Muni Long

Muni Long’s wide-eyed R&B is written with pure honesty. In recent years she has come to bare all of herself in song, but that ability was honed across more than a decade making hits for the likes of Ariana Grande, Rihanna, and Mary J. Blige—among countless others. Aside from the Platinum plaques and chart certificates, she even received a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year via her work on H.E.R.’s 2021 LP, Back of My Mind. Muni Long was born in Vero Beach, Florida, and she’s been making music since before she can remember. Public Displays of Affection, a soundtrack of intimacy released months later, seemed to offer an answer: You let love lead. “I am a lover,” she explains. “I prefer to be kind. I believe in fairytales. The reason Public Displays of Affection worked is because love was absent in R&B.” For that breakthrough project, Muni wanted to mimic the ebbs and flows of a relationship, dipping and diving between moods and sounds—which is real, because love can be tumultuous, too. Even amidst the lush collection of songs, “Hrs and Hrs” was an immediate standout. She’s hoping that her platform can show other people like her that it’s possible to succeed by being true to yourself. In Muni’s eyes, her rise is proof that Black women are commercially viable in an industry that has traditionally said otherwise. “I want to be a catalyst for little Brown girls,” she says. “You can be whatever you want.”