Kehlani

Kehlani’s fifth album is centred around joy—including the joy of collaboration with the artists that first inspired her. “Growth doesn’t always sound pretty at first,” says Kehlani to begin her self-titled fifth album. “Sometimes it cracks. Sometimes it bends. But it always finds its way to the light. You’re about to hear a heart that’s been stretched, healed and reborn. A voice stepping into its truth with no fear, no filter and no apologies.” It’s a long way from the voice that opened her debut commercial mixtape, 2015’s You Should Be Here. “You could tell I was fighting to try to find the good part of it, but there was so much pain and hurt in that intro,” Kehlani tells Apple Music. “To be able to come full circle—I’m 31 now, and I was 20 for You Should Be Here—and you can hear it. You can hear it even in my tone of speaking voice, how I’ve grown up and I’ve matured and I’m confident now.” A decade after her debut, the Oakland musician released the biggest song of her career: “Folded”, whose Brandy-inspired vocal runs beamed listeners back to the early aughts, became her first Billboard Top 10 hit and won Best R&B Song and Best R&B Performance at the 2026 Grammy Awards. “[Listeners] are like, I don’t know if it’s a breakup song, or is it a love song,” she says. “Or is it an ‘I messed up’, or did you mess up, or do we hate this person? Do we love this person? Do we miss them?” For years, Kehlani drew from trauma as a wellspring of artistic inspiration, but as her fifth album came together, she wondered about the limits of making pain your whole identity. “If you think of religious texts, it’s all these grand stories of all these ups and downs and trials and suffering to teach us how to move through those things in our own lives,” she says. “I think that’s just how we learn and process as humans. It’s why music works; it’s why art works; it’s why you go cry at a ballet: because everything is just so moving and we need these processes to unstick ourselves. So I’