Three days before No Guidnce ended, Kaci released a solo EP under another name. As Brook Rivers, he dropped The Balancing Act on Friday (Sept 18), a project he wrote and produced himself. Describing the year behind it, he listed "navigating labels on my own, random jobs tryna find money," in remarks about the EP.

Monday (Sept 21) was also the day the London quartet he had spent five years in announced its end. In a joint statement on Instagram, Zeekay, Josh, Kaci and Eshan did not point to a feud or a creative split. They wrote that fans knew about unreleased music the group had long wanted to share, and that "we no longer have the financial means and resources to deliver that to you."

The same post says the members spent the last eighteen months trying to keep the band alive behind the scenes without success, then asked fans to follow each of them into whatever comes next. No Guidnce ended because its four members could no longer fund the group they had built, at a moment when the title track of their debut EP sat near 35 million Spotify streams.

The announcement landed ten days after British R&B got its first official chart built only for homegrown releases. It also repeats a pattern R&B groups on both sides of the Atlantic have lived through for decades, from a diamond-selling trio in Atlanta to a London girl group whose label collapsed mid-campaign.

How No Guidnce Got Here

Formed in 2021, the group built its audience on TikTok covers, and by May 2023 it was working the TikTok stage at The Great Escape in Brighton with only two singles released. The debut EP, Is It A Crime?, arrived on June 2 of that year with a writing roster that included Victoria Monét, JR Totem, Akeel Henry, Lunchmoney Lewis and Theron Thomas. Between them, those writers carry credits with Ariana Grande, Rihanna, Giveon, Nicki Minaj and Usher.

A second EP, Spicy, followed that September, and an acoustic set, No Guidnce (Unplugged), closed out 2023, giving the group three projects in roughly seven months. The lineup changed in 2024 when Ebubé left, and he later told Rated R&B in a March interview that his exit came down to creative misalignment.

Eshan came in, and the reshaped quartet released Confessions of a Loverboy in 2025, an EP credited to NG Records. The last group release arrived that May, a take on Brandy's "Angel in Disguise" recorded for Spotify Singles. From that single to Monday's statement runs sixteen months, which leaves almost no daylight between the band's public silence and the eighteen months of private effort its members described.

The Solo Records

Brook Rivers decided what his debut would be before he made it. He has said he wanted his first project to be self-written and self-produced, to prove to himself that he could finish something alone. The year, as he described it, meant starting his career over while learning production and running his own creative direction. Zeekay, who also records as Zuriel, has released two singles this year, "Out Of Order" and "Find Out."

The group's statement calls the breakup a necessary step into the next chapter of the members' lives and tells fans that all four are happy and healthy.

Keep Struggles Are Not New

TLC hit the same wall with the biggest album of its career still selling. On July 3, 1995, less than eight months after CrazySexyCool came out, T-Boz, Left Eye and Chilli filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and listed $3.5 million in debts.

Some of that traced to insurance payments and medical bills, but the members laid most of it on their deal with Pebbitone, the production company run by Perri "Pebbles" Reid. After recording costs were recouped, the group said, LaFace and Pebbitone kept billing back airline travel, hotels, promotion, videos, food and clothing, and each member cleared less than $50,000 a year.

Their 1991 contract paid 56 cents per album, split three ways. In February 1996, with the case still open, TLC won Best R&B Album at the Grammys. The fight settled late that year, when LaFace renegotiated and Pebbitone let the group go in exchange for royalties on some future releases. TLC also bought the rights to its own name, which Pebbles had owned, the same question of who controls a group's name that took the Isley Brothers three years to resolve this summer.

Twenty years later, the remaining duo went to fans instead of a label. A 2015 Kickstarter campaign set a $150,000 goal and raised $400,000, and the album it paid for, TLC, arrived in 2017 with its lead single issued through the group's own label, 852 Musiq.

En Vogue's money fight split the group itself. Dawn Robinson has said the quartet earned two cents a record while it sat near the top of the charts. When the members took their contracts to MC Hammer's attorney, she said, their producer answered by barring them from writing on the second album and revoking their royalties.

"We should be making a lot more money than two cents a record," Robinson told The Jasmine Brand in an interview in 2021. She left in 1997 after contract talks stalled and signed with Dr. Dre's Aftermath, while En Vogue carried on as a trio.

Mis-Teeq, the London trio of Alesha Dixon, Sabrina Washington and Su-Elise Nash, had seven consecutive UK top-10 singles and two double-platinum albums behind them on Telstar Records. On April 5, 2004, Telstar went into administration, and its co-chairman blamed problems facing the entire record business.

The group was promoting "Scandalous" in the United States at the time, and the song reached No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100 that June as the theme from Catwoman. Mis-Teeq announced its split in February 2005, pointing to the label's collapse, and members later added that years of touring and promotion had worn them down.

On Sept 12, 21 years after that announcement, the trio returned to Wembley Arena to mark 25 years of Lickin' on Both Sides, with original member Zena McNally joining them for "Why?" Nine days after that show, No Guidnce posted its statement.

Ten Days in September

On the Friday before the Wembley show (Sept 11), the Official Charts Company launched the Official R&B UK Chart, a weekly ranking of British R&B singles by sales and streams. The chart was built with Everything RNB, the platform DJ Ace and Billi John founded in 2017.

The following Wednesday (Sept 16), Daley opened a 27-city U.S. tour in St. Louis. Two days later he released Strange Nature, ending eight years away, on TEXX7, an imprint built from his own initials and licensed to The SRG/ILS Group. Rivers's self-produced EP came out that same Friday, and the group he came from ended three days later.

The 2023 Musicians' Census, drawn from nearly 6,000 UK musicians, found that nearly half of working musicians in Britain earn less than £14,000 a year. Seventeen percent reported being in debt, a share that rose to 28 percent among Black and Black British musicians. Three-quarters of those with income outside music said they took that other work for financial reasons, and Rivers's random jobs are that figure with a name attached.

A follow-up report on musicians from the Global Majority, written with Black Lives in Music, put their average annual income at £17,745. In that survey, 35 percent said music could not support them or their families.