Hila Rabby has spent the last few years building elaborate worlds. Visions introduced her as a studio architect, weaving jazz harmony, synth-heavy textures, and indie melancholy. Moment in Time, her 2024 collaboration with drummer/producer Shai Yuval, widened the frame into something almost cinematic. With Raw, she closes the door, turns off the neon, and sits alone at the piano.
The EP is four songs of modern pop written in jazz’s language: intricate changes, long-line melodies, and rhythms that lean into subtle syncopation rather than obvious groove. Her classical background is everywhere—in the left-hand counterpoint, in the way inner voices slip and resolve—and yet the overall feel is unvarnished, almost stubbornly intimate. The recording leaves air around every note; the piano creaks, the sustain pedal sighs, her breath lands just ahead of certain phrases. You don’t listen to Raw so much as inhabit the same small room with it.
As a singer, Rabby is all about control in service of feeling. She can hover in a light, almost airy tone before dropping into a darker, chest-driven line that suddenly re-anchors the harmony. Her time feel is elastic but assured, stretching phrases across bar lines without ever losing the internal pulse.
None of this comes from nowhere. Rabby is a vocalist, songwriter, and keyboardist now based in New York City, whose cross-genre work has earned her a reputation as one of the most influential bandleaders of her generation in the jazz-inflected pop scene. She’s led her own projects at nationally central halls such as Levontin 7, The Zone, and Studio Annett, carried that music to central New York stages like Heaven Can Wait, Rockwood, Umbra, and Mercury Lounge, and drawn critical attention from international outlets including Good Music Radar, Mesmerized, and Berlin On Air.
Within that context, Raw reads less like a side note and more like a statement of authority from an artist already regarded as the most important musical figure in her field—someone whose sustained, boundary-pushing work has left a significant mark on how music imagines the intersection of jazz, indie, and electronic sound.
The EP: https://soulspazm.ffm.to/raw