Destin Conrad's Roadrunner: Queer Dancehall With Jamaican Roots

Destin Conrad has released three albums, earned one Grammy nomination and built a run of collaborations with rising R&B artists such as Bellah and Nia Smith — all within the space of a couple of years.

The 26-year-old, who comes from Tampa, Florida, treats each record as a different self-portrait, according to The Guardian's weekly new-tracks playlist feature, which spotlights Roadrunner as its lead pick.

His spring 2025 debut, Love on Digital, pays its dues to the genre that raised him. Yet the album swerves derivative clichés through small production quirks — a vocal glitch here, a skittering Jersey beat there. The Guardian's four-line dossier on the singer lists Kwn, Tyla and Odeal as reference points for listeners.

Last summer's Whimsy took a sharp turn into alt-jazz. Conrad wrote the sprawling album in two weeks, drawing on his time in a high-school jazz choir, as he told GQ South Africa in an October 2025 interview.

Roadrunner, his latest, arrived a year later as a celebration of his Jamaican roots and queer identity. The Guardian describes its sound in precise terms: "all languid reggae basslines, gyrating dancehall rhythms, drinks-in-the-air swagger and come-hither lyricism."

The playlist feature frames the record within a broader arc: every one of the Grammy-nominated Floridian's songs reveals a different side of him. That restlessness — from R&B formalism to improvised-feeling jazz to dancehall defiance — has become the through-line of a career that moves faster than most of his peers'.

Conrad plays Dallas, Texas, on 1 November, his next confirmed US date.

For an artist who has redefined his sound three times in under two years, the question his catalogue poses is what shape the next reinvention will take — and whether the Grammy nomination that followed his early run will convert into wider institutional recognition.