Melonyx is a duo from Nottingham, consisting of vocalists Georgia Copeland and Nadia Latoya. They made their debut on Tru Thoughts in 2021 with the release of Black Elixir EP. Since that time we’ve been teased with some remixes and singles, but now we finally get their debut full-length album, Soul Glow.

For this endeavor, Melonyx teamed up with fellow Nottingham artist Joe Buhdha to handle the production duties. Buhdha has been at this for a nearly two decades, and he’s worked with such artists as Harleighblu and Terri Walker in the past. This is to say that Melonyx did a great job of setting themselves up to succeed. They wanted to make some experimental and spiritual neo-soul, and Buhdha was just the right person to help them bring that vision to life. Over the course of the album, these two are singing sweet harmonies, delivering some great melodies, and giving you a lot of themselves as they sing about what it means to be a young Black woman in the UK, how they’ve navigated their lives as emerging artists, and how they find strength through sisterhood and spirituality. When you put all of this together, you can really see Melonyx in a lineage that goes back through Georgia Anne Muldrow and Erykah Badu. They never feel the need to get big with the music, instead allowing the weight of their words to land gently as they give them space to breathe in their compositions. They also aren’t afraid to experiment and push the form and melodies of their songs into unexpected directions, where you just have to trust in them and see where the music is going. It’s an incredibly mature album that is steps beyond where you might expect them to be for a debut album like this.

Soul Glow is a confident and daring first album from Melonyx that establishes them as one of the premier neo-soul groups working today. They have a great sense of themselves as artists, and they’ve used that to push the music in interesting directions, all while delivering an album that is deeply personal and spiritual as well.