The 2010s File Feature
Suncity
Suncity: Khalid and Empress Of Capture the Light and Longing of El Paso "Suncity" arrived in 2018 as one of the more quietly beautiful additions to Khalid's …
01 The Story
Suncity: Khalid and Empress Of Capture the Light and Longing of El Paso
"Suncity" arrived in 2018 as one of the more quietly beautiful additions to Khalid's growing catalog, a track that captured the specific atmosphere of his hometown El Paso, Texas while reaching toward something universal about belonging, nostalgia, and the places that shape a person's emotional geography. The collaboration with Empress Of, the indie pop project of Honduran-American musician Lorely Rodriguez, brought a particular sonic dimension to the track that distinguished it from Khalid's more straightforward R&B output. The song entered the Billboard Hot 100 on November 3, 2018, reaching number 88 in its sole charting week, a commercial footprint that significantly understated the song's actual impact on Khalid's audience and legacy.
Khalid: The Voice of Gen Z R&B
Khalid Donnel Robinson, born February 11, 1998, in Fort Stewart, Georgia, and raised primarily in El Paso, Texas, had established himself with remarkable speed as one of his generation's most compelling voices in R&B and pop. His debut single "Location," released in 2016 while he was still in high school, became a viral success that led to a record deal with RCA Records and paved the way for his debut album American Teen, released in March 2017. That album, which debuted at number nine on the Billboard 200, established Khalid as a genuinely significant artist capable of communicating the specific emotional textures of contemporary adolescence and young adulthood.
His collaborations with artists including Billie Eilish ("Lovely"), Logic ("1-800-273-8255"), and Normani ("Love Lies") demonstrated his versatility and the broad appeal of his voice, which carries a particular emotional warmth combined with a sense of interiority that made him feel accessible and yet somehow private at the same time. By 2018, he had become one of streaming's most consistent performers, with millions of monthly listeners and a reputation for live performances that translated his recorded intimacy into larger-scale settings without losing its essential character.
Empress Of and the Collaboration
Empress Of, the musical project of Lorely Rodriguez, brought a distinctly different aesthetic background to the collaboration. Rodriguez's music, which incorporated elements of electronic pop, indie pop, and art pop, was characterized by sophisticated production and lyrical introspection. She had released two albums, Me (2015) and Us (2018), that built a devoted following in indie music circles, and her collaboration with Khalid represented an interesting crossover between indie and mainstream R&B contexts.
The sonic combination of Khalid's warm, conversational baritone and Rodriguez's ethereal contributions created something that felt genuinely collaborative rather than a simple featuring arrangement. The track benefited from the contrast between their voices and approaches, with Empress Of's contributions adding an atmospheric quality that complemented Khalid's more grounded delivery.
The "Suncity" Project
"Suncity" was released as part of a five-track EP of the same name on October 19, 2018. The EP was conceived as a love letter to El Paso, the city where Khalid had grown up and which had shaped his artistic sensibility in ways he wanted to acknowledge explicitly. El Paso's nickname is "The Sun City," a reference to the overwhelming desert sunlight that defines the city's physical atmosphere, and Khalid used this geographical specificity as a springboard for more universal reflections on place, identity, and belonging.
The EP represented an interesting artistic choice for a mainstream pop artist to make, releasing a project so explicitly rooted in a specific place that was not necessarily a city with the glamour associations of New York, Los Angeles, or Atlanta. The decision reflected Khalid's genuine commitment to his hometown's significance in his artistic development and his confidence that emotional specificity was more powerful than geographic ambition.
Chart Performance and Streaming Impact
The Hot 100 appearance of "Suncity" on November 3, 2018, debuting and peaking at number 88, reflected a track generating sufficient streaming activity to register on the broader chart without the radio support that would have driven a longer chart run. The song was not a radio single in the conventional sense, making its chart appearance a pure reflection of organic streaming consumption by Khalid's established audience and new listeners drawn to the EP's atmospheric qualities.
The actual commercial and cultural impact of "Suncity" extended considerably beyond this brief chart presence. On streaming platforms, the track accumulated many millions of plays and became a fan favorite within Khalid's catalog, the kind of deep cut that devoted listeners return to repeatedly even as casual listeners might primarily know his more widely promoted singles. The 49 million YouTube views the track accumulated confirmed this sustained engagement.
Critical Reception
Critical reception to both the song and the EP it anchored was warm, with reviewers praising Khalid's willingness to root his music in geographical and emotional specificity rather than chasing a more generic mainstream appeal. The collaboration with Empress Of was noted as a particularly successful pairing, with the artistic chemistry between them producing a track that felt like a natural extension of both artists' sensibilities rather than a commercially motivated combination.
