Givēon’s Beloved: A Patient Return to Soul’s Unfinished Stories

Givēon’s new album Beloved, released on 11 July 2025, finds him leaning fully into classic soul while staying rooted in the raw edges that have shaped his writing.

The record uses real string sections across its fourteen tracks, with violins, horns and light percussion drawn straight from seventies R&B.

The production stays wide enough to keep his baritone out front. Nothing crowds him. Each track holds back just enough to let every line land.

He has called Beloved “a complete encapsulation of the very transformative growth I experienced over the past three years.”

He also said, “Maybe there is a world where I can just keep creating and keep writing stories. But I have to live first. It is a non-negotiable.”

That sense of pausing to actually live sits at the heart of these songs.

Compared to Give or Take, which felt like a diary cracked open in real time, this album sounds more like he is reading back pages with a little distance.

The singles Twenties and Rather Be hold the album’s softer tension.

On Twenties, he writes about giving up the best years for a love that did not last, calling it “the experience of investing your most precious years into love, but unfortunately a love that expires.”

Tracks like Keeper and Avalanche push deeper into that space, using live musicianship and gentle layers that keep things cinematic without losing the soul feel.

Film shapes how he pulls these stories together. “I love it when the movie starts with something big happening, then you rewind and it tells you how the story got to that point,” he told Essence.

That approach leaves Beloved feeling like a series of scenes, some clear, some half-buried, all tied together by the voice that still pulls you in even when the truth is messy.

Beloved sits with the phone calls never made, the words left unsaid and the choices you might try to change if you could.

Givēon’s baritone holds all of it without forcing a neat ending. It is the unfinished pieces that stay with you and remind you he had to live first.