Josh X

A contemporary R&B performer with a gentle vocal approach, Josh X moves comfortably between tender love songs, intense romantic cuts, and upbeat dancefloor material. Since emerging in the late 2000s under the name Josh X-an-tus, he has issued more than a dozen singles—including the charting tracks “First Time” and “Heaven on My Mind”—alongside the commercial EPs Amour (2017) and Piano Confessions (2019), the latter issued through Epic.

Joshua Exantus, who was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Queens, began studying piano at age six and composed his first song roughly seven years afterward after hearing Brian McKnight’s “Anytime.” He honed his craft at the Juilliard School and Five Towns College. Early credits include work on Grafh’s Black Hand America mixtape under the name Josh Exantus, followed by his recorded introduction as Josh X-an-tus with the 2008 single “Let’s Ride,” which featured Jadakiss. Further singles appeared over the ensuing years, among them “First Time,” which logged twelve weeks on Billboard’s Adult R&B chart in 2009, and the Ghostface Killah collaboration “I Don’t Care,” which appeared on the R&B/hip-hop chart for a month in 2011. During that stretch he also contributed hooks to recordings by Statik Selektah and Termanology.

In the mid-2010s Exantus shortened his stage name to Josh X. He reunited with Jadakiss on 2015’s “All for Love” and co-wrote “Ready to Go,” performed by Jussie Smollett for the series Empire. The following year the KSR single “Heaven on My Mind,” a duet with new labelmate Cardi B, remained on the Adult R&B chart for twenty weeks. That momentum prompted the 2017 release of the Amour EP, which included a solo rendition of the earlier hit. A subsequent distribution agreement between KSR and Epic yielded the 2018 Rick Ross collaboration “All on Me,” another track that enjoyed an extended Adult R&B chart run. Between 2019 and 2020 Exantus maintained a steady output that encompassed the Piano Confessions EP and singles such as “I Don’t Care” with Ghostface Killah, “No Luv,” and “I Miss You.”