Snoh Aalegra on Tour
While some artists use pyrotechnics and choreography to stand out onstage, Snoh Aalegra is a master of quiet drama. As a performer, she's all about vibe, blessing audiences with smoky-smooth vocals that could emanate from a dimly lit lounge where patrons sip wine and whiskey. Her band is equally high-class and down-to-earth, bringing her patent "cinematic soul" to life with warm guitar, burbling bass, snapping drums and twinkling keys. It's a perfect pairing for an artist who's cultivated a vintage-meets-modern R&B sound that's attracted MCs as genre-blurring as Vic Mensa and Vince Staples, and producers as innovatively accessible as No I.D. and RZA. Aalegra's uniqueness has led to some wild outcomes: in 2014, she was handpicked by Prince to become one of his protégés, and in 2017, Drake sampled her single "Time" in the closing track on his More Life mixtape. With her Ugh, a Tour Again tour (named after her bewitching 2019 album, - Ugh, those feels again), she brings that one-of-one talent and one-on-one mood directly to a fandom that's been busy memorizing her lovelorn songs.
Snoh Aalegra in Concert
Snoh Aalegra was born Shahrzad Fooladi, the daughter of parents who'd emigrated from Iran to Sweden before having her. She found her way to music at a young age: falling in love with Whitney Houston's Bodyguard soundtrack at 7, writing her first song at 9 and, at 13, signing an artist development deal with Sony Music Sweden. Though that fizzled, Aalegra had a couple of pop hits in her home country under the name Sheri, and recorded a cover of Sade's "Smooth Operator" that pointed in her future direction. When Aalegra reemerged in 2014 under her new name, on Common's Nobody's Smiling LP, she sounded both intriguingly fresh and curiously vintage. When her There Will Be Sunshine EP came out that same year on No I.D.'s ARTium Recordings, she'd already forged a signature sound: a sweeping soul informed by old film scores, the genre-fusing R&B of her youth and modern hip-hop production. She would hone that approach over the two albums that followed — 2017's Feels, and 2019's playfully titled sequel - Ugh, those feels again — via meditative head-bobbers like "Sometimes" (featuring Logic) and cooly clever ruminations on romance like "Situationship."