It’s remarkable how few ideas are contained within this hour-plus Blue Ridge Mountains mood board of an album. Man of the Woods is a misstep large enough to merit relitigating Justin Timberlake’s status as a pop superstar. How much of his career should we chalk up to fortune, privilege, and an essential malleability? Is working with Pharrell Williams and Timbaland—pantheon-level producers who collaborated extensively with Timberlake at or near the peak of their powers, and continue to do so—an act of creative genius, or just kismet? There may be no definite answers. But Man of the Woods’ failure invites the questions.
Timberlake wants to be thought of as an innovator. He struck gold at the beginning of his solo career with “Cry Me a River,” an icy amalgam of beat-boxing and Gregorian chants that’s still thrilling 16 years later. He had the gall to name an album FutureSex/LoveSounds and filled it with pop inventive enough to live up to the title. He embraced auteurist extravagance across the messy, occasionally brilliant halves of The 20/20 Experience. When he unveiled Man of the Woods, his first album in five years, he framed his new music as the product of an audacious fusion of Southern sounds. Its problems invite the listener to scrap this narrative and stitch together a different story. Forget the album’s trailer—in which Timberlake comes out of the closet as a fire-building, creek-wading, baby-clutching Jeremiah Johnson cosplayer—or the baffling videos for singles like “Filthy” and the Migos-meets-preppers joint “Supplies.” It’s all there in the music: warm, indulgent, inert, and vacuous.
Man of the Woods rings hollow with familial contentment: Timberlake’s wife, the actress Jessica Biel, sings or speaks on a handful of tracks, and closer “Young Man” comes complete with a cooing feature from Timberlake’s toddler. Even the credits have a no-new-friends feel: The majority of the album was made in tandem with the Neptunes, Timbaland, and Danja, the chief architects of his sound from Justified onwards. Instead of surging forward with a new vision for pop music, it leans on the sounds and genres that have become American comfort food: country, soul, funk, disco, gospel.
Matrimonial and paternal pride suit Timberlake nicely under the right circumstances, and they’ve certainly brought him success in the past. The 20/20 Experience highlight “Mirrors” is a genuinely touching tribute to a partner without whom Timberlake feels incomplete, and a treacly bit of disco cut from the Trolls soundtrack became one of the biggest hits of his career. There are a few endearing moments on Man of the Woods that operate in this mode, songs anchored by one soupçon of detail that keeps them from dissipating into pure meaninglessness. He recounts an awkward introduction on the swaggering “Higher Higher,” one that ends with Timberlake and his partner dancing to Madonna’s “Lucky Star.” The late-’70s Bee Gees throb of “Montana” is the perfect fit for a romantic—and potentially hallucinogenic—evening in the mountains. And while “Breeze Off the Pond” leans on a layered-harmony trick Timberlake’s been using for a solid decade, it also invites you to imagine him taking a stoned canoe trip soundtracked by “Tiny Dancer.” Timberlake is such an abjectly poor lyricist that scraps like these feel like manna from heaven.
Too much of Man of the Woods is musically and thematically shallow; at 66 minutes, it’s a mile wide and an inch deep. There’s a point midway through the album—right around the threadbare-shirt hymnal “Flannel”—where you realize “modern Americana with 808s” wasn’t just a cute tagline: That’s really the whole idea, and it quickly wears thin. Timberlake may have yanked back the reins on the interminable song lengths of The 20/20 Experience, but many of these tracks still manage to overstay their welcome by a minute or two. They don’t have the hooks or the dynamism to justify their continued existence: phrases get recycled, breakdowns feel like intrusions from completely different songs, grooves are sought but remain undiscovered. “Midnight Summer Jam” is a sub-Robin Thicke boogie with a sub-John Popper harmonica solo; “Sauce” is Beyoncé’s “Don’t Hurt Yourself” cut with a jug full of pond water.
And there’s no refuge from the lyrics, which in many places engender the same mix of emotions you’d confront upon walking in on your parents having sex. Timberlake never quite oozed virility—he topped out somewhere around “Hollister model breaking bad”—but this aspect of his persona has aged particularly poorly. The horny android moans and tiger growls of “Filthy” are sensual and elegant compared to “Sauce,” which invites you to imagine a partner’s “pink” pressing up against Timberlake’s “purple.” The title track features this charming depiction of foreplay: “But then your hands talkin’, fingers walkin’/Down your legs, hey, there’s the faucet.” He takes a break from amassing iodine tablets on “Supplies” to reminisce about an early morning flight home, “just to show up and hear your sounds (The multiple times!)” That last phrase is delivered with a puff of Auto-Tuned harmony and driven home when the beat cuts out for a split-second, which is just enough time for you to realize how excited he is about making his wife orgasm more than once. Whether or not the faucet is running at this point remains unclear.
This isn’t just prudishness at work, either. The songs that have nothing to do with coital bliss are just as lifeless. “Say Something,” a duet with beloved Nashville star Chris Stapleton, defies every attempt to discern some kind of through line or coherent message; the profound conclusion reached during the bridge is that “Sometimes the greatest way to say something/Is to say nothing at all.”
Father-to-son message “Young Man” is similarly devoid of any meaningful advice. According to Timberlake, here’s a short list of things a young man should know: stand for something; don’t back down; don’t act out; don’t stay down; you’re gonna break somebody’s heart, because “that’s what we do.” Other artists of Timberlake’s stature have written songs in this same vein imbued with anxiety, regret, and hard-earned wisdom. When they’re done right, they glow with the unconditional love parents feel for their children. “Young Man” is an insipid birthday card by comparison.
Timberlake is performing at his second Super Bowl halftime show as a solo artist this weekend. He’s returning to the stage as an old family friend, one unblemished by the “wardrobe malfunction” that kneecapped Janet Jackson 14 years ago. The incident is a microcosm of Timberlake’s career: At no point has his ascendance been interrupted by anything like negative consequences. He played a pivotal role in one of this century’s defining TV controversies and was happily invited back to the scene of the crime little more than a decade later. He rush-recorded and released a massive two-part album to fulfill contractual obligations and was welcomed back into the music industry with arms wide open. He wore a full denim suit and cowboy hat on the red carpet; he played a crucial role in The Love Guru. None of it mattered. When you skate through your life unscathed, you accumulate hubris. And it takes a lot of hubris to make an album like Man of the Woods.
