Album Review: Kehlani by Kehlani
The Oakland singer turns a relationship that keeps ending into her fifth album. With a stacked guest list, Kehlani sings this record harder than she has, and the writing gives her the range to do it.
“Growth doesn’t always sound pretty at first. Sometimes it cracks. Sometimes it bends, but it always finds its way to the light. You’re about to hear a heart that’s been stretched, healed, and reborn. A voice stepping into its truth with no fear, no filter, and no apologies. I am Kehlani.” — Kehlani on “Intro”
Ten years of Grammy nominations and no wins. Then Kehlani walked onstage at the 68th annual ceremony and picked up Best R&B Performance and Best R&B Song. “My first time being nominated for a Grammy was 10 years ago,” she told the crowd, “and it’s been a really long time.” She closed with “Fuck ICE” and walked off.
Count up the year before the ceremony. Cornell canceled her Slope Day performance in April 2025. The City Parks Foundation pulled her NYC SummerStage Pride slot a month later. She went to the AMAs red carpet and closed her remarks with “Free Palestine.” She described receiving organized death threats on The Breakfast Club and said she’d moved residences because of them. Her 2024 video for “Next 2 U” had Palestinian flags and the phrase “long live the intifada” in the armature (Cornell cited it as reason for the cancellation). The Grammy speech was continuity. Eight weeks later, on her thirty-first birthday, her self-titled fifth album arrived. The songs are about one relationship she keeps leaving and asking back. On one of them she’s folded his laundry, stacked it by the door, and called to tell him to come get it.
Hear her sing. “Folded” is tiny, a head voice that at phone-call volume—restrained, close to the mic, a performance about not performing. It never climbs. She doesn’t vibrato through the phrasing even once. Brandy (her idol and one of her biggest influences) shows up on “I Need You” and Kehlani matches her note for note. Same with Usher on “Shoulda Never,” a full duet and not a featured-guest cameo. The grit in her chest voice is new. She’s been in the booth for a decade and stopped trying to prove she can wail, as evidenced in “You Got It,” a song about needing a partner to hold her down through a bad stretch (“Can you stick around and hold me down/When I can’t keep my shit together/When its all chipping away, is you gonna put me back in place?”).
Lil Wayne opens the record with a Wayne verse, which is a choice. Brandy takes a full verse on the Jam & Lewis-produced “I Need You,” a heel turn in 2026 (which is wild), and splits the bridge with Kehlani line for line. Missy Elliott does the jealous-boyfriend bit on “Back and Forth,” rapping “Where you goin’?” and “Who you riding with?” with the casual menace she built her career on. Usher duets through “Shoulda Never” with her, front to back. Pusha T and Malice pull up together on “No Such Thing,” a Clipse couplet over a drum loop from The Pharcyde’s “Runnin’.” Smaller features fill the margins, with Leon Thomas on the slow-moving “Sweet Nuthins,” Cardi B on the bouncy, filthier writerly invention of “Pocket,” Big Sean on “Lights On” with an uninspired verse (“My lil’ water sign, I might plant a seed and grow out your family tree”), and Lil Jon ad-libbing, T-Pain-assisted “Call Me Back”—which the production has this “Buy U a Drank” feel. Every one of those names was defining R&B or rap in a window that closed two decades ago, and Kehlani came up learning her voice out of theirs.
An ex has left clothes at her apartment, and she’s calling to say come get them:
“Come pick up your clothes
I have them folded
Meet me at the door while it’s still open
I know it’s getting cold out, but it’s not frozen.”
That’s the conceit of “Folded,” the lead single and the Grammy song. She washed the hoodie, folded it, stacked it on the bench by the door, and called. For three more minutes the song tests the offer from different angles. Hear the second verse.
“I don’t need no more empty promises
Promise me that you got it
I don’t need roses
Just need some flowers from my garden.”
The singing stays quiet the whole way through. Khris Riddick-Tynes (the album’s executive producer), who co-wrote and co-produced the track alongside D.K. the Punisher, kept the production to a guitar and groovy drums (with strings by Johnny May) so nothing would come between her and the line. The Grammy was waiting for a song like this.
