A military kid, shunted between schools, states and countries throughout his childhood, 21-year-old Khalid says he always felt “like an outcast”. So it took him a while to process being named as “the voice of a generation” when his second single, “Young Dumb & Broke” became a global hit last year. Mixing the smooth sounds of urban soul with angsty lyrics – about feeling alone and fretting over his mum smelling the dope he’d smoked in the car – he created a kind of mellow R&Bemo. Although his sweetly grazed vocals are lovely, the Middle-Class Activist Mum in me wished that Gen Z had found themselves a more proactive hero. Still, I know they’re stressed by the personal pressures of social media and overwhelmed by the global political and environmental crises. You can’t really blame them for sinking into the undemanding beanbags of Khalid’s mid-tempo jams and passively inhaling his Grammy-nominated debut album, American Teen. The best albums of 2019 (so far) Show all 67 1 /67 The best albums of 2019 (so far) The best albums of 2019 (so far) Rina Mushonga – In a Galaxy It’s not uncommon for an artist to be influenced by the place they grew up in. Yet few are likely to have as much inspiration to draw on as India-born, Zimbabwe-raised and now Peckham-based artist Rina Mushonga. The singer-songwriter’s nomadic personality is reflected in the vast scale of reference points on her new record, In a Galaxy. It’s technically a follow-up to 2014’s The Wild, the Wilderness, but the newfound boldness on this new work is startling. Since that first record, Mushonga has begun to incorporate themes of empowerment into her work. On “AtalantA”, she showcases her muscular vocals, which are capable of switching between an airy lilt to a deep, emotional moan, as she sings lyrics inspired by the Greek hunter goddess who refused to marry. In a Galaxy is a record that takes you far beyond the borders of the world you’re familiar with, and into something altogether more colourful. (Roisin O'Connor) The best albums of 2019 (so far) Deerhunter – Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? On Deerhunter’s eighth album, frontman Bradford Cox takes on the role of war poet, documenting the things he observes with a cool matter-of-factness, and heart-wrenching detail. Death is everywhere on Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, as much as others may refuse to see it. Already Disappeared is not an easy album. It’s often bleak and experimental: Cox’s vocals burst through like distorted, burbling fragments of static, or appear muffled amid the instrumentation. This is a new side of Deerhunter that gives the listener much to contemplate. (Roisin O’Connor) The best albums of 2019 (so far) Sharon Van Etten – Remind Me Tomorrow After a period of tumult, Sharon Van Etten’s fifth album is a reinvention. But beneath its hazy synths and electronics are songs of endurance and inner peace, of settling after a flurry of activity. On Remind Me Tomorrow, written during her recent pregnancy and the birth of her first child, Van Etten dims her spotlight on toxicity and instead casts a warm glow behind the record’s psychic overview. The anxiety and pride of impending parenthood converge on “Seventeen”, a paean to the invincibility and melancholy of adolescence. Addressing a younger version of herself, the 37-year-old sings of the carefree young and their mistrust of those defeated by time. After years making peace with drift and uncertainty, she’s never sounded more sure of anything. (Jazz Monroe) Ryan Pfluger The best albums of 2019 (so far) Bring Me the Horizon – Amo BMTH frontman Oli Sykes wants to assert the fragility of the boundary between love and hate. Amo is a way of exploring that, even down to the title itself. Closer “I Don’t Know What to Say” is cinematic in its symphonic drama – perhaps inspired by their 2016 shows at the Royal Albert Hall that featured a full orchestra and choir – and becomes the album’s most moving song. Over urgent, darting violin notes and soft strumming on an acoustic guitar, Sykes sings about the loss of a close friend, building to a hair-raising climax where he screams out the song’s title one last time. Amo won’t satisfy all of BMTH’s fans, but it’s certainly accomplished, catchy and eclectic enough to bring in some new ones. (Roisin O'Connor) The best albums of 2019 (so far) Nina Nesbitt – The Sun Will Come Up, the Seasons Will Change Nesbitt is back with her second LP, switching to a brand of soul and R&B-fused pop that feels bang on time, and suits her far better. The Sun Will Come Up, the