Joy Oladokun

Few singer-songwriters sit as comfortably between folk, R&B, rock and pop as Joy Oladokun, and the reason lies in her biography. The American songwriter, who grew up in Casa Grande, Arizona, draws on her identity as a queer person of colour, and that vantage point shapes everything from her lyrics to her sense of who her songs are for. Raised on country and folk alongside Bob Marley and Lauryn Hill, she came to music through a Tracy Chapman video that sent her to the guitar at ten.

Her debut EP, Cathedrals, was self-released in 2015, and the Kickstarter-funded album Carry followed in April 2016 on Well Records. In 2020 she released "I See America", which NPR named among the 100 best songs of that year, and her second album, In Defense of My Own Happiness (The Beginnings), arrived that July. Proof of Life, from 2023, featured Noah Kahan and Chris Stapleton, and in 2024 she opened for Hozier's Unreal Unearth Tour. Her sixth album, Hope is a Heavy Thing, came out on 25 September 2026.