Neo-Soul Legend D’Angelo Dead at 51

D’Angelo, the elusive singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer who helped to define the neo-soul movement of the ’90s and beyond, has died at the age of 51. As TMZ reports, he’d been battling cancer.

The musician born Michael Eugene Archer leaves behind a concise yet influential discography that includes three studio albums: Brown Sugar (1995), Voodoo (2000), and Black Messiah (2014). While known as a trailblazing solo artist in the vein of Prince, one of his heroes, D’Angelo was also a founding member of Soulquarians, a consortium of innovative Black musicians that included Questlove, Common, James Poyser, Erykah Badu, Q-Tip, Bilal, Talib Kweli, and Yasiin Bey.

D’Angelo was born February 11, 1974, in Richmond, Virginia. The son of a minister, he taught himself piano as a youngster and won an amateur night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem when he was a teenager. After writing and producing for other artists, D’Angelo released his debut album, Brown Sugar, in 1995, just as a generation of young R&B musicians began reaching back to the warm, organic sounds of the ’60s and ’70s. Thus was born the neo-soul movement. The LP yielded three Top 10 hits on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, including “Lady,” written with Raphael Saadiq. The single crossed over to No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became the biggest pop hit of D’Angelo’s career.

Five years passed before D’Angelo returned with 2000’s Voodoo, a landmark, genre-blurring album made with Questlove as his “copilot,” according to a Rolling Stone profile. In crafting the album, D’Angelo, Questlove, and their team of collaborators hunkered down at Electric Lady Studios in New York City and studied the artists they revered most—James Brown, Prince, George Clinton, Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, and Fela Kuti, among others. The album was heavily inspired by Detroit producer J Dilla, whose off-kilter rhythmic feel became a guiding light.

Voodoo won a Grammy for Best R&B album and spawned the sexy R&B smash “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” which is perhaps best remembered for its music video, a testament to both D’Angelo’s prodigious musical skills and his chiseled abs.

In the years following Voodoo, D’Angelo become something of a recluse and struggled with drugs and alcohol. All the while, fans held out hope for the singer’s third album, which finally arrived in 2014. Titled Black Messiah and credited to D’Angelo and the Vanguard, Black Messiah earned rave reviews, landed on many critics’ best-of lists, and won a Grammy for Best R&B Album.

Black Messiah would prove to be D’Angelo’s final studio album, though in 2024, Saadiq told Billboard that his friend and longtime collaborator was prepping new music.

“He’s working on six pieces right now and he seems super excited,” Saadiq said. “He’s in control of his own destiny at this point. He has a management team, but they can’t make him do anything that he don’t wanna do. He knows it’s on him now and I think that’s a different angle that he’s coming from.”