There is one particular subject in music which is very hard to get right: sex. The truth is that extreme horniness often tends to frolic hand-in-hand with being incredibly embarrassing to everyone except the person (or indeed people) you’re gleefully having it off with; I don’t mean to sound like a massive prude, but there is nothing that makes me want to enrol in a nunnery more than inadvertently seeing somebody else’s sexts.
Unfortunately, many of the worst lyrics on Everything I Thought It Was – Justin Timberlake’s first new album since 2018’s Man of the Woods – conjure up this variety of mortification. You’d think that if anybody could pull it off, it might well be JT: this is the man, after all, who managed to nail a seamless delivery of Rock Your Body’s spoken word zinger: “better have you naked by the end of this song”. And yet.
In place of an overarching concept, Everything I Thought It Was is a pastiche of contemporary genres knitted together with a never waning enthusiasm for “making love”, each metaphor becoming ever more tenuous.
“You the password, I’mma hit reset,” Timberlake purrs on F***ing Up The Disco (yes, really), accidentally harnessing all the sensual allure of an IT technician in severe danger of being reported to HR. “That’s a promise not a threat,” he adds, hurriedly.
And on the ominously-titled Infinity Sex (sounds painful) he urges his latest bedfellow to “pray this hotel room is insured”. What on earth has he got planned, a spot of mid-coital fire eating?
Guest star Tobe Nwigwe’s decision to rhyme “loins” with “boings” on Sanctified is admittedly a brave one, and I greatly enjoyed JT shouting “I just wanna give you one hell of an eveeeeeeeening!” on Play. Though the latter track gets off to a promising start, letting its melodies do the heavy lifting as Timberlake offers to dish out glasses of the “bougie rose”, it is ultimately derailed by what I can only describe as a musical jump-scare – JT emerging out of the silence of a trick song-ending like The Unknown at Glasgow’s Willy Wonka experience. “Gonna give you something to play with!” he announces, terrifyingly.
The one-liners steal the show here, which is a good job because the sonic direction of Everything I Thought It Was is all over the place, veering between a steamy, brooding rip-off of The Weeknd’s signature sound, to high-pass filter laden nu-disco (No Angel) and clumsy attempts at harnessing Afrobeats (Flame) to the overwrought orchestral balladry of Alone, and the simpering croon of its quite procedural closer Conditions. “Sometimes you gotta put the car in reverse to go forward,” he explains, sounding slightly too much like a driving instructor.
At 18 tracks long, Everything I Thought It Was certainly has stamina, but to heavily paraphrase an ancient adage, it’s not the size of your album that really matters.
