Baby Rose

Fayetteville, and a voice nobody could place

Baby Rose was born Jasmine Rose Wilson in Washington, D.C. in 1994, and moved to Fayetteville, North Carolina at eleven. She had already been playing piano and recording since she was nine. At E. E. Smith High School a manager, Terry Flowers, overheard her singing and playing and signed her, and in May 2010 she appeared on BET's 106 & Park as a Spotlight Artist under the name Jasmine Rose.

She went on to Spelman College in Atlanta to read sociology, and later studied online at Berklee College of Music during the pandemic. Atlanta is where the professional work started — she is a fixture of that city's rap and soul session economy rather than a product of the New York or Los Angeles machine.

The voice is the thing everyone writes about first. It is a contralto that sits far below where most R&B singers pitch, with a heavy vibrato, and it has consistently confused people about her age — she was a teenager when she started releasing music that sounded like it belonged to someone three decades older.

A decade of records, and one label that let her go

The early catalogue is scrappy and useful: a J Dilla x Baby Rose EP in 2016, the mixtape From Dusk 'Til Dawn on 24 July 2017, and the To: You EP in 2019. Her debut album To Myself arrived on 22 August 2019 through Human Re Sources. Island Records put out a deluxe edition in 2020 and then dropped her; Secretly Canadian picked her up the same year and has released everything since, starting with the Golden Hour EP.

Alongside that she built a guest-feature résumé that explains how widely she is respected inside the industry — work with Dreamville, Rapsody, Big K.R.I.T., Robert Glasper, Vince Staples and Matt Martians.

Her second album, Through and Through, came on 28 April 2023 and is the record that moved her from cult to consensus. She followed it in April 2024 with Slow Burn, an EP made with the Canadian band BADBADNOTGOOD and cut to tape. "Recording on tape with the band was a first," she said of it. "I felt like we were channelling Muscle Shoals' rawness." Two songs from that session, "On My Mind" and "One Last Dance", are still load-bearing parts of the live set.

2025–26: a film, a Grammy, and a hit

In 2025 she made her on-screen debut in the A24 film Materialists, playing a wedding singer, and contributed "I'll Be Your Mirror" and "That's All" to the soundtrack, released on 13 June 2025.

The bigger shift came from a feature. She sings on "I Used To" from Leon Thomas's album Mutt, released 27 September 2024, and when Mutt took Best R&B Album at the 68th Grammy Awards she collected her first Grammy as a credited collaborator. FLOOD reported the win on 10 February 2026, tied to the release of "Friends Again", a new single reuniting her with Thomas, with a video directed by Morian Mikhail.

"Friends Again" became the most successful release of her career, passing 15 million global streams, and NPR named it among the best songs of the year. After ten years of critics' lists and session credits, she finally had a song that carried on its own.

YEARNALISM

Her third album, YEARNALISM, was released on 10 July 2026 on Secretly Canadian, executive-produced by Biako with Baby Rose producing and writing, and featuring Leon Thomas and Elmiene. The title is her own coinage. She defines yearnalism as the process and documentation of desire in its many forms — "desiring freedom, desiring love, desiring what you can't have, desiring expansion" — and describes the record as covering "desire in all its forms: whether it be romantic or personal, who I love or who I'm becoming, the ache, the growth".

Reviewing it for NPR, Sheldon Pearce called her contralto "oaky, smoky and sweet" and traced the album's sound back through Motown, Philly soul, Stax and the blues, while noting that the writing sits deliberately in ambiguity — relationships in limbo rather than resolved. She tracked vocals through vintage microphones that were never designed for singing, chasing feel over polish. "There's uncertainty there," she said of the method. "You don't fully know what you're doing yet."

The sequence moves through "When I'm Gone", "The Reason", "Is This Love", "Let Me Go", "Sunday", "Believe Me" and "But, Nvm" before the Thomas duet. "Let Me Go" went out as a single on 16 June 2026; the video for "Better" was directed by Amaya Segura.

Where she stands in September 2026

The album landed on the same day she started opening for Olivia Dean on The Art of Loving tour, beginning in San Francisco on 10 July 2026. That run put her in front of arena crowds through the summer, including Madison Square Garden on 14 August and State Farm Arena in Atlanta on 22 August.

With the support run finished, the autumn is deliberately small: two shows a night at the Blue Note Jazz Club in New York on 22 September, two nights at Blue Note Los Angeles on 30 September and 1 October, and a return to the New York room on 26 and 27 October. It is an unusual sequence — arenas one month, a 200-capacity jazz club the next — and it suits a singer whose material works better close up than at distance.

The scale then changes again. She is confirmed as support for Harry Styles on all three nights of his Together, Together shows at Croke Park in Dublin, on 18, 20 and 21 August 2027 — her first announced stadium work, and in front of a crowd that has no particular reason to know who she is.

The set as it stands

The arena sets ran short by design. In Atlanta she played roughly half an hour and closed with "One Last Dance" and "All My Love", the latter opening out into a funk groove that the studio version only hints at. The fuller setlist logged by fans at Madison Square Garden on 14 August opened with "On My Mind", moved almost immediately into a cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide", and then worked through the new album — "But, Nvm", "Better", "Let Me Go", "Sunday", "Dressed in Metal", "Is This Love", "Friends Again", "The Reason" — before the same two-song close.

Reviews of the support slot have been consistent on one point: it did not play as a warm-up. Writing on the Atlanta show, Eulalie described a performance that established the mood of the evening rather than filling time, with a voice that carried an arena without obvious effort. The Blue Note dates are the first chance in a while to hear the same material in a room built for it.