Album: Jessie Ware – That! Feels Good!
When Jessie Ware wrote “Remember Where You Are”—the final song on her career-altering 2020 record What’s Your Pleasure?—she knew she’d unlocked the sound of her future. “I think I finally understood my place in music,” she tells Apple Music. “I felt like I was combining all my loves, from musical theatre to soul, groove, dance and funk to R&B and orchestral moments and group vocals. I wanted to do ‘Remember Where You Are’, but with a big old dance beat.” That’s more or less what you can expect from That! Feels Good!, on which the London singer-songwriter doubles down on her devotion the dance floor and—after the varnished opulence of What’s Your Pleasure?—embraces a looser, louder, more live sound. It’s (almost) all up, with brass and string arrangements, choruses of voices, very winking lyrics and, perhaps most surprisingly, rapping à la Blondie or Tom Tom Club. “My voice was always the thing, which is fabulous,” says Ware (who, of course, also belts out plenty of elastic vocals here). “But for me it was like, ‘Let’s see what else I’ve got.’”