Khalid’s latest album, Sincere, has a hot track called “Heatstroke.” See how he was inspired to write the fiery track, from songwriting to the music video!

Khalid:
Hey, what’s up? It’s Khalid here, and this is how it went down with my song “Heatstroke.”

“Heatstroke,” to me, is a risk for me to take. I love genre bending. I love music. I’m a music listener. I’m a student, and that was a genre that I hadn’t dipped my toes in. And I wanted to make sure that when I was writing this song that it felt real and it felt down to earth.

Super fun working with John Hill. We really wanted to make something that brought me back to one of my favorite times of music, and that is 2010s indie pop.

When I record music, I like to sit in a dimly lit room, be by myself in the booth, where I can close my eyes and I can disappear. And although it might have been nearly winter when I when I wrote this song, I close my eyes and I’m immediately on the water side at the beach in the middle of August.

When I was writing “Heatstroke,” I wanted to make sure that it felt authentic, even before I knew that the name of the album was going to be called Sincere. Something about that moment freestyling a song. It’s like I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “What if I told you?”

“Heatstroke” is a special song. It’s one of those songs that you finish in the moment, and you leave and you don’t think about it for a while, and it comes back to you.

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