Album Review: KONNAKOL by ZAYN

On the British-Pakistani singer’s fifth solo record, a Carnatic percussion concept does the heritage work. The English lyrics are still the lost-love material he was writing a decade ago.

Courtesy of Mercury Records.

The press cycle has promised a heritage album. South Indian vocal-percussion syllables (konnakol, literally the title of the record) form the rhythmic bed for an opener that takes its name from the late Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Interview copy describes an album built from those syllables before any English lyrics existed. On paper, KONNAKOL is the record where ten solo years reach the British-Pakistani half of the pop singer making them, a direction ZAYN’s catalog has been quietly heading for a decade. Inside the English lyrics, that arrival mostly doesn’t happen.

Heritage references keep turning up in his solo catalog, almost always in small doses. “Intermission: Flower” on his 2016 debut was sung in Urdu and dedicated to Khan and his father. “Tightrope” on 2021’s Nobody Is Listening sampled a 1960 Mohammad Rafi ballad. In 2023 he featured on Pakistani group AUR’s “Tu Hai Kahan.” Five solo records across ten years, and the heritage moments arrive as visits while the main work stays within a pop-R&B vocabulary that loops lost love and self-warning over adult-contemporary production. KONNAKOL is the fifth record on that loop.

A small image bank runs the record. Every chorus circles the same handful of pictures: names called into the dark, lights going down, hands in weeds, cigarettes that barely hit the way they used to, someone’s shadow being traced. Five or six images, running from chorus to chorus.

“Tried but it ain’t easy, leanin’ all the way up
Come and hit this weed, won’t you kiss me on clouds?
Swimmin’ throughs seas with trees right now
Tracing your shadow, shadow.”

That’s “Betting Folk,” and almost every word in its chorus reappears on other tracks. “Nusrat” promises to call out the name till the sun burns out. “5th Element” ends every line of its chorus with the same four-word tag, four times running. “Used to the Blues” spends three minutes on cigarettes that don’t hit, then takes a verse into matches and kerosene. On “Prayers,” he’s still drinking the barley. The opening of “Breathe” has him running, apparently, so long he cannot find peace of mind.

Chorus after chorus, the narrator stages himself as the damaged one. “The side effects of loving me,” he sings on “Side Effects.” On “Prayers” he introduces himself to a stranger as “what you need” from “the flames of defeat.” “Blooming” turns on “maybe I was my own Achilles.” “Take Turns” makes the bargain direct (“Love me like you hate me/Like you wanna break me”).

Five solo records in, the warning-label pose has become ZAYN’s default setting. A chorus on KONNAKOL nearly always starts with him explaining what’s wrong with him. The heritage pitch shows up inside the music for exactly one track. That track is “Fatal.” ZAYN starts it as a generic pop ballad:

“I’ve been a little stupid
Might go a little dumb.”

Then the chorus cracks into a Hindi post-chorus, सफारी यादेहम भुला देगे, repeated four times, and then four more times as the outro. The English preceding the Hindi admits uncertainty, the rhythm opens onto something beyond another pop-ballad turnaround, and the percussion-syllable concept that sold the record actually gets to do its work inside a song. For roughly a minute, the title of the record means something.

Pop craft is the other real thing on offer. It peaks on “Sideways,” a clean midtempo cut with an ‘80s tilt, made by the German, Jesse Shatkin, and Monsters & Strangerz team (not Malay). The chorus describes being next to someone who isn’t really there.

“I miss lookin’ at you sideways
Face-to-face with your lips on mine
And our legs on the pillowcase
Sideways, late at night with your love lying next to mine.”

Nothing in the song reaches for the Carnatic concept, the Qawwali tribute, or the South Asian heritage the record’s pitch is selling. It’s a pop chorus doing honest pop-chorus work.

One song measures itself directly against what ZAYN has said about the record. In the ELLE India cover story he named “Met Tonight” as the track that best shows where he is right now (his words). It’s an explicit sex song, and the lyrics are mostly filler:

“The way you fucking me, loving me, know your body like
No lies, no lie.”

Four lines of the bridge run as essentially open-vowel filler. If this is where he is, take him at his word. A decade into solo work, the song ZAYN has picked as his self-portrait is one with nothing in it.

Nothing in the production or vocal work here reads as incompetent. Malay, who co-produced Channel Orange and Blonde, still has a gift for Frank Ocean-adjacent arrangement, and ZAYN’s voice, breaking into falsetto over a held tone on “Breathe,” still does what it has always done. Predating every English word on the record, the percussion-syllable foundation did the rhetorical work of progression, and the lyrics never picked it up. With this voice and this producer, he could write a Qawwali-echoing English song on lineage, family, migration, or the language his father grew up around. He hasn’t yet. “Fatal” holds about a minute of Hindi and a minute of the record’s concept, which is not nothing. Everything else is another song about the empty side of the bed.

Slightly Below Average (★★½☆☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Sideways,” “Fatal”