Review Summary: Nothing but the surface.
Six years is a long time to keep people waiting. To properly elucidate just
how long of a wait six years' time actually is, the world went through an entire pandemic in the timespan between 2018's
Man of the Woods and Timberlake's latest 2024 release,
Everything I Thought It Was. The Playstation 4 and the Xbox One moved on to the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series (albeit clumsily, shoddily). Almost two entire presidential administrations have passed since then. Half a decade is quite a bit of time, and mind you, this is only Justin Timberlake's
sixth studio album release in a solo career that's spanned over twenty years by this point.
Timberlake has a tendency to make his listeners wait egregious amounts of time between each release. In his prime, he was able to justify the bloated wait times between releases through the simple pleasures of having good songs. Up until
Man of the Woods, every one of Timberlake's releases felt like they were improving in quality with each increment, culminating in
The 20/20 Experience, a glossy, glamorous two-parter LP whose sophisticiated, complex, and well-produced songs wound up being some of the finest pop songs of the 2010's. Now,
Man of the Woods was a dud that no one particularly liked, but given Timberlake's more-or-less solid track record, the album felt more like a fluke at the time, a minor misstep at best. Surely his next release would be better, whatever (and whenever) that would be. Right?
Well, in fairness to
Everything I Thought It Was, this album
is a little stronger than
Man of the Woods. For starters, Timberlake isn't riding off a god-awful and insincere take on country music for the duration of the album. This time around, Timberlake's sticking to his comfort zone: the sleek, lavish, glitzy-sounding pop, funk, and RnB that put him on the map in the first place (ironically feeling more like a return to his roots than the supposedly homely
Man of the Woods). It's a step in the right direction to be sure, only this time, something feels...
off. This inherent sense of offness can be felt in the opening track, "Memphis", a restrained, bumbling, and honestly tired-sounding take on "Hotline Bling"-era Drake, complete with airy, washed-out synth pads, a sleepy vocal performance from Timberlake, and a truly cringeworthy rap bridge with some of the middest, whitest bars known to man. For a song that seems to be repping his hometown - and for a song that namedrops the album title - "Memphis" sounds uninvolved, disinterested, and just plain dull, which unfortunately makes it the perfect opener for
Everything I Thought It Was given how a fair majority of tracks follow in its stead.
Almost the entire record is laced with what can best be described as exhaustion, an inherent lack of passion and drive in the songwriting, almost like Timberlake doesn't really want to be doing this but feels obligated to pump out content all the same. "F**kin' Up The Disco" is an attempt to capture the slinky, club-ready dance-pop of the
FutureSex/LoveSounds without an iota of the swagger, charisma, and even the occasional dorkiness that made that record work in the first place. Likewise, "Imagination" lumbers by on an RnB groove with practically all of the stank and edges sanded off, leaving a bland take on Jamiroquai and Michael Jackson behind in its place. "No Angels" is virtually indistiguishable from every generic, radio-ready "funk" hit that's floated through the airwaves in the last six years, "What Lovers Do" feels like it never properly starts or ends, and album closer "Conditions" is an underwhelming, Post Malone-y pop rock tune that wastes a mellow, islandic beat on an uninspired, trap triplet-heavy vocal performance. Most songs tend to blend together after a while, coalescing into a vaguely-pleasant but aggressively-samey cloud of mellow, funk-leaning pop devoid of any interesting bells and whistles.
"Paradise" should be a big deal, given that it's the first time NSync has been since in the same vicinity as Justin Timberlake in over twenty years - well, apart from the
Trolls Band Together soundtrack - but it's easily one of the worst songs on the record, a bland, faux-inspirational Coldplay-esque ballad that only highlights just how similar and homogenous every member of NSync truly sound as a collective whole. If anything, "Paradise" is an unintentional admittance that perhaps there was nothing all that special about Timberlake compared to the rest of his long-abandoned comrades, that Timberlake merely got lucky by managing to snag both The Neptunes and Timbaland as his producers. And indeed, this album is largely bereft of Timbaland's influence - the man's name only popping up on a few tracks that're usually bereft of his signature percussion-heavy style - and neither of The Neptunes are featured on this record at all, leaving only Justin Timberlake and a rotating set of indistinguishable producers to fill the void.
A fair deal of
Everything I Thought It Was suffers from this tendency towards being tepid and forgettable, more concerned with generating radio-ready products than anything truly artistic. Even some of the highlights feel somewhat neutered: "Selfish" is a mellow, catchy tune and the groove in "My Favorite Drug" has some solid forward momentum, but both of these tracks and the dancehall-heavy "Liar" are held back by sounding merely derivative of better songs and more relevant artists. With all that in mind, there are a few diamonds in the rough to be found amidst this middling, unassuming tracklist. "Technicolor" is a soulful, lush RnB ballad that deftly evolves into a brisk, spacey funk jam during the halfway point. The hollow, aquatic beat present throughout "Drown" creates a solid atmosphere occasionally punctuated with some tasteful string pads and reverb-heavy backing vocals. The obvious Prince influence throughout "Love & War" adds some dulcet, sophisticated elegance to the minimalist track, the swing-heavy "Sanctified" is one of the few tracks on the album with a genuine sense of strut, stank, and swagger, and "Flame" is a gorgeous, textured burst of delicate strings, rich piano chords, and faraway guitars tied together by a bittersweet vocal melody and a well-constructed drum machine beat.
The intermittent moments where Timberlake manages to capture the same sparks that put him on the map have a tendency to fizzle out into middling nothingness. Calling
Everything I Thought It Was "content" feels particularly apt given that
18 songs are present on the 70-minute record. It's a fair amount of songs to deliver to your audience after such a long wait, but the album's tracklist is undeniably quantity-over-quality, designed to pump out singles and bloat the album's runtime in an attempt to make it seem more sophisticated and complex than it really is. If the album was shorter and oriented itself more around strong tracks like "Flame", "Drown", and "Technicolor", I'd be willing to write off
Man of the Woods as a simple misstep in the wrong direction, a momentary lapse of judgment on the part of an otherwise-good artist. Unfortunately, however, the overall-milquetoast quality of
Everything I Thought It Was merely seems to confirm something I've been thinking in the back of my head for a while: without the overwhelming influence of Timbaland and The Neptunes, there is nothing all that special about Justin Timberlake as an individual artist. Take away the rich, distinctive stylings of those producers and you're left with is a functional pop vocalist, an outdated boy-band remnant that rests on his laurels, spiced up with a somewhat inflated ego and a hint or two of cultural appropriation. All this album does is confirm everything I've been thinking he always was.
