What Happened to Next? Touring Arenas With R&B Legends in 2026

If you were anywhere near a radio, a school dance, or a roller rink in 1998, you heard “Too Close.” You probably heard it four times in an hour. Next were the smooth-voiced Minneapolis trio behind the biggest single of that entire year — and then, somehow, they slipped out of the conversation while lesser hits kept getting oldies-radio love. So whatever happened to them? Short answer: they never actually stopped. Here’s the full story, including where you can see them this year.

01Profile

Group name

Next (originally Straight4ward)

Original members

Robert "R.L." Huggar, Terry "T-Low" Brown, Raphael "Tweet" Brown

Origin

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Formed

1992

Signature hit

"Too Close" (1998) — No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for five non-consecutive weeks

Breakthrough album

Rated Next (1997), certified double platinum in the US

Years since "Too Close"

28 years as of August 2026

Status in 2026

Still performing; billed on arena and festival shows through the summer

A quick note on that “years since” line, because it’s the kind of thing that makes you stare at the ceiling for a second: “Too Close” is now old enough that people who were conceived to it are eligible for a mid-career promotion.

02The Rise: From Minneapolis Choirs to the Hot 100

A gospel-choir introduction

Next came together in Minneapolis in 1992, and the connection was about as wholesome as R&B origin stories get. Brothers Terry and Raphael Brown were introduced to Robert Huggar — R.L. — through the Browns’ uncle, a gospel choir director. They started out as a quartet under the name Straight4ward, lost a member, and rebranded as Next, a name chosen to sound less like a church group and more like something a label could sell.

They spent the mid-’90s doing what unsigned groups did in that era: local showcases, community-center gigs, and a demo tape passed hand to hand. That tape eventually reached KayGee of Naughty by Nature, who was building his own imprint, Divine Mill, under the Arista umbrella. He signed them. It’s worth flagging that relationship early, because it comes back around thirty years later.

”Butta Love,” then everything

Their first single, “Butta Love,” arrived in September 1997 and became a genuine R&B hit, climbing into the top five on Billboard’s R&B chart. That was enough to make Rated Next a real album rather than a label experiment. But the second single is the one that changed their lives.

“Too Close” was released on January 27, 1998. It was mid-tempo, unhurried, built on a sample of Kurtis Blow’s 1979 track “Christmas Rappin’,” and it was extremely direct about what it was about — direct enough that a lot of radio programmers had to think about it and then play it anyway, because listeners would not stop calling. It went to No. 1 on both the Hot 100 and the R&B chart, held the top of the Hot 100 for five non-consecutive weeks, and finished the year as Billboard’s No. 1 single of 1998. The single was certified platinum, with reported US sales of roughly 2.1 million units. Rated Next went double platinum.

The follow-up nobody talks about enough

Next did not immediately fall off, which is a detail people forget. Their second album, Welcome II Nextasy, arrived in 2000 and did real business: No. 12 on the Billboard 200, No. 4 on the R&B chart, certified gold. Its lead single, “Wifey,” went to No. 1 on the R&B chart and became the kind of song that generated an entire vocabulary. R.L. was also writing, and writing fast — over the following decade his credits reportedly included work for Usher, Jamie Foxx, Ginuwine, and Luther Vandross. In 1999 he’d already scored a Hot 100 top ten of his own, the Deborah Cox duet “We Can’t Be Friends.”

By any reasonable measure, this was a group with a second act queued up. Then the industry did what the industry does.

03The Turning Point: Label Trouble and a Throat Condition

The unraveling was slow and had several moving parts, none of them scandalous. R.L. stepped out with a solo album, RL:Ements, on J Records in 2002; it reached No. 53 on the Billboard 200 and No. 6 on the R&B chart — respectable, not transformative. Next then delivered a third album, The Next Episode, in December 2002, also through J Records. It underperformed badly. Arista’s restructuring, a new label home, and a shifting radio format all landed at once.

The harder problem was physical. Per Wikipedia’s account and a 2011 Singersroom report on the group’s reunion, Next’s split was driven by a combination of internal conflicts and a throat condition affecting T-Low that was, at the time, considered career-ending for a singer. That same reporting says the condition was later corrected surgically, which is what made a reunion possible at all. The group has discussed this chapter itself, including on TV One’s Unsung.

