Ten years on from the release of his solo debut ‘Mind of Mine’, it feels like Zayn Malik is still searching for himself. ‘KONNAKOL’, though, suggests he might be about to give up on looking. It finds him retreating from the quiet character development of 2024’s ‘Room Under the Stairs’ to retrace the hollow grooves of his most commercially successful, but least artistically adventurous, era.
The record is saturated in mid-10s EDM-pop aesthetics: Side Effects and Met Tonight are competent, occasionally irresistible, pop songs that nonetheless sound like artefacts rather than arguments for continued cultural relevance.
Fatal is the album’s most genuinely interesting moment, its lo-fi English and Urdu vocals welded to a club-inflected trip-hop chassis, yet this intriguing construction is undermined by lyrics that gesture at depth without committing to it, hinting at the crux of the issue.
Across 15 tracks, Zayn and his considerable roster of co-writers deploy a great many words to say very little. “I’m so sick of these long-distance ménages,” he intones on Prayers, promising provocation and delivering a shrug. On Fatal, the line “sitting around / been down ‘cause I’m helpless” mistakes a sense of resignation for profundity.
When genuine feeling briefly surfaces on 5th Element, it's smothered in reverb and clichés before it can breathe. Elsewhere, Take Turns comes closest to being a genuine banger by sheer force of will. The rest blurs into a bit of a nothing and, in a year where Harry Styles is playing a record-breaking residency at Wembley Stadium and Louis Tomlinson is releasing the best work of his career, Zayn risks being left in the choppy wake of his former One Direction bandmates. ‘KONNAKOL’ doesn’t warrant repeat listens. It barely warrants finishing.
ZAYN Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Tue May 12 2026 - MANCHESTER AO Arena
Thu May 14 2026 - DUBLIN 3Arena
Sat May 16 2026 - GLASGOW OVO Hydro
Tue May 19 2026 - BIRMINGHAM Utilita Arena Birmingham
Sat May 23 2026 - LONDON O2 Arena
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