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, like when she was discovered on YouTube as a teen, singing the dictionary, turning random words and definitions into improvised melismatic gold. Later, in early 2022, Muni Long became known to the world by turning the tangible ache of irresistible love into “Hrs and Hrs”— a Grammy award winning hypnotic R&B gem she famously wrote while doing dishes. The track soon went on to garner a Platinum certification, as well as over 2 million TikTok creates, more than 1 Billion streams across platforms, and a #16 peak on the Billboard Hot 100. Every song she shares seems to demonstrate an ever-deepening understanding of the complex emotions of romantic entanglements, and the struggle to find yourself in relationships. She’s become R&B’s breakthrough R&B artist in the process of searching for herself. But in a way, her viral breakout almost felt like destiny—the web was the first place she saw how far her voice could travel. Public Displays of Affection, a soundtrack of intimacy, 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. 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.”