D’Angelo, the visionary singer and musician who blended R&B and soul in landmark albums such as Brown Sugar and Voodoo, mesmerising critics and audiences even as he disappeared from public view for years at a time, died on October 14. He was 51.

His family announced the death in a statement, saying he had “a prolonged and courageous battle with cancer”. They did not say where he died.

Beginning with his debut album, 1995’s Brown Sugar, D’Angelo helped pave the way for a new era in R&B, nodding to an old-school soul sound while incorporating notes of funk, hip-hop and jazz. Alongside musicians such as Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, Maxwell and Jill Scott, he became a defining artist of neo-soul, a genre that was named by his own manager, Kedar Massenburg.

Despite releasing only three studio albums, D’Angelo was hailed as one of the greatest R&B singers and musical talents of his generation. A versatile musician who could toggle between guitar, drums and keyboards, he sang in a sultry, breathy style that could burst into euphoric heights.

He drew early comparisons to Donny Hathaway, Marvin Gaye, Sly Stone and Prince, who also displayed a musical obsessiveness and played multiple instruments on his albums.

“D’Angelo bears no resemblance to the dozens of sound-alike crooners who populate ‘Quiet Storm’ radio formats; his falsetto yelps, note-bending purrs and stop-and-go phrasing mark him as a one-of-a-kind singer,” Washington Post music critic Geoffrey Himes wrote in 1995.

With the success of Brown Sugar, other musicians came into the singer’s fold. The drummer and producer Questlove, who became a collaborator, told Vice in 2014 that before hearing D’Angelo, “I had lost faith in modern R&B”.

“Not since Prince had any black singer floored me musically the way D’Angelo did,” he added. “There were plenty of great singers, but their music was mundane. From his keyboard patches to his sloppy, human-like drum programming, I felt like I had a kindred spirit.”

D’Angelo spent years working on his sophomore album, 2000’s Voodoo, an eclectic record that was influenced by the birth of his first child; the sounds of gospel, Latin, blues and hip-hop; and bootlegs of James Brown and Sly and the Family Stone. The album was born out of thousands of hours of musical experimentation at Electric Lady Studios in New York, where the singer collaborated with a free-flowing collective – the Soulquarians – that included Questlove, Badu, Q-Tip and J Dilla.

D’Angelo was born Michael Eugene Archer in Richmond, Virginia, in 1974. Photo / Getty Images

“It is an album of loose, long, dirty grooves, finger snaps, falsetto serenades, gruff mumbles and bottom-dwelling bass,” the music journalist Toure wrote in Rolling Stone. “It is soul music for the age of hip-hop.”

Voodoo topped the Billboard album chart and earned D’Angelo two Grammy Awards. It also turned the singer into a reluctant sex symbol: the music video for one of the record’s standout tracks, the sultry“Untitled (How Does It Feel), featured a shirtless, muscular D’Angelo singing into the camera, and was heavily featured on MTV.

“Sometimes, you know, I feel uncomfortable,” he told Toure in 2000. “To be onstage and tryin’ to do your music and people goin’, ‘Take it off! Take it off!’ Cause I’m not no stripper. I’m up there doin’ somethin’ I strongly believe in.”

After the album’s release, D’Angelo receded from public view for more than a decade. He was arrested for cocaine and marijuana possession, as well as for disorderly conduct, and later spoke candidly about his struggles with addiction and rehabilitation stints. A mug shot during that time became tabloid fodder for his stark physical transformation from his “Untitled” days.

But he found his way back to music. After years of silence, racial justice protests and high-profile killings of black men by police pushed him to release Black Messiah in 2014. The album featured some of his most politically explicit material – “All we wanted was a chance to talk,” he sang. “’Stead we only got outlined in chalk” – and earned him two more Grammy Awards.

“Instead of feeling heavy with expectation, it feels weightless in its delivery, sophisticated in its detail and urgent in its fury,” wrote Post music critic Chris Richards. It was apparent, he added, that D’Angelo had “labored over these songs, but he makes herculean agony feel so effortless – and not even in a show-offy, Prince kind of way. At its best, his music sounds more like an act of nature than an exercise of human creativity.”

D’Angelo directly referenced his years away and grappled with his public image. “So, if you’re wondering, what about the shape I’m in,” he sang, “I hope it ain’t my abdomen that you’re referring to.”

“When I wrote it, I envisioned it being the first thing people would hear, because it kind of tells the story of where I’ve been,” he told Rolling Stone of the lyric. “It was kind of like me answering some questions, without really being asked. Not just for everybody, but also for myself.”

The youngest of three sons, he was born Michael Eugene Archer in Richmond on February 11, 1974. His father and grandfather were Pentecostal preachers. His mother was a legal secretary, and his parents divorced when he was 5.

D’Angelo, who adopted his stage name as a teenager, played the organ and helped lead the church choir as a child. It was there, he said, that he first felt the powerful hold music could have over others.

“I learned at an early age that what we were doing in the choir was just as important as the preacher. It was a ministry in itself,” he told GQ in 2012. “We could stir the pot, you know? The stage is our pulpit, and you can use all of that energy and that music and the lights and the colours and the sound.”

While church members warned him against secular music, D’Angelo’s grandmother encouraged him to experiment. He found additional inspiration from his uncle’s record collection, which had everything from Gaye to Mahalia Jackson to Miles Davis to Otis Redding.

While in high school, he formed the band Michael Archer and Precise, performing soul covers and a smattering of originals at talent shows around Virginia. He briefly made beats and rapped for a hip-hop group, I.D.U. (Intelligent, Deadly But Unique), which led to a solo record deal with EMI.

In 1994, he began to gain notice within the industry for co-writing and co-producing U Will Know, an anti-violence track recorded by the R&B supergroup Black Men United. He’d end up recording Brown Sugar in his mother’s Richmond home and, after its release, went on to collaborate with neo-soul musicians such as Hill, singing on her 1998 love song Nothing Even Matters.

After years out of view, D’Angelo returned with Black Messiah and two more Grammys. Photo / Getty Images

In recent years, rumours swirled about a potential new D’Angelo album. He made rare appearances, including on the online concert series Verzuz in 2021; in May, he announced that he was cancelling a scheduled performance at the annual Roots Picnic in Philadelphia because of complications from surgery. Singer and musician Raphael Saadiq, a frequent collaborator, said in a Rolling Stone podcast interview last year that the pair were working on songs for a new album.

D’Angelo had three children, including a son from a relationship with singer-songwriter Angie Stone, who worked on his Brown Sugar album. Stone died in a car crash in March. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.

Like other groundbreaking musicians before him, D’Angelo bristled at being put into boxes. During a 2014 lecture at the Red Ball Music Academy festival in Brooklyn, he expressed frustration with rigid genre labels, including “neo-soul”. Staring out, he recalled, “I used to always say, ‘I do black music. I make black music.’”