It’s time to get in Gabriel Jacoby’s corner

Gabriel Jacoby woke up one morning to a phone full of strangers repeating the same prophecy: “Michelle loves you.” No surname, no clue which Michelle. “I was like, who is Michelle?” he tells NME, still sounding faintly stunned by his own story. Somebody eventually sent a clip of Michelle Obama comparing Jacoby to D’Angelo and Chico DeBarge on a visibly impressed Keke Palmer’s podcast. “I just started cursing,” he laughs. “I screen-recorded that bit, immediately sent it to my mama, and posted it real quick.” That’s Jacoby in a nutshell: always rerouting his biggest moments back home.

For anyone arriving cold, Jacoby’s music sounds like it was cooked up somewhere between a Tampa block party and a backwoods Southern jook joint. ‘Gutta Child’, his 2025 debut EP, pours bayou funk and Florida blues through a voice thick as cane syrup, basslines rolling loose beneath like they’ve got somewhere to be. It’s humid, jaunty and dripping with Southern stank – imagine an R&B session in Rico Wade’s basement with the Dungeon Family, except somebody’s left a window open and Tampa krank is rattling the blinds. But for all the familiar ingredients, the 27-year-old never sounds beholden to the past. Gabriel Jacoby is constantly figuring out where his sound can go next.

Naturally, the comparisons have followed: Maxwell, Prince, Anderson .Paak, and the aforementioned D’Angelo, with a little Jamiroquai and ‘Justified’-era Timberlake sprinkled in. But Jacoby is the first to complicate this perception of a starry-eyed revivalist. “I didn’t even know who D’Angelo was until a couple of years ago,” he admits. “Then everybody was like, ‘Oh, y’all kinda sound similar.’ And then I didn’t realise it until I listened to it, and I thought to myself that was kinda crazy.”

For Jacoby, the resemblance is incidental, for he has little interest in cosplay. “I was never the type of artist to want to mimic anything.” Instead, the self-taught guitarist and producer obsesses over tempos, hi-hats, kicks and drum kits like a mad scientist frantically pacing around the lab, figuring out how disparate pieces can occupy the same space. His favourite word for it is “juxtaposition”. “How is this gonna bleed through to people where they don’t feel like they’re reading a history book and being reminded of something they’ve already experienced?” he muses. “I want you to be able to experience something new.”

Gabriel Jacoby on The Cover of NME. Credit: Karis Beaumont for NME

The irony is that Jacoby’s future remains inseparable from his past. Born in rural Anderson, South Carolina, he moved with his family, including six other siblings, to Tampa when he was nine. Before Florida, there was no internet or cable TV in the house, but he resists framing those formative years through the sole lens of hardship. “How do you know you’re going through something unless people tell you?” he asks rhetorically. “To me, that was just regular. It wasn’t until I got to Florida that I got exposed to what adversity at certain times is supposed to feel like.”

To him, being a “Dirty South baby” means recognising the beauty alongside the ugliness. “To some degree, it’s a dirty, muddy, rainy, muggy way of life,” he explains. “But a lot of the most beautiful things in the world came from the South.” That pride courses through ‘Gutta Child’, a project that rarely allows difficult circumstances to dictate its mood. You can almost hear Jacoby grinning on the title track, a head-nodder that struts along a rubbery bassline and pays homage to his two homes: “Carolina water, mix it with that Florida.” “The culture of Carolina is its own thing. The culture of Florida is its own thing, and I have appreciation for both,” he says. “And I do genuinely feel like both made me who I am.”

Credit: Karis Beaumont for NME

Underneath the irresistible jumble of springy drums and livewire guitar of ‘Bootleg’ sits krank, the fast, percussive hyperlocal dance music Jacoby grew up around – one he has increasingly woven into his own R&B. “If Tampa was a village, krank is the native dance,” he explains. “As time went by and technology advanced, it kinda got swept under the rug.” But rather than dusting it off for nostalgia’s sake, Jacoby wants to fuck around with it. “I don’t really see myself as one genre, but I feel like it’s cool to bring it into my own way.”

It’s the EP’s laid-back closer ‘Be Careful’, though, that might contain the most succinct description of Jacoby’s artistry. “I can lean back in this blues truck / Easy way to find my way around this tune up”, he croons in his tender falsetto while the tempo drops, conjuring up an image of a young musician cruising forward inside something battered, distinctly Southern and considerably older than himself. It’s little wonder that Jacoby has mentioned in past interviews that it’s the song he wants people to listen to first.

