In Rotation: Gabriel Jacoby

Born in Anderson, South Carolina, and raised in Tampa, Gabriel Jacoby is the eldest of seven kids and a self-taught player of the guitar, bass, drums, and piano. You can hear both geographies in his tracks. The Carolinas show up in his raspy vocal runs. The Florida humidity drips off his funk-driven basslines. When his 2025 project gutta child dropped, writers rushed to throw out D'Angelo and Andre 3000 comparisons. I get the impulse. Jacoby operates within that same Southern soul lineage, but the parallels only go so far. Jacoby lacks D'Angelo's thick gospel weight. His vocal pocket is actually much closer to early Prince, just stripped of the Minneapolis synth-pop sheen. He relies on raw instrumentation instead of digital gloss. On his recent PULSE Records single "baby," he weaves a delicate falsetto right over a thumping bassline. He leaves the fret noise and the tape hiss in the final mix. He just dropped the official visual for "need your love." The vocal arrangement is incredibly precise. Independent radio is already catching on, with the track pulling adds from WRUR in Rochester down to WMNF in his hometown of Tampa. He cut his teeth on the road touring with Khamari recently. A kid who taught himself four instruments while being raised by a single mother is going to treat the live stage like a proving ground. He is booked for the Jazz Cafe Festival in London this August and Austin City Limits in October. The stage is where those studio layers translate into real sweat. We get a lot of over-polished R&B right now that sounds like it was generated in a sterile lab. Jacoby makes soul music for people who actually study the groove. Hit play below.