The backstory of a Bullion song is never obvious. All that’s legible are stray details—a name, a place, an age—silhouetted in the warm light of emotional afterglow. In “Hula,” my favorite song from 2020’s We Had a Good Time, he hinted at stolen moments on dancefloors in Tokyo, Mexico, and Berlin (no further context; guess you had to be there) and asked, out of nowhere, “Are people in pain where you are?” That a bittersweet synth-pop track so perfectly suited for swaying cheek to cheek coincided with the onset of the novel coronavirus made the question feel uncannily apropos.
The British singer, songwriter, and producer born Nathan Jenkins similarly blends the vague with the vivid on “Your Father,” one of the standouts on his new album, Affection. Over characteristically subtle production—a fistful of agates for a synth line; flashing shoals of guitar and sax—he sketches out the blurriest fragments of a private memory, then twists the focus ring: “Your father/Listened to/The whole of/The White Album/As he waited to collect us.” No matter how many times I rewind the line, I can’t quite make sense of it. I can see it: chaperone, tape deck on the dashboard, an hour that Dad spent killing time while the kids got up to who knows what. But the specifics are indistinct, known only to Jenkins and the “you” of the song. Bullion’s vignettes are just that: sharp in the center, darkened around the margins of the frame.
But you don’t come to Bullion’s music for the stories, really; you come for the sound, and he has never sounded more in control of his craft than on Affection. Since the late 2000s, Jenkins has been developing an idiosyncratic style that’s hard to sum up, in spite of its elegant restraint. You could call it retro-conscious electro pop with one foot in UK dance music; you could also simply call it pop, or at least the kind of pop you’d expect from someone who’s produced Carly Rae Jepsen and Nilüfer Yanya. He calls it “Pop, not slop”—also the name of a long-running playlist he maintains on Spotify.
Whatever that term may lack in precision or pith, the playlist efficiently triangulates Jenkins’ musical coordinates. It’s full of sophistipop, electrified yacht rock, Japanese city pop, mellower strains of new wave, and, above all, the odd curveball from ’70s rockers who greeted the next decade by spending major-label money on top-of-the-line synths and drum machines. Bullion’s music is steeped in the liminal areas where genres blend promiscuously and digital reverb bleeds across acoustic guitars and gridded click tracks. If his tales feel like strangers’ snapshots found in a box at the flea market, his songs have an equally vintage tint, shot through with a déjà vu quality that makes them feel like you’ve heard them before, but can’t quite place where.
In the listener-friendly tradition of pop music, Jenkins keeps his songs around the three-minute mark, and sometimes shorter. “Cinch,” the album’s sleekest encapsulation of yearning, is a scale model of bittersweet, just two minutes of pulsing arpeggios, wordless coos, and a delicious little twist in the chord change that gets me every time. His arrangements are more pared back than ever; why use two synths when one will do? But his sounds have never been more sumptuous. The keys drip with liquid texture, glow like runway lights through a rain-spattered window; voices sail into earshot on flying carpets of reversed reverb, giving songs the feeling of moving backward and forward at once.
Jenkins delights in toying with expectations: “A City’s Never,” featuring an unusually understated Panda Bear, bookends a single verse in a chorus as spotless as an electric-vehicle showroom, then twists up the bassline in its final moments, slyly throwing a toylike wrench in the works. Other songs feel like conduits for fleeting moments of joy: You may come to “Rare” for Jepsen’s heart-warming vocal harmonies, but it’s the 18-second guitar solo near the end that keeps you hitting replay. Just once does he go a little gonzo, with the fiddle and harmonica of “World_train,” featuring Charlotte Adigéry—probably my least favorite song here, though I applaud the gung-ho spirit. And sometimes a song that seems otherwise unremarkable, like the strummy “Open Hands,” suddenly assumes a more vivid shape, as though its strings had been pulled taut.
Jenkins executive-produced Avalon Emerson’s & the Charm, in which the American DJ reinvented herself as the frontwoman of a group, and he assumes a similar role here, roping a dozen or so session players and backup vocalists into streamlined songs that spin like tightly wound clocks. You can visualize the imaginary band on stage—here’s the drummer, there’s the bassist; the keys are mapped across left-hand chords and right-hand leads. A human sense of scale abides, even on songs that are almost certainly computer-assisted studio concoctions. A surprisingly large number of guitarists are on hand, given the instrument’s unobtrusive role—but when a solo like the one Joe Newman plays in “Your Father” floats to the surface, it lights up the room. Bassist Ben Reed, who played on Frank Ocean’s Blond and Endless, deserves a nod as the album’s stealth MVP; his work can be muscular, lithe, and lighthearted, sometimes all at once. He brings livewire funk to the glistening “Affection,” dutifully powers the middle-school slow dance of “Rare,” quickens the pulse of “Your Father” like a brand new crush.
The guest singers never steal the spotlight. Panda Bear’s Noah Lennox comes closest, only because he has such a distinctive drawl, but Jenkins does something clever with the mix that leaves Lennox’s voice trailing his own, like an angled shadow. Jepsen and Adigéry also lie low, inconspicuous as friendly ghosts. Jenkins’ presence is affable, modest, and muted—almost like a backup vocalist on his own songs. He sings with his head voice, slightly nasal, but there’s no shortage of warmth or tenderness in his tone. More than anything, he knows the value of simplicity.
Take “Once, in a Borrowed Car”: There are no verses, just a chorus that’s repeated five times, with minuscule variations. “Bullet down the highway,” he sings, drawing out the first word until it feels like a speeding projectile caught in slow motion; “Body blow/The body knows/Rushing to your location/To seek affection.” In those five slim lines, we’re transported into the act of desire itself. We may not know where he’s going, or to whom, or what force caused that body blow, but it hardly matters. For three minutes and change, between the blushing close harmonies and hiccupping piano solo, that desire feels as real as the blood pumping in your veins.
