Latest Release
- NOV 17, 2023
- 1 Song
- Heaux Tales · 2021
- Shea Butter Baby · 2019
- Get Close - Single · 2023
- Pressure - Single · 2021
- Still Over It · 2021
- Shea Butter Baby · 2018
- Might Delete Later · 2024
- Shea Butter Baby · 2019
- Shea Butter Baby · 2018
- age/sex/location · 2022
Essential Albums
- Ari Lennox is Dreamville’s resident singer-songwriter, rounding out the label's hip-hop-heavy lineup with rich, midtempo soul birthed from basslines, melody, wind instruments, and supreme heartbreak. “I never thought I'd make money off of soul music,” the Washington, DC-based singer told Beats 1’s Ebro. “I always thought I'd have to be this pop artist or make this super hit, but no.” Lennox was discovered after putting her music up online, signing with Dreamville in 2015. She's contributed “Shea Butter Baby” to the Creed II soundtrack and released the 2016 EP Pho. The positive response to tracks like “Backseat” showed that her retro R&B fits well in contemporary times. “There's so many opportunities that come to me,” she said. “And I'm just like, ‘You guys like soul and R&B that much? That's awesome.’ I didn't know it could ever happen again, because I knew it was really booming in the ’90s and the early 2000s, and then it felt like people stopped caring.” On her debut full-length, her voice is strengthened and emboldened by both breakup and “u up?” texts. She celebrates independence (“New Apartment”) and processes pain (“Speak to Me,” “I Been,” “Pop”) with equal parts frankness and freedom. Cameos by JID (“Broke”) and J. Cole (“Shea Butter Baby”) and a classy Galt MacDermot “Space” sample on “BMO” give the album its pronounced bump. “It’s soul,” she told Ebro. “There’s no gimmicks. It’s feeling.”
Albums
- 2023
- 2023
- 2022
Artist Playlists
- Naked confessionals rendered with irony and elegant power.
More To Hear
- Nothing says girl power like these two R&B queens.
- The R&B singer talks about her album 'age/sex/location.'
- Ari Lennox joins Nadeska Alexis to talk through her third studio album, age/sex/location.
- Zane Lowe speaks to the artist about “Waste My Time.”
- Holiday classics reimagined by some of your favorite artists.
- The artist talks to Dotty about her single "Pressure."
- Dotty connects with R&B artist Ari Lennox.
More To See
About Ari Lennox
With a hint of world-weary rasp in her voice, soul artist Ari Lennox sings about milestones both earth-shattering and life-affirming, couching her revelations in the humdrum details of millennial life. Born Courtney Salter in March 1991, she grew up in Washington, DC, and got her start in the early 2010s posting covers of songs by Frank Ocean and Beyoncé online. Adapting her onstage alias from the name of the orphaned protagonist in the 1993 film The Secret Garden, she hopped between jobs and drove ride-shares before signing to J. Cole’s Dreamville Records in 2015. She was the only woman—and only singer/songwriter—then signed to the hip-hop-oriented label, and she took her time to develop the disarmingly frank neo-soul of her 2019 full-length debut, Shea Butter Baby. With the same candor that TLC brought to R&B in the mid-’90s, Lennox recounts smoking away her heartbreak on “I Been” and pulling cartwheels through her living room on “New Apartment.” Determined but down-to-earth, she’s an artist who goes deep on complex feelings while defying unrealistic social standards. “I don’t expect to be some huge superstar or whatever,” she once told Apple Music, expressing gratitude for her success to date. “I’m just happy that I can one day afford a nice, simple, $200,000 house somewhere in the South.”
- HOMETOWN
- Washington, D.C.
- BORN
- March 26, 1991
- GENRE
- R&B/Soul