Mark your calendars — in the summer of 2024, Khalid became less a singer-songwriter and more a vibe. The Texas artist’s 16-track “Sincere” is a collection of beautiful harmonies and airy and spare rhythms, melting together like a sticky popsicle on the dash.
It’s music you should listen to on a dark highway on the way home after being up all night, headlights steady and hands surfing the summer air as the sun peaks up again. Whatever Khalid is singing about — drug addiction, depression, love, breakups, freezing cold and soaring temperatures, high or sober — just zips along without leaving much of a trace.
“Sincere” marks Khalid’s first full-length project since his 2019 release, “Free Spirit,” — with the terrific singles “Talk” and “Better” — an album that was selected among the AP’s top collections in 2019.
The new one likely won’t make anyone’s 2024 list, maybe because we’ve learned what to expect from Khalid or maybe because the artist is just treading water.
There are some outstanding tunes — “Lifted,” with its lazy guitar lick, and the punchy “Everything We See” — but the cumulative effect is numbness. Too many songs come and go without a noticeable difference. The whispery prayer “Broken” leads to the ghostly harmonies of “Who’s There To Pick Me Up.” Even Khalid’s attempt to change up his vocals — like on “Ground,” sung partly with gritted teeth — fails to jolt us out of our lazy high.
Though he’s known to collaborate with everyone from Halsey to Kane Brown, Khalid again keeps the guest list light here, with only Arlo Parks jolting the album into something intriguing on “Breathe.” He clearly needs her a lot more than she needs him.
Songs like “Tainted,” “Adore U,” “Long Way Home” and “Heatstroke” would be home runs on anyone else’s album, but here they’re mostly filler — colors and atmospheres and moods all too familiar.
“I never thought it’d be over so quickly,” he sings on the final song, “Decline.” He’s talking about a lost love, of course, but it might as well describe the entire “Sincere.” It’s got vibes but no soul.
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Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits ___
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