Khalid Essentials

In 2016, Khalid Robinson was voted Most Likely to Go Platinum by his high school class—and he soon lived up to it. A military kid who moved through Georgia, Kentucky, upstate New York and Germany before settling in El Paso, Khalid often felt like an outsider due to that dislocation, and started songwriting to cope with loneliness, uploading tracks to SoundCloud where his music gained rapid attention. His breakout single, “Location”, recorded during his senior year’s spring break, quickly became a hit, selling over five million copies in the US. Khalid’s debut album, 2017’s American Teen, was a mix of synth-pop and neon-lit R&B that helped earn him five Grammy nominations. In between records, he featured on high-profile collaborations with Logic (“1-800-273-8255”), Calvin Harris (“Rollin”) and Normani (“Love Lies”), among others. He followed with 2019’s soulful, creatively unbounded Free Spirit, on which he charted new emotional terrain with a strong focus on his wellbeing, as heard on tracks such as “Better” and “Talk”. And his R&B evolution only continued on 2021’s Scenic Drive (The Tape) (which included collabs with 6LACK, Lucky Daye, Ari Lennox and Smino) and 2024’s Sincere, the latter a survey of just how much he’d grown since his career took off.