Khalid’s journey into the music industry began at 19 with the release of his acclaimed debut album American Teen—a coming-of-age story filled with the trials and tribulations of burgeoning adolescence. Khalid’s unfiltered lyricism and earnest portrayal of adolescent frustrations and anxieties resonated with many and propelled him to stardom. At 21, he released Free Spirit, a soulful meditation that saw the singer-songwriter shedding the naivety of his teenage years and marking his first step into adulthood. Half a decade after Free Spirit, Khalid is back and better than ever and ready to show his fans his growth with the release of his third studio LP, Sincere. “I needed to take that break,” he tells Apple Music. “I needed to stop. And I don’t look at it in a place of being afraid to come back. If I’m going to take this break, when I come back, I’ll come back with more clarity. I’ll come back with a better choice of decisions, more maturity, more knowledge.” On Sincere, Khalid proudly shows off that new knowledge, drawing inspiration from life experiences over five years and showcasing his evolution not only as an artist but as a person as well. “It was a very difficult process in naming this album, because I had to find one that summed up what I really felt in this music,” he says. “I thought of it as my most vulnerable in a while, because when I’m thinking of these songs, I’m saving them over the year like, ‘Okay, no, I have to keep this.’ And that’s vulnerable because I’ve known the songs’ impact on me when I was in the studio. I believe that if I trust my intention and I trust my heart, then it’ll have a similar impact to my listener.” Throughout the album’s 16 tracks, Khalid shares intimate vignettes about the lessons he’s learned, whether it’s about heartbreak (“It’s All Good”, “Broken”, “Tainted”), loneliness (“Who’s There to Pick Me Up”, “Decline”) or falling in love (“Adore U”, “Altitude”). However, not every song on the project is about love lost: Khalid is introspective on the soul-searching and dreamy track “Ground”, where he details his experience with psychedelics due to feeling uncertain within his career. On the Arlo Parks duet “Breathe”, Khalid is transparent as he yearns for freedom from the darkness of his mind. “When I listen to this album, you can see the time that it took,” he says. “You can see the time.”