The rising singer-songwriter’s second album shows off a bedroom-pop sound that’s as influenced by indie confessionals as R&B valentines
Malcolm Todd is a rising star with a sweet, lilting voice and a knack for intimate popcraft. But if you’re looking for the illusions of grandeur we often expect from rising pop people, look elsewhere. The L.A.-based singer-songwriter opened his self-titled 2025 debut worrying that he might not make it because he’s “not a Harry Styles” (one of the most memorable admissions of comparative career jitters since Pink told us she wasn’t as pretty as Britney a quarter century ago). On “I Saw Your Face,” a gently insistent track from his new Do That Again, he offers “Life’s not a movie/I’m not a movie star.” But Todd wears his realism well, finding a nice mix between earnestly romantic and achingly self-aware. “I probably shouldn’t do it but I’ll do it for the song,” he sings before throwing himself into what sounds like it might be an emotionally risky hook-up on “Breathe,” as subtle bass bumps and lowkey Chic-guitar flecks stir up the mood.
Todd fits in with artists like Omar Apollo (who he’s toured with), Mk.Gee, and Steve Lacy, musicians who blissfully elide genres and excel at boiling big emotions down to the most human scale. His metier is bedroom-pop that’s as influenced by indie confessionals as R&B valentines. “Jean Skirt” sets sweaty clothes-on-the-floor imagery to watery guitars; the brackish ballad “Free99” dreamily reflects on fading innocence; “Difficult Love” luxuriates in the only kind of love he seems to know over a plush hip-hop-tinged bounce.
The buoyant “Malcolm In the Middle” references the popular early-2000s sitcom (on which his father was a writer and he appeared as a kid), but the song isn’t a cloying complaint about growing up almost-famous, it’s a complex reckoning with relationship politics, delivering bereft lines like “if you can’t tell a word I say then I won’t make a sound” with forlorn verve.
The album teams with moments like this, bits where the music might evoke a modern homespun permutation of greats like Hall & Oates or even Prince, and the lyrics add new wrinkles to classic pop heartbreak. “My doorbell only rings when my food is at the door,” he opines on “Lonely Song.” Anyone can relate to that feeling, maybe even Harry Styles.