• 1992R.L. Huggar and brothers Terry and Raphael Brown form the group in Minneapolis.
• 1997Debut single "Butta Love" and the album Rated Next arrive on Divine Mill/Arista.
• 1998"Too Close" tops the Hot 100 for five weeks and finishes as Billboard's No. 1 single of the year.
• 2000Welcome II Nextasy goes gold; "Wifey" hits No. 1 on the R&B chart.
• 2002R.L. releases a solo album; The Next Episode follows in December and underperforms.
• 2000sThe group fractures amid internal conflict and T-Low's throat condition, later reported as surgically corrected.
• 2011Next reunite and return to performing.
• 2016A second reunion follows their episode of TV One's Unsung.
• 2018The trio independently release a new single, "Want It."
• 2023Next join forces with Naughty by Nature as Next by Nature and release "That's Me."
• 2026Billed on the R&B Live Tour in Atlanta in February and the Hampton Jazz & Music Festival in June.

04Why Too Close Refuses to Die

Here’s the strange thing about Next’s disappearance from the pop conversation: their biggest song never disappeared at all. It just kept resurfacing without them attached to it.

First there was the cover. In 2001, the English boy band Blue recorded “Too Close” and took it to No. 1 in the UK, where an entire generation of listeners grew up assuming it was a Blue original. It also hit No. 1 in New Zealand. That’s a genuinely odd form of afterlife — your signature record becomes someone else’s signature record in another market.

Then, in 2015, the internet got involved. The song became the soundtrack to the “Why You Always Lying” meme, which racked up more than 76 million views on Vine before migrating to YouTube and everywhere else. Suddenly a 1998 slow jam was the background music for a joke told by people who had no idea whose voices they were hearing. For the group, this was both flattering and mildly maddening: enormous cultural reach, very little name recognition attached.

That gap — massive song, modest group profile — is basically the whole reason a piece like this exists. Next were never a scandal story or a cautionary tale. They were a group whose hit outgrew them.

05What Next Is Doing Now

Back in business with the man who signed them

The most interesting recent development traces straight back to 1997. In March 2023, Next reunited with Naughty by Nature — KayGee’s group, and the source of their original label deal — under the joint banner Next by Nature, releasing a single called “That’s Me.” Per reporting from AllHipHop and YouKnowIGotSoul, R.L. wrote the track and KayGee produced it, with a full-length collaborative album in the works. KayGee framed it as a family reunion he’d been trying to engineer for years.

Maybe us doing a joint project will help ignite the family to come together. — KayGee of Naughty by Nature, AllHipHop, March 2023

As of this writing, we haven’t been able to confirm a release date for that full album, so treat it as in progress rather than imminent.

R.L. is writing and releasing again

R.L. has stayed the most publicly active of the three. In a May 2025 interview with UrbanBridgez, he discussed a solo album in development and a joint project pairing Next with the ’90s group Silk, alongside continued touring. He also reportedly issued solo singles during 2025. He maintains an official site and active social presence under the handle “justrl,” and his songwriting has always been the group’s engine — by his own account he writes at speed, sometimes finishing a song in about twenty minutes.

The stage is where they actually live now

This is the part that answers the question most directly: Next are still working, and not in small rooms. On February 15, 2026, they were billed on the R&B Live Tour at State Farm Arena in Atlanta, sharing a bill with Tyrese, Jagged Edge, Tank, and Silk. On June 26, 2026, they appeared as part of the “No Skips Friday” opening night of the 56th Annual Hampton Jazz & Music Festival at Hampton Coliseum, alongside Jagged Edge, Dru Hill, 702, and Lil’ Mo. Festival organizers billed them as a multi-platinum act behind some of R&B’s most recognizable records, which is both accurate and a little understated.

One caveat worth stating plainly: coverage of the group’s exact current lineup has been inconsistent. Some outlets describe all three original members as touring together; others report that one member has stepped back from music. We haven’t found an official statement that settles it, so we’re not going to pretend otherwise. What is clear is that the Next name is on major bills in 2026 and the shows are happening.

06Summary

Next are one of the cleaner examples of a group that got separated from its own legacy. No arrests, no meltdown, no cautionary tale — just a label collapse, a health problem with real career consequences, and a hit song so big it started travelling without them. Nearly three decades on, they’re doing exactly what a group with a catalog like theirs should be doing: playing to rooms full of people who know every word.

If you’ve been carrying around a vague sense that Next were a one-hit group who evaporated, this is your correction. They had a No. 1 R&B follow-up, a frontman who quietly wrote for some of the biggest names in the genre, and a working relationship with the producer who discovered them that’s still generating music in the 2020s. The radio moved on. They didn’t. And if a lineup of ’90s R&B names rolls through your city this year, check the fine print — there’s a decent chance they’re on it.