Seasons Will Change has slick, polished production from Fraser T Smith (Adele), Lostboy (Anne-Marie), Jordan Riley (Zara Larsson), and Nesbitt herself. Several tracks tap into a Nineties R&B sound that UK women, from Mabel to Ella Mai, are excelling at right now. Assertive tracks “Loyal to Me” and “Love Letter” nod to TLC’s “No Scrubs” and Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor”, but there is vulnerability, too, in the acoustic guitar-led neo-soul of “Somebody Special”, and the tender heartbreak on ”Is it Really Me You’re Missing”. (Roisin O'Connor) Press image The best albums of 2019 (so far) Better Oblivion Community Center This self-titled record, a loose but beautifully crafted collection of folk-rock songs, explores the kinds of anxieties intrinsic to the modern age – the longing to be at once noticed and invisible; the paralysing effects of limitless information, and the desire to do good versus the desire to be seen doing good. As if to hammer home their parity, they even largely sing in unison – which might have had a plodding effect if the pair’s voices weren’t so distinct: Bridgers sings with a hazy assurance, Oberst with an emotive tremor. And when Bridgers’ melody does sporadically glide above Oberst’s, it is all the more potent for it. (Alexandra Pollard) The best albums of 2019 (so far) Ariana Grande – Thank U, Next The album is packed with personal confessions for the fans – “Arianators” – to pick over.<doc-sep>With his 2017 debut, “American Teen,” Khalid (whose last name is Robinson) arrived as a teenager from El Paso, speaking for fellow teens, with a peer group of “young dumb broke high school kids” — a little proud, a little humble and mostly just dazedly matter-of-fact. With his long-breathed croon floating over unassuming low-fi production, he sang about circumscribed but smartphone-connected lives, misfiring romances and looming life choices. The immediacy of his melodies, the Everyteen sensibility of his lyrics and the direct yearning in his voice quickly found a wide audience. More than a billion streams, five Grammy nominations (though no wins) and a 2018 EP (“Suncity”) later, Khalid’s second full-length album, “Free Spirit,” grapples with a more singular, more isolated experience: coming to terms with fame, wealth, broader horizons and lingering insecurity. “Is this heaven or Armageddon?” he wonders in “Free Spirit.” He has moved from “we” to “I.” Image Khalid’s second album is “Free Spirit.” The music cushions his unease. It’s a generous album — 17 songs — that rolls along smoothly for nearly an hour, one leisurely midtempo groove after another, while Khalid’s voice conveys far more longing than agitation. He has upper-echelon producers now (among them John Hill, Digi, Charlie Handsome and Hit-Boy), and he’s separating himself from the twitchy, narrow-band approach of the SoundCloud rap crowd. He’s also learning from R&B’s more distant past. On the new album, Khalid embraces a fuller sound that often harks back to the 1980s and 1990s, with pillowy synthesizers, tickling guitars and multiple layers of his own vocal harmonies.<doc-sep>Khalid Robinson’s 2017 debut LP, American Teen, was a coming-of-age record that made young-dumb brokeness feel like the only way to go. At 19, Khalid had appeared on tracks by Kendrick Lamar and Future, and he was tight with Kylie Jenner. Yet he perfectly inhabited the world of an average high school kid as he tried to make sense of his messy emotions over Eighties-loving R&B tracks. The results reduced Drake-size ambition to the relatable scale of a dude who sang about living with his folks. A gifted artist with a searching voice that can suggest a stoner Sam Cooke, Khalid further developed his pop chops on last year’s Suncity EP, nodding to reggaeton and Coldplay-esque melody. That wide-ranging talent is on display all over his second LP. The best moments recall American Teen’s airy feel and warm charisma. “Talk,” produced by U.K. house duo -Disclosure, is a gorgeously bloopy synth-soul strut; on “Right Back,” Khalid extends an invitation to hang at the beach, over a sparkling track that smoothly interpolates Big Pun’s Nineties classic “Still Not a Player.” The credits to Free Spirit include Norse hitmakers Stargate, and Portugal. The Man producer John Hill. Yet despite some noteworthy cameos — John Mayer on the feathery disco tune “Outta My Head,” Father John Misty assisting on production for the maudlin “Heaven” — the LP isn’t overly burdened by the bold-faced guest spots you’d expect on a follow-up by an artist coming off a Top 10 