Miguel

Miguel’s sound evolves every time he encounters a new way to express love—and as one of pop’s friskiest experimentalists, that means his career is a study in subverting the very notion of a conventional R&B star. The singer-songwriter born Miguel Jontel Pimentel (Los Angeles, 1985) was drawn to music’s insider/outsiders from the beginning, mimicking the moves of Michael Jackson at family gatherings at age three, and later drawing both artistic and sartorial inspiration from the likes of David Bowie, Prince, and Jimi Hendrix. So when it came time for his 2010 debut, All I Want Is You, Miguel flouted tradition by moving elegantly, sexily, both within and beyond his assigned genre. In back-to-back tracks, he slid from boom-bap soul to vulnerable a cappella to uptempo electro-funk. His confidence found composure on 2012’s Kaleidoscope Dream, which sounds as Technicolor and wondrous as the title suggests. On 2015’s Wildheart, he dove deeper into psych rock, incorporating his own guitar and a Lenny Kravitz cameo into raw, grinding cuts that also supported Kurupt rapping and Miguel singing in Spanish. By 2017’s War & Leisure, he seemed to be flitting across genres just to prove he could. After returning to his Art Dealer Chic EP series following almost a decade-long gap in 2021, Miguel explored the dark, difficult aspects of his divorce on 2025’s CAOS. During an Apple Music radio takeover ahead of the album, he cited the influence of synth- and sample-wielding outliers like Nine Inch Nails and Flying Lotus alongside the brooding alt-rock of Nirvana and Radiohead. But despite those chameleonic tendencies, he reassured listeners that his music remains very much his: “It’s always gonna be me at the center, and you’re always going to hear my voice in the lyrics.”