Feel the funk with Gabriel Jacoby’s exclusive playlist for The Cover

Gabriel Jacoby is this week’s star of The Cover – check out the story and his exclusive playlist for NME below. READ MORE: It’s time to get in Gabriel Jacoby’s corner The American R&B artist was profiled by Oumar Saleh and photographed by Karis Beaumont in London in July exclusively for The Cover, which is accompanied by his playlist ‘Funky Buddha’. It features tracks by Nina Simone, Curtis Mayfield, Outkast, Erykah Badu and many more. Stream it on Apple Music here and on Spotify below: The playlist ends with ‘Another Life’ by the late, great D’Angelo, whom Jacoby was compared to by Michelle Obama in a recent appearance on Keke Palmer’s podcast. In his Cover story, Jacoby spoke on the comparisons he’s been getting: “I was never the type of artist to want to mimic anything… I want you to be able to experience something new.” The South Carolina-born, Florida-raised Jacoby dropped his debut EP ‘Gutta Child’ in 2025, which propelled him to a place on the NME 100 of 2026, our list of essential emerging artists to watch. The EP is a heady mix of R&B, funk, soul, backwoods blues and, in the song ‘Bootleg’, Tampa krank, the hyperlocal dance genre Jacoby grew up on. Coming up next f...