The EP as a whole was cited as evidence of Khalid's genuine artistic ambition, his desire to use his commercial platform to explore more personal and specific territory than his hit singles alone would suggest. "Suncity" as its title track became the EP's most enduring statement, a track that captured something real about the experience of loving and being shaped by a particular place while communicating that experience in terms accessible to listeners who had never been to El Paso.
El Paso's Place in the Song's Legacy
The relationship between "Suncity" and El Paso became a meaningful dimension of the city's own cultural identity in the years following the song's release. Khalid remained connected to El Paso, and the city's subsequent tragic history, including the devastating mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart on August 3, 2019, which claimed 23 lives, made his expressions of love for the city carry additional emotional weight. Khalid's public responses to the tragedy and his continued identification with El Paso kept the song relevant as a document of genuine affection for a community that needed affirmation of its beauty and significance after devastating loss.
02 Song Meaning
Light, Place, and Longing: The Emotional Landscape of "Suncity"
"Suncity" is a song about geography as emotional autobiography, about the way a specific place becomes so woven into a person's identity that leaving it or even thinking about it generates a particular quality of feeling that cannot be explained entirely by the place's objective attributes. Khalid uses El Paso, Texas as a site of personal meaning, and in doing so, creates a track whose themes are simultaneously hyper-specific and broadly resonant with anyone who has ever felt defined by or connected to a particular landscape or community.
Place as Identity
The central thematic operation of "Suncity" is the equation of place with self. El Paso does not function in the song merely as a setting or a background but as something that constitutes part of who the narrator is. This is a recognizable and deeply human experience: the sense that the place where one grew up is not just where things happened but a physical environment that shaped perception, emotional responses, and fundamental orientations toward the world.
The desert sunlight that defines El Paso's physical atmosphere becomes in the song a kind of emotional light, warm and overwhelming and inescapable. The city's nickname, The Sun City, allows Khalid to work with solar imagery in ways that carry double meaning, describing both the literal atmosphere of his hometown and the emotional intensity of belonging to a place so completely that it becomes part of how one experiences everything else.
Nostalgia Without Sentimentality
One of the song's most skillful qualities is the way it approaches nostalgia without collapsing into sentimentality. The emotional relationship to place expressed in "Suncity" is not simply "everything was better there" or "I wish I could go back," but something more nuanced: an acknowledgment of the complexity of loving a place, including its limitations and the need to leave it, while still maintaining the genuine warmth of the connection.
This nuanced relationship to home is characteristic of Khalid's best songwriting, which consistently treats young adult emotional experiences with more complexity than the genre's conventions typically demand. The song does not romanticize El Paso into something it is not but instead honors what it genuinely is and what that genuine reality meant to the person who grew up there. This honesty is part of what makes the song's emotional impact so durable.
Empress Of and the Collaborative Emotional Register
Lorely Rodriguez's contributions to "Suncity" add a layer of emotional texture that enriches the song's thematic content. Her voice, which carries a different quality from Khalid's, creates a sense of call and response within the track, as though the place itself is answering the narrator's expressions of attachment. This dialogic quality, the sense that love for a place might be a relationship rather than a one-directional attachment, deepens the song's thematic complexity.
Rodriguez's indie pop aesthetic also introduces a slightly abstract, atmospheric quality to the track that prevents it from being purely a confessional narrative. The production choices create a sonic environment that mirrors the qualities of desert light, overwhelming and encompassing, beautiful and slightly blinding. The atmospheric production serves the thematic content by making the listener experience something of the sensory quality of the place being described rather than simply hearing about it.
Youth, Transition, and the Feeling of Leaving
Running beneath the song's celebration of place is an awareness of transition that gives the emotional content additional dimension. Khalid wrote "Suncity" at a point in his life when he had left El Paso for a career that would take him to cities and stages around the world. The song's emotional register is therefore not simply that of someone currently embedded in their hometown but of someone looking back at a formative place from a distance.
This perspective of departure is crucial to understanding what the song is actually doing emotionally. It is not a song about being somewhere but about having been somewhere and carrying that experience forward. The love for El Paso expressed in "Suncity" is the love of someone who has put distance between themselves and the place they are celebrating, and that distance is what transforms present attachment into the particular emotional register that the song occupies.
Belonging and the Search for It
Beyond its specific geographical content, "Suncity" participates in a broader thematic conversation that runs through much of Khalid's early work: the search for belonging and the various forms it takes in young adult life. His debut album American Teen was explicitly about the experience of adolescence and the longing for connection and identity that characterizes that period, and "Suncity" extends that investigation into the dimension of place.
The feeling of belonging that El Paso provides in the song is set implicitly against the placelessness of modern life, especially the life of a successful young musician who travels constantly and has no fixed geographic anchor. In this context, the song functions as a way of maintaining connection to something stable and rooted while occupying a life defined by movement and change. The act of writing and releasing a song about El Paso is itself a form of belonging, a way of keeping the connection alive through artistic documentation even when physical return is not always possible.
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