There is more good soul and funk being made right now than at any point since the 1970s, and almost none of it is on the radio. The labels doing the work are small, the pressings are limited, and if you are not watching their release schedules you will find out about a record six months after it sold out.
So here are the new soul releases actually coming between now and the end of the year, drawn from the labels we trust. Some of it is out already; most of it is on pre-order. Where a record is already gone, we have said so.
Daptone: a strong run into autumn
Brooklyn’s Daptone has had one of its busiest years, and the through-line is a label that has stopped being a revival act and started being a home for new artists who happen to record on tape.
The Womack Sisters — The Womack Sisters
Out since 14 August, and the release on this list with the most riding on it. The sisters are direct descendants of one of soul music’s foundational families, and the label’s own framing is that the record “looks forward by looking back, paying homage to their family’s lineage while creating a sound that is uniquely their own.”
That framing would be marketing on most records. Here the lineage is literal, which raises the interesting question of what a family inheritance in soul singing actually consists of. If you came to Bobby Womack through the conversational, half-spoken delivery of his early 1970s sides, that is the thing to listen for.
The single “If I Let You” landed a couple of weeks ahead of the album on 27 July, and is the obvious entry point.
Jalen Ngonda — Doctrine of Love
Released 28 July. Ngonda’s debut made him the most discussed new voice on the label, and the second album expands the orchestral approach while, in Daptone’s description, bringing “pop sensibility and soulful melodies with raw grit and groove.”
The thing to watch with a singer this naturally sweet is whether the arrangements stay lean. Plush orchestration is the standing risk for a voice like this, and “raw grit and groove” is the label promising it has been avoided.
Thee Sacred Souls — the Victor Axelrod 45s
Two tracks from Got a Story to Tell reworked by Victor Axelrod and issued on 7-inch, also 28 July. Axelrod — also known as Ticklah — has a long record of taking a song somewhere deeper and dubbier than its album version, which is exactly what justifies this kind of release: not a remix in the modern sense, but a different reading of the same song.
Orquesta Akokán — América
Out since 17 July, with new vocalists including members of Combo Chimbita. Big-band Cuban music on a Brooklyn soul label remains one of the more unlikely propositions in current music, and it keeps working.
The Constellation Tour
Announced 5 August: Thee Sacred Souls, The Womack Sisters and La Lom touring US cities together. Nothing announced for Europe at the time of writing. If you are on this side of the Atlantic, this is the year’s most frustrating listing.
Colemine and Big Crown: the autumn schedule
Ohio’s Colemine has quietly become the most reliable singles operation in the field, and its distribution arrangement with Big Crown means one release calendar covers a lot of the best current soul. The autumn run is dense.
Out now
Okonski — Additions. Available already. Okonski’s catalogue sits at the quiet end of what this scene does: spare, patient, closer to a jazz trio than a soul band. Useful if you want something from this world that works at low volume.
October
Surprise Chef — Frogs In A Pond (23 October). The Melbourne instrumental group has been on an unbroken run of good records, and their particular blend of library music, cinematic funk and Australian understatement has no real competition.
The Charities — “Movin’ On” / “I’m Still Learning How” (23 October). A 45, which is the correct format.
November
The Winston Brothers — Sweets (6 November).
Menahan Street Band — Illusions (13 November). The one we are most interested in. Menahan Street Band is the instrumental outfit at the centre of the whole Brooklyn scene — their catalogue has been sampled to death by hip-hop producers, and for good reason. A new album from them is a fixed point in the year.
Let Your Hair Down — Let Your Hair Down (13 November).
Aaron Frazer — “Paint The Picture” / “Back Into The World” (20 November). Frazer’s falsetto is one of the most distinctive instruments in modern soul, and his singles tend to be better than his albums — the format suits him.
December
Doctor Bionic — The Beat Zealot (11 December). Further out on the beat-making end of the catalogue.
What these new soul releases tell you about the scene
Read those two lists of new soul releases together and a few things stand out.
The instrumental groups are carrying a lot of the weight. Menahan Street Band, Surprise Chef, Okonski, Doctor Bionic — a substantial share of the autumn calendar has no lead vocal at all. Part of that is the hip-hop production market, which has an endless appetite for usable instrumental music. Part of it is that a band can tour cheaply without a singer. But it also reflects something real: this scene has become a musicians’ scene, where the rhythm section is the attraction.
