“Could life be heaven on earth?/After the hell we been through?” Kali Uchis asks on the opening track of her fifth album, Sincerely, posing a question that also serves as the record’s thesis statement. “Heaven Is a Home,” with a cinematic string overture reminiscent of the same Old Hollywood feel Lana Del Rey started off Born to Die with, promises to tell “a story of a girl/Who was once imprisoned by her own mind.” Written prior to many of the events that would shape the record, “Heaven Is a Home” introduces a series of references that scaffold the Colombian American pop innovator’s vulnerable meditation on motherhood, her own childhood, and the challenge of holding opposing truths with equal care.
After balancing bolero, reggaetón, merengue, and other styles on her last album, 2024’s Orquídeas’, this LP finds her singing almost exclusively in English, and takes a narrower retro-pop approach. Still, the album has many hallmarks of Uchis’ sound, evoking organic silks and rose body oil with a signature mix of kiss-offs and cosmic, jazzy-R&B, and dream-pop breakdowns, à la Cocteau Twins. Underscoring all of these complex musical impulses, especially on tracks, like “All I Can Say,” that focus on acceptance of self and the contradictions that come with that acceptance, is a pristinely produced, dreamy Fifties and early-Sixties sensibility. It’s a sound that calls back to Uchis’ early doo-wop influences while also bringing to mind an era of family, innocence, and slow living — or at least the illusion of it. She’s the executive producer on the album, a first for her, and she gets a co-writing credit on every track.
There are golden-oldies easter eggs all over Sincerely: a nod to Elvis Presley when she sings “Walk like an angel/Sometimes, I might even/Talk like an angel” on “Territorial,” echoed by the deliciously sung line “te falto el respeto,” a bit of of “It’s Just Us” that resembles the Beatles’ “In My Life,” and an album title inspired in part by Brenda Lee. With songbird trills, languid organs that bleed major key into minor, and gauzy production, this music is a fitting frame to illustrate the kind of domestic peace that Uchis has sought for a long time, even as she sings about feelings that should be too big for these kind of sweet melodies to hold.
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Uchis has spoken about her tumultuous upbringing before — “Kicked out the house as a teen/But I was on my own much longer it seemed,” she tells us on “It’s Just Us” — but this is the first project in which she reflects on how it’s shaped her as an artist, a partner, and now, a mother herself, nurturing her younger self in the process. “Love is a gun/I’ll bite the bullet/Wasn’t that enough for you?” she sings resentfully on “For:You.” She then folds, fawning: “Yeah, if I could/I’d bite the bullet.”
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One of the album’s alternate covers features a veiled Uchis and her son in a very Latina depiction of the immaculate conception, one in which our ancestors are the angels; on “Angels All Around Me,” she sings about reaching them through a call to “let us pray.” In April, Uchis publicly shared the news of her mother’s passing, and her mother’s voice opens “Sunshine and Rain …,” a song born from what Uchis calls her “epiphany”: “We all need somebody/That makes the earth feel heavenly/Baby, I’ll be that somebody.”
The acceptance Uchis finds on the latter half of the album doesn’t come at the expense of the chaos and insecurity she sings about earlier on. It’s all there, together: love and hurt, heaven and earth, birth and loss. These contradictions reach their full apotheosis on “ILYSMIH,” which stands for “I love you so much it hurts” and is dedicated to her son: “He showed me what my life was really worth/Down here on earth/ And it hurts, it hurts, it hurts.” His giggling “mama” closes the album, a last word that’s also a first word.
