Sargent Tucker returns with the soul album You're The One For Me

Sargent Tucker has a new album out. You're The One For Me follows a string of singles and lands in the part of the year he tends to favour, with SoulTracks naming it a featured album and noting that he has been a fixture on the site for more than a decade.

The record collects songs about relationships in their various states rather than one arc, and keeps the organic, played in a room feel that has characterised his work from the beginning. Tucker sings, writes and plays guitar, which is a rarer combination in contemporary soul than it sounds.

The lead single, U...Can't Text Love Away, went out ahead of the album and did well enough abroad for the site to call it an international hit. It is also a fair introduction to how he works: a plain premise, played rather than programmed, with the arrangement staying out of the way of the vocal.

The rollout is old fashioned on purpose. You're The One For Me comes out on CD and vinyl first and reaches streaming services later, which is a choice a lot of independent R&B and soul artists have been making as physical sales become the part of the business that actually pays.

Chris Rizik, who has run the site since 2003, wrote the piece and framed the album as the sound its readers already expect from Tucker. That is a modest claim, and probably the accurate one: this is a record for an audience that already knows what it wants from him.

Other independent soul releases in the same window include Dawn Richard's Creole Culture and Danielle Ponder's second album. Release dates across genres are collected on the release calendar.