It’s hard to pinpoint where Nico Segal and Nate Fox went wrong with Intellexual, but it certainly didn’t stop at the name. Producers and instrumentalists by trade, the pair have made an album that sounds like misting truffle oil on plain pasta and serving it with a chef’s kiss. To listen to Intellexual—their official debut after years of behind-the-scenes collaborations—is to poke at something hollow, and the duo’s recent press run confirms the bullshit: “For Intellexual it wasn’t just about a song being good, it was more so, What is intellexual about it?” Segal told Billboard. “How do I make it intellexual? How does this song get executed in an intellexual way?” Later in the same interview, he declares that the song he’s “most proud of” is the one called “Overthinking.”
Segal (formerly known as Donnie Trumpet) and Fox have built a pedigree through their close work with Chance the Rapper on Coloring Book and as members of the Social Experiment. You can hear moments on Intellexual where they’ve lifted their own fingerprints from those sessions and smudged them onto a blank slate. Their production is elaborate, but the songs are vapid. And though Intellexual is framed as an earnest singer-songwriter record, these are not so much songs as vibes.
Across a dozen tracks, Segal and Fox corral a group of semi-familiar vocalists like Knox Fortune, Vic Mensa, and Raury. But instead of training a spotlight on their stars, they overdirect them with ham-fisted production. “Roxstar” takes a half-baked Knox Fortune song and obscures his personality, leaving no meat on the bones but plenty of garnish. Segal’s trumpet swells up in a triumphant flutter, background vocalists riff endlessly, everything except the piano drops out, something twinkles, nothing happens. “Times have changed/I think it’s strange/We’d stay the same,” Fortune sings. The chorus delivers another clunker in his pretty falsetto: “The things that make us right/Sometimes make us wrong.”
“Like I Feel,” a direct echo of Segal and Fox’s gorgeous Social Experiment vamp “Pass the Vibes,” from Surf, is even more of a shell of a song. Surf was dense and soulful, and there, “Pass the Vibes” felt like an exhale. “Like I Feel” has no purpose and nothing to tether it down, just a pretty moment and a repeated phrase: “When you feel like I feel, you feel good.” The calculated new-age samba of “Boca” sets lower stakes and fares better, even if it amounts to intricate background music, easy listening with extra flavor.
There are bigger and more obvious missteps on Intellexual—Vic Mensa makes an ineffectual appearance, Segal and Fox croon corny and nonsensical lyrics at every turn—but it’s the post-genre mashup production that sinks the ship. At best Intellexual is quaint; at worst it’s unsubtle and full of itself. It’s the sound of two talented musicians stumbling over their own chops, doing too much and too little in the same motion.
