There is a very specific feeling that the best disco-funk produces, the feeling of walking into a room and deciding, somewhere between the first note of the bass and the second bar of the groove, that tonight you are the most interesting person in it, not because anything external has changed but because the music has reminded you that you are allowed to believe this, that the self-consciousness you walked in with is optional and the floor is open and the only remaining question is whether you are ready to let go of the armor and just move. Solar Flair, the collaborative debut from San Diego-based producer Jonny Tarr and vocalist Sandi King, released May 6, 2026, is built to generate exactly that feeling, and it succeeds with the ease of music made by people who understood their goal precisely and had the combined skills to achieve it.
Tarr is a multiple San Diego Music Award winner, including Album of the Year 2024, a credential that represents genuine peer recognition in a music community serious enough to make the distinction matter. His six-month incremental construction of Solar Flair, layering funk-driven production and disco feel before bringing King in to complete it, reflects a production philosophy that trusts the process to reveal what the song needs rather than forcing a predetermined outcome. The track was built from the rhythm and the groove up, the foundation laid before the voice arrived, which is the correct approach for music that lives in the body before it lives in the melody. By the time King came in, the song’s physical DNA was already established, and what she brought was not a performance grafted onto a finished track but the element that the track had been building toward without knowing exactly what it needed.
King’s vocal contribution goes well beyond technical delivery, the warm and playful character of her voice taking the production in a direction that Tarr himself acknowledges he could not have anticipated alone. There is a specific quality to a singer whose personality is audible in every note regardless of the material, whose presence in a song changes what the song is rather than simply what it sounds like, and King has that quality on Solar Flair, the warmth and the irreverence sitting in every phrase with the ease of someone singing from a place of genuine creative ownership rather than hired vocal performance. Tarr’s reference to Annie, the legendary vocalist whose technical power is one of the benchmarks of the form, is not a comparison so much as an acknowledgment that King could go that direction if she chose, and that her choice to go somewhere entirely her own is what made the track what it became.
The friendship between the two collaborators is audible in the music in the way that genuine creative partnerships built on genuine mutual trust and affection always are, the ideas coming thick and fast as Tarr describes because the social friction that slows down professional collaborations between people who are still learning to read each other has already been resolved by years of shared experience. The playfulness of King’s delivery is the playfulness of someone comfortable enough in the creative context to take risks, and the production choices Tarr makes around her vocal reflect the understanding of someone who knows the voice well enough to create space that serves rather than constrains it.
The Eurythmics influence that informs Tarr’s production sensibility is present in Solar Flair in the way that deep influences tend to be present, shaping the architecture of the sound without announcing itself as an explicit reference. The Eurythmics at their best understood how to fuse synthesizer production with genuine soul feeling, how to make electronic music that moved in the physical way that organic music moves, and this understanding is embedded in how Solar Flair handles the relationship between its programmed elements and the live saxophone that Tarr plays on the track. The saxophone is the human body in the machine, the breath and the physical resonance of an instrument played by hands providing the warmth that pulls the whole production away from the purely digital and into the territory where people can actually feel it in their chests.
The female empowerment at the song’s lyrical core is not the performative kind that reduces empowerment to a keyword, but the genuine kind that comes through in the music’s actual character, the joy and the confidence and the irreverence of King’s delivery being the empowerment rather than the description of it. You do not need to read the press materials to understand that Solar Flair is about owning your light. The voice and the groove make it unmistakable, the song doing what the best anthems of this tradition have always done, which is to make you feel the thing rather than simply to tell you about it.
Solar Flair marks the first of what is described as many collaborations between King and Tarr, which is a prospect that should interest anyone who has heard what they produce together when the ideas come thick and fast and a close friendship does the work of a hundred recording sessions of professional relationship-building. The first collaboration has landed in a place that suggests the second will go somewhere none of us can predict, which is the most exciting possible state of affairs for a creative partnership at its beginning.
Own your light. The dancefloor is yours. Jonny Tarr and Sandi King have provided the soundtrack.
