The name stands for God Energy, Naturally Amazing, loosely inspired by Gina from Martin, because of course it is. When Liv.e and Karriem Riggins decided to make music together as GENA, they did not plan it the way albums get planned in 2026. There was no writing camp in a rented house. No Zoom calls with A&R. They built The Pleasure Is Yours through virtual sessions, passing ideas back and forth, letting Karriem's masterful percussive frameworks become spaces for Liv.e to fill with her smoky, unpolished vocals. The result, released in February on Lex Records, is sixteen tracks of neo-soul that sounds like two people having a conversation only they fully understand, and not caring whether you catch every word.
Two Lineages Colliding
Karriem Riggins is a drummer's drummer. He has played with J Dilla, Common, Diana Krall, and Ray Brown. His work with Madlib on the Madvillain sessions is the stuff of hip-hop production mythology. He understands rhythm not as accompaniment but as architecture, the thing that holds everything else up.
The Dilla connection is worth holding onto. Riggins absorbed that approach to swing and quantization at close range, the philosophy that a groove is most alive when it carries a human imprecision, when the timing is felt rather than calculated. On The Pleasure Is Yours, that philosophy is audible in every bar. The drums do not sit on top of the music. They are the music, and everything else is filling the spaces the drums define.
Liv.e, Dallas-born and now LA-based, is a different kind of force. Her solo work, Couldn't Wait to Tell You... in 2020 and Girl in the Half Pearl in 2022, established her as one of the most unpredictable voices in experimental R&B. She sings like she is remembering a melody rather than performing one, her phrasing always slightly off-center, always landing somewhere more interesting than where you expected.
What makes her an ideal match for Riggins is that she is not a singer who needs a neat grid to work against. She does not depend on the beat holding still while she executes. She finds the pocket in music that barely has one, and she makes it feel inevitable after the fact. Put the two of them together and the groove is never where you expect it, and it is always exactly right.
Put them together and you get GENA: a project that sounds like classic soul refracted through a prism built by two people who learned different lessons from the same tradition.
The Album as Conversation
"Lead It Up" is the album's most immediate entry point, Liv.e's voice floating over Riggins' warm, percussive groove, the whole thing feeling like a sunset drive with the windows down. "HOWWEFLOW" pushes deeper into abstraction, the rhythm section becoming more insistent while Liv.e's vocals dissolve into texture. "Circlesz" lives somewhere between jazz and hip-hop, neither fully committing to either, and stronger for it.
But the real revelation is how the album moves as a whole. Sixteen tracks in forty-three minutes means nothing overstays. Ideas arrive, develop, and leave before they have time to become predictable. The "Douwannabwitastar!?" video, directed by Mackai Sharp, captures this energy perfectly: playful, kinetic, slightly chaotic in the best way.
Riggins gave Liv.e room to be herself, serving as what Lex Records described as "a conduit for her to find rhythms organically and imaginatively fill the spaces that Karriem built for her experimentation." That description sounds like label copy, but listening to the album, it rings true. There is a generosity in the production. Riggins never crowds Liv.e, and she never wastes the space he gives her.
What Lex Records Means Here
Lex Records is a label with a specific history and a specific sensibility. Founded in the UK in the early 2000s, it built its catalog around hip-hop and electronic music that resisted easy classification: Prefuse 73, Dabrye, Nobody, Four Tet before Four Tet was a household name in dance music. The label has always been about artists who take the long view, who make records for listeners who are paying close attention.
Releasing GENA on Lex is not a commercial calculation. It is a curatorial statement about where this music belongs. The decision signals that The Pleasure Is Yours is not a crossover attempt or a market exercise. It is a record made for people who care about records, distributed through a label that has always found those people regardless of how small the audience seemed.
The sixteen-track runtime, the forty-three minute running time, the refusal to pad the runtime with radio-ready singles: these are all consistent with Lex's aesthetic of letting records be exactly what they are, no more and no less.
Why Now Matters
The virtual construction of The Pleasure Is Yours is also its defining context. These are not songs written in a room. They are songs assembled across distances, shaped by the latency and the limitation of remote collaboration, and the slightly airless quality that digital-only sessions can produce is paradoxically part of the album's texture. It sounds intimate the way a late-night phone call sounds intimate: present and distant simultaneously.
GENA plays Aisle 5 in Atlanta on April 12, with Stacy Epps joining the bill. The duo's ability to translate these virtual sessions into live energy is something worth witnessing before the venues get bigger, and they will.
The Pleasure Is Yours is not a supergroup album in the traditional sense. It is not two famous people combining their audiences. It is two musicians who share a language deciding to speak it together for the first time. The sixteen tracks feel like the beginning of a conversation that will keep going. In a year already stacked with collaborations, this one earns its existence on every track.
The chemistry that produced this record cannot be manufactured after the fact. It was there before the sessions started, built from years of each artist developing a vocabulary that happened to be compatible with the other's. The album is the evidence. It does not need to explain itself.
