Review Summary: Zayn is making the music he has always wanted to make. Unfortunately it's music none of us really wanted to hear.
The only surprising moment on
Nobody Is Listening comes at its very beginning, and unfortunately it’s not a great one. Zayn’s rapped verse on opener “Calamity” is a corny stream of consciousness lacking in both rhythm and nuance (“You’re a snake, fell off the ladder” being a particularly cringe example). It’s the moment that best reflects the increase in creative control Zayn claimed to have for this project, but in the same breath it shows that his artistry may have flourished most with another creative mind at the helm.
I don’t want to judge an artist too much for taking a swing and a miss, but it would be more respectable if it weren’t the only swing on the album. The following 10 tracks on
Nobody Is Listening are a risk-averse showcase of contemporary R&B’s most generic modern trends. Passionless sexual metaphors, likening love to drugs, and takedowns of fake friends – if you didn’t grow tired of these dime-a-dozen tropes in the 2010s, you might actually enjoy what’s on offer here, but I don’t think I can even pretend to stand such cliches in 2021.
Zayn has a fantastic voice, but you wouldn’t know it based on what this LP has to offer. The few moments he showcases his falsetto (the pre-chorus of “Connexion” for example) are dizzying, but the lower end of his range lacks the unique timbre of peers such as The Weeknd or Ruel. The album’s best moment is when another voice is introduced to break up the monotony – “When Love’s Around”, with its solid groove and Syd feature, is probably the sole moment from
Nobody Is Listening that will live onward in one of my playlists. But as for the rest… you guessed it, nobody is listening.
