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. I was like, ‘You know what? I need something to help me a little bit more.’” So he took it on himself and started to write.Khalid is a 19-year-old pop prodigy with a lovely, leathery voice and a knack for big, breezy sing-songs. Reflecting on his evolution from spectator to artist for Apple Music’s Up Next series, Robinson said, “I would sit in this apartment, I would look at the mountain behind me, I would watch all the lightning, and I would listen to music. He followed that up with 2019’s soulful, creatively unbounded Free Spirit, on which he charted new emotional terrain with a strong focus on his well-being. An EP, Suncity, arrived in late 2018, opening with audio of Khalid being given keys to the city of El Paso-not bad for a kid who’d moved there only a few years before. In between, Robinson featured on high-profile collaborations with Logic (“1-80”), Calvin Harris (“Rollin”), and Normani (“Love Lies”), among others.

alone.) In 2017, he released American Teen, a celebratory but bittersweet mix of synth-pop and neon-lit R&B that garnered five Grammy nominations-proof that you’re rarely an outsider alone. (His breakout single, 2016’s “Location,” was recorded during spring break of his senior year a few weeks after it came out, he won Prom King within a couple of years, the song had sold more than five million copies in the U.S. Self-described as “an awkward teen,” he picked up songwriting primarily to stave off loneliness, sharing music through SoundCloud and quickly catching the ears of both his peers and the industry. A military kid, Robinson split his childhood between Georgia, Kentucky, upstate New York, and Heidelberg, Germany, eventually settling in El Paso, Texas-a pattern of dislocation that often made him feel like an outsider.

About a year later, he proved them right. In 2016, Khalid Robinson was voted Most Likely to Go Platinum by his high school class.

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