Billboard's March Caribbean Fresh Picks Spotlights 10 Reggae and Dancehall Tracks

Ten tracks. Three moods. One playlist that lands right as festival season starts to heat up. Billboard's March Caribbean Fresh Picks column is built for tastemakers, selectors, and serious listeners who want to know which reggae, dancehall, and Caribbean crossover songs are moving before the crowds catch on. The March 2026 edition, published on March 30, spans everything from nyabinghi-laced conscious roots to raucous soca refixes and late-night gyal tunes, with names like Jah9, Protoje, Shenseea, Teejay, Masicka, Problem Child, Adam O, and Shemmy J all making the cut. The full Spotify playlist that Billboard maintains alongside the column expands beyond the written picks, but the 10 highlighted tracks are the editorial signal: these are the songs worth auditing right now.

Rather than recapping the list in the order it appears, here's a faster way to get in: pick your mood, hit play, and then nominate your festival pick at the end.

Roots Uplift

Jah9's "S.E.X. (Sacred Energy Xchange)" infuses a classic reggae groove with notes of slow jam R&B and pronounced nyabinghi drums, arriving as the finale of her four-part Open Heart Project, which follows the arc of self-discovery that can come out of a powerful relationship. The track is exactly what the name promises: reverential, unhurried, and rooted. In a scene where so much of the conversation around sex leans crude or purely physical, Jah9 recenters the human — and the spiritual — without losing the riddim.

Protoje's new Art of Acceptance album drops April 17, and he has already shared another taste of the project. The contemporary reggae artist tapped pop-dancehall star Shenseea for "Goddess," an uplifting anthem dedicated to women that doubles as their first-ever collaboration. The lilting reggae bounce plays well against both artists' seductive timbres, which only underscores how intense their vocal chemistry feels. Proto croons, "You a Goddess, some woulda say you a the baddest/ I woulda say ya the best, yeah it real so me say it with me chest," with Shenseea replying that she's a Goddess and "want something real inna times like these." For listeners tracking Protoje's artistic arc, "Goddess" is a promising preview of what the full album might deliver.

Sound System Heat

The takeover of DJ Mac and CrashDummy's "WYFL" riddim is still going strong, and Virgin Islands artist Adam O has delivered one of the more inventive reinterpretations with "Strut." Assisted by producer D'Mitri, Adam flips the steely trap-dancehall riddim into a raucous soca affair, complete with rapid-fire bouyon drums. This is the kind of riddim culture move that demonstrates just how elastic a strong instrumental can be in the Caribbean space: the original riddim has already set a high bar for cross-genre reach in 2026, and Adam O is pushing that frontier deeper into soca territory. Play it loud, play it twice.

Masicka and Problem Child round out the dancehall side of the sound system lane. Both are confirmed picks on the March list, and both bring the kind of catalog-building energy that defines contemporary Jamaican dancehall at its most focused. Teejay made a name for himself with dance-centric hits like "Drift," which helped him land a Billboard digital cover, but he understands the true key to dancehall longevity is an ever-expanding catalog of gyal tunes. His March pick, "Perfect Body," sees him team up with producer YowLevite for a slinky riddim anchored by a swaggering electric guitar riff, with his "no fi twerk for nobody" refrain already sounding like another hit in the making.

Late-Night Soca

Saint Lucia's Shemmy J has delivered a sweet soca tune for the season with the Teamfoxx-produced "Everything," leaning more into the genre's groovy side. Where Adam O's "Strut" brings the bouyon energy and rattling percussion, "Everything" settles into something more sensual and melody-forward. Shemmy J is a Saint Lucian artist who understands how soca can hold space for both the road and the after-party, and "Everything" splits that difference cleanly.

Industry Signals: Disputes, Awards, and What's Coming

Billboard's March column does what the best editorial playlists do: it contextualizes the music within the conversations happening around it. The biggest cultural flashpoint this month involves a 30-year-old classic. Buju Banton's "Murderer," from the iconic Til Shiloh album, is making headlines for a whole different reason in 2026. Buju and Wayne Wonder, singer-songwriter of "No Letting Go," dominated social media with a fiery back-and-forth over the creation of the 1995 single, with Wonder taking to his social media pages to share statements denying Buju's characterization of events and even calling him a "demon." The dispute over songwriting credits on a song that old speaks to a broader tension in Jamaican music history: who gets credit, who gets paid, and what happens when those conversations go public decades later.

The column also nods to two late-March awards outcomes shaping the scene's current momentum: the MOBO Awards and the JUNO Awards, both of which landed results that will influence how labels and playlist curators position Caribbean artists in the months ahead. For anyone tracking which artists are being set up for wider North American and European exposure heading into summer, these picks and those award outcomes are the clearest early indicators available.

The full Billboard Spotify playlist runs deeper than the written 10, but the editorial selection is the real prize: ten tracks across reggae, dancehall, and soca that represent both where the music is right now and where it is being pointed. Which of these deserves a full festival set slot this spring? Drop your pick and tag the DJ or selector you want to hear spinning it.