Y2K is back and Justin Timberlake is the asterisk in the trend report, left in the dirt like skinny scarves and fedoras. The ex-*NSYNC singer’s stuttering electro-pop, kissed with silky millennium-era R&B, produced at least one all-time album with 2006’s FutureSex/LoveSounds. But after a decade of borderline unlistenable music, hindsight suggests that despite his talents as a performer, Timberlake was also simply in the right place at the right time to benefit from Timbaland’s mid-’00s hot streak, or snag the Michael Jackson rejects that made up his 2002 debut Justified.
Timberlake’s sixth album, Everything I Thought It Was, is designed to buff the dents out of his public image in the wake of a recent memoir by his ex-girlfriend, Britney Spears. She wrote that he encouraged her to get an abortion, told the media she was a “cheating slut and a liar,” and generally acted even worse than you might imagine from a cornrowed white dude who’s prone to speak in AAVE. In an interview to promote the album’s lead single “Selfish,” a wispy mea culpa directed to “the owner of my heart and all my scars,” aka his wife of 12 years Jessica Biel, Timberlake spoke admiringly of music that lays male emotions bare. Referencing Donny Hathaway’s cover of “Jealous Guy,” he told Zane Lowe, “You just don’t hear that from men often, that they would express an emotion that makes them vulnerable. Growing up the way I grew up, you’re kind of taught not to do that.”
Timberlake’s read on contemporary pop could have been true half a decade ago, but today’s radio airwaves are full of men talking about feelings, and the biggest songs last year from male artists were yearning country ballads. No one really wants to hear about gender from an artist who saw fit to name a 2013 single “Take Back the Night,” but softboy masculinity is a useful touchstone for an artist embarking on a redemption arc. Listening to his new album makes it all feel about as convincing as the rootsy pose he struck on 2018’s Man of the Woods, an album for the hypebeast whose hiking boots have never seen soil.
At 77 minutes, the mercilessly unhurried Everything I Thought It Was does everything you thought Justin Timberlake did but worse. Contrary to the story he told Lowe, the album stops short of meaningfully grappling with his past, offering a lily pad for rote, randy showmanship. “Flame” shoots for the cinematic swoop of “What Goes Around…Comes Around” but trades the intricacy of FutureSex/LoveSounds’ karmic ballet for smooth radio piano, soundbank samples of siren wails, and arson metaphors piled like dusty coals that are never going to take. By the end of the song you’re begging for something, anything to jolt the song’s eight producers out of bird-feeding Timberlake’s former triumphs back to you.
Timberlake’s songwriting hasn’t matured much since he co-wrote the labored addiction metaphor “Rehab” for Rihanna in 2007. Love is like war but also like a drug; women are angels who “taste” of cotton candy, or demi-gods with a “temple” primed for worship. The Timbaland co-production “Technicolor” should be a synesthetic delight with its kaleidoscopic imagery and visions of cosmic union, but it falls into The 20/20 Experience’s trap of an overlong runtime and a beat switch that goes nowhere. (Not for the first time on this 18-song album, I wondered what bass ever did to hurt Timberlake and his collaborators.)
Timberlake was always a shameless flirt with just enough goofy self-awareness to pull off a song as fundamentally silly as “Sexy Back.” On Everything I Thought It Was, gone is the switchy sub begging to be whipped if he misbehaves, replaced by an epilated chancer who gives you the ick. “Help me mess up this bed,” Timberlake sings on “Liar,” a fine-enough Afrobeats track featuring Fireboy DML and produced by Danja. “Don’t act like you don’t know what I meant.” We did. On “Imagination,” one of the album’s better attempts at disco-funk, Timberlake promises that “feeling is believing,” the kind of pick-up line that could keep a group chat fed for weeks. The electro-funk-leaning Calvin Harris co-production “Fuckin’ Up the Disco” is a highlight, even if the lyrics evoke an overserved IT technician at a conference wrap party. “You the password, I’ma hit reset,” he speak-sings, in a song that also invites its subject to “run your nine-inch nails all over my back.”
I’ll resist a gag about Timberlake’s own downward spiral, because Everything I Thought It Was is less of a faceplant than a comfortable rehash of past glories that has nothing to do with putting a fresh spin on his signature sound(s) and everything to do with cautiously course-correcting ahead of an extensive world tour. Timberlake has lived an uncommon, fascinating life, but offers only boardroom-approved breadcrumbs of insight. Album opener “Memphis” is a cliché take on the pressures of fame that makes Spears’ “Lucky” look like “For the Roses.” “They say, ‘Just be great/Who cares if there’s too much on your plate?’” Timberlake sings over a Noah “40” Shebib-esque beat that Jack Harlow would pass on as too generic. Aside from a shoutout to “Phineas, Jess, and Si”—his wife and kids—the song could be by anyone.
Ironically, it was songs like “Cry Me a River” that helped establish a template for gossip-powered pop hits that use not-so-secret Easter eggs about artists’ personal lives to jumpstart discourse. (See Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers” or Olivia Rodrigo’s “Vampire.”) But with Timberlake you’re not sure you even want to hear it. There’s little on Everything I Thought It Was that piques curiosity, even though its author is utterly convinced of its importance. “A singular piece of art,” Timberlake recently declared while unboxing a vinyl edition with an alternate cover. “If there’s any film buffs out there like myself, this is a Fellini reference.” At least the singer resisted saying that something else was 8½.
Timberlake’s reticence to reveal much of anything makes you wonder if he really wants to play in pop’s big leagues at all. A recent raft of poorly judged features arrived to crickets, and Everything I Thought It Was’ only headline-making moment came after news that *NSYNC would reunite for one new song, “Paradise” (it’s ghastly). The album’s best moment looks to Timberlake’s boy band era more cannily. On the elegantly spare closing track “Conditions,” he draws on his quieter head voice to worry if a partner will stay by his side “if I lose myself and I go missin’/Make a couple hundred bad decisions/Do some shit I know won’t be forgiven.” He sounds adrift, with just a flicker of the pathos that bristled through *NSYNC’s indelible “Gone.”
The moment is brief. Timberlake has been punching below his weight and coasting for a decade thanks to certain stylistic and demographic advantages. Everything I Thought It Was brims with a misplaced confidence that can only be described as Timberlakean, laboring for such a long, long runtime under the misapprehension that a risk-averse mop bucket of last decade’s trending sounds is gonna hit through the sheer force of its performer’s waning charisma. For Timberlake in 2024, that’s something like business as usual.
