Anaiis - Devotion & The Black Divine

Devotion & the Black Divine is anaiis making a record about tenderness as a discipline, and it might be the warmest soul album released in 2025.

The French-Senegalese singer, based in London, has spent since 2019 circling the same territory from new angles: Blackness as an interior life, family, folklore, inheritance, all sung across multiple languages in a voice that never raises itself to be heard. This one arrived alongside new motherhood, and the difference shows. Where an earlier record might have chased resolution, this album settles into uncertainty and simply stays there, cut at 5dB Studios in London with Brazil's Grupo Cosmo adding a sense of drift and motion to the arrangements.

Fourteen tracks, ten songs threaded with four spoken interludes voiced by Ja'Tovia Gary, Sanah Ahsan, and Adrienne Maree Brown, which turns the album into something closer to a conversation than a tracklist. Something Is Broken opens with a stark admission before the instrumentation blooms around it, Deus Deus is the record's most transporting stretch, Moonlight moves at the pace of the hour it names, and Bright Lights closes things with the acceptance the whole album has been reaching toward.

Deep, lush, unhurried soul that asks you to sit with it rather than skip ahead.