What Happened to Carl Thomas? Where He Is Now in 2026

If you owned a radio in the year 2000, you know the opening bars of “I Wish” whether you meant to or not. Carl Thomas was the velvet-voiced heartbreaker Bad Boy Records built a whole R&B lane around, and for about two years he was inescapable. Then the hits stopped, the albums slowed to a trickle, and a whole generation grew up without ever hearing a new Carl Thomas record. So where did he go, and what is he doing now? The answer is quieter than you would expect, and busier.

01Profile

A quick note before we go further: nothing in Thomas’s story involves the kind of career-ending scandal these articles often chronicle. His disappearance from radio was mostly a matter of grief, label churn, and an industry that stopped making room for the thing he does best.

02The Rise: From Aurora Open Mics to Bad Boy

A Chicago kid with a church-trained voice

Thomas grew up in Aurora, Illinois, attended East Aurora High School, and cut his teeth performing around Chicago as part of a group called The Fourmula before moving to New York. That relocation is the pivot point of his entire life. He worked the open-mic circuit in New York clubs, and in 1997 Sean “Puffy” Combs heard him sing and signed him to Bad Boy Records, then an Arista imprint.

At the time, Bad Boy was a hip-hop juggernaut with a thin R&B bench. Thomas became the label’s male R&B centerpiece, appearing on records with Bad Boy labelmates before his own album ever arrived.

”I Wish” and an album that defined its moment

The single dropped February 15, 2000. Produced by Mike City, “I Wish” is a beautifully constructed piece of adult heartbreak: a man realizing the woman he loves is already someone else’s. It spent six weeks at number one on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart and peaked at number 20 on the Hot 100. That crossover number undersells how large the song actually was. It was a barbershop record, a cookout record, a car-with-the-windows-down record.

Emotional followed on April 18, 2000, and went platinum. “Summer Rain,” “Emotional” and “Giving You All My Love” kept it in rotation for over a year. Jay-Z name-checked the song’s ubiquity on his own hit “I Just Wanna Love U” later that same year, which is about as clear a signal of cultural saturation as the era offered.

Awards, features, and a very short window

The recognition arrived quickly. Thomas won the 2001 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding New Artist and picked up multiple Soul Train Music Award nominations. He appeared on records with Memphis Bleek, Amerie, and a posthumous 2Pac release, and earned a 2007 Grammy nomination for “Everyday (Family Reunion)” alongside Chaka Khan, Yolanda Adams and Gerald Levert from the Madea’s Family Reunion soundtrack. For a stretch, he looked like R&B’s next long-haul star.

03The Turning Point: Loss and a Stalled Career

Here is the part of the story most casual fans never learned. Thomas’s second album, Let’s Talk About It, arrived March 23, 2004. “Summer Rain” and the title track charted respectably, and the record should have been the consolidation of a career.

Then, on Halloween night 2004, his brother Duranthony Evans, a corrections officer at the Illinois Youth Center in St. Charles, was killed in a drive-by shooting on Aurora’s east side. Thomas cancelled his tour. The album’s promotional campaign effectively stopped where it stood, and Let’s Talk About It underperformed as a result. His label established the Duranthony Evans Foundation in his brother’s memory.

You cannot separate what happened next from that October. An artist who steps off the road at the exact moment a sophomore album needs a push does not usually get that moment back, and the R&B marketplace was already shifting underneath him.

1997Signed to Bad Boy Records after Sean Combs sees him at a New York open mic.
2000"I Wish" tops the R&B chart for six weeks; Emotional goes platinum.
2001Wins the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding New Artist.
2004Let's Talk About It arrives in March; his brother Duranthony Evans is killed in October and Thomas cancels his tour.
2007Third album So Much Better lands on Bungalo/Universal and reaches number 25 on the Billboard 200.
2011Fourth album Conquer released on Verve Forecast, with Snoop Dogg on lead single "Don't Kiss Me."
2019Releases "One With Heaven"; later has surgery to remove a noncancerous salivary-gland tumor.
2021Forms Chicago R&B supergroup The Chi with Dave Hollister and Donell Jones.
2024Supports Tank on the R&B Money Tour and performs at the Black Music Honors.
2025Releases the seven-track EP Explosive, his first new project in 14 years.
2026Tours theaters and amphitheaters across the United States, including a June date at Akron's Lock 3.

04The Long Quiet Between Albums

Thomas did keep working. So Much Better came out in 2007 on Bungalo and Universal and charted at number 25 on the Billboard 200. Conquer followed in 2011 on Verve Forecast, with Rico Love producing the Snoop Dogg-featuring single “Don’t Kiss Me.” Neither album restored him to radio, and each one arrived on a different label, which tells you something about how unstable his industry footing had become.

