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.
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.
KONNAKOL features many moments like this, where Zayn appears content to enjoy the wordplay of his anodyne reflections. If you’re feeling generous, you could connect this tendency to the album’s title, which references the practice of reciting percussive syllables in South India’s Carnatic musical tradition. You could argue how “Met Tonight” and “5th Element”’s Afrobeats-reminiscent instrumentation illuminate his affinity for cross-diasporic rhythmic connection, rounding out a discography that includes perennial earworm “Still Got Time” with PARTYNEXTDOOR, his cover of a Bollywood film track, or even “Eyes Closed,” his recent duet with BLACKPINK’s Jisoo. But Zayn doesn’t elicit a sympathetic read when he references the overreferenced “Mr. Brightside,” buries his singing in aggressive modulation on “Take Turns” (an annoying album-wide tendency that felt more transgressive in 2013), or otherwise casts aside the vocal boldness central to those South Asian traditions he loves.
It’s in his embrace of these legacies that KONNAKOL shines brightest. Opening track “Nusrat” pays indirect homage to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the late Pakistani master of the Sufi devotional tradition known as qawwali. Between layered vocal runs that hint toward Khan’s technique without copying it, Zayn relates overwhelming but redemptive pain: “Seven years and a million things are running through my mind” in “the darkest cloud I had to leave behind.” Similarly arranged vocal motifs pepper other songs, lending a subtle oblatory quality to the codas of “Betting Folk” and “Used to the Blues” (that regrettable song’s best part), and the singalong-primed chorus to dance track “Fatal” (well-timed for his upcoming tour). And it’s less about leaning on his Desi-ness than what else brings listeners to his heart: “Like I Have You” puts his thick Yorkshire accent on display, a small reminder of his uncompromising roots in a working-class, very South Asian city once better known for xenophobic unrest.
Zayn’s come a long way from Bradford, though. The world’s a stage, and he’s got the fandom, tabloid attention, and freedom from representing whole diasporas that he didn’t have when Simon Cowell threw him and four other boys into the worst kind of music industry pressure cooker. Having a farm to tend, a child to raise, and arenas full of day-one fans ecstatically singing along to album closer “Die for Me” this summer—without finding it uncomfortably similar to Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control”—might be enough for him.
