Zayn is at relative peace with his tumultuous past, or at least trying to get there—and on the occasion of his new solo album, he wants the world to know. As he said in a headline-inciting podcast interview in February, he’s farming in Pennsylvania, giving his daughter a lot of money for her loose teeth, and wondering if he was ever in love with her supermodel mother, Gigi Hadid. The clarity that allows such bold introspection should’ve helped him finally act on the promise of his artistic potential. But expecting KONNAKOL to break the pattern of underwhelming, moody R&B-pop albums, or to make Zayn as interesting as he’s tried to signal he is for over a decade, will disappoint anyone not already committed to loving him.
Most of his fifth album since exiting the era-defining boy band One Direction in 2015 commits his considerable vocal talents to overproduced tales of torturous love, sexual yearning, and gruff self-evaluation that rarely go deeper than recognizing the condition. At least some of the fault lies with producer James “Malay” Ho, a key collaborator on Zayn’s 2016 solo debut, Mind of Mine. Promotions for that album referenced Malay’s work on Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange, the 2012 juggernaut that helped redefine R&B for the blog era. Back then, the connection aimed to paint Zayn as a similarly paradigm-shifting artist—a pop icon, sure, but also an avatar of so many sociocultural dynamics. Fellow 1D alum Harry Styles could be a David Bowie-caping rock star without also being a symbol of multicultural England, or the only Western boy band star with a Pakistani Muslim parent, or a target of Islamophobic hate for tweeting #FreePalestine. Plus, Zayn made a deliberate point of saying he wanted to do things he couldn’t in an uber-manufactured boy band. Taken together, the subtext went, Zayn could be that gamechanger.
No score yet, be the first to add.
That never came to pass. Mind of Mine, 2018’s bloated opus Icarus Falls, and the reactively subdued Nobody Is Listening didn’t escape the trap of noncommittal sensitivity, riskless sensuality, and recycled Lothario-but-I’m-tired personality into which he’d backed himself. 2024’s Room Under the Stairs buried hints of reckoning in a Man of the Woods-esque affect. KONNAKOL shows a bit more maturity, but rehashes enough of the played-out parts (he smokes, y’all, still!) to reinforce the self-preoccupied tendencies every millennial male artist—let alone one who pled no contest to harassment charges for allegedly striking his child’s grandmother, possibly referenced in “Blooming” with the Killers-interpolating line, “I’ve been fighting my case and I’ve been doing just fine”—should leave back in the ’10s.
Consider “Used to the Blues,” a plodding rocker in which Zayn pleads for deliverance from unhappiness using, naturally, a smoking reference. “Cigarette don’t hit me like it used to/I got used to the blues,” he croons over the intro, his emotive power muted by reverb. The song eventually gives way to rhyming dictionary phrases, building toward a half-climax that doesn’t quite land. If this slog means to inspire candor, it offers nothing redemptive in return.
