Midway through “BABY BABY,” a highlight of the excellent new Nourished by Time record, there is a sudden, descending synth swell, coupled with a delirious groan: Baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby! This refrain, “baby, baby,” is the centerpiece of the song, and up to now, it has been mellow: a muttered coo, spoken like a groggy lover. As a vocalist, Marcus Brown is dynamic and world-weary, his elastic range spanning the hope and heartbreak of life in a withering empire. Weightless as his music may sound, it is burdened by capitalist rot, which is what makes it wrenching—pinpointing the precise moment you realize, like many Americans, that you are fucked. This despair floods “BABY BABY,” and at this specific juncture, when he trades his mutter for a moan, it curdles into something agonizing. No longer tender, “baby, baby” becomes a cry for mercy: the tipping point between having everything and having it taken from you.
Brown, an outspoken 30-year-old from Baltimore, makes music for the things our dystopia steals from us. The moniker “Nourished by Time,” which borrows from “Guided by Voices,” is a statement of process: a “reminder,” Brown explained last year, “that if you put your energy and put your love and heart into something, it has no choice but to bloom.” As in his music, there is a bleak subtext to this beautiful sentiment. Energy, love, and heart—human things—are incompatible with late-stage capitalism, a system where time is not nurtured, but ground, along with people, into profit. His debut, 2023’s Erotic Probiotic 2, had a mournful varnish, a memorial service for hopes crushed and dragged away on conveyor belts. On “Workers Interlude,” when he pleaded “Don’t make me wait so long,” it felt like a meta-commentary: For Black, working-class Americans, time may never arrive to nourish you at all.
The history of revolution, in America, is peppered with cries of Wait! Be patient with the system. Brown’s music is inextricable from this history, which almost makes “Nourished by Time” feel winking, sarcastic. The feeling is more biting than ever on The Passionate Ones, whose titular characters, weary of waiting, wrestle for their humanity in a dehumanizing era. Unlike Brown’s prior releases, The Passionate Ones renders oppression as materially grimy, earthbound, suffocating. Where Erotic Probiotic 2 was hypnagogic in spirit—drawing from ’80s pastiche, sports-television samples, echo-heavy harmonies—this LP foregrounds rawer, more physical elements, without sacrificing Brown’s booming, atmospheric textures. For a musician so adept at concocting dreamscapes, this renewed iteration of post-R&B, punk-tinged and apoplectic, feels bluntly anti-escapist, as if to say: No, this is not music to dissociate to. These times call for urgency.
The narrators of The Passionate Ones fight for life and love in a world that refuses both. On lead single “Max Potential,” an anthemic arena-rock chorus describes romance as martyrdom: “If I’m gonna go insane/At least I’m loved by you/If my heart should burst or break/It was overdue.” In the chronology of Nourished by Time singles, this vulnerable guitar song is preceded by the evilgiane collab “INSTANT DEATH,” an icy and brooding two-minute guitar solo. Side-by-side, they pose two versions of dystopia: a chilling one, in which you are perpetually alone, and a crowded one, in which you can love, but you must die. In choosing the latter, Brown transforms a barren reality into a triumph of stubborn desire, rendering passionate death preferable to lethargic life. The rat-race paean “9 2 5” insists on the reality of the struggle (“It’s a hateful life”), but even more on the counter-struggle to survive: “You won’t always be here/To be tricked and lied to/May you always have a fight.” It’s a depersonalized, unnamed “you,” but in that distance lies the message—this is a communal fight, not specific to Marcus Brown. The pinballing vocal sample sounds like multiple people, and it really ought to.
The only time there actually are multiple people on The Passionate Ones is “Jojo,” a soulful stomper that comes within striking distance of gospel music. The UK polymath Tony Bontana, the album’s sole guest, sounds somewhat out-of-place, his conversational flow a far cry from Brown’s preacherly baritone. Hilariously, the moment he says “I ain’t got time,” the music falls out and comes back in, as if to give him a second to realign. Yet when Bontana returns, slightly off-beat, it feels revelatory: Here is a dude figuring it out, stumbling and recovering, in real time. So much of The Passionate Ones is about reclaiming the autonomy—the time, the space, the compassion—that capitalism denies. “It’s okay to change your mind, I know it’s pain/But you gotta let that pain get inspired,” he rap-rambles in closing, stumbling along the tightrope. “We hardwired for love.” If time won’t come to nourish us, the love definitely will.
