Since their ascent in the early aughts, Maroon 5 have been inescapably viral: Songs like “This Love” and “Moves Like Jagger” have ridden to the top of the pop charts (even if frontman Adam Levine has insisted he’s inspired, above all else, by hip-hop); they’ve soundtracked everything from Kia commercials to Disney movie trailers; they headlined the 12th annual Honda Civic Tour. Can you even call it selling out when the whole point has always been commercial success? Love Is Like, the group’s eighth album since Songs About Jane rocked the adult contemporary scene in 2002, continues Maroon 5’s legacy of neutered, frictionless songs to activate brands to. Here, behind a roster of plug-and-play beats and glittery guest stars like LISA and Lil Wayne, you can meditate on the way algorithms breed cultural hegemony and imagine you’re trapped in a Sandals resort lobby.
Adam Levine’s white boy swagger has never been less convincing, particularly as he raps non sequiturs on tracks like “Yes I Did.” It’s a chilling Notes-app non-apology for spousal infidelity: “Yeah, if you ask me if I ever really loved you/Yes, I did,” he says between a falsettoed bridge. “Need to know that I still wanted to be in this/Yes, I did/If you're questioning my motivation, you know where I live.” Later, in the refrain, he cops to “making every mistake there was to make” and “turning a negative into a positive” between a noxious peppering of “yeah yeah yeah”s. Everything is a pose, it seems, from remorse to sincerity (“We was only having fun,” he insists on “California,” adopting a grammar whose authenticity is questionable).
Meanwhile, “All Night” is an exploration of a toxic relationship written from the perspective of, one can only assume, an A.I. chatbot. The music video stars his wife, Behati Prinsloo, in a Robert Palmer homage—but while Palmer’s addiction to love had teeth and a latexed vision of ’80s hedonism, “All Night” just mouthbreathes platitudes and cliches that feel just a little too stupid for an Instagram caption. “We do it all night, until the sunlight,” sings Levine on the hook, a line so bad it barely hides his contempt for his audience and the American tradition of songwriting of which he claims to be a part.
But if your shoulders begin to shimmy despite your misgivings at the end of “I Like It” featuring Sexyy Red, you’re not afflicted and you’re not alone. Maroon 5 is the Monsanto of music, genetically and corporately engineered for maximum palatability. They’ve proven in the past that they can, on occasion, tilt that earworm quality towards a pleasant kind of maximalism, embracing his inner cheeseball that lets you forget you’re being pandered to and fall effortlessly into the groove. “Burn Burn Burn,” is as close as this record gets, a head-nodding chronicle of heartbreak that feels like too much time in the sun on Venice Beach.
Too anemic for the Trolls movie franchise yet too emotionally complex for toddlers, Love Is Like is the latest repackaging of benign background noise for people who register music as something that happens without registering its particulars. It goes through your system like a juice cleanse—quick and optimized, but ultimately meant for the toilet.
