I’m told that we’re living in a sexless era—that Gen Z simply isn’t doing it and that everybody else is too busy or too addicted to their phones or just too freaked out to fuck. There are other great reasons for this—the pandemic, the widespread suppression of bodily autonomy—but historically, eras of oppression lead right into Dionysian excess, where all that apocalyptic dread manifests in, say, clubwide make-outs at 4 a.m., bods grinding under the purple glow of bisexual lighting. New York in the 1970s was the apex of this concept: the need for temporary relief from widespread poverty, racial and queer discrimination led to the creation of a queer, Black, and brown space—the disco—where the youth could unloose and commune with like-minded peers. “You could be on the dance floor and the most beautiful woman that you had ever seen in your life would come and dance right on top of you,” the legendary house producer Frankie Knuckles once said of the original disco, The Loft. “Then the minute you turned around a man that looked just as good would do the same thing.” Which is to say, repressive eras often find an antidote in the nightlife underground, usually soundtracked by music that demands a kind of spiritual freedom.
Jessie Ware, the British quadruple threat—powerhouse singer, author, podcaster, and children's fashion magnate—has spent the last few years reading up on queer history, and is looking to her forebears for inspiration. Disco is a long-explored touchstone for excess and emancipation, and the genre, or at least the concept of the genre, has certainly taken hold of the modern pop milieu, whether Beyoncé’s full-body immersions, Dua Lipa’s corpo-rave pleasers, or Lizzo’s feel-good bass funk. But That! Feels Good!, Ware’s fifth album, stretches beyond vibes and delves into the well-oiled mechanics of bands like Chic, Sister Sledge, the Trammps, and a little P-Funk, opening up the hood and pulling out all the parts to see if she can piece them back together. Alongside disco-savvy producers like Stuart Price (aka Thin White Duke/Jacques Lu Cont) and James Ford (Simian Mobile Disco), as well as co-songwriters Shungudzo Kuyimba and Sarah Hudson, Ware has achieved a rare feat: a genre revival album that’s painstakingly true to its source material, but doesn’t sound like a curdled rehash. This has everything to do with Ware’s unfailingly strong vocals—one of her generation’s preeminent white belters—and the wild joy she emits on every track, with a thesis that le freaking it on the dancefloor and in the bedroom is key to liberation, and that love alone will save the day.
Disco is familiar territory for Ware—2020’s What’s Your Pleasure looked towards Giorgio Moroder’s blueprint for arpeggiated synths and light-up dancefloor grooves, helping kickstart pop music’s disco revival. That! Feels Good! is a grittier affair, reminiscent of the small underground disco clubs of the early ’70s at individual apartments and lofts in downtown New York. Accompanied live by the preternaturally tight eight-piece funk/Afrobeat band Kokoroko, which has the freewheeling but precise instrumentation of disco down to a science, Ware floats into the sweet spot for her elastic soul vocals, somewhere between Donna Summer and Teena Marie: a glamorous libertine we’ll follow into any dingy club so she can show us the light.
It helps that Ware is a true believer, underscoring That! Feels Good!’s title track with a command that’s almost militant: “Freedom is a sound, and pleasure is a right. Do it again.” Like Donna Summer before her, she eliminates the distance between dancefloor ecstasy and sexual pleasure, suggesting an imperceptible difference between the two. With the thrust of funk bass and spontaneous yelps, she also conjures the physical release of a Soul Train line, transported by syncopation. And when she belts, “Why don’t you please yourself? If it feels so good then don’t you, baby! Don’t you stop!” she revels in the sensual prerogative of adult womanhood, of spiritual excess, staking out her own joyful territory. (She also suggests, over the driving piano of “Free Yourself,” that rapture doesn’t necessarily require a partner.) Her confidence fizzes and levitates with an assuredness that feels deserved but hard-won. “I’ve always relied on people that believe in me because maybe I haven’t believed in myself enough,” she told Pitchfork of her past experiences with music industry men, “but now, actually, I do, which is really wonderful.”
Having reached the point where she can own her vast talent, she’s in a position to extend the favor. On “Beautiful People,” she drops a perfect pride anthem, channeling her existential angst—“I wake up in the morning and I ask myself, ‘What am I doing on this planet?’”—into a purple leather outfit and a cocktail party. “Mix your joy with misery,” she reasons, before deciding that “beautiful people are everywhere.” It’s a vibrant exhortation fueled by cowbell and the band’s robust horn section, mining the eternal solution to life’s indignities—the dancefloor, with friends—and a song dying for a drag queen to lip-sync it. (Whither Sasha Colby!)
Largely, though, Ware’s focus is on the corporeal, celebrating self-determination and sexual versatility with cheeky metaphor: bottles that pop, lips that are underworked, and the mother of all innuendo, pearls. (She also works in time-tested double entendres of food and humping, linking her career interests by invoking limes, strawberries, and pink champagne.) On “Pearls,” she conjures the soul arias of Chaka Khan with another paean to dancing until your insecurities are moot and your clothes are in a pile. “Freak Me Now” ups the cosmopolitan allure by introducing French touch and a distinctly computerized synth whorl to the equation. While it steps away slightly from the ’70s lane Ware has so carefully carved, it sits comfortably among the analog piano and string jaunts. The only other track outside That! Feels Good!’s classic disco-ball rubric is “Lightning,” where Rhodes, strings, and layered harmonies sit next to a pitch-shifted vocal flourish and a boom-bap beat that zooms you right ahead to 2016. It’s a lovely song because Ware is an exceptional vocalist, but it takes you out of the fantasy, which any actor or drag queen can tell you is a mortal mistake.
But overall, That! Feels Good! stays focused on a mission that never feels like a chore. In its relatively brief 40-minute runtime, Ware takes her task extremely seriously, but she’s unencumbered by its immensity; actually, it seems to unleash her, as she experiments with vocal tricks—smoky, Grace Jonesian talk-singing; spirit-catching falsetto that’ll absolutely melt off your Halston—with the sure knowledge that the good-time, nighttime prima donna was always who she was meant to be.
