Brent Faiyaz Returns With ‘Wasteland’ Album

Brent Faiyaz performs a sold out show at Union Stage in Washington, DC

The Washington Post via Getty Images

Since rising to fame in the late 2010s, Brent Faiyaz has worked with music industry heavy-hitters like Drake and Tyler, the Creator and established himself in a growing field of R&B singers. Today, Faiyaz is back with Wasteland, his sophomore studio album and his first full-length project since his 2017 debut Sonder Son.

Wasteland comes on the heels of his EP Fuck the World, released in early 2020. As a result, the new album — like many other artists’ projects in 2022 — contains songs written during and inspired by the pandemic era. He released the album’s first single, “Dead Man Walking,” back in the fall of 2020, and in 2021, he earned his first entries on the Billboard Hot 100 with his Drake and Tyler, the Creator collabs “Gravity” and “Wasting Time.” On Wasteland, he enlists the help of other respected musicians including Alicia Keys and The Neptunes.

For Faiyaz, Wasteland was an organic endeavor that came together only after he’d written several songs. “It was less of an album process and more of a life process,” he told Vogue. “I just made a collection of songs and tied a story line together once I saw that they all kind of shared a similar theme. I didn’t really realize I was working on an album until I was maybe a little over halfway through. Then I realized, ‘Wait a minute, this is a body of work.’”

He went on to acknowledge how important of a role songwriting plays in the creation of his music. “For me, it’s something different when it comes to lyrics,” he said. “I think that it touches on when a song moves past just music, in terms of the literature. That’s one thing that people tend to forget about. Music is music, but an actual song is a form of literature too, so it kind of switches mediums. When you actually break down a song and look at it for the writing and the words, it hits differently.”