Khalid is (finally) back after locking us in from album one and keeping a firm hold on the fast fleeting attention of today’s music industry. Features on songs with Marshmello, Rae Sremmurd, Lil Yachty, Billie Eilish, and others kept his lyrics on our lips and his viscous voice in our minds as he led a trail of breadcrumbs to his recent release, Suncity. While at a whopping five songs, this highly anticipated release leaves much to be desired, we will hang on with a gripping clutch to what morsels we’ve been given. Violins triumphantly call us into “Vertigo”, the first vocal piece on the album, and welcome back the velveteen vocals we’ve been missing. We are, to our dismay or delight, reminded that the man behind the voice has barely reached adulthood in songs like Saturday, where he boastfully belts about “all the things [he] knows that your parents don’t,” however, we don’t protest, as once again Khalid’s delivery accompanied by beautiful melody manage to bring us all right back to days of secret sneak-outs and declarations of “they just don’t understand me!!” Like it or not, Khalid is back, and with the drop of Suncity, so is our teenage angst.
For those who missed his high-school-graduation-prompted debut in 2017, Khalid brings a new and if you haven’t yet picked up on, young, caramel coated voice to the scene. While he notes his mother as his greatest musical inspiration, one can detect some of Khalid’s more salient influences including Frank Ocean and Lorde woven through his melodic mixes. On his inaugural album American Teen produced by Right Hand Music Group and RCA Records, Khalid, at the ripe age of eighteen, blessed our ear buds and playlists with a lineup of soulful ballads and instant hits that demanded nothing short of an all-consuming nostalgia for the days when we, too, lived under the watchful and intrusive eyes of mom and dad. Best known for singles “Location,” “Young, Dumb, & Broke,” and “Saved,” the album flirts with and flows around the woes of teen love in a style that manages to pull at our young heart strings- still thrumming and only freshly healed to our great surprise- rather than elicit grownup eye-rolls at the calamities of yesteryears. There’s a youthful wistfulness that listeners can’t help but give into as Khalid harmonizes us down the dusty open California roads leading off into a backdrop distance featuring a hazy horizon and a world of infinite possibilities. Somehow reminiscing just sounds better on his voice than the catchy choruses of Katy Perry and her boyfriend’s jeans.
via: Billboard
What’s my big hang up on the age, you may wonder? After all, becoming a chart-topping artist before being of age to pop champagne in celebration is hardly a novel feat; Justin Bieber held three number one albums before the age of eighteen and at nineteen Taylor Swift released “Love Story,” which would become the world’s best selling country song of all times. However rarely do these budding musicians capture an audience beyond their own teenage demographic in the way that Khalid has been able to wrangle the attention of his entire generation, claiming a fan base that spans to the edge of millennials clocking in at 10 years his elders. While Khalid has no shame in reminding us he’s “just graduated,” or recounting the anxiety of making mom’s car smell like last night’s joint, we can almost forget about these high school highlights in the second half of his debut album which features more somber hymns that demonstrate his husky yet honeyed range that he’s become so known for. This unconventional sound may be the strongest contributor to his universal appreciation. His head-nod-inducing intros swell into rounded and well thought out beats and instrumentals that remain sleek and simple, complementing rather than cloaking his vocals. His motifs may be centralized around youthful themes but his sound strays far from the recycled top-hits that boom from the DJ booth on prom night and strictly abide to the formula of largely meaningless lyrics carrying promises that “only tonight matters.” The pop-R&B hybrid sound he’s curated has managed the great pleasure of reminding us what music sounded like before anti-climactic beat drops and laser-like auto-tunage eradicated our understanding of a human vocal range. Perhaps Khalid’s ability to both belt of stolen kisses behind football bleachers while not isolating his demographic to those who are still living such experiences is best summed up in his own words in an interview with Rolling Stone shortly after American Teen’s release; “this is what I went through during high school: heartbreak, love, all the clichés – but not necessarily in cliché format.” Six months after its release the album was certified platinum and had sold over 1 million units. If this success proved anything it’s that twelve or twenty-eight, we are indeed wholly onboard for the heartbreak, love, and all the clichés… as long as they’re coming from our favorite American Teen.