Eamon is an artist originally from New York who signed with Jive Records and had a hit when he dropped “Fuck It (I Don’t Want You Back)” in 2004. After that initial success, Eamon found his career stuck in limbo for quite some time, having projects get shelved or not properly promoted, forcing him to seek out collaborations here and there just to get something out into the ether. One of those collaborations led to him finally breaking out in 2017, when he teamed up with Stoupe of Jedi Mind Tricks to release his third album, Golden Rail Motel. Now Eamon is back with a new project, this time teaming up with Now-Again to release his fourth album, No Matter the Season.

For No Matter the Season, Eamon teamed up with production/songwriting duo Likeminds, and together they went into the vaults of Now-Again and started chopping up all of these amazing retro soul and Afrobeat records they now had access to. Once they had some beats, they filled out the sound of each track with live instrumentation to complete the transformation of the music into new compositions. The result is an album that has its roots in Nigerian Funk and Ethiopian Jazz as well as Philly and Detroit soul, but then updated with a touch of modern hip hop and R&B. On the microphone, Eamon’s voice and lyricism is what brings everything together and pushes the album over the top. When he was first getting started, you might have gotten something snarkier or a little more immature, but Eamon is a grown man who’s been through some ups and downs, and he’s now singing with not just the confidence of someone who knows his way around the recording studio, he’s singing with the lived in experience of how life can throw you some major curveballs. He’s taken some licks over the years, but the good news is that he’s still here, and the perspective that he has now when it comes to songwriting is much more mature and focused. Throughout the album, Eamon is singing about some grown folk romance, but he’s also taking some time to look outward and speak to other issues, such as on the poignant “Ready For War.” As he’s doing this, Eamon is showing great melodic instincts, crafting some great hooks, and finding just the right moments to jump up into his falsetto. He’s also got a nice rasp to his voice that helps accentuate that lived-in, mature feeling across the album.

No Matter the Season is a welcome return for Eamon. He found some excellent collaborators in Now-Again and Likeminds, and the result is his best album to date. It has its roots in retro soul and Afrobeat, but it’s an album that resonates in 2022, thanks to some great production, songwriting, and of course, some killer vocals from Eamon.