Khalid is new to Los Angeles, but he’s already come to see the art at LACMA “a couple times,” posting shots of himself among the sculptures and paintings on his Instagram. In a few months he’ll hit the road with Lorde, who called Khalid’s “Young, Dumb and Broke” “fucking gorgeous,” and whose music has a similarly potent combination of zoomed-in specificity and generational sweep. Khalid has appeared on tracks with Kendrick Lamar and Future, and he’s befriended Kylie Jenner, who gave his breakout hit, “Location,” a crucial boost when she played it on her Snapchat. American Teen debuted at Number Nine and is already certified gold.
Technology references – cellphone photo albums, ride-share apps, GPS pins – pop up constantly, sometimes enabling connections, sometimes crippling them. The album is full of fragile relationships – friends having a blast only to grow apart lovers yearning for one another only to get caught up in passive-aggressive mind games.
His debut album, American Teen, came out a few months ago, and although it pulses with euphoric dance beats, Eighties synths and tales of marijuana-and booze-fueled high school raging, melancholy is never far away, either. Khalid is a 19-year-old pop prodigy with a lovely, leathery voice and a knack for big, breezy sing-songs.
