The new Black hair is all over the place with dreads / curls, often ends up as a light grey

Same for me and a lot of people unfortunately.

Yeah, there's a few that unfortunately seem like they're a bit too much on the gray side. The braids and the locs definitely stand out a lot ( a few more too). Hope they make them a closer shade to the other ones that aren't like that.

Same here, I recall them mentioning in the blog that they always start with grey hair and then add the colors. Looks like they did not add enough black on these hairstyles. Maybe they were hesitant because black removes the hair details...

The end result is a bit disappointing on some hairstyles.

This now has an official bug report:

https://answers.ea.com/t5/Bug-Reports/Black-Hair-looking-gray-on-several-hairstyles/m-p/10377649#M183486

I don't think it's just on dreads/curls/locs - I'm finding it on a lot of hairstyles in general. For example, the difference between the original Black swatch and the new Neutral Black swatch on this base game hair for men:

https://i.imgur.com/suIS6Dx.jpg

It's like they turned down the contrast way too much. The swatch on the right is so washed out and grey.

Yeah in the bug report people are posting images of it across a wide range of hairstyles.

Yesterday when I first saw it, it was just dreads and curls that I had tried and I didn't want to overstate the case if I was wrong. But this one looks to be very widespread.

Some hairs with the new color are genuinely dark black, while the old 'black' is actually a dark black with blue highlights.

But most of them appear to have ended up as some random shade of gray. Some like the one just above being so light of a gray they look like one of the grays from the other side of the color choices...