Album Review: Kiana Ledé – ‘KIKI’

Kiana Ledé took the industry by storm this week, dropping her debut album, “Kiki”. Ledé has created quite a buzz for herself, not only in music but in the acting world as well, with her roles in “Scream” and the Netflix original series, “All About the Washington’s”. She has garnered a lot of attention from R&B fans in the last few years with a few EP’s including “Myself” and Selfless”. Now, with her album “Kiki” the music community has the chance to see what a full-length project from Ledé looks like. 

“Kiki” packs a lot into the 17-tracks Ledé offers up on this LP. The greatest strength of the album is it’s consistency, and how personal Ledé’s writing is. Within the span of the 50 minutes, Ledé informs her fans of the layers of her personal life, in a way that keeps the listener interested and wanting more. For a debut album, Ledé showed a great deal of experience and growth in regards to creating a full project. Sometimes, newer artists struggle with dropping a debut album that matches the expectations set by their previous work, but that is not the case here. The music she presents on “Kiki” is more provoking than her previous showings, and this record displays that she has developed her sound in a productive direction in the last few years.

The features and production only accentuated her sound, rather than distracted from it. Particularly, her chemistry with Lucky Daye was magnetic, and you could hear how well their stylistic choices worked together on “Forfeit.”. The rest of the features, including Ari Lennox and 6LACK, work extremely well with Ledé’s style, and brings out different aspects to the record. At times, the album blends together a little too well, with some tracks not distinguishing from the others, but the features disrupt this and make the album more concise and provoking. Ledé shows a great ear for beats and feature artists on “Kiki”, and it adds a flavor throughout the record that might have been missing without these inclusions. 

“Kiki” showed great promise, and displayed the pure talent Ledé has, but at times it was too similar. It’s obvious that Ledé has a natural knack for creating personal and intimate records, but hopefully on the next album we see her take more creative leaps. This was a great debut project, but fans should expect Ledé to develop and expand on her sound with her next record, charting into territories that were untouched on this album. Overall, “Kiki” was extremely impressive, and Kiana Ledé proved that she is a superstar in the making.