Queen Naija
R&B/Soul
•
41m
With the recent arrival of her debut album missunderstood, Atlanta-based singer/songwriter Queen Naija has cemented her status as one of R&B’s most compelling young stars. Hailed as “the first soul star of the social media generation” by The New York Times, the 25-year-old Detroit native has amassed over a billion combined global streams to date, each song showcasing the powerful vocal skills she first developed by singing in church. Although she initially found fame through a YouTube channel launched with her former husband, Queen struck out on her own with her breakthrough single “Medicine”: a January 2018 release that debuted at No. 45 on the Billboard Hot 100 (a nearly-unheard-of achievement for an unsigned artist), and quickly landed her a deal with Capitol Records. By summer 2018, she’d delivered a critically acclaimed self-titled EP, which debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Emerging Artists chart and earned major recognition in the 2019 awards season (including nominations for Top R&B Artist at the Billboard Music Awards and Best New Artist at the BET Awards, in addition to three nods at the iHeartRadio Music Awards).
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