Leven Kali on Beyoncé, Quincy Jones, and His New Album ‘LK99’

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f you scroll through Leven Kali’s iPhone camera roll, you’ll find old camcorder videos of him as a two-year-old toddler, wide-eyed and grinning in front of a tiny toy drum set. His mom excitedly cheers him on as he bangs the instrument, a bit off-beat. “I still have memories of that kit, the way that pedal felt and the way that the sticks would feel,” Kali tells Rolling Stone while looking at the video, smiling through his tinted sunglasses. “The drumstick bag that I see in the video, I still have.” 

Now, at 31, Kali has a more advanced sense of rhythm. 

The multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter, who rocks an early era Maxwell ‘fro, plays drums, plucks bass, and sings about the ups and downs of love and consumerism on his new album, LK99. The title came to Kali after learning about numerology while going down YouTube rabbit holes: “Every significant number in our universe boils down to the number nine,” Kali says, naming off the nine-ish planets, nine months of pregnancy, and the 180 degrees-rule for triangles as examples. “So that fucked me up a while ago, and I was just like, ‘Wow, like, nine is so important.” The album is technically Kali’s third LP, coming after 2019’s Low Tide and 2020’s HIGHTIDE. In many ways, he considers the former albums as lessons in how to make music. “I could feel my own journey kind of coming to this end of a chapter,” Kali says of making LK99, “but really the beginning of a new era.” 

In the six years between albums, Kali’s learning process has included encounters with some of the biggest names in music. He’s written for Beyoncé, Playboi Carti, and Jazmine Sullivan, and there are other pioneers who’ve given him sage advice. “I’ve spent time with George Clinton [and] Quincy Jones and they’ll say, ‘I’m just getting started’ ….If you really want to be one of those ones, you have to feel like a beginner all the time,” he says.

Born in a town outside of Amsterdam but raised in Southern California, Kali lost interest in his childhood drumset when he was a teenager. He came from a musically inclined family — his mom loves singing; his father, Jerry “Wyzard” Seay, played bass for Atlanta funk band Mother’s Finest; and his childhood pet cockatoo was named Hendrix. But Kali, instead, focused on golf, which earned him a Division I scholarship at UC Riverside. However, his musical dreams returned to him in the form of SoundCloud in 2015, when he started making music in his dorm room. His talent quickly caught the attention of the music industry. “I got contacted by G.O.O.D. Music,” Kali says, remembering the pivotal moment when Kanye West and Travis Scott showed interest in his producing ability while he was still on scholarship. “They were like, ‘you’re making gospel-trap music?’ and I was like ‘I gotta go to school, man.’” 

Over time, Kali worked his way back to the scene. He spent time trying to do it all: early morning wake-ups for sports workouts and class before making the hour commute to L.A. to work in studios. Kali eventually stepped away from school and pursued music full-time. “I made a deal with my parents, like, if I don’t have shit popping in a year, then I’ll go back.”

With his ability to seamlessly blend genres, Kali stayed off the greens and began working on the music that would eventually become his debut, Low Tide, from 2019. His follow up, Hightide, was released in the middle of the pandemic, just weeks before the murder of George Floyd. “I finished the album. We put it out. You know, the world froze, then got lit on fire,” Kali says. “Then I got dropped [from my label].” 

Without being able to promote and tour, Kali found solace collaborating and creating songs for other artists. “I sent like a pack of beats to Jazmine Sullivan, maybe I sent like two beats,” Kali says. “She liked one of them, she sent me back like the most insane vocal I’ve ever heard in my life… I was like, ‘Well, this is so easy. Send beats to somebody and they send it back.’ …That’s only how it works with Jazmine.” Their collaboration resulted in “Tragic,” a song off Sullivan’s Deluxe version of Heaux Tales. 

Kali continued to write for others before locking in for LK99, resulting in credits on Beyonce’s Renaissance (“Alien Superstar,” “Plastic Off The Sofa,” and “Virgo’s Groove”) and Cowboy Carter (“Bodyguard”). Kali says he learned the “ability to discern” between moments that can’t be replaced in recordings and moments that need repetition to be perfect. “I think sometimes people maybe have a fear of being judged [if they] didn’t do it in the first few tries… It’s like, ‘man, I’ve seen people that are way doper than you do it 100 times.’” 

LK99 leads off with “Breathe!” which feels like a Salt-N-Pepa-led breathwork session before switching off into wah-wah pedal bliss. Kali moved into Parliament Funkadelic-style interludes in “Stars, Stripes and Credit Card Swipes” before shifting into the neo-jazz melody of “Remedy,” reminiscent of Sade’s “No Ordinary Love” and later whisks its way into 2000s soft-rock guitar strums on the album’s seventh track “Jus a Lil’ Bit.” Instead of features, Kali elects to pitch his voice up and down to give the album texture: During “Stars, Stripes and Credit Card Swipes,” his voice goes low, resembling a funk radio disc jockey warning about materialism. On album closer “Without You,” he pitches himself higher for sweetness as he tells his significant other that the only necessity in this world is their love. Kali describes the full musical journey as simply “soul.”  

Despite spending years prior in collaboration and having features from Syd, Ty Dolla $ign, and Smino in previous albums, Kali kept LK99 to himself, producing about “95 percent” of it on his own. “it just felt clean,” he says but he teases that later iterations of the album will have “friends” joining the LK99 songs on special presses of the album. “Lucky Daye is on ‘Pieces,’ on the remix coming” he reveals.  

In his era of new beginnings and endings, Kali is most excited for listeners to feel inspired by the new music. “There’s a lot of mistakes on this album that I kept on purpose.” With intentionally flat and sharp notes, Kali hopes those little flaws create space in a world where the perfection of AI is constantly being pushed in every direction. “I just wanted there to be the inspiration to be unapologetically real,” he says, ”and just feel something that feels like you met someone that allowed you to be your real self.”