“I want you to be able to experience something new”

Jacoby is just as big on visual storytelling. He sees music before he hears it, and cites Akira Kurosawa, Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan as readily as any musical inspiration – Kurosawa’s 1990 film Dreams gave him the idea to use a spoken Japanese intro to his 2023 kaleidoscopic single of the same name, Burton’s gothic oddities feed his weirder impulses, and Nolan inspires the scale and grandeur. “Most of the stuff I create is inspired by either a dream I’ve had or just something visual. I’m the composer, and I’m choosing to put a movie, a short film, behind this.”

Even the boxing imagery scattered across his oeuvre comes from memory rather than a mood board. Growing up, Jacoby and his brothers couldn’t afford a punching bag, so an oak tree took the beating instead. “If I’m not sparring with my brother or cousins or something, all I had was an oak tree, so I felt like I had to bring that in, had to show people that.” Floridians clocked it instantly, and limitations turned into myth without anybody sanding the splinters off.

Credit: Karis Beaumont for NME

There were harder times, too. Before committing fully to music, Jacoby spent time incarcerated, writing lyrics on paper and imagining beats he had no way to build. “It was never the same as when I could actually play piano or play guitar. It really just taught me to appreciate freedom and not take it for granted,” he says, before circling back to the one thing that never changed. “I could never see myself doing anything else. I came out the womb only thinking about music and only being about music.”

Money took longer to catch up with the talent. In the summer of 2024, he was scrubbing plates one day, discussing his future with label executives the next. By August, he’d signed to Pulse Records and relocated to Los Angeles, putting him within arm’s reach of myriad producers and studios. “I’ve always been alone in the sense of, like, I can do everything myself,” Jacoby says. “But I’ve come to appreciate other creatives. I really appreciate producers because that’s the superpower.”

Credit: Karis Beaumont for NME

Still, you can take the boy out of Florida, but not the other way around. When the songs stopped arriving naturally, he flew straight from a show in London to Miami to work with production team The Monsters & Strangerz. Jacoby simply needed the rain, humidity and palm trees again. “I have been creating in LA at least since ‘Gutta Child’ came out, and it hasn’t really worked as much,” he admits. “I’m big on inspiration, and nature is my biggest inspiration.”

New famous friends haven’t changed that equation much. Justin Bieber found Jacoby’s music online, invited him over, and what Jacoby remembers isn’t a brush with fame but mutual recognition between two musicians. “He actually truly is like a musician,” he says, recalling Bieber behind a drum kit and a guitar. “He’s doing the same stuff I’ve done, except we’ve just come from two completely different sides of life.” His sessions with Kaytranada are even more intriguing, given the dancefloor pulse already running under Jacoby’s neo-soul. They prioritised finding a song together, he says. “Let’s make a Kaytranada-Gabriel song, and it will be something entirely new.” There’s material sitting on a hard drive somewhere, but he’s in no rush to touch it.

“I came out the womb only thinking about music and only being about music”

His own next chapter comes first in the form of a new upcoming project. Where ‘Gutta Child’ was something Southern listeners could hold up and say, “look, this is who we are”, the follow-up goes further beneath. “I’m gonna make something even more undeniable, to where you just can’t look away,” he says. The songs will confront his own pain alongside what women, children and a world reshaped by war are going through. “It’s not gonna be metaphorical anymore.”

The local keeps travelling, too. At London’s Jazz Cafe Festival in August, he watched crowds thousands of miles from Tampa move to ‘Bootleg’ like they grew up on krank. As one of the first in his immediate family to leave the country, that landed heavier than just a stamp in his passport. Next up: playing Austin City Limits and sharing the Camp Flog Gnaw bill with Future, Steve Lacy, Isaiah Rashad and Tyler, The Creator – another leap for a kid who, just two summers back, was still a dishwasher hunched over a sink.

Ask Jacoby where all of this is supposed to lead and he reaches without hesitation for Michael Jackson, Bob Marley and Prince – not for the stadiums or the numbers, but because he hears the same message running through all three discographies. “I am going to push nothing but love,” he says. “I’m never going to compromise my message.” Even if you take away the acclaim, co-signs and momentum, his answer is still the same: “I’m never gonna stop creating. Even if I was dead broke, living on the street, I always, always made music.”

Gabriel Jacoby has new music coming soon. He will perform at Austin City Limits and Camp Flog Gnaw 2026

Listen to Gabriel Jacoby’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.

Words: Oumar Saleh
Photography: Karis Beaumont
Styling: Al Rogers, James Loach
Makeup: Patricia Hytonen
Location: Arch Studios
Label: Pulse

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