Hayley Kiyoko Wants to Host an LGBTQ ‘Bachelorette’ Season
Four years after Hayley Kiyoko dropped her ambitious debut album, Expectations, the singer-songwriter has returned with a fresh batch of pop earworms, this time armed with renewed clarity and hard-won perspective.
Her second album, Panorama, which dropped Friday, is basically the artistic embodiment of the well-worn cliché, “It’s about the journey, not the destination.” The album’s 13 tracks cover plenty of the lows Kiyoko weathered over the past couple of years, including battles with depression and feelings of isolation during the pandemic. Ultimately, however, she arrives at a place of balance, determined to remain present and enjoy the view on whatever calamitous path she’s traversing. As she puts it on the sonically lush, lyrically intimate title track, “I don’t have to be on the top to see.”
And because this is Hayley Kiyoko we’re talking about, she also has plenty of certified bops and cheeky kiss-offs on deck, including flirty album opener “Sugar at the Bottom” and lead single “For the Girls,” which arrived alongside a video parodying The Bachelorette and featuring real-life Bachelor alum Becca Tilley, Kiyoko’s girlfriend of the past four years.