Artist Spotlight: Kumail took Mumbai bedroom beats to Kinshasa and Lisbon, and came back with a soul album

Imagine making a record in three countries on three different continents, with a chef from your own restaurant speaking Lingala on one of the tracks. That is roughly how Kumail's second album, Mudbrown, got made, and it sounds exactly as warm and lived-in as that sounds.

Kumail (Kumail Hamid) is an R&B and soul producer, composer and vocalist from Mumbai. He started out sketching loops on a laptop keyboard, drifted through lo-fi beatmaking and ambient textures, and slowly moved toward neo-soul. He now lives in Lisbon. In between, he spent five years in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the album is named after the river there.

The line into your taste

If Frank Ocean's Blonde and the slow, smoky side of Brent Faiyaz live on your phone, this is the next door to knock on. Kumail's reference points, by the label's own account of the record, are D'Angelo, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, J Dilla and Erykah Badu. You can hear all of it: loose drums, fuzzy electric piano, guitars that sit back in the pocket, and a voice that never oversings.

The difference is the travel. Funk, bossa nova and African rhythms from his Kinshasa years run through the record. In the album announcement from Tru Thoughts, his label, Kumail said of the record: "It's not clean or perfect, it's real."

Start here

"Vultures" (feat. Nickson Dufala). The best way in. A tight groove, and Dufala, who is a chef at Kumail's restaurant, speaks in Lingala over it. It is the sound of the album's whole idea in a few minutes.

"Darlin'". The single that ended a six-year gap in December 2025. It is a love song for his wife: guitars, a slightly smudged electric piano and a vocal shared with Rahel. Late-night playlist material.

"Tear It Off" (feat. Fly Anakin). The rap guest here is the American rapper Fly Anakin, which pulls the track toward the hip-hop side of the same Dilla-shaped room. Good if your taste leans Tyler and Kendrick as much as Frank.

"Lady". The record's focus track, and its most direct R&B moment. Two remixes of it, by Laroye and Oliver Night, also came out through Tru Thoughts.

Then play the whole record, which has ten tracks named in the announcement including "True to You", "Off My Back", "Bring It Back", "Money", "On Something" and "Get Down".

Why now

Mudbrown came out on 10 April 2026 through Tru Thoughts, the Brighton label that also puts out Bonobo and Flowdan. It is Kumail's first album since Yasmin in 2019. Indian R&B has been having a good year, from Raveena abroad to Mary Ann Alexander in Bengaluru, and Kumail adds a different thread: an Indian producer whose sound has been shaped as much by Central Africa and Portugal as by Mumbai.

For a quiet November, it is a record that gets better the more you let it sit in the room.

If you like Kumail, try

• Sampha, for the same hushed, home-built intimacy.
• Raveena, the Indian-American voice who turns South Asian roots into dreamy R&B.
• Erykah Badu, the neo-soul blueprint behind so much of this sound.