Sincerely,

SINCERELY,: GRIEF, BIRTH, AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF LETTING GO

Kali Uchis’ Sincerely, (Capitol Records, May 9, 2025) is the Colombian-American singer’s most compositionally restrained and emotionally direct album yet.
Her fifth studio record, it arrived through Capitol Records — a new label partnership announced alongside the album title reveal.
Where her previous cycle leaned into bilingual maximalism — Spanish-language features, reggaeton crossovers, the glitter of commercial Latin pop — Sincerely, strips all of that away.
Uchis has since confirmed that the death of her mother and the birth of her first child together inspired the album, and that she dedicated it to her mother, wanting to immortalize her in the music.
The result is an album that operates at lower metabolic temperature than anything in her catalog, and is stronger for it.

Production Architecture: Less Surface, More Depth

The production credits on Sincerely, read like a deliberate curatorial act: Kali Uchis serving as executive producer alongside an ensemble that includes Vegyn, Leon Michels, Vince Chiarito, Al Shux, 54 Ultra, and The Outfit.
Each collaborator brings a distinct textural vocabulary, yet the album maintains a singular atmospheric logic — which is itself an achievement, given how many hands touched the sessions.
Uchis confirmed the album was recorded in 2023, during her pregnancy,
which may partly account for its sense of internal stillness: sessions conducted in a particular physical and emotional state tend to acquire a coherent grain.

The opening track “Heaven Is a Home…” sets the register immediately: soft reverb tails, elongated note-lengths, minimal low-end percussion. Uchis’ vocal sits forward in the stereo field, nearly unprocessed — a stark contrast to the more heavily treated performances on ORQUÍDEAS. The fifth-relation chord movements on “Sugar! Honey! Love!” lean closer to neo-soul classicism than pop construction, with a mixolydian ambiguity in the harmony that keeps the track from resolving cleanly, giving it its characteristic pull.
Eight tracks in, “Fall Apart” delivers a notably different weight — a psychedelic soul sequence that the first seven more buoyant tracks make feel like a structural rupture.

Leon Michels’ fingerprints — he built his reputation co-founding the Daptone-adjacent El Michels Affair and producing for various soul revival projects — are most legible in the mid-album arrangements, where analog organ chords bleed between major and minor, and brass overtones sit just below the surface mix level.
The album’s measured tempos and heavy reverb establish a singular, concentrated mood, with songbird trills and gauzy production forming a frame for the kind of domestic peace Uchis has long been pursuing.
Vegyn — known for PC Music-adjacent processing and Frank Ocean’s Blonde sessions — contributes an opposing texturology on select tracks: precisely timed silence, air in the arrangement, the sense of empty rooms. The two poles coexist without friction because the tempo rarely exceeds mid-groove, giving the mix room to breathe. For a point of reference within the current R&B landscape, the album’s spatial logic sits closer to Brent Faiyaz’s work — whose catalog you can explore on his 2026 release Icon — than to anything genre-dominant in 2025.

The original fourteen-track configuration carries zero guest appearances, demonstrating Uchis’ capacity to sustain a full-length body of work on her own terms.
That is not a commercial calculation — it is a structural and philosophical one. The sonic world of Sincerely, is hermetically sealed by design, and breaking it open for a feature would have been an act of category confusion.

Songwriting and Vocal Performance: The Epistolary Logic

Uchis framed the album’s thematic intent clearly: Sincerely, is about the “complexities of life” and the effort to “find joy in life despite the world,” to “appreciate every moment and not take life for granted.”
The comma after “Sincerely” in the title is not a stylistic flourish — it signals a letter incomplete, a thought still unfolding. The epistolary structure runs through the record at the lyrical and formal level: tracks function less as discrete pop units and more as paragraphs in an extended private correspondence.
Uchis eventually confirmed that her mother’s death and her child’s birth were the twin coordinates from which the album was written, and that she dedicated it explicitly to her mother.

Uchis sampled her mother’s voice directly in “Sunshine & Rain…,”
the lead single — a decision that functions less as a sentimental gesture and more as a musicological one. The sample grounds the album’s abstraction in a specific voice, a specific body. It gives the record a biological provenance that no amount of songwriting precision alone could manufacture.
In earlier interviews, Uchis described the album as a more down-tempo exploration of her “emo side” — not in the My Chemical Romance mode, but one colored by currents of alt-rock moodiness.

All tracks are written under Uchis’ given name, Karly-Marina Loaiza — with “It’s Just Us” co-written with David Burke and “ILYSMIH” co-written with Pooks.
The co-writing credits on those two tracks are telling: “ILYSMIH” (I Love You So Much It Hurts) is one of the album’s most emotionally exposed moments, and the collaborative writing process may account for its slightly more outward tonal quality.
Composed shortly after Uchis gave birth, the song reportedly captures the emotions of that specific period with unusual directness.

Vocally, Uchis operates in a lower dynamic range than on any previous record. She has never been a maximalist singer — her instrument is characteristically diffuse, with a timbre that sits between classic torch-ballad contralto and soft-focus dream-pop upper register — but on Sincerely, she allows the vulnerability of understatement to carry structural weight. “For: You” demonstrates this clearly: the register is kept deliberately narrow, almost conversational, and the control required to make that restraint feel charged rather than depleted is considerable.
As Paste’s Andy Crump noted, the complete absence of guests across each track makes plain that “this is her album, and hers alone; if not for that autonomy, it simply wouldn’t be sincere.”