He has been candid about the Bad Boy years without being bitter. In interviews he has described the label as excellent at breaking a new artist but less suited to sustaining one over the long haul, and in a 2020 Okayplayer piece about the making of Emotional he recalled Combs pushing the recording process to move faster than he might have liked. He has never framed any of it as a grievance so much as a structural fact of that era.

After Conquer, the gap stretched out. He surfaced in 2019 with “One With Heaven,” a collaboration built on lyrics from Israeli poet Gila, though he told YouKnowIGotSoul at the time that it was a gift to fans rather than an official comeback single. He talked then about finishing an album for his own imprint, New Earth Energy, and about making music with his son David. That album did not materialize on the timeline he described.

Also in 2019, Thomas underwent surgery to remove a noncancerous tumor from a salivary gland. Outlets including theJasmineBRAND and Black America Web reported at the time that the procedure was successful and that he expected to be back on stage within weeks. For a singer, that is not a small thing, and it is worth noting he returned to the road without an apparent loss of range.

The other thread from this stretch is The Chi, the Chicago R&B supergroup he formed with Dave Hollister and Donell Jones in July 2021. Jones later stepped away, and by May 2024 Syleena Johnson had taken his place, with the reconfigured trio debuting at that year’s Black Music Honors in Atlanta. As of mid-2026, the group has performed live but has not released an album under the name.

05What Carl Thomas Is Doing Now

A comeback EP almost nobody noticed

In early 2025, without a major-label rollout or a press blitz, Thomas released Explosive, a seven-track, roughly 21-minute EP issued through Music of the Sea. It was his first new project in 14 years. The sound is not what you would predict from the man who made “I Wish” either. Instead of ballads, it leans into funk, horns and a live, seventies-flavored groove.

Writer Dami Ajayi, reviewing it in February 2025, called it:

Soulful and retro without sounding dated. — Dami Ajayi, February 2025

The same review made a pointed observation: despite Thomas averaging around half a million monthly Spotify listeners, the EP landed during Grammy weekend and drew almost no coverage from major music outlets. That gap between audience and attention is the single most accurate summary of where his career sits in 2026.

He is on the road constantly

Here is the thing people get wrong about “faded” singers. Thomas has not stopped working. In 2024 he supported Tank on the R&B Money Tour alongside Keri Hilson. Through 2025 he played One Musicfest at Piedmont Park in Atlanta in October and the Heart & Soul Music Festival in Apopka, Florida, and headlined a run of shows built around the 25th anniversary of Emotional, including a Howard Theatre date in Washington with Case in March and an intimate New York rooftop concert that June.

The 2026 calendar has been just as full. Listings and setlist records show him at Detroit’s Sound Board in January, Raleigh in February, Columbia’s Township Auditorium in April, Brookhaven, Georgia in May, and a co-billed date with Joe at the Oakdale Theatre in Wallingford, Connecticut later that month. In June he headlined Lock 3 in Akron as part of the venue’s summer concert series, a booking the city announced back in March alongside acts like the Gin Blossoms.

What comes next

The pieces are all sitting there: an active supergroup that has yet to record, an independent imprint, a back catalog with genuine staying power, and a live audience that reliably shows up. What has not happened is the full-length solo album he has been discussing for the better part of a decade. Treat any announcement cautiously until it has a release date attached.

06Summary

Carl Thomas did not crash out. He got hit with a family tragedy at the exact moment his career needed him at full strength, then spent two decades on smaller labels in a genre that stopped funding grown-folks R&B. The voice never went anywhere, which is why he can still fill a theater in 2026 on the strength of an album that turned 26 this April.

Carl Thomas in 2026: Quick Facts

Best known for "I Wish," which topped the R&B chart for six weeks in 2000, and the platinum debut Emotional.
His career stalled after his brother Duranthony Evans was killed in October 2004 and he cancelled his tour.
He released four solo albums between 2000 and 2011 across three different labels.
In early 2025 he released Explosive, a seven-track EP and his first project in 14 years.
He toured steadily through 2025 and 2026, including One Musicfest and a June 2026 Lock 3 headline slot in Akron.
He is a member of Chicago supergroup The Chi with Dave Hollister and Syleena Johnson, which has yet to release music.
He posts as @carlthomasnow on Instagram, where his bio still reads simply "R&B Soul-Singer."

If you want to hear him, do not wait for radio to bring him back. The tour listings are the real story here, and so is a 21-minute EP that deserved a much louder reception than it got. Go find “I Wish” one more time, then go find Explosive. The gap between those two records is 25 years, and the man singing on both of them is unmistakably the same.