Album Review: Icon by Brent Faiyaz

After scrapping Icon the night before release, Faiyaz returned with something tighter and stranger. Raphael Saadiq executive-produces a sealed-off Valentine, with music as pristine as ever.

Courtesy of ISO Supremacy.

Wanting someone so badly that you start drafting bylaws for the relationship is a specific kind of desperation, and it saturates every song on this record. The need behind every mandate sounds real, sounds expensive, sounds like a man who would genuinely rearrange his life for you and also genuinely expects a receipt. Brent Faiyaz can make desire sound urgent enough to board a plane over. On Icon, that urgency has narrowed down to one woman at a time and one question per song, will you stay, will you stay, will you stay, asked ten different ways with ten different melodies, each one more controlled than the last. The album lives inside the specific tension of a man who wants total devotion and keeps offering it in language that doubles as terms and conditions. He means every word. That’s what makes the record work and what makes it sting.

Icon was supposed to exist five months ago. Faiyaz had it finished and dated for September 19, 2025, per Billboard’s announcement that summer, and then he killed it the night before release. His team confirmed to Rated R&B that he sent a group text pulling the plug, scrapping the lead single and its video along with it. “Have To” surfaced on Halloween as the only public sign that the album’s direction had shifted. The version that arrived is ten tracks, featureless, executive produced by Raphael Saadiq, with the earlier singles “Tony Soprano” and “Peter Pan” gone from the tracklist. Whatever Faiyaz recorded the first time, this is a leaner, more private album, and it sounds it. Ten songs about one subject, delivered by one voice, with nobody else in the room to interrupt.

On the real, “Have To” earned its spot as the surviving single. Faiyaz races across time zones pledging to “pack and ship myself” if necessary, and the devotion has a pulse to it, a man literally trying to close the distance between himself and someone he can’t stop thinking about. “You my drug, you my plug through the storm, through the flood” is a wild line, collapsing romance and dependency into one breath, and the production, co-steered by Dpat and Tommy Richman, leaves enough space for Faiyaz's voice to carry the whole weight, and it does.

The three-song stretch is where Icon finds its deepest groove and its most revealing habit. Each song approaches love from a slightly different angle (rescue on “Wrong Faces,” anxiety on the first half of “Butterflies,” obsessive reassurance on “Other Side”), but they all end up in the same room, which is Faiyaz telling a woman what she needs and how to get it. “I’ll be your reason to stay at home" on “Wrong Faces” has real warmth in the vocal, genuine protectiveness. “Remember to take care of number one” on “Butterflies” sits inside a verse calling her “Superwoman” and a dying breed, and the admiration is obvious. “Won’t you tell me all the time?” on “Other Side” comes wrapped in dream imagery and falsetto that could melt glass. These are beautiful songs. They are also, if you listen closely to what’s actually being asked, a man writing the schedule for someone else’s life and calling it love. That the music makes this feel sweet instead of alarming is the album’s most impressive and most unsettling accomplishment.

“You was supposed to change your last name” sits right next to “I won’t explain a damn thing” on “Strangers,” and that collision tells you more about this album’s central nerve than any single ballad does. Faiyaz is tallying what he gave against what she gave, calculating the exchange rate on a collapsed relationship while refusing to say what went wrong. The outro is a strange, wonderful detour. A spoken-word list of self-improvement notes (be truthful, eat healthy, read books, give without expecting anything) addressed to himself, delivered with the dazed conviction of a man who just got dumped and went straight to a bookstore.

Two songs on Icon crack the whole project open by saying the quiet part aloud. “World Is Yours” vows total access, singing “have me your way, here I stand,” then immediately rehearses for the loss. He promises to write her name on every shore, and whether that qualifies as devotion or graffiti depends entirely on whether she asked. Meanwhile, “Pure Fantasy” braids God and girlfriend into one refrain, alternating “God is pure” with “you’re all I need” until the church vocabulary and the bedroom vocabulary swap clothes. The interlude begs for belief the way a salesman pitches financing. “Only if you know you still believe in that kind of thing, I know I do, shit, let me help you.” Between these two songs, the fear underneath all of Icon’s possessiveness finally has a name. This is a man who worships someone and suspects worship won’t be enough.

Money and jealousy share a verse on “Four Seasons.” It’s the one song where Icon puts the double standard on the table without flinching. Backed by late ‘90s-styled production, he sings about watches purchased, cars purchased, and then the demand: “You had one job, so what your job is?” He concedes in the second verse that he wasn’t perfect, confesses he wanted virtue he never earned, and still asks her to come fix things. “Vanilla Sky” comes closest to asking a question it might actually want answered. “What is happiness to you?” and then “Is this a safe space for me to lead with honesty?” Real questions, rare on this record. But the song cycles through its own chorus again before waiting for a reply.

Icon commits to a single emotional frequency with enough vocal precision and lyric-level specificity to carry ten songs without a guest in sight. Raphael Saadiq's executive production gives Faiyaz room without cluttering him (also thanks to his close collaboration with Dpat, Paperboy Fabe, Jordan Ware, and even the Neptunes’ Chad Hugo), and the discipline of the running order keeps the album from bloating into redundancy.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Strangers,” “Pure Fantasy,” “Vanilla Sky”