Justin Timberlake’s career is a monument to image-consciousness. A lifelong entertainer, he saves face in a scandal by making careful adjustments to his never-ending likability offensive. On the cover of the erstwhile Mouseketeer’s 2002’s debut, Justified, he teetered on the precipice of a pout, signaling boyhood in decline and an intent to seize control of the story of his breakup with Britney Spears. He whiled away the rest of the aughts seeking hip-hop cred, ingratiating himself to the Timbaland and Neptunes fans his debut was courting, and dishing about his ex to Star and Buc Wild. 2018’s Man of the Woods saw him performing family values for neocon culture-war hounds to avail himself of responsibility for Janet Jackson’s brazier malfunction at the Super Bowl.
But when Timberlake’s handle on a situation slips, you get to see sides of him he is loathe to show elsewhere, switching gears so drastically you almost hear the brakes screech. He made a perfect mark on the first season of Punk’d in 2003, stifling tears as someone trampled his guitar. His initial response to the Super Bowl gaffe was a jittery defense, full of proclamations of outrage and particulars about how little time he was given to practice. Last year, his actions before and after the break with Spears came up for review when she released her memoir, The Woman in Me, which revealed an abortion she claims Timberlake talked her into. February delivered a flash of his vindictiveness onstage as his band launched into Justified’s breakup anthem/red herring “Cry Me a River†and the singer quipped, “I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to absolutely fucking nobody.â€
The perilous reception to Woods and the aftermath of Spears’s book put wind in the sails of Timberlake’s sixth album, Everything I Thought It Was, which offers everything you might’ve expected it to: a hodgepodge of nostalgic Timbaland and Danja bounce, rehearsed Mike Jack airs, pointed raunchiness, yearning romanticism. Like Usher, his old foil in the arms race to appoint an M.J. successor, Timberlake can only get so far from the up-tempo dance numbers and drippy slow songs of the classics before creating unrest in the constituency. Everything sticks to the script, conjuring memories of beloved hits in a low-stakes quest to facilitate a good time. The sprightly “No Angels†pushes his voice toward the breathy falsetto of “Rock Your Bodyâ€; “Flame†pairs minor key melodies and dramatic tone shifts just like “What Goes Around …â€; the barrage of audio/visual metaphors throughout “Technicolor†starts to smell like “Ayo Technology,†his 2007 50 Cent collab. “Paradise†rallies his old ’N Sync bandmates to dive into the history Timberlake’s last five albums resisted. It all screams “I Want You Back,†a careful act of reputational repair from a master of the form.
For years, Timberlake acted confidently, knowing he’d always get the benefit of the doubt, whether or not his intentions were noble in the moment. It worked because we wanted it to. We needed to believe that the man claiming offense and aggrievement was set about by jezebels. It was easier than accepting that we were practically bloodthirsty about women in the public eye and goading stars into breakdowns back then — just as, lately, we often prefer to gorge ourselves on the worst a person has done over offering a crack at redemption. That table turning for Timberlake among people who will never let him outlive key mistakes — who ran up streams of Spears’s “Selfish†when his version dropped — is ultimately just desserts. You make a bed, you lie in it.
But Timberlake has been a people pleaser since Disney, and he continues to plant himself wherever he sees social mores and musical trends congealing. The aggressively self-referential Everything spots an opportunity in tickling early aughts nostalgia, weaponizing familiar song ideas and peppering them with modern chart conventions the Weeknd, Justin Bieber, and Ty Dolla $ign minted in the past decade. Pitching a curt “yeah†into a bed of echoing guitar and synth noodles at the top of “Technicolor†and modulating between two-note melodies and raps in “Memphis,†he gets close to Drake until the raps shit the bed: “I was handin’ out too much milk money, too much kitten, and ass, and titties / I lost my voice like a pastor, faster than a Harlem shimmy.†“Fuckin’ Up the Disco,†where a fleet synth bass line nods to two different generations of Cali party jam, trots out the “SexyBack†formula of riding racy lyrics and distorted keys to a melodically enticing bridge. But verse two ruins all its goodwill by firing fatherly pickup lines: “Run your nine-inch nails all over my back / Yeah, I like that, I like that / Put your cheekbones all the way into my neck / Take a bite on the side, let your tongue get wet.â€
In the scant, lighthearted conversations he had about the album before release, Timberlake framed the new music as a product of years of toil. He told Kelly Clarkson he wrote 100 songs to get to the 18 we’ve heard. The issue with drawing our attention to the pen this time is that Everything I Thought It Was can’t consistently match the highs of the works it routinely gestures to. “Drown†— an almost cynical rehash of the downcast emotion and delicate orchestration of “What Goes Around …†and the pulsing synths of “My Love,†featuring a flugelhorn riff that carries a whiff of “Bye Bye Bye†— feels superfluous, the kind of song whose destiny is to be connective tissue in live sets.
Revisiting his past doesn’t always make the writing feel rusted; “Infinity Sex†taps Timbaland for a beat with “Blurred Lines†airs, which Timberlake greets with the giddily horny lyricism of a “Spaceship Coupe.†“No Angels†dabbles in vocal manipulation in the back end, angling to give the Calvin Harris collab a bit of the vocoder-y French touch of Daft Punk but sounding more like Dolla $ign popped in for a feature. The runs and the vocal production are top notch even when the lyrics aren’t holding up their end of the bargain. “Sippin’ that bougie rosé†in “Play,†he reminds you of his “wicca wicca†years (“Ginuwiiiiiine!â€). “My Favorite Drug,†which rubs elbows with French house and American electro like Dawn FM, reveals Everything’s great gift: the sound of expensive reverb and delay swaddling the voice. Even that one delivers a quick chant callback that admirers of “Señorita†would appreciate. Stacked voice lines pop, as they should for someone who graduated boy-band boot camp with honors.
But as often as this album’s leaps through musical history can excite, they suggest a crossroads. Trolls fans need all-ages slaps like “Can’t Stop the Feeling!,†Jackson and Spears’s admirers want earnest acknowledgment of the man’s flaws, listeners won over during the bad-boy pivot perk up for that motherfucker who don’t know how to act. Everything snaps dizzyingly between good-natured silliness, bedroom invitations, and apologies for nebulous misdoings, losing a sense of cohesion while it attempts to appease diverging factions. The breakup yarns seem like deliberate business choices, but he sings much more convincingly about smoldering, undying desire than he does trying to remake “Cry Me a River.†The album’s best songs thread the needle carefully between carnal aches, pledges to weather relationship highs and lows, and conciliatory admissions that the singer-songwriter and producer doesn’t always make the best choices. The lush Disney-like ballad “Alone†casts rumors of turmoil in the marriage. “Conditions,†the closer, balances optimism and hard-won reflection (“Sometimes you gotta put the car in reverse to move forwardâ€), but it feels like the chorus is winking at the listener: “If I lose myself and I go missing / Make a couple hundred bad decisions / Do some shit I know won’t be forgiven / Could you love me under those conditions?†The excitement the ’N Sync reunion has elicited suggests the answer is yes. Everything places the singer in a different pop elder space than perhaps Justin Timberlake intends: He’s the vet with a cooling pen who still snatches souls onstage every night. The new album won’t enthrall people who hate him now — a tighter, weirder track list and some new ideas might’ve helped on that front — but it keeps him on trend and on television. It changes the subject.