Albums

Kehlani Returns With Third Album, ‘Blue Water Road’

blame it on Meka April 29, 2022

Kehlani had a pretty good 2020 (despite the year being an overall trash bucket). They worked with the likes of Disclosure and Victoria Monét, and released her sophomore album It Was Good Until It Wasn’t to critical praise and a top-2 debut on the Billboard 200. They would follow that up with several collaborations to in 2021 — with Kiana Ledé, producer Amorphous, T-Pain, Lil Durk, Pink Sweat$, and Ant Clemons, among others.

Kehlani has now returned with their third album, Blue Water Road. “That process is dictating everything I’m currently doing in my life,” Kehlani said to Apple Music’s Nadeska about the project. “I have taken a huge leap into directing, a huge leap into film study, just a huge leap into all these interests that I had before that were just little passionate interests of mine that actually became full-time things that required actual application and dedication. And I’m actually heavily involved in it now, but it wouldn’t have been sparked if I hadn’t been forced into it by myself, essentially. I forced myself. But it felt more of a universal force than it was just me being like, ‘I got to do this.’ It was like, ‘Man, I know this is just time. If I really want this shit to happen, I got to make it happen.’ But I took all of that into this album, especially because I was very locked in pandemically. I’m going to turn that into a word. But I made this album majority pretty much with one person. I mean, me and Pop been working for a very long time. But when we discovered that we were on the same type of time at the writing camp and the camp we put together with all these producers and all these people, I was hopping around from room to room to room to work with, we were like, ‘We’re here with it. Why don’t we just keep building? It feels good.’ And so we just kept coming back to this studio every day until we had what really quickly felt like an album. We made this album in probably two months.”

Led by the singles “Altar,” “Little Story,” and “Up At Night,” The likes of BLXST, Justin Bieber, Syd, Jesse Reyez, Thundercat, and Ambré join them throughout the project. Stream the album below.