Sampha, like Smokey Robinson, uses R. & B. as an expression of the personal and the cerebral rather than the sensual. Illustration by Siggi Eggertsson

When Sampha Sisay appeared on late-night television for the first time, in 2013, he was—like many others at the time—an accessory to Drake, who was promoting an album on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.” Seated at a tiny keyboard, Sisay played the plaintive melody of “Too Much,” in which Drake lays bare the kinds of struggles—over finances, illness, thwarted ambitions—that most superstars would keep under wraps. Drake has made his name by toggling between rapped verses and emotionally sung hooks, but for this song he deployed Sisay, a Londoner who goes by Sampha, as a kind of sentimental counterweight. “Money got my whole family going backwards,” Drake rapped forcefully into the camera, and Sampha delivered the chorus from the wings, just above a whisper: “Don’t think about it too much, too much, too much.” He was a restraining force, urging Drake not to venture any deeper into his turmoil.

Earlier this month, Sampha performed on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” this time by himself. The keyboard had been replaced by a glossy upright piano, and Sampha’s silhouette, backlit in burnt orange, looked imposing and artful. Performing “(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano,” a ballad with gospel overtones from his début solo album, “Process,” he accentuated the gentle melody with careful Stevie Wonderian sways and head cocks. Sampha’s mother died of cancer last year, and the tragedy permeates his new album without swallowing it whole. On “Fallon,” there was no sidekick to urge Sampha to resist the depths of his own thoughts. “They said it’s her time, no tears in sight,” he sang. “I kept the feelings close.”

For the past half decade, Sampha’s voice has echoed through the corridors of popular music. After a string of songs with a fellow-Londoner, the electronic artist SBTRKT, who introduced his music to Drake, Sampha became a sought-after collaborator for both independent-minded peers and the sorts of mainstream musicians who aspire to high art. He has become a quietly familiar presence, owing to his work with Kanye West, Jessie Ware, Frank Ocean, Beyoncé, and her sister Solange Knowles. His voice, a velvety soprano, is both soothing and capable of lending emotional gravitas to a song. Sampha can tread so lightly that he’ll sometimes make his way onto a track without receiving proper credit. He appeared on “Mine,” a song from Beyoncé’s self-titled album, from 2013, but his name did not appear in the liner notes.

This is the kind of minor slight that could rile another artist, but Sampha’s ethos is centered on modesty and humility. Like his friends in the xx, a sense of quiet is crucial to his project. (“I have to talk quieter because I feel like I’m yelling next to Sampha,” the radio host Ebro Darden said during an interview last year.) You could call it the second coming of the Quiet Storm, the R. & B. movement named for Smokey Robinson’s 1975 album. Like that cohort, Sampha uses R. & B. and soul as an expression of the personal and the cerebral rather than the sensual—“songs carried on the back of a breeze,” as Robinson once described his aesthetic.

On “Process”—which follows two sketchbook-like EPs—Sampha reconciles his timidity with a hunger for expression. He pushes his voice to the forefront, with more urgency, more punch, and less reverb than on his earlier work. And yet he also shrouds himself carefully. “Process” deals with his mother’s death, but it’s more impressionistic meditation than raw dirge. It’s as if he were presenting death as it would be experienced in a dream state, a place where memory greets loss in a psychedelic jumble, tangled with flashes of angels, Heaven, and spiritual release. “You’re free / You’re free enough to find your feet / You’re also free enough to hide from me,” he chants on “Take Me Inside.” Sampha nearly always prefers free association and metaphor to literal-mindedness: “Flying high above all your memories / I have a bird’s-eye view,” he sings on “Incomplete Kisses,” a song that draws grief plainly.

“Process” shows keen awareness of the promises and the hazards of the digital era. Sampha has little formal training, and he prefers to write and record at home. Because the Internet provides such easy access to any style and era of music, he, like many of his peers, has happily tossed aside preconceived genre constraints. Sampha’s work is a bit gospel, a bit R. & B. There’s some classic soul, made to feel modern with synthesizers; there’s experimental electronica, made to feel classic through the use of analog instruments and quiet piano interludes. But he is not often concerned with creating a tangible framework or song structure so much as with evoking a vibe. The future of independent music is a place where drums and choruses are deeply out of fashion.

There’s a fine line between freedom and aimlessness, however; each day, hundreds of songs are released that toe that line. Some of them have come from Sampha, whose first two EPs felt like rough drafts, airy wisps of melody. On “Process,” he has edged away from that sensibility. When he set out to record the album, he begrudgingly yielded to convention, hiring musicians to join him during his recording sessions, which took place in legitimate studios. These sessions resulted in an album that leans on ambience but has backbone and songwriting heft. Sampha is at his best on “Under,” a song heavy on hi-hats and bass drum, with a slinky chorus that channels Sade at her peak. Despite the title of his new album, these songs are inching away from process and toward finished product.

Atlanta rap is crowded with youthful innovators and traditionalists alike, small-time insurgents and big-league legacies. Migos, a trio of twentysomethings from Lawrenceville, Georgia, have recently graduated to genuine big-league status by way of an insurgent No. 1 hit. That would be “Bad and Boujee,” a calm snarl of a single with a pair of opening words—“raindrops, drop-top”—that seem nonsensical. But nonsense is catnip for the meme machine, which closed in on “Bad and Boujee” with glee. By late December, social-media feeds were filled with images captioned with variations on the opening line. (It turns out that nearly anything can rhyme with “raindrops, drop-top,” including Hillary’s laptop and “staaahhp.”) In recent years, the Billboard Hot 100 chart has broadened to include a greater number of sources, among them digital streams and social-media mentions. When “Bad and Boujee” topped the chart, in January, it usurped Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles”—which had claimed the top slot in part because it provided the soundtrack for another popular meme, the Mannequin Challenge. To the type of person for whom the curious and often inscrutable hits horse race is entertainment, this was tremendously fun to witness.

Not quite as much fun as listening to “Bad and Boujee,” though. To characterize this track as one that successfully gamed the charts undermines the sly power of the song and the evolution that Migos have undergone since they made their initial splash, a few years ago. Early on, the trio—made up of Quavo, Offset, and Takeoff—found a signature style that enabled them to stand out among Atlanta’s variety of aesthetics. They rapped in a quick-fire triplet—three notes a beat—that was eventually christened the “Migos flow” and borrowed by imitators. They tempered their street-rap sensibilities with screwball lyrical flourishes in the vein of Gucci Mane, and they also turned repetition into its own art form, yelling the names of cultural symbols so many times in a row that familiar proper nouns began to take on new meaning: “Hannah Montana, Hannah Montana, Hannah Montana, Hannah Montana,” goes one song named for Miley Cyrus’s famous Disney Channel character, a term that doubles as drug slang. “Versace, Versace, Versace, Versace, Versace,” goes another. Was this talent or craftiness? Did the distinction really matter?