Ella Mai

London, New York, London again

Ella Mai Howell was born in London on 3 November 1994, to a Jamaican mother and an English-Irish father. Her mother, a jazz fan, named her after Ella Fitzgerald. At 12 she moved to New York City when her mother took a teaching job there, and she has spoken about being bullied for her accent before returning to England at 17. That split upbringing explains a good deal about her: a singer whose records sit squarely inside American R&B, but whose speaking voice and early audience were always partly British.

Back in London she enrolled at the British and Irish Modern Music Institute in 2014, and the same year she auditioned for the eleventh series of The X Factor as one third of a group called Arize. They went out at the first stage. What mattered more was what she did on her own: in 2015 she uploaded an EP called Troubled to SoundCloud. It reached DJ Mustard, the Los Angeles producer behind a long run of West Coast rap and R&B hits, and he signed her to his 10 Summers imprint at Interscope. Every record she has made since has come through that door.

The slow burn of 'Boo'd Up'

Three EPs followed under Mustard's supervision, Time, Change and Ready, released in quick succession. Ready, in 2017, carried 'Boo'd Up', a song that did nothing for months and then did everything. It climbed the Billboard Hot 100 to number five as a sleeper hit, and the follow-up 'Trip' reached number 11. Her self-titled debut album arrived in October 2018 and entered the Billboard 200 at number five.

At the 61st Grammy Awards in early 2019, 'Boo'd Up' won Best R&B Song and was also nominated for Song of the Year. The same year brought three Billboard Music Awards and three iHeartRadio Music Awards, alongside a Brit Awards nomination for British Breakthrough Act, an unusual pairing for an artist whose sound had been built in Los Angeles but whose passport said otherwise. The song remains the pivot of every set she plays, and she still introduces it on stage as the record that changed her life.

A second record, then four years of quiet

Heart on My Sleeve, released in May 2022, debuted at number 15 on the Billboard 200. It was a more measured record than the debut, and the chart position reflected a career that had settled into something durable rather than explosive. Then she went quiet. The reason became public later: in 2024 she had a son with the Boston Celtics forward Jayson Tatum, and she has since described the new album as having been written across the phases of that pregnancy and the months afterwards.

The return was gradual. A single, 'Little Things', appeared on 3 November 2024, followed by 'Tell Her' on 29 August 2025, with a video directed by Cole Santiago the following month. In December 2025 she played a six-night retrospective series billed as the Did You Miss Me? Tour, taking in London, Amsterdam, Paris, Atlanta, New York and Los Angeles to mark ten years since Troubled. A vinyl compilation, Time. Change. Ready., put the early EPs on a physical format for the first time in years. By the time the new album was announced, the groundwork had been laid for an audience that had last seen her properly in 2022.

Do You Still Love Me?

The third album was announced on 6 January 2026 and released on 6 February through 10 Summers and Interscope. It runs to fourteen tracks and just under forty-six minutes, with Mustard as the only producer, an arrangement that keeps the record in the same sonic family as everything she has released since 2015. A third single, '100', preceded it on 14 January. She has framed the songs as love letters, written from different points of view and concerned with how couples communicate, or fail to.

Critically it landed well without being treated as a landmark. Clash gave it 8 out of 10 and called it a warm and intimate continuation, singling out '100' and 'Luckiest Man'. Pitchfork scored it 7.3. Euphoria, reviewing on 10 February 2026, awarded 3.5 out of 5 and praised vulnerable storytelling that still managed to feel universal, naming 'There Goes My Heart', 'Somebody's Son', 'Luckiest Man' and the closing track 'No Angels' as the strongest material. The recurring note across the reviews is that the voice does the heavy lifting, and that the album asks little of the listener beyond patience.

Commercially it was her smallest opening. The album entered the Billboard 200 at number 44 and the US Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart at number 14, with a number 66 placing on the UK album downloads chart. In a market where streaming favours the catalogue over the new, that is a modest figure for an artist with a Grammy and a multi-platinum debut, and the tour that followed has been doing much of the work of reintroducing the record, song by song, in rooms where 'Boo'd Up' still guarantees the last ten minutes.

The tour, and where it goes next

The Do You Still Love Me? tour has been running through most of 2026. The North American headline leg was under way by 10 July at Chicago's Salt Shed, with the singers Girlfriend and AMA opening across the run. The Los Angeles stop at the Greek Theatre in early August drew the warmest notice: Sharafa Odusanya, writing for The Knockturnal on 3 August 2026, described a clean, understated production that put her vocals ahead of visual spectacle and called the night another successful chapter. She paused the show there to thank Los Angeles for taking her in as a Londoner who had turned up with nothing but a Mustard signature and a SoundCloud link.

The campaign now moves to Europe. Live Nation lists Store Vega in Copenhagen on 13 September, Huxleys Neue Welt in Berlin on the 18th, Carlswerk Victoria in Cologne on the 20th, the Bataclan in Paris on the 24th, the Eventim Apollo in London on 25 September and the O2 Apollo in Manchester on the 28th. The London and Manchester dates are the first UK headline shows of the album campaign and her first British appearances since the December 2025 retrospective nights. For an artist who was bullied out of one accent and built a career in another, a Hammersmith headline with a Grammy on the shelf is a reasonable place to be at 31.