Album Review: LK99 by Leven Kali
Leven Kali built four songs on Renaissance, plus a song on Cowboy Carter, and makes a compact case for remembering his name. LK99 asks for permission a lot—to love, to stay, to call back.
Four songs on Beyoncé’s Renaissance (”Virgo’s Groove,” “Alien Superstar,” “Plastic Off the Sofa,” “Summer Renaissance”) and then “Bodyguard” on Cowboy Carter. Co-signs from Quincy Jones and George Clinton. A feature on Playboi Carti’s “Flex” that has racked up north of 240 million Spotify streams. And most people could not pick the man responsible out of a lineup. Leven Kali has been putting out music since 2017, raised in Santa Monica by a father who played bass in the Atlanta funk-rock band Mother’s Finest and a mother who coached his voice, and he’s spent the better part of a decade writing behind the curtain for Tinashe, Jazmine Sullivan, Snoh Aalegra, and others. LK99, his third full-length, is a bid to step out from behind all of that. Self-produced with his longtime collaborators Sol Was and Daniel Memmi, with the assurance of someone who has spent years sharpening other people’s hits. The question isn’t whether he belongs up front. It’s whether this record gives him enough to say once he’s there.
Almost every cut here is asking somebody for something. “Are U Still” wants to know if the other person is still in love. “Jus a Lil’ Bit” bargains that one kiss and one night would be enough. “Without U” drops every pretense in its final seconds: “Fuck it, I’ma give you a call/We can do it all once one more time.” “Grab It” dares someone to stop holding back, “Starlet” confesses it can’t separate love from lust, and “Remedy” pledges to be a pillow, a blanket, a pen, a page, a fighter, a friend, all at once, which is either very sweet or a lot to promise inside two and a half minutes. The feelings are plain and unguarded, and Kali sings them in a warm tenor that sits comfortably between Miguel’s falsetto heat and something more grounded, almost conversational. He means all of it, but the question is whether meaning it eleven times over is the same as saying eleven different things.
“Are U Still” is the longest track on the record at three minutes and fifty seconds, and it earns the extra room. It opens on a direct confession (he told himself the other person was the issue, but he’s the one still holding on), then slides into planning a future together, kids and a house, before pulling back into a chant about vibration and ghosts and a howling wolf, and in its closing stretch he’s demanding an answer: “Is you bout it bout it bout it bout it.” That piece covers enough emotional ground in under four minutes that you can feel Kali working through something real, not just restating a mood. “Jus a Lil’ Bit” is the most grounded writing on the LP, partly because of one image—“It’s New York in August/A lil’ too hot, but I like the weather”—that pins the longing to an actual place and season instead of letting it drift. And “Raining Sun” is the only moment where anything beyond the two people in the room gets mentioned. Its second verse brings in bad news breaking on the outside, asks to be told something good even if it’s a lie, and then kicks into:
“Now we’re beaming, ultraviolet
I’m a dreamer, you’re the pilot
Take us anywhere you like.”
Some of the best material on LK99 does something with the wanting instead of just stating it, and these three each find a different way to charge the ask with real weight.
A handful of tracks coast on pleasantness without arriving anywhere memorable. “BREATHE!” strings its one directive into a full number and drifts nicely enough, but there’s almost nothing to hold onto once it’s over. “Remedy” burns through devotion metaphors at a pace that saps them of weight. He’ll be a lover, a friend, a fighter, a pen, a page, a writer, a pillow, a bed, a blanket, a peace, a pride, a patience—the list keeps building, but the sentiment stays fixed. “Pieces” cycles between wanting to make love and wanting to get high without saying much about either impulse or what connects them. None of these are weak on their own. Kali’s voice and the instrumentation (funky, warm, played by real musicians with a psychedelic tint) keep everything listenable. They just don’t stick the way the stronger cuts do, and on a record this short, three or four numbers that blur together shrink an already compact space.
Every track on LK99 is about the same person, or at least the same feeling directed at the same kind of person, and there is almost no complication in any of them. No betrayal, no anger, no real sadness. The closest is “Without U,” where he concedes something is missing, but even that one ends with him grabbing the phone. “Stars, Stripes and Credit Card Swipes,” a spoken-word interlude that opens with a sharp little satire about consumerism and closes on “love is all we’re looking for,” is the one place the set acknowledges a world outside the relationship. “Raining Sun” cracks the window again with its mention of bad news. Otherwise, LK99 stays locked in. For thirty-one minutes, that bet mostly pays off. The LP doesn’t drag, and Kali’s voice and his band (Justus West, JJ Scheff, Micah Gordon, Alissia) play with enough color and groove that the sameness in subject matter doesn’t equal sameness in feel. But after a full pass, you start wishing he’d tell you something about the person he’s singing to, what happened between them, what would actually make the asking stop. The whole set is warm, but it’s warm the way a room with no windows is warm.
LK99 works best as a thirty-one-minute introduction. Kali can write a melody, hold a groove, and strip his vocal down to the line where sweetness doesn’t tip into softness. “Are U Still” has the kind of arc (confession to desperation to a chanted dare) that hints he can build a piece that goes somewhere unexpected. “Jus a Lil’ Bit” proves he can write a specific, located line instead of a floating sentiment. On “Without U,” the closer, he rattles off what he has—cars, clothes, money—and owns up that none of it matters, and then tells himself “fuck it” and calls anyway. That candor, that willingness to quit negotiating and just act, is the best thing on the record. The next one could use more of it.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Are U Still,” “Jus a Lil’ Bit,” “Raining Sun”