From London
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It has been a while since there was a boyband of any real importance – and even longer since there was one singing R&B music. They used to be a joyous part of 90s pop, especially in the US, with Boyz II Men, 112, Blackstreet and more, and to a lesser extent in the UK, thanks to Damage and Another Level. Tight harmonising, loose jeans and an absolute unwillingness to break eye contact in music videos made for dozens of earnest, yearning hits.
Then there was nothing for years, until the London quartet No Guidnce resurrected and updated the form in considerable style. Beginning in 2021, they won an audience of millions on TikTok with their a cappella cover versions – recorded in an echoing car park for poignant, evanescent reverb – then segued into releasing original tracks in 2023.
They arrive at a time when R&B is as critically and commercially successful as it has been in years, with SZA and Victoria Monét topping 2024’s Grammy nominations (the latter has co-written some No Guidnce songs) and the genre getting its own category at the Brit awards for the first time.
As with all good boybands, each member is a slightly different type of tremendously attractive – pretty (Josh), smiley (Zeekay), smouldering (Kaci) and even more smouldering (Ebubé) – and their superb voices offset each other well. “Vocally, we sit in different places,” says Josh. “It didn’t feel like we were competing, just complementing each other.” Each was grounded in R&B from childhood, whether it was Josh via his Filipino family (“in Filipino culture, a big thing was power ballads like Céline Dion, but on the other side was R&B”) or Ebubé via songs in the car on the way home from church (“gospel and R&B are very closely linked, so it was an easy transition”).
They are all, therefore, au fait with the tropes of this intense, romantic music, down to the unironic air-grabbing choreography. “R&B is mostly about love,” Zeekay says. “And, in a boyband, we’re going to sing to the ladies.” The last word is knowingly pronounced as “laydeez”. Is their audience screaming girls, or more diverse than that? “Screaming girls!” comes the reply in unison, although Josh caveats: “There are some guys who want to be in a boyband as well and emulate that sound. Or it’s the girls’ boyfriends.”
Zeekay says: “We’re just trying to spread love. That’s what people who are attracted to the boyband concept will be most attracted to anyway: four guys singing their hearts out.” They offset any corniness with a dash of transgression. On their biggest song, Is It a Crime?, they present themselves as so helplessly in thrall to their libidos that they need multiple partners – not a crime, but not exactly ethical. It’s potent to have this bad-boy toxicity sung so sweetly. I ask if they find it easy to get into the mindset of being a love object and Kaci has a devastatingly smooth reply: “Of course – I’m always in that headspace.”
While R&B is a core part of US pop, the UK hasn’t always taken to it. Moreover, social media fame doesn’t always translate to real-world success – No Guidnce have a healthy 600,000-odd monthly listeners on Spotify, but none of the 10 songs they have released has broken the UK Top 100. As Josh says, in the world of social media, “not everyone’s a fan – they’re just a follower. It’s really interesting trying to migrate those people into being actual fans.”
“We’ve had many moments of impatience,” Zeekay says. “When we came out we were ready to” – he points up, like a graph plotting mega sales. “Two and a half million followers on social media? We were ready to do the whole thing. And it was much more of a build than we would have wanted, in terms of becoming famous straight away. It was a wakeup call, to let us know the hard work only gets harder.” Kaci agrees: “It’s quite unrealistic for people to expect things to happen just like that now” – he clicks his fingers. “Even in the industry, people get too caught up in having a ‘moment’. It’s a process.”
Not that they have tempered their expectations. Ebubé says they want to be an arena-level band, while Zeekay says they hope to take British R&B global in the way Central Cee has done with UK drill. Kaci says it’s their peers in gen Z, for whom the idea of a British R&B boyband is new and even weird, who will take them there. “In this generation, it’s just about free expression – it’s never about trying to conform,” he says. “Being more outside the box actually gives you more of a chance.”
