Yazmin Lacey drops ‘Sweetest Season,’ a sun-drenched new single produced with Ezra Collective’s Femi Koleoso, following her acclaimed 2025 album Teal Dreams
Yazmin Lacey released “Sweetest Season“ on June 11, 2026, and it is everything the title promises. The East London songwriter has spent a decade building one of the most distinctive voices in British soul and jazz, moving from her acclaimed debut Voice Notes in 2023 through to last October’s Teal Dreams, a 14-track second album praised by critics for confirming her place at the center of UK music’s current golden age. “Sweetest Season” is the first new music since that album, and it arrives with a collaborator who knows her world well.
Femi Koleoso is the drummer and heartbeat of Ezra Collective, the Mercury Prize-winning London jazz ensemble that Lacey has performed alongside on multiple occasions, including a memorable appearance on Strictly Come Dancing and Radio 1’s Live Lounge. He is also a DJ and BBC Radio 6 Music broadcaster, and the multi-directional nature of his musical life makes him a natural fit for a track built on the loose, sun-drenched energy of summer freedom. Their working relationship is not new, but “Sweetest Season” gives it a standalone platform for the first time.
What ‘Sweetest Season’ Sounds Like
The track is an ode to summer freedoms, simple in its emotional intention and precise in its execution. Lacey’s vocal sits front and center, purring and warm, delivering a lyric that asks for nothing more complicated than presence and warmth: “Let’s just pretend that winter never happened / Let the sun rays grace your face.” It is a small lyric that does exactly what it needs to do. In Lacey’s hands, the plainness of the sentiment becomes the point. She has always been a songwriter who trusts directness over complication, and “Sweetest Season” leans fully into that instinct.
The production carries the qualities that have made Lacey’s catalog a fixture across UK jazz and soul programming, the same blend of soul, ska, Lover’s Rock, and jazz that The Arts Desk described in their Teal Dreams review as “not high tech, no signifiers of modernity, but absolutely sounding like London 2025.” Teal Dreams was recorded with collaborators including Miles James, Barney Lister, Jack Peñate, and Matt Maltese, and was inspired in part by Lacey’s time studying horticulture at London’s Walworth Garden. It reached its apex with the headline show at Electric Brixton in March 2026, Lacey’s biggest solo show to date. “Sweetest Season” steps directly out of that momentum.
The Broader Context: British Soul’s Finest Moment
Yazmin Lacey occupies a specific and significant position in British music right now. Her debut Voice Notes drew comparisons from Pitchfork to Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill. Teal Dreams expanded the sonic palette further into ska and Lover’s Rock while keeping the emotional intimacy that made Voice Notes a word-of-mouth success. She has performed alongside Ezra Collective and Joe Armon-Jones, two of the central acts in a London jazz and soul movement that critics have repeatedly described as a generational flowering. “Sweetest Season,” with Femi Koleoso alongside her, places that community back on record together.
The song is not a statement about anything beyond its own feeling. That restraint is Lacey’s signature. She makes music that is precisely as large as it needs to be and no larger. In a summer full of maximalist pop releases and festival-scale productions, “Sweetest Season” is quietly, deliberately the other thing: a song that sounds like a window open on a warm afternoon, doing exactly what it promises and nothing more.