The 45 is genuinely back. Four of the releases above are singles. For a decade the seven-inch was a nostalgia format; it is now the standard unit for this kind of music again, because it matches how the records are made and how DJs use them.
Second albums everywhere. Jalen Ngonda, Thee Sacred Souls, Orquesta Akokán — a lot of these artists are past the debut. That is the interesting part of a career and the part where revival scenes usually fail, because a second record has to be about something beyond the sound.
The lineage is explicit now. A Womack record on Daptone in 2026 is not a revival act doing an impression. It is the family business, continued. Whether that is enough to make a great record is a separate question, but it changes what the scene is claiming about itself.
How to actually get these records
The practical problem with modern soul releases is not finding out what is good. It is that limited pressings sell out during the pre-order window and then reappear on the second-hand market at three times the price within a fortnight.
Pre-order rather than wait. With a pressing of a few hundred, waiting for reviews means missing it. If you trust the label, buy on announcement.
Sign up for label mailing lists. Unglamorous and completely effective. Most of these labels announce to their list before anywhere else.
Consider a singles subscription. Several labels run them. You pay monthly and a 45 turns up. The records you would not have chosen are the point.
Buy digital if the vinyl is gone. The artist still gets paid, and you still hear the record. Sulking about a sold-out pressing helps nobody.
If you are working out which labels to follow in the first place, our guide to the soul and funk labels worth your attention covers the field in more detail, including the archival operations reissuing the older material.
A word on the reissue side
Everything above is new music. The archival end of this world runs on a different rhythm and rewards a different kind of attention.
Reissue labels rarely announce far ahead, because the announcement depends on licensing clearing, and licensing a 1972 single from a label that dissolved in 1978 can take years and occasionally never completes. What this means in practice is that archival releases appear with little warning, sell through, and are not repressed.
The tactic that works is the standing order. Several archival labels will ship you everything they release, and given how small the runs are, that is often the only reliable way to get any of it. It requires trusting a label’s taste enough to buy unheard — which, if you have chosen the label well, is the entire pleasure of the thing.
Watch for three things in particular over the coming months: privately pressed gospel-soul, which is the current frontier for the digging labels; anything sourced from a newly located tape archive, which is announced with unusual fanfare because it happens so rarely; and the continuing flow of non-American material, where the best finds are increasingly coming from West Africa, Brazil and the Caribbean rather than from the exhausted American independent scene.
A note on what we cover
This is a release diary, not a reviews page. Everything above comes from the labels’ own published schedules and from what these artists and producers have done before. Nothing here is a verdict on how the records turned out — the ones worth a proper write-up will get one, separately, once we have lived with them.
We also do not run press releases as news. Where a label’s own words are quoted, they are in quotation marks and attributed, so you can tell the difference between what a label claims and what we think.
Release dates on small labels move. Pressing plant delays are the norm rather than the exception, and a date in a pre-order listing is a statement of intent. Treat the December titles in particular as provisional.
Setting a budget for new soul releases, honestly
Buy everything listed above on vinyl and you are looking at a meaningful amount of money for what is, after all, a hobby. Some blunt guidance.
Pick two albums and a subscription. Two records you will actually play, plus a monthly 45 from a label whose taste you trust, is a better year of listening than eight records bought on impulse and played twice.
The pre-order panic is mostly manufactured. Some of it is real scarcity; some of it is a marketing technique. A record from a label with reliable distribution will usually be repressed. A record from a digging label with a run of 300 will not. Learn which is which before you let urgency make your decisions.
Live is where the money should go. This music was built for rooms. A ticket costs about what an LP costs and it will stay with you longer. If The Constellation Tour or anything comparable reaches your city, that is the better purchase.
Do not buy for resale. People do, the market encourages it, and it is the mechanism by which a scene stops being about music. Buy what you will play.
Frequently asked questions
Is modern soul as good as the original 1960s records?
Different question than it looks. The best current records are made with more care and better equipment than most 1960s sessions, which were cut fast and cheap. What the originals have is the pressure of a scene where this was the popular music of the moment. Some of today’s records match them; the context cannot be recreated.
Why is everything limited to a few hundred copies?
Economics. Pressing vinyl has a high fixed cost and pressing plants have long queues. A small label that presses 2,000 copies of a record that sells 400 has lost money it cannot recover. Small runs are how these operations survive.
Which of these new soul releases should I start with?
The Womack Sisters album. It is out, it is available, and it is the one that will still be interesting in five years.