“I’ve always been a hopeless romantic,” Kali Uchis sings on ‘Sunshine & Rain’, this album’s sumptuous penultimate track. You won’t doubt her sincerity – and not just because she named the album ‘Sincerely,’, with a comma that makes it sound like she’s signing off an intimate letter. This gorgeously wrought record, Uchis’ first sung entirely in English, feels like a celebration of love’s potential to soothe, strengthen and offer stability.
It’s also a change of pace after Uchis’ last album, 2024’s ‘Orquídeas’, on which she drew from rhythmic Latin genres including reggaeton, dembow and merengue. ‘Sincerely,’ is more downtempo and reflective. In a recent interview, the Colombian-American artist said the shift was inspired by an unspecified “life-altering event” and her subsequent quest to “find joy in life despite the world”.
It makes sense, then, that Uchis and co-producers including Dylan Wiggins [The Weeknd, Miguel] and Josh Crocker [Rosé] have given these swirling neo-soul songs a cocoon-like quality with swelling strings, soft pattering drums and synth-pop accents. Uchis and her partner Don Toliver welcomed a son last year, something she sings about on lush album closer ‘ILYSMIH’: “All the world is crazy, but you’re here / My baby made me realise that nothing else even matters.” Touchingly, the song and therefore the album ends with the sound of a child laughing and saying “mommy“.
However, cocoon-like doesn’t mean closed-off emotionally. “How did you fall for someone complicated and flawed as me?” Uchis asks on ‘Silk Lingerie’, a sensual, jazz-tinged track that lives up to its title. She’s equally vulnerable on the lightly psychedelic ‘Fall Apart’, on which she wonders: “Do you love me even when I get difficult? Do you love me even when I fall apart?”
Elsewhere, Uchis sounds far more self-assured. When she sings “I’m not sorry for the way that I love” on the doo-wop-flavoured ‘All I Can Say’, she sounds like the lead singer of a ’60s girl group. On the glimmering ‘Territorial’, where Uchis’ honeyed vocals are punctuated by pizzicato strings, she warns off a romantic rival with a nonchalant shrug: “I’ll be villain in your story, you can play thе victim too.”
‘Sincerely,’ sometimes meanders – six woozy minutes of ‘Lose My Cool’ is too much – but more often, it matches the dreamy intimacy of Uchis’ stunning 2020 smash ‘Telepatía’. Here, her music shimmers with confidence even when her lyrics hint at deep-rooted insecurities. The world is a particularly brutal place right now, but this album supplies a timely but timeless-sounding balm.
Details
- Release date: May 9, 2025
- Record label: Capitol Records