Khalid Donnel Robinson is a bashful chart-topper who has played arenas – including 3Arena, in Dublin, in 2019 – and guested on records by Billie Eilish and Ed Sheeran while until recently remaining largely below the radar. He has his fans, and 50 million monthly streams on Spotify, but in the wider world there seemed little danger of his ever becoming a household name. Behold the 21st-century phenomenon of the invisible star.
That threatened to change in late 2024 when a former partner outed him, on TikTok, as gay. Having his privacy taken away so starkly was initially a shock, and the 27-year-old Texan described the incident as nasty. Still, he was quick to make peace with that upheaval, and on his gorgeously gauzy fourth album, After the Sun Goes Down, Khalid basks in the glow of love and freedom.
It’s a grippingly untethered listen, sprawling across 17 luxuriant tracks on which the pace rarely rises beyond that of a sort of blissed-out meander. Yet, amid the permahaze, this is a soft-focused record with a firm centre.
Engaging publicly with his sexuality, he says, provided a “new spark of creativity”, and you can hear it on the jazz-steeped burble of the album’s opening track, Medicine, which pairs diaphanous beats with his expressive voice. Lyrically, it’s cheerful and explicit. “Oh, both of us in this room / What is a man supposed to do / When your lips are all over me?” he croons, at peace with the world and keyed into his sexuality.
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Khalid is often compared to the more commercial the Weeknd, Spotify’s most-streamed artist, who is best known for Blinding Lights (and perhaps also for getting lost in the Super Bowl tunnel during his Covid-era half-time show of 2021. (Who knows, perhaps he’s still in there, wandering his perpetual hall of mirrors.)
The parallels are valid in so far as both performers are happy to uncork their swoonful falsetto as required. Yet Khalid is a mainstream singer with the soul of a bedroom-pop artist, and his music carries the heavy, introverted ache of singers such as Clairo and the early Eilish.
He also knows how to balance expansive moments with intimacy. As if rifling through a diary he has kept locked in the attic too long, he alludes over and over to the high price of living in the closet. “Oh, I got so much to tell you / cause something ain’t right,” he sings on In Plain Sight, before the tune pivots into a plea for honesty from a lover whom he suspects of unfaithfulness.
If heavy in spots, After the Sun Goes Down is often winningly joyous. Khalid channels the digressive, Joycean style of Frank Ocean on the whirring True. Then there’s Out of Body, which sounds like a less problematic updating of Justin Timberlake’s Future Sex/Love Sounds, and which is driven by a bulldozing sitar (and by production from Rodney Jerkins, aka Darkchild).
The album coasts by, and it’s no surprise that Khalid uses the open road as a metaphor. He drops multiple references to Cadillacs and Lexuses (Lexi! as Alan Partridge would say). Going even further on Rendezvous – think Kraftwerk at a beach party – he beseeches a lover to “Ride me like autobahns / Be on autopilot”. The sentiments are undoubtedly heartfelt, yet they may also potentially violate basic road-safety regulations. Whatever you do, don’t remove your safety belt, Khalid.
There are shameless pop moments amid the hazy R&B. Tank Top is an Auto-Tune steamroller written with the Swedish pop star Tove Lo. From there, After the Sun Goes Down concludes with a rare moment of understatement, on Nobody (Make Me Feel), a brooding infusion of electro balladry that again suggests his old collaborator Eilish. It’s a beautifully dark ending to an album that burns brightly with love, freedom and the determination to embrace life and all its possibilities.
