20 Best R&B Albums of 2025: Staff Picks

There’s one thing you can say about 2025 musically: it was a very good year for R&B. After years of naysayers pronouncing R&B dead or irrelevant, the genre yielded a welcome embarrassment of riches this year that illuminated the genre’s vast, versatile scope — and mainstream appeal.

As Billboard staff writer Kyle Denis noted in his insightful essay “Why Did Everything Finally Seem to Click for R&B on a Mainstream Level in 2025?”: “This year is the direct result of several intersecting scenes that have ridden larger cultural and sociopolitical shifts to usher in a new, rich, diverse era of R&B.” Examples of those “intersecting scenes” range from recent Super Bowl halftime shows featuring R&B/pop stars like The Weeknd, Usher, Rihanna and SZA and viral TikTok revivalist trends sparked by older R&B hits like Miguel’s “Sure Thing,” to the burgeoning international R&B/soul crossover movement led by rising talents such as FLO,  kwn, Elmiene and Odeal.

Billboard’s R&B/hip-hop team sorted through a bumper crop of more than 60 R&B album releases – an additional testament to the genre’s robust 2025 output. And the yield came in all flavors from both the major labels and, increasingly, the indie sector: traditional, blues, contemporary, alternative and experimental It was a year marked by major breakthroughs (Leon Thomas, Mariah the Scientist); the return of icons (Mariah Carey, The Weeknd, Mavis Staples) and established stars (Teyana Taylor, Ledisi, Miguel, Estelle, Q Parker and the funkateer himself, Bootsy Collins); promising early-career releases (Alex Isley, JayDon, Mereba, Jenevieve) and attention-grabbing works from genre disruptors (Destin Conrad, Dijon, Durand Bernarr).

Needless to say, this bounty gave way to lively discussions and sometimes tense debates as the team took on the tough task of composing the 20-album list below (in descending order). This year’s honorable mentions go to Fridayy’s Some Days I’m Good, Some Days I’m Not, Mariah Carey’s Here for It All, Mariah the Scientist’s Hearts Sold Separately and Eric Benet’s The Co-Star.