When Khalid and I meet in a recording studio in downtown Manhattan, it’s almost six months after that fateful day. It’s pouring outside but inside the studio, it might as well be the height of summer. Holding court at the dashboard, the pearlescent chrome polish on his nails shining in the dim light, Khalid is playing songs from his upcoming album, a collection that is surprisingly buoyant, sneakily carnal and unabashedly written from a queer perspective.
Noticeably, the new material brings out a different side to his vocals, a higher register, a joyful energy. “I’m singing in a different pocket of my soul because there’s no fear in my heart. I’m just like, ‘I’m here. I’m alive,’” he says. “It comes from me embracing my sexuality. It’s almost like it opened a whole new register creatively. Because being ambiguous is one thing and can be respected, but being bold, it’s like so many people have listened to me be this mysterious kind of a storyteller, but for this, the veil has been completely lifted.”
On the walls of the studio are multi-platinum plaques marking the success of pop-R&B bangers of previous eras, from Estelle’s recession-era floorfiller “American Boy” to Toni Braxton’s sultry Y2K smash “He Wasn’t Man Enough,” a Rodney Jerkins-produced banger that delivered the R&B superstar from Quiet Storm rotation to the club. The songs on Khalid’s new album seem designed to do something similar for him, taking him from the bedroom blues of past hits like “Location” to the center of the sweaty, sensual dancefloor.
It’s also a pretty horny album, I suggest. “Definitely,” he says. “The night is alive. “The desires of the nighttime… They do say the freaks come out at night.”
Before long, we zero in on “In Plain Sight,” the project’s first single. “Deceit in your eyes, should’ve seen it coming,” he sings—a sneer in his words but an unbothered playfulness in his delivery. “Don’t take me for a ride.” A classic it’s-not-right-but-it’s-okay R&B kiss-off, the song is an unabashedly nostalgic throwback to the teen pop of eras past, from the New Jack Swing of the early ‘90s to the maximalist pop of Total Request Live at the turn of the millennium—made contemporary by the top-of-the-line pop sheen and Khalid’s confident delivery. “I like to refer to myself as a one-man boy band,” he tells me, laughing.
And on “In Plain Sight,” he’s frank and swaggering. “What’s the tea about him?” he sings, making the pronouns of the trifling ex clear. It’s a song that evidently follows in the fierce footsteps of sultry turn-of-the-millennium breakup anthems.
“I resonate with that Toni Braxton song,” he tells me. “In a way, she’s reclaiming herself [on ‘He Wasn’t Man Enough’]. She’s reclaiming her worth. When you’ve been wronged so many times, there’s nothing more powerful than choosing yourself. When I choose myself, it bleeds out into the writing, the self-respect, the self-worth. I aspire to be in the place that Toni was when they wrote that song, because that’s the intensity and the energy that I want to bring. Not, Oh, I’m sad that you don’t want to be with me, please. I’m begging, I’m yearning. It’s like, I’m not dealing with your shit. You could go take that over and do that to somebody else.”
