Kehlani’s fifth album is centred around joy—including the joy of collaboration with the artists that first inspired her. “Growth doesn’t always sound pretty at first,” says Kehlani to begin her self-titled fifth album. “Sometimes it cracks. Sometimes it bends. But it always finds its way to the light. You’re about to hear a heart that’s been stretched, healed and reborn. A voice stepping into its truth with no fear, no filter and no apologies.” It’s a long way from the voice that opened her debut commercial mixtape, 2015’s You Should Be Here. “You could tell I was fighting to try to find the good part of it, but there was so much pain and hurt in that intro,” Kehlani tells Apple Music. “To be able to come full circle—I’m 31 now, and I was 20—and you can hear it. You can hear it even in my tone of speaking voice, how I’ve grown up and I’ve matured and I’m confident now.” A decade after her debut, the Oakland musician released the biggest song of her career: “Folded”, whose Brandy-inspired vocal runs beamed listeners back to the early aughts, became her first Billboard Top 10 hit and won Best R&B Song and Best R&B Performance at the 2026 Grammy Awards. “[Listeners] are like, I don’t know if it’s a breakup song, or is it a love song,” she says. “Or is it an ‘I messed up’, or did you mess up, or do we hate this person? Do we love this person? Do we miss them?” For years, Kehlani drew from trauma as a wellspring of artistic inspiration, but as her fifth album came together, she wondered about the limits of making pain your whole identity. “If you think of religious texts, it’s all these grand stories of all these ups and downs and trials and suffering to teach us how to move through those things in our own lives,” she says. “I think that’s just how we learn and process as humans. It’s why music works; it’s why art works; it’s why you go cry at a ballet: because everything is just so moving and we need these processes to unstick ourselves. So I’m happy that I’m able to share in that way, and connect with people in that way. But there does come a time where I’m like, ‘Are we all just trauma bonding?’” Instead, Kehlani is centred around joy, including the joy of collaboration with the artists who first inspired her. Listed in the album’s stacked guest list are some of the brightest luminaries in the past 30 years of hip-hop and R&B, from Brandy and USHER to Missy Elliott and Lil Wayne. “What I wanted to happen on this album was I really needed all the features to feel like this joyous return to what they truly loved to do,” she says. The resulting album plays out like a dual celebration—of how far Kehlani’s come, and of R&B at its best. On “Back and Forth”, she and Missy Elliott go toe-to-toe with a jealous boyfriend, with the requisite nods to Aaliyah. The neo-soul slow-burner “No Such Thing” recruits Clipse and borrows a drum loop from The Pharcyde’s “Runnin’”. T-Pain and Lil Jon appear on “Call Me Back” for a snap-&-B number straight out of 2005, while Lil Wayne introduces Kehlani over the chipmunk soul of “Anotha Luva”. (“My only requirement to Lil Wayne was that he must flick the lighter,” says Kehlani. “‘I would never tell you what to do in this life, my king, but I need you to flick that lighter.’”) And on “I Need You”, she joins Brandy, one of her greatest inspirations, over sparkly production from R&B legends Jam & Lewis. In the process, Kehlani learned to disregard an old adage. “Meet your heroes,” she says. “Because I have literally had nothing but an incredible lifetime of experiences to learn from the greatest people.”