🎧 Approved: Kamal.

Kamal. started piano at six and put out his first single at seventeen. By nineteen he was featuring on Dave’s ‘Mercury’, had 250 million streams and a Billie Eilish co-sign. He’s now 23 and still hasn’t put out a debut album. That changes on 17 Jul.

His music is bittersweet, introspective R&B / bedroom pop. Raised on his dad’s neo-soul records and the UK rap coming out of Church Road, he tends to write the way people actually talk about hard things: directly, without dressing it up too much.

New single ‘Back Then’, featuring Natanya, literally starts as a voice note he recorded in the house he grew up in. It’s about going back to your parents’ place after moving out for the first time, the nostalgia, the gratitude, and the weird low-grade grief of realising you don’t quite live there anymore. 

It’s about “the flooding memories, the nostalgia for childhood, the thankfulness, but also a sense of loss and estrangement that comes with growing up”, he says. 

The production earns every bit of that, Natanya’s vocal layering builds through the track before her harmonies open up fully in the final chorus, interplaying with Kamal’s. It’s the kind of song that makes you want to call your mum.

The debut album ‘how the fuck does everybody else manage?’ has a lot to live up to. We suspect it will.

🎧 Watch the video for ‘back then’ below