple R&B thematic discourse, Phabo’s songwriting prominence entrenches the album in much more depth. The influence of this father on his music is an ever-present foundation for the the LA transcendentalist’s rangy sound to come home to. And even while his expanding confidence as a rapping vocalist, jumping back and forth across his stylistic bridges at will à la other modern names like Bryson Tiller, 6LACK, and K CAMP, makes for a sonic vortex maneuvering through twists and turns of epoch and preconceptions of genre, the knack at vocal runs he absorbed from his father often takes center stage. Just follow the track list in order, and be taken for a ride sans any specific adherences for stylistic boundary, but always be brought back to the centerline by Phabo’s sense of musical North. It’s a testament to Phabo’s range, but simultaneously, his willingness to always try new things with his art is owed to a balanced R&B middleground.

‘It’s purposely peaks and valleys placed throughout the project so that you don’t get too comfortable in any mindset, like “Ooh, look at him. He in love on this song. He’s talking like he don’t even care to be here type-sh*t on ‘Your Loss’ with Kalan.FrFr.” It’s just unpredictability in that sense. New words, new inflections, new beat patterns [and] new cores. [It’s] more authenticity from the start to the finish. I feel like people can look forward to those notes of classic R&B that they grew up listening to and loving as well as the sound that we’re trying to push forward as well,’ Phabo told Rated R&B.