Every so often I become plagued by one question, and I ask myself that question over and over: How hard is it, really, to make a hit? I don’t ask myself this because I’m planning for my own No. 1 single to take the charts by storm, but because I keep wondering how much credit we should give someone for crafting a piece of music that so many people, from so many walks of life, want to hear—or, at the very least, aren’t compelled to turn off. I usually answer my own question with another question, which is: What kind of hit are you making? In my view, there are two kinds of ways to write a hit song. One, you can write a song so ridiculously good that the vast majority of people acknowledge it as such and cannot stop listening to it. Or you can make something so inoffensive that it gets played simply because there’s no reason not to. If it comes up on your playlist, the radio, or in a store, you’re unlikely to notice—and so there it chugs along in the background, making its artist a whole lot of cash without anyone really caring. Broadly speaking, I believe that Jungle fall into this second camp, and Sunshine is their latest album to prove me right. On this record, it becomes increasingly clear that the group—made up of Josh Lloyd-Watson, Tom McFarland and Lydia Kitto—have found a formula that they know works and aren’t interested in changing it. To this I say: fair enough. A lot of these songs sound nice, and I don’t mind having them on in the background while I’m doing things like my laundry or wheezing through leg presses at the gym. But as an exercise in making music that holds your attention, Sunshine is less successful. In spite of some genuinely bright moments—songs like “Busy Earnin’” and “Happy Man” from their earlier records still hold up—Jungle’s discography tends to blend pleasantly into one. Sunshine is no exception. Sunshine finds the group still working with many of the same collaborators, instruments, and ideas. After her significant contributions to their last two albums (Loving in Stereo and Volcano), Lydia Kitto officially joined Jungle as a full-time member in 2023, and she is significantly more present on this album, taking the lion’s share of the lead vocals, with Lloyd-Watson and McFarland tending to provide able harmonic backing. It’s a refreshing change that reinvigorates a few tracks—Kitto has a great voice, tender and smooth, and she sings with lovely sincerity, adding emotion even to the flatter lyrics. Her presence also brings Jungle’s chemistry into sharper focus. The lead single “Carry On” shows them working in great vocal synchronicity, with Lloyd-Watson and McFarland humming behind her lead vocals in a Bee Gees-esque fashion, adding nice color to the music’s tone. Variation is fairly scarce here, however, and for the most part that synchronicity gives way to uniformity. Of all the songs on Sunshine, those in the latter half show more imagination: “Natural” is a stand-out, a sleek and sexy bit of neo-soul that makes the case for Jungle straying farther away from their well-worn path. In some ways it sounds more like the older, more mysterious parts of Jungle’s discography: its stripped-back production echoes “The Heat,” the opener of their 2014 debut. Closer “Heavy on my Soul” has a nice minimalism to it, too, with a classical guitar pitched down to make an anchoring bassline, before widening into a string arrangement that is lush without being overstated. For the most part, though, this depth is missing on Sunshine, leaving behind a faltering, shallow collection of songs. The group’s commitment to a more relaxed, “lo-fi” record has meant that the dancier elements of previous releases are gone; that isn’t an issue in itself, but it exposes some of the blander parts of Jungle’s songcraft. “Sunshine,” for instance, has all the hallmarks of a Jungle song: sampling, repeated vocal phrases, walking basslines, a couple of string parts thrown in for good measure. Rather than building in one direction or another, the song flatlines from its opening, offering three minutes of pleasant but forgettable music. Likewise, “Move Like You Do” is potentially the most active attempt at a song that might get people onto the dancefloor, but it feels like a pastiche of other tried and true Jungle techniques: vague lyrics that could be about dancing or connection or a secret third thing, falsetto backing vocals, some chopped samples thrown in without enough variation to meaningfully alter the song’s shape. Often, on Sunshine, there is a feeling of an aborted idea or thought. There are gestures toward certain styles that, if taken further, might make a good song. “The Wave” is held down by a guitar sample that has a samba-ish feel to it, but only ish: a more interesting piece of music is eschewed in favor of the usual Jungle features, and the sample is buried beneath layers of sound. “Romeo II,” a sort of sequel to the track on the last record that also featured Bas, flirts with being a hip-hop song, but stumbles at the last hurdle. The result is the persistent sense that a good record might be hiding somewhere inside Sunshine, but remains frustratingly out of reach. Some of the best soul and dance music of our time isn’t a bland expression of a single emotion or the other. Instead, it bends and splices feeling, offering meditations on despair, ecstasy, fulfillment, and anger, even when the musical elements themselves aren’t as complex. When Jungle have made really good music—and they have, in fact, made good music, even on this album—it’s because they’ve shown an appreciation for this fact, not because they’ve relied on the same combination of elements, repeated ad nauseam, to craft song after song that might as well be playing in a department store. On Sunshine they sound like they’ve elected to set up camp where they feel comfortable: firmly in the middle of the road. [Caiola/AWAL] Mariam Abdel-Razek is a writer and critic based in London. Her writing has previously appeared in The Line of Best Fit, The Tonearm, and Varsity.