Giveon returns to ‘Beloved’ for ‘Act II’ with Kehlani, Teddy Swims and Leon Thomas

Giveon has released ‘Beloved: Act II’, a nineteen-track deluxe version of the 2025 album that put him back in the Billboard top ten after a two-year stretch off the release calendar. The expansion adds five previously unreleased songs and four guest features — Kehlani on ‘Save Some For Me’, Leon Thomas on ‘Fool Me Once’, Sasha Keable on ‘Replica’, and Teddy Swims on ‘Keeper’ — while restoring the architecture of the original to the front of the running order.

The strategy makes the deluxe more than a vault-clearing exercise. Each feature is paired with a current R&B voice that has built an audience on the same lane Giveon refuses to leave: the slow-burn ballad, the chest-voice climb, the romantic register that streaming algorithms have spent two years pushing toward the margins in favor of hyper-pop and amapiano. Kehlani is the album’s anchor name. Teddy Swims is its commercial accelerant — his ‘Lose Control’ did to soft-soul radio in 2025 what ‘Heartbreak Anniversary’ did in 2020.

‘Beloved’ itself was framed as a recovery record when it dropped on July 11, 2025. The original debuted at number eight on the Billboard 200 — Giveon’s highest peak since his 2022 debut — and was reported as having taken more than a thousand days to make. The lead singles ‘Twenties’ and ‘Rather Be’ had been seeded across 2025, both ballads that traded on quiet rather than volume. The Act II expansion does not change that thesis. The five new tracks — ‘Jezebel’, ‘Mud’, ‘Strangers’, ‘Numb’, and ‘Avalanche’ — sit inside the same emotional vocabulary, with a heavier guitar texture on ‘Mud’ and a near-gospel build on ‘Avalanche’.

Production credits on the original carried Matthew Burnett, Jahaan Sweet, and Sevn Thomas — long-time Giveon collaborators who built the analog warmth that has become the album’s signature. The deluxe largely keeps the same production team, with the four feature tracks integrating the guests’ usual collaborators without breaking sonic continuity. The result feels less like a deluxe-edition add-on and more like an extension of the same recording window.

For context, this style of release — the major drop, the deluxe six months later, sometimes a second deluxe — has become the default play for catalog artists in 2026. Drake’s recent reissues, Olivia Rodrigo’s deluxe of ‘Drop Dead’, SZA’s perennially expanding ‘SOS’ — the deluxe is now where the second wave of streaming revenue lives. The risk is the same one critics have flagged across the trend: the deluxe inflates the runtime, dilutes the curated album as an art object, and trains listeners to wait for the bigger version rather than commit to the first one.

Whether ‘Act II’ clears that bar is open. Five new tracks across a nineteen-song listen is generous, but R&B-album skeptics will note that no Giveon song on either version steps outside the same emotional and tonal range — by design, but also by limit. The feature picks are also stacked toward artists whose work already lives in the same lane; there is no curveball collaboration that pushes Giveon into a different register. For listeners who arrived through ‘Heartbreak Anniversary’ and stayed, that is the point. For anyone wanting to see him stretch, this is not the project.

The album is available now across major streaming services and as a deluxe CD with signed insert via Giveon’s direct-to-consumer store. Giveon has not yet confirmed a tour cycle around the Act II release, though he has been performing the original ‘Beloved’ material on a small run of US dates running into early summer. The first single off Act II is expected to be ‘Keeper’ with Teddy Swims, which is being serviced to urban-AC radio.