Chris Brown

Brown (to be released May 8, 2026)

Look at that R&B lean on this album cover – an image reserved for R&B bangers like MJ’s Thriller, Lutha’s Give Me the Reason and Teddy P’s It’s Time for Love.

Look at the name of his upcoming tour with Usher – The R&B Tour.

Look at the climate of R&B. Artists like Kehlani leaned into that vintage sound with great success and fans are demanding more. R&B parties are all the rage (although I’m begging you DJs to play something besides “Can We Talk” and “This is How We Do It”)

Isn’t this what we’ve wanted? A more mature Breezy?

Well unless this is your first stop here, you know that’s ALL I’ve been screaming for a decade now.

Make no mistake – my wayward Cousin Chris Brown has been the mainstream face of R&B since the early 2010s. But it’s the mid-2020s. And for better or worse  – mostly the latter – we’ve been getting the same music from him for years and years. AND YEARS.

The same oversexed lyrics. The same screechy autotune and pseudo rapping. The same New Testament length albums crammed with filler.

I’ve been begging for growth because I KNOW he can deliver more. But with his fanbase seemingly content with the same song and dance – literally – there’s been no incentive for that growth.

Until maybe now.

His fanbase is older. The vintage R&B sound – embraced by everyone from Silk Sonic to October London – is in style.

So maybe Brown is finally time for Chris to grow up.  

Spoiler: Not really.

And that’s what makes Brown, album No. 12, so frustrating. He briefly dips his toe into new waters but runs right back to the same ol’ rivers and lakes that he’s used to.

Things start out promising enough. “Leave Me Alone” kicks off the album with beautifully haunting production, and even more pointed lyrics. “Every scar got a story, every wrong made me right” he croons before adding “I don’t need your applause.” CB is known for his defiance but this seems less like immaturity and more like clarity – he’s owning who he is, flaws and all. It’s not a side we often see.

Speaking of seeing, I’m sure you’ve all see the (ugh) AI (ugh) vintage ad promoting both this project and current single “Fallin” – again seemingly setting up a throwback direction. And while the bluesy track isn’t perfect, it’s a positive step forward, mainly thanks to guest star Leon Thomas stealing the show. He sounds more comfortable here than Breezy but Cousin Chris holds his own, proving that his tone is a good fit for the slower pace. You tend to forget he’s a solid singer when he’s not screaming over the beat.

But “Fallin” is not at all a representation of this project, it’s an outlier. Because for the next 10 or so songs, it’s the SAME STUFF we’ve heard since Obama was president and gas was 3 bucks.

You’ve got the disposable drunk n’ sex songs (“Say Nuthin’”); the “you don’t understand me” tracks that feel more like pity parties than introspection (“Hate Me”); songs with admittedly great production – the Three 6 Mafia sample on “Call Your Name” is fire – absolutely ruined by guests who are horrendous (Sexxy Red’s Fisher Price rap/singing should be a federal offense) or just off-topic (GloRilla on the same song).

Credit where it’s due, we do get some 90s-era nods on “It Depends;” it interpolates Usher but does little else to stand out. “Cry for Me” also wastes its sample of Rose Royce’s “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore.”  And  there might be a good song buried inside “For the Moment” – if you dig through all the annoying vocal effects.

But if you stick with it long enough, glimmers of hope pop up. It takes the album roughly 30 minutes (!!!!)  to finally start pulling itself together. Y’all better be lucky I have the patience of Job. Or the common sense of a brick.

“It’s Not You It’s Me,” “Perfect Timing” with Fridayy and “Slow Jamz” with Lucky Daye won’t be making my Best Songs of 2026 list, but all are a major improvement over what came before. Lucky, specifically – whom we all know Does. Not. Miss – fights with the power of the Grayskull to make a hit, but can only raise things so high.

But it’s the back half of the album where things finally – FINALLY – start to take shape. “In My Head” boasts ethereal production as Breezy daydreams about his girl, while “What’s Love” digs event deeper. Here, he is at his most vulnerable, outright admitting that he doesn’t know what love is and he can’t help screwing up his relationship.

“Colours” is another deep moment of self reflection, as he examines his scars – both physical and mental, outward and inward – and realizes that the flaws are what make the man.

SEE, why can’t we get more of THIS and less of him bragging about dislocating vaginas like on “Cry for Me?”

Of course, it doesn’t last long, as he’s back to demanding women to “buss it open” for him and Tank on “#BodyGoals” and Pulitzer Prize winning prose like “you wear my hands like a necklace, I eat your chocolate for breakfast” on “Skin to Skin.”

Been there, done that. A million times.

After nearly NINTEY MINUTES – seriously, this album is almost as long as the Super Mario Galaxy Movie – we finally get another winner with “Present.” It’s another emotionally resonate song with fantastic production and even 90s-era NAYOOOOOs  – the audio equivalent of the R&B cover lean.  

And that’s what makes Brown – the album, the man and the career – so eternally frustrating. This isn’t the mature new sound we were lead to believe, it’s a Whitman’s sampler –  a couple nice morsels and a bunch of weird stuff. This isn’t the tight, concise record he’s promised since way back with 11:11, another album where he pulled a bait and switch.

“F*** and Party,” probably my favorite song on the project tells the tale better than I can – it’s basically Breezy admitting that he can’t grow up, all he wants to do is have sex and wild out.

We know, homie, we know.

Now that I think about it, it feels like Cousin Chris initially made Brown a mature, inward-looking, soulful project to match the album cover and marketing (a good eight or nine tracks do fit that bill, admittedly), then he  got cold feet and loaded up the project with a bunch of songs like “Honey Pack” (THE most irritating song I’ve heard in 2026 so far) to pad out the runtime and give Team Breezy new fresh meat.

That’s not how you make a classic R&B project to showcase growth and cement yourself as the face of the genre. That’s just doing what’s safe to keep the streams streaming.

That’s not R&B. That’s Tyler Perry.

Brown is not the worst album I’ve heard this year. But’s for sure the most disappointing. We could have had something special. Instead, we got a rerun.

Y’all aren’t allowed to do the R&B album lean NO MORE.

Best tracks: “F*** and Party,” “In My Head,” “What’s Love,” “Present”

3 stars out of 5