Nicotine

When Trevor Daniel first started laying down the guitar chords to his breakout single, “Falling,” the Houston, Texas, singer teared up. “It was pretty, bro,” he says on Verified, a video series by Genius and Apple Music. “The whole energy in the room was great.” The song went viral on TikTok before earning remixes from Summer Walker and blackbear, and introduced fans to Daniel’s moody mishmash of mainstream sounds: He mixes R&B intimacy, pop structures, hip-hop stylings, and emo edge. The singer’s first full-length Nicotine, which meditates on the addictiveness of drama more than anything else, finds him neck-deep in his feelings. “I’m trying to be honest with my happiness/Don’t know why I’m bad at this,” he sings on “Past Life,” a strummy guitar ballad co-written with FINNEAS. “I don’t wanna sit all in my sadness/I know it’s a habit of mine.” His heightened emotional state is borne out in the songs, which swing between high highs and low lows: He pledges his devotion to a magic woman (“Lovesick”), confesses he’s been thinking about dying (“Anymore”), and gets tangled up in the lure of someone else’s girlfriend (“Disaster”). But it isn’t all distress and despair. On the propulsive synth-pop cut “Things We Do for Love,” a rare moment of clarity, he details heartbreak from a mature, healthy distance: “I gave you everything short of a wedding ring/There’s not a thing I would change.”