I Went to a Cleo Sol Concert. It Felt Like Church

CLEO SOL STANDS center stage at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. It’s March 2025. Her flowing red ball gown doesn’t detract from her grounding presence. Her forehead glistens under the warm beams. My arms are outstretched and tears stream down my face. The room swells as Sol and her backing vocalists sing these words in the song “Build Me Up”:

“Am I invisible? / I’m not invincible”

After the show, I see three young Black people holding hands in a circle. “We’ve gone to church, y’all,” one says, the other two friends guffawing while slapping her shoulders. That’s how it felt, a mass witnessing of divine intervention.

Sol and I were both born in London, yet there we were, thousands of miles across the Atlantic, sharing space with a community whose history is not our own. Her music made strangers kin, and it made me, a Black British woman, feel at home not through place, but through sound. That spiritual high faded soon after I left the venue. An unhoused Black man was sleeping on a bench in the subway carriage, untroubled by the shakes and screeches as the train descended into Brooklyn. We passengers were also unperturbed, giving him at most a quick glance before staring at our phones.

Since moving to New York, I’ve constantly had to confront how economic inequality intersects with racism in the U.S. That evening, I questioned all those who deemed New York to be the best city in the world. Best for whom?

I didn’t know how to help that man. A city like New York can inhibit the ability to think in utopian terms; it numbs you to suffering. I felt a sense of helplessness pressing on me. So I put on my headphones and played Cleo Sol—not to escape reality, but to channel the overwhelming emotion into faith, faith in a future that can feel humanly impossible.

In his seminal book Black Music, Amiri Baraka (writing then as LeRoi Jones) wrote that modern Black music’s emotional patterns refer to the spirit of worship, following the tradition of African American spirituals in the slavery era. At a time when “complete fullness of expression” by Black people was “constantly censored” by white people, the church was the one place Black people could “unleash [their] emotions and hear words of encouragement for [their] life here on earth.”

Sol’s father is Jamaican, and my parents are Nigerian—two countries to which Christianity was brought and enforced through the machinery of empire. Yet what began as a tool of domination took on a life of its own, embedding itself at the heart of Black cultural and spiritual life in both Britain and America, reshaping it into something affirming and liberatory. When Sol borrows elements of Black faith traditions in her performance—repetition, call-and-response, layering of voices—the music feels like the prayer, protest, and the collective dreaming of our ancestors.

The music binds me to a lineage of people who turned worship into protest and despair into imagination.

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“It’s an old cliché that if you just change the lyrics of the spirituals, they are R&B songs,” Baraka wrote. This interplay of faith and feeling is evident in Sol’s music. Her dulcet vocals dance over piano-driven, bass-backed instrumentation, following in the footsteps of her neo-soul forebears. Like Stevie Wonder, Erykah Badu, and D’Angelo, Sol incorporates the vocal styles and emotional depth of gospel in her more stripped-back discography. Her tender lyricism echoes those encouraging lyrics found in the gospel melodies that soundtracked my formative years. In “Things Will Get Better,” she reminds the listener that “God will never fail you / God sees your heart / I know you’re in the dark, but / It’s a part of life.” This mirrors the assurances of a track that defined my childhood, Marvin Sapp’s “Praise Him in Advance”: “I’ve had my share of ups and downs / Times when there was no one around / God came and spoke these words to me / Praise will confuse the enemy.”

Sol, like Sapp and other modern gospel pioneers—Kirk Franklin, Fred Hammond, CeCe Winans—encourages listeners to use their faith as a foundation for finding resilience. “He gives strength to the weary / And increases power to the weak,” Sol sings in “Reason.”

My Christian upbringing was forged on a double-edged sword: gospel lifting me up, and homophobia pushing me down. I discovered my attraction to women while worshipping in a familial church community that condemned same-sex attraction. My existence felt like an inherent contradiction: Embrace God and go to heaven or live your truth and submit to eternal damnation.

In his book Blutopia, music writer Graham Lock theorizes that Black “affirmative music can be traced back to slaves’ spirituals. These spirituals represent one of the guiding forces in Black culture” because they denote “a sense of belonging no less than a sense of freedom.” While lyrics to songs such as “I Give Myself Away” and “We Fall Down” affirm my inherent worth, church dogma told me something different: These affirmations were restricted to those who fit our church’s narrow definition of holiness.

With lyrics that drift seamlessly between religious and secular, Sol reminds me that it’s okay to live in both worlds. I can take the teachings of Christianity—to love with determination, continue to grow, hope for a better future—without forcing myself to subscribe to the prosperity gospel and homophobic rhetoric. Her discography became my crutch in times of crisis. “People change, so put your faith in God,” she sings in “Heart Full of Love.” She continues, “We don’t know what life will bring / But a good heart will bring you the best things.”

The church hasn’t always encouraged me. When I was growing up, it taught me that God’s love wasn’t for me. Cleo Sol reminds me otherwise. In “Please Don’t End It All,” Sol delivers a heartfelt and whispering plea. She’s directly speaking to my inner child, the version of me defined by insecurity and self-doubt: “I know that you lost your way / Drowned yourself in doubt / But please don’t end it all / ’Cause God is still writing / He’ll never let you fall.”

In Sol’s music, I hear the same force that carried our ancestors through slavery and empire: a refusal to accept the world as it is.

To be marginalized and want better for yourself requires determination and political imagination. I have found that in the music of Sol and those who came before her. Neo-soul music doesn’t erase the contradictions I’ve experienced with Christianity, but I don’t think it needs to. Rather, the genre binds me to a lineage of people who turned worship into protest and despair into imagination.