The American R&B singer and songwriter D’Angelo, who has died aged 51 of pancreatic cancer, was a pioneer of what came to be known as “neo-soul” – forward-looking music that incorporated elements of funk, jazz and hip-hop.
Despite releasing just three albums over two decades from 1995 to 2014, he was influential well beyond the boundaries of the new musical style he helped to create, with a series of Top 40 single hits in the UK and US that included Brown Sugar, the title track of his debut album. His second long-player, Voodoo, reached No 1 in the US and his third and final album, Black Messiah, also made it into the Top 10, with both releases winning two of his four Grammys.
D’Angelo was born Michael Archer in Richmond, Virginia, to Luther Archer, a Pentecostal minister, and his wife, Mariann (nee Smith). A talented pianist and singer from an early age, he learned his music in the church, and in his teens put himself on the map by winning three consecutive amateur talent night contests at the Apollo theatre in Harlem, New York.
He also played in a series of groups in the Richmond area, including Three of a Kind, Michael Archer and Precise, and Intelligent, Deadly But Unique (IDU).
By 1993 he had been signed up as a songwriter with EMI, for whom he composed U Will Know, a charity single addressing black-on-black violence that was released in 1994 by the supergroup Black Men United (including Lenny Kravitz, R Kelly and members of Boyz II Men), and made the Top 30 on both sides of the Atlantic.
His platinum-selling Brown Sugar album – under the new name of D’Angelo, which he had derived from Michelangelo – appeared the following year, peaking at No 22 in the US charts and spawning two Top 30 hit singles in the US with the title track (“an ode to marijuana disguised as a love song”) and Lady. In 1998 he appeared on another landmark neo-soul album, Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, singing and playing electric piano on Nothing Even Matters.
Thanks to a long spell of writer’s block – allied to his obsessive nature in the studio – it was not until 2000 that D’Angelo’s follow-up album, Voodoo, was released. But the final product, with a more experimental, darker feel and honed in collaboration with the Soulquarians musical collective – which included the drummer-producer Questlove, and occasional vocal collaborators Erykah Badu and Mos Def – was worth the wait. Described by Variety magazine as “a cornerstone of modern R&B” and listed at 28 in Rolling Stone magazine’s 500 greatest albums, it was a critical triumph, topping the US charts and peaking at No 21 in the UK.
Five singles were spun off from Voodoo, but despite the album’s success only one of them, Untitled (How Does It Feel), reached the Top 30 of the US charts, partly on the back of a highly eroticised accompanying video that D’Angelo later came to regret, feeling that it cast him in many eyes as just a sex symbol. The image stuck, despite the song winning a Grammy.
After touring with Voodoo worldwide for more than a year following its release, D’Angelo fell into a long period of alcohol and drug abuse that resulted in an even longer gestation period for his final album, Black Messiah (2014), which took more than a decade to take shape.
Nonetheless, he still had many fans in waiting, and the album was another critical and commercial success, shooting to No 5 in the US on its release, also making it into the Top 50 in the UK. Rolling Stone rated the Grammy-winning album “a warm, expansive masterpiece” while Paul Lester in the Guardian called it “a restatement of faith in the principles and sounds of the pre-digital era of black music”. The first single from it, Really Love, earned D’Angelo his fourth Grammy.
Apart from a one-off single, Unshaken, in 2019, however, there were to be no further releases from the star. Although there was occasional talk of another album in the offing, he became increasingly reclusive across his final years, and the American public’s main awareness of him came largely through occasional live appearances or guest recording slots with other artists, including alongside Jay-Z last year on the song I Want You Forever from the soundtrack to the 2023 film The Book of Clarence.
The American music journalist Sheldon Pearce noted that there seemed to be “a clear disconnect between D’Angelo’s compulsion to be heard and his reluctance to be seen” – an internal tug-of war that resulted in much of his material either failing to make it into the public domain or languishing for years until it emerged.
D’Angelo himself rejected categorisation. “I never claimed I do neo-soul,” he said in 2014. “When I first came out, I used to always say, ‘I do black music. I make black music.’”
He is survived by three children, Michael, Imani and Morocco, the first of whom was from a relationship with the singer Angie Stone, who died earlier this year, and with whom he had also collaborated musically.
• D’Angelo (Michael Eugene Archer), singer and songwriter, born 11 February 1974; died 14 October 2025
