R&B Up-And-Comer of the Month Mack Keane Has Long Been Instrumental Behind the Boards — Now He’s Taking the Solo Spotlight With ‘Wide Eyed’
Categoria: Musica
The LA-bred singer-songwriter is bringing blue-eyed soul into 2026.
Por Billboard | 22/07/2026
Even if you aren’t intimately familiar with his still-growing catalog, you’ve almost certainly spotted Mack Keane’s name in the credits of some of contemporary R&B’s most exciting and expansive projects. Between Destin Conrad’s Grammy-nominated Love on Digital , Omar Apollo’s God Said No (Live) and Joyce Wrice’s Overgrown , Keane’s talents as a songwriter, instrumentalist, producer and vocalist have helped an exciting, ascendant pocket of the genre streamline their respective sounds. Related Caribbean Up-And-Comer of the Month: Ayetian Is Shaking Up Dancehall by Blending His Haitian & Jamaican Roots Hip-Hop Up and Comer of the Month: Lelo On Ghettotech, Sada Baby & the ‘Kooky Ass’ 1970s Movie Inspiring Him Country Up and Comer of the Month: Kaitlin Butts Is Writing Hits and ‘Writing Off Toxic People’ For Keane (born Mackenzie Paul Keane), his lifelong love affair with music began in his childhood home. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Calif., Keane is the son of actress-singer Paula Mulcahy and Grammy-nominated songwriter-producer Tom Keane. Keane’s grandfather, Bob Keane, was also a musician and the founder of Del-Fi Records, which notably released Ritchie Valens’s classic “Donna” / “La Bamba” single. Pursuing music was less of a question and more of a natural endpoint for Keane, 29, whose career took off with his 2016 “Model Behavior” single while studying at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. By 2019, Keane began firing off his first two EPs ( Donna Ave and Aquanetta Dr ), but he “didn’t know what the f—k [he] was doing.” Once he linked up with Filipino-American DJ-producer ESTA. (born Francis Esteban) for 2022’s Intersections , clarity followed. “With those first few EPs, I was doing everything myself from writing to producing, with the help of a select few friends who would kick it at the studio with me and my manager,” he tells Billboard while traveling between stops on his Wide Eyed Tour. “I was just making songs because I wanted to express myself in that way. Once I started working with other artists and writing and producing for other people, I learned what I want to do, how I want to do it, what I like and what I don’t like. “That’s why I see [ Wide Eyed ] as my first album,” he continues. “I’m stepping into the artist that I am.” Keane always planned to put out a solo album after Intersections, but his work on other projects — and a particularly busy period in his life — forced him to scrap what he had been working on in favor of 2025’s Entries , a mixtape that felt like a more immediate purging of his emotions. After hunkering down with key collaborators like twin brothers Austin Daniel Brown and John Sterling Brown, Keane whipped up Wide Eyed , which arrived May 8, via a partnership with Rob Walker’s recently relaunched Star Trak Entertainment, once home to N.E.R.D., Clipse and Kelis. At once strikingly candid and quietly hopeful, Wide Eyed relays the myriad life lesso