Belz: How Yacht-Rock Harmonies Built the Situationship Pop of Make Up Your Mind
A New York Pop Singer Stacks R&B Harmonies on a Song About Being Left Waiting
Stacked harmonies over a sunny groove, wrapped around a story of being strung along: that formula runs from late-1970s West Coast soft rock all the way to a new single. The New York pop singer Belz released Make Up Your Mind on 15 October 2026. It opens close and quiet, then bursts into a full jam.
Find Belz in the playlist below, between the new jack swing, quiet storm and pop R&B records this desk is spinning, and trace the full run of coverage on the Belz artist profile. Make Up Your Mind reached BlackSounds.News through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news titles. Press play, then keep reading.
The lineage is worth tracing, because it is older than the playlists that now carry it. When the Doobie Brothers released What a Fool Believes in 1979, Michael McDonald had co-written the song with Kenny Loggins. The record sat right on the border between soft rock and soul. Aretha Franklin recorded her own version a year later, which tells you which side of that border the groove came from.
Why the Yacht Rock Sound Keeps Coming Back to R&B
The genre only picked up its yacht rock label decades afterwards. Still, the core was always the same: smooth chords, a steady pocket and a vocal stack built on R&B harmony. That sound never fully left. In 2020 Thundercat brought McDonald and Loggins onto Show You the Way, and a new generation heard the pairing of jazz-trained chords and soft-rock warmth as something current. Pop and R&B singers have borrowed the palette ever since, because it lets a sad song move.
Where Belz Fits, From Jazz and Classical Lessons to the Make Up Your Mind Jam
Belz is the stage name of Isabella Scolaro, a singer-songwriter who has been singing since the age of five. At ten she started voice, piano and guitar lessons, training through jazz and classical music. She began writing songs at twelve. Her teachers told her that mastering jazz and classical music would prepare her for anything, and that schooling shows in how comfortably she handles a harmony stack.
Her route to the stage is unusually broad. She has sung at Radio City Music Hall and toured the world as a singer on AIDA Cruises. She has also played many stages in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and under her own name she pursues musical theatre. In a 2024 interview with CanvasRebel, she described her lane as pop with R&B and funk flavours, chosen because it leaves room for powerful vocals.
Make Up Your Mind by Belz is her seventh single. It follows Dirty Sneakers, Tip of My Tongue and Psycho in 2021, ARROGANT and thing in 2022, and Love and Gucci Gloves in 2023. The new record blends pop, R&B and yacht-rock touches, and its stacked harmonies give the chorus a bright, addictive lift.
The story underneath is not bright at all. The song deals with a situationship in which Belz kept making excuses for someone who could not choose her. That is the classic yacht-rock trick in a new setting: the arrangement smiles while the lyric aches. The track starts intimate and vulnerable, then opens into an upbeat jam. As a result, the emotional whiplash of the situation is built into the structure itself.
Adjacent Acts for Belz and Make Up Your Mind, From Thundercat’s Chords to Michael McDonald’s Soul
Listeners who came to this palette through Thundercat will find the same willingness to put a hurt lyric over warm, jazz-trained chords. Fans of Michael McDonald will hear the debt to his blue-eyed soul in the layered backing vocals. The comparison is about sound and approach only; Make Up Your Mind is Belz telling her own story.
The single is for anyone who likes modern pop and R&B with a retro shine. It is also for anyone who has spent too long waiting on a person who would not commit. On headphones, the harmony stack is easiest to pick apart. In a room, the jam section does its job.
It is also a beginning. This single is the first step in an eight-song project that moves from waiting on someone else to finally choosing yourself. TikTok promotion, radio play and live shows in New York City are carrying the rollout.
Where to Hear Make Up Your Mind and Follow Belz
BlackSounds.News’s curator team: “The smartest choice on Make Up Your Mind is the restraint at the start. Belz holds the harmonies back until the song needs them. When the stack finally arrives it feels like a decision, which is exactly what the lyric is asking for.”
Stream Make Up Your Mind on Spotify or Apple Music, or pick your platform through the smartlink. Then follow Belz across platforms: Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, YouTube channel, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X, and her official website.
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