Notice the reversal on the second single. Five months before the album, Khris Riddick-Tynes returned on “Out the Window” with co-producer Antonio Dixon (a former Underdogs associate who left the group in 2009). It’s the same ex played from the opposite angle. “Folded” has her telling him the door is open. “Out the Window” has her outside his door, begging, “Damn, who knew the silent treatment’d be so fucking loud?”
“But, baby, I want you
I’m focused, it’s overdue
Don’t throw it out the window.”
The video references Aaliyah’s “Try Again.” Missy nods to her on “Back and Forth” too (“got me feeling like Aaliyah”). Together, these two singles map the album’s range. Ultimatum and repentance. Same relationship, opposite sides of a week of silence.
Those references reach past the video and into the cover art. The “Out the Window” single cover was shot by Markus Klinko (his other credits include Beyoncé’s Dangerously in Love and Mariah Carey’s The Emancipation of Mimi). Its music video runs through the whole era beyond “Try Again”—Usher singing in the rain, Toni Braxton’s “He Wasn’t Man Enough,” TLC’s “No Scrubs,” a pay phone straight out of any 1999 slow jam. Aaliyah’s posthumous account endorsed the homage online. And last October the Folded Homage Pack gathered Toni Braxton, Brandy, Mario, Ne-Yo to cover the song six different ways. That’s the 2000s R&B tradition with the participants on speed-dial, elders singing on the next one’s record.
Song after song, she keeps changing her mind about whether she wants him back. On “Cruise Control” she takes the confident line, “I been alone so long and I’m proud to be/You say you need more, you know how that sounds to me.” Earlier in the sequence, “Anotha Luva” hands off from Lil Wayne to Kehlani, who spends her verse in circles, “I know you’re not mine, telling myself/But every time that I rewind, I don’t want nobody else.” The break comes on “I Need You,” where Brandy shares the bridge, “I’m not too proud to say, ‘Better try somebody else’/Wanted to fill your space, but baby, can’t nobody help.” R&B relationship albums live inside that kind of back-and-forth. Kehlani writes better from inside one than above it.
Past the midpoint, “Still” brings everything to a crawl for good reason. The hotel-room opening, “Damn, you got me cryin’/In this hotel/And I got a secret that I won’t tell nobody,” drops the honesty she’s kept off the other tracks. She doesn’t oversing it. And who’s that accompanying Kehlani in the second go-round of the song? Additional vocals ad-libs underneath on the chorus line, “My body knows I love you still.” The string arrangement keeps the composition in background harmony under the chorus, and it does more with those eight bars than most would do with their own track. The second verse arrives at the admission she’s been avoiding, “You think we’re good, well, I’m not at all.” And she’s in the same hotel room she started in.
On the opposite, “Sweet Nuthins” isn’t bad, just slack. The conceit (making up for being a flake by making sweet love) is fine, but the execution doesn’t push past the conceit. Leon Thomas’s verse essentially restates Kehlani’s apology from the male side (“I gotta work on me, that doesn’t mean I don’t deserve you”), so the duet structure doesn’t add a second perspective the way “Shoulda Never” with Usher does, where the dynamic is both people refusing to be the regular type. One song on the album points somewhere. Call it “Unlearn.” She sings it alone, no guest, no production flex (well, it’s the best Underdogs record on the album). On a record built around circles, that’s unusual enough to notice. She holds the position for a minute, then the chorus arrives, “I got a lot to unlearn about me/But I’ll do the work if you still believe.” Kehlani sings this record harder than she has on any of the first four albums, and the writing gives her the range to do it.
The Grammy came ten years late. Why did it take that long? An industry had been quietly calling her a boutique act while she was out-writing its A-list. This album takes the R&B voices she came up listening to and puts them on her tracklist (Brandy, Usher, Missy, an actual Clipse verse), and she sings beside them without ducking. The self-titling is a small overreach, not bad. But fifth albums do that. She has six more decades of album titles to use.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “No Such Thing,” “Still,” “Cruise Control”