debut. Instead, it gets tripped up by a different sophomore pitfall: Now that he isn’t an underdog, Khalid lapses into a little too much new-star introspection, exploring an ivory-tower aloneness that can recall the Weeknd’s goth-‘n’-B. On “My Bad,” he tries to stir some drama out of missing your texts because he was working too late at the studio, with nothing to ease his angst but some limpid George Benson guitar flicks. Elsewhere, why-me reflections like “Alive” and “Hundred” feel like solo late-night Uber rides into the dark heart of the soul. The self-examining gloom gets thicker as the record proceeds. But Khalid remains a sympathetic guy; see “Self,”where he shifts from bluesy grumble to flighty falsetto as he observes, “My raw emotion make me less of a man?” turning self-doubt into a critique of phony masculinity. That openness also comes through on the bonus track “Saturday Nights,” also on Suncity; Khalid’s voice vaults beautifully as he sings to a girl with a rough home life and a job she hates. It’s a sweet song with a classic message: Growing up is hard to do. Free Spirit reminds us just how weird it can be.<doc-sep>The children are always our future — but when it comes to popular music, teen culture has dominated the waning years of the past few decades. The turn of the millennium literally brought us Backstreet Boys’ Millennium as well as associated ilk ranging from Britney Spears to Blink-182; as the 2000s came to a close, then pint-sized phenom Justin Bieber rose to pop prominence while the Disney-era careers of Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato, the Jonas Brothers, and Selena Gomez were reaching their collective apex. As the 2010s wind down, pop is in a similar demographically situated position: marble-mouthed Atlanta rapper Lil Yachty has maintained a consistent presence as the self-anointed “King of Teens,” and last week 17-year-old outré-pop phenom Billie Eilish broke big with her spooky debut When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? El Paso-hailing singer/songwriter Khalid Donnel Robinson — Khalid for short — was barely 19 years old when his 2017 debut American Teen was released, and the success of that album (it’s since gone double-platinum) cemented his still-going rep as the presumptive voice for a young generation navigating a world that seems increasingly perilous with every passing day. “Sharing attributes with all our own enemies/ You gotta pay to live and even dying ain’t free,” he lilts over the splashy drums of “Hundred” off sophomore effort Free Spirit. The lyric represents one of the few moments throughout the album in which Khalid waxes lyrically on concerns — the ever-present cult of toxic masculinity, mental health, the temporary escape that drugs and alcohol sometimes provide — shared by aging millennials and Khalid’s Generation Z cohorts alike. Khalid’s generational appeal is easy to comprehend — even more so when considering the similarities he shares with his closest musical analogue, Frank Ocean; both employ a vocal approach that often splits the difference between a dreamy mumble and pure emotional eruption, and the plush, slightly left-of-center production on American Teen distantly recalled the warm embrace represented by Ocean’s instant-classic channel ORANGE in 2012. (Fittingly, Khalid covered that album’s swinging “Lost” for the BBC in 2017.) Whereas Ocean often reaches for poetic abstraction or once-removed storytelling as his modes of expression, Khalid tends to embrace a literalism that’s essential to his popularity. “I’m 18/ And I still live with my parents,” he ached on American Teen‘s no-money-no-problems anthem “8Teen,” and the specter of guardianship makes a slight return on Free Spirit‘s “bonus track,” the paean to gentle rebellion “Saturday Nights”: “All the things that I know your parents done/ They don’t care like I do.” Over the album’s 17 tracks, he details missed texts, besotted nights out, and moments of self-reflection over barely-tweaked variants of the airless R&B that’s become his signature sound. “Does my raw emotion make me less of a man?,” Khalid asks over the drunk tones of “Self”; on “Twenty-One” — a theoretical sequel to “8Teen” — he vibes over a fingerpicked bass, “You just turned 21, so lately you’ve been drinking” before seemingly addressing himself in absentia: “You’re only hiding from yourself.” There’s a real person behind these songs, seemingly, and Khalid’s lyrics on Free Spirit reflect the all-too-relative mindset of a young man on a long, contemplative drive with his adolescence stowed