With a voice that fuses the sacred and the soulful, Hall of Fame icon Chaka Khan defies age and genre on her 13th solo album—proving that good music truly is the language of the angels.
“Good music is the language of the angels.”
The quote comes from an ABC interview with 2024 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Chaka Khan.
For Khan, whose four-octave vocal range has been compared to a saxophone, it makes sense to call good music the language of the angels, since the Bible describes angels using trumpets as instruments to announce divine judgments and the return of Christ.
Her voice, or “instrument,” feels both sacred—suggesting a spiritual or pure quality—and charged with deep, earthly emotion, blending the two seamlessly.
Songs like "Tell Me Something Good," "Sweet Thing," "I'm Every Woman" and "Ain't Nobody" have benefitted from this for the duration of her career.
Six decades later, that instrument shines again. With her new Snoop Dogg collaboration, “Boogie’s In My Soul,” Khan achieves miraculous timelessness, defying her 73 years and making her 13th solo album, “Chakzilla,” out September 18, 2026, via BMG Rights Management, feel right on time.
It’s her first album in seven years. In a streaming-first environment, legacy acts, K-pop and Latin pop, and country stars share the spotlight. Now, time, space, and place have collapsed, leaving only energy as a guiding force.
Ultimately, the union of art and physics makes it worthwhile to mention Khan’s new music. In the industry and marketplace, the funk icon’s latest work has few metaphysical peers.
The closest parallel might be Sia, her collaborator, who obscures her identity to let audiences focus solely on the music.
But this is entirely different.
Imagine a body that somehow feels like it’s living and working not beyond its means, but beyond itself. Imagine music that works as a direct fusion of vibes into hearts, where the body merely houses the spirit that’s doing the work.
If that sounds too ethereal, Elyse Gardner, in a 2024 essay on Khan’s Hall of Fame induction, described the magical duality of her artistry.
“Imagine honey and fire captured in the same bottle, with all their defining qualities – the sweetness and rich texture, the ferocity and heat – somehow kept entirely intact. Add to this mix the inimitable balance of sensuality, muscle, and elegance that has defined Khan’s style – for a great voice alone does not a great singer make – and you’ll…(have) a unique and irrepressible force.”
To be an alchemical superstar, one must first be as direct as they are dynamic in their creativity.
Whether as a solo artist or as the lead vocalist of Rufus, Khan topped Billboard’s dance and R&B charts every three years for three decades and was a top-10 album artist in jazz, pop, and R&B for 20 years.
She’s also a performer in an inspirational lineage that includes Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker.
Take a jazz-loving hippie and soulful funk performer. Blend them with masters of improvisation and advanced harmonic understanding. Add an approach to phrasing that makes vocals sound like instruments, or instruments sound like they are singing. The result is someone who feels a level above the comprehension threshold.
Yet, the spiritual energy of Khan’s upcoming release has already been felt.
Before Khan turned Prince’s 1979 “I Feel For You” into a 1984 hit, Prince recorded “Sweet Thing” by Chaka Khan and Rufus in 1976.
In a 2016 Rolling Stone feature, Brian Hiatt describes what also embodies Khan’s power at 73, approaching a timeless moment.
“(Prince) doesn’t just shy away from the song’s ostensibly feminine qualities; he actively accentuates them. When Chaka sings “Sweet Thing,” it is in its own way a subtle undermining of gender roles: her performance is strong and assured, providing the gospel-inspired “heat” and “fire” to complement her (male) band’s silky, demure musical backing. When Prince sings it, however, he takes on a more passive, plaintive role, the kind more stereotypically associated with a woman: his falsetto is so delicate and fragile that one can almost imagine it blowing away like dandelions in the wind. And at the very moment in the song when Chaka’s vocals reach the peak of their power–the aforementioned ‘you are my heat, you are my fire’ lines in the bridge–Prince just gets more vulnerable, softly harmonizing with another track of himself singing in an even higher register.”
Once again, Chaka Khan once said: “Good music is the language of the angels.”
She means it.
