Lauded as one of Pitchfork’s 21 Breakout Artists to Watch, Brooklyn-based singer and songwriter Cleo Reed debuts at SFJAZZ as part of the 2026 NoisePop Festival with music from their 2025 album Cuntry — an assured mix of R&B and folk music that Pitchfork calls "a proud and emphatically Black update on the American folk tradition.”
Born Ella Moore, Reed is a gifted New York-reared polymath who took the professional name “Cleo” in tribute to their great-grandmother.
A founding member of the dream punk band Pretty Sick and a Berklee College of Music alumnus, Reed made an impact with their debut single “Vulnerable/Change My Mind” and issued their full-length album Root Cause in 2023.
Reed is a recipient of the 2022 NYC Women’s Fund for Media Music and Theatre and is a 2023 OneBeat Fellow who collaborated with Jon Batiste on his American Symphony at Carnegie Hall.
Of Cuntry, Reed says: “This album is very current, and I don’t think there’s any other time that I could’ve written it. It is a folk rap album, that tells stories of American labor, empirical agenda, and intends to hold space for the working class to understand the ways in which we have been exploited or have participated in the exploitation of others. It also deals with the body, particularly the Black Femme Body.”