in the trunk, adulthood a perpetual and intentional missed exit. It’s frustrating, then, that Free Spirit‘s sanded-down sprawl more often than not threatens to suffocate any presence of a personality imbued in the music itself. Despite an impressive list of collaborators — ranging from pop heavyweights Stargate and the Weeknd cohort Doc McKinney to pop-house duo Disclosure and Bobby Krlic, the noise musician behind the harrowing Haxan Cloak project — little on Free Spirit stands out due to its wallpaper-esque sonic congruence. Many of its songs are composed of identical elements — a guitar lick, some gentle low end, maybe a glowing synth or two — making for a thoroughly mid-tempo listening experience suited for shopping-mall speaker systems and consumer-driven playlists alike. Such a singular establishment of mood is impressive in its own right; when John Mayer appears in the middle of the soft-lit pop of “Outta My Head” with a ridiculous guitar solo, his presence feels downright disruptive. But Free Spirit could also use a few more disruptive moments like it, if only to jolt the listener out of total somnambulance. C+<doc-sep>
At a middle school dance somewhere in America, hundreds of students are getting rowdy to “Thotiana” while the chaperone tells the DJ to spin something else, something less vulgar, something inoffensive. Something like Khalid. He mainly sings about love, never too deep or personal, like he got inspiration from a Netflix original movie starring Noah Centineo. The 21-year-old is maturing—he can drink now and smokes a little more weed than he did before—and his second album, Free Spirit, comes at a time in which Khalid is both a Billboard Hot 100 mainstay and figuring out if he should be the same teenager that first found success with “Location” or if his music should age with him. Like so many emerging pop stars trying to be the voice of the next generation (See: Billie Eilish or Dominic Fike), a selling point of Khalid’s music is that it’s genreless. Free Spirit is definitely the first album that can claim both Murda Beatz and Father John Misty in the credits. Khalid’s melodies fit over any instrumental they touch, whether that be an acoustic guitar-heavy ballad like “Saturday Nights” or a Disclosure-produced dance track like “Talk.” Yet, no matter how diverse Free Spirit is in sound and guests, the output is always the same harmless, generic Khalid. Khalid has no edge, so his attempts at darker songwriting come off like “Riverdale” fanfiction. “Is this heaven or armageddon?/I’ll be gettin’ high with you to watch the ending,” he sings plainly on “Free Spirit.” It’s fitting that one of the top YouTube comments praising his collaboration with country heartthrob Kane Brown on “Saturday Nights (Remix)” is, “No naked scenes, no alcohol, no drugs, no cars around but only soft and smooth voices.” Khalid, unlike an actual teenager, is afraid to cross any line—everything that leaves his mouth is bland. His relationship stories are frustrating, “Can you feel the tension? You’ve got my attention/I know we’re just friends, but I’d rather be together instead,” which he says on the John Mayer-featuring “Outta My Head” that belongs in an Old Navy commercial. The saving grace of Free Spirit is that none of Khalid’s dull lyrics and euphemisms can take away from the high-budget production showcase. Take “Talk,” where Disclosure gifts Khalid a bubbly dance instrumental. It works, despite Khalid sounding like an R&B singer without the sex and a pop singer without the fun. Hit-Boy recently brought new life to the emo-rap gloom of Juice WRLD and on “Self,” the producer tries that same kick-drum magic with Khalid. That goes well when he opens up about his anxiety, but not when he’s wondering, “Does my raw emotion make me less of a man?” And of course, when record labels need to make a pop singer engaging, they call up folk-trap mainstay Charlie Handsome who uses his talents on “Bluffin’” to squeeze exactly one ounce of soul from Khalid’s monotony. Khalid is simultaneously a pop star of the past and the future. Like so many pop stars before him, his albums only amplify weaknesses that are difficult to detect when he’s only releasing a single every couple of weeks or months. But Khalid feels perfect for an era where some of the most popular music is popular because it fits onto Spotify playlists meant solely to be used as background noise. Free Spirit isn’t the coming of age album Khalid intended it to be, though in his nascent adulthood he has mastered something. Unfortunately, it’s the art of being innocuous.