Nick Jonas’ new album is mainly Bleh

There is a saying that goes something like this: Happy people make bad art. In the case of a happy marriage to Nick Jonas, whose new album Astronaut came out today, it’s more like bleh music.

Former Jonas Brother staged one of the most successful post-boy band solo careers in the mid-2010s, selling relatable friends like “Jealous” and “Bacon” and capturing intimacy and heartbreak in hits like “Chains” and Tove The collaboration “Close.”

He became one of the best centrist pop stars – not very conceptual, but a good chronicler of butch sensitivity (and a favorite of gay Twitter). He’s been busy in the years since his last solo album, 2016 The past year has been complicated, both personally and professionally. Marrying Priyanka Chopra in an extravagantly sponsored wedding and leading the massive return of the Jonas Brothers in spring 2019 raised her profile.

He collaborated with his brothers and producer and songwriter Ryan Tedder for the comeback album Happiness begins‘biggest hit, “Sucker”, the only # 1 song of his career, and a perfectly crafted maximalist pop hit of the kind that used to dominate the charts.

Your new album, Astronaut, is a kind of conceptual album about feelings evoked by relationships, as well as a love letter to his wife. But Jonas’ personality becomes bland through the concept, and the album’s coherence seems lost in space.

With this album, Jonas faced the problem of Katy Perry “waking up pop” from being a big pop star in an era of massive change and wanting to somehow seriously get involved in cultural conversation while staying true to his largely joyful music.

The title song “Spaceman” – and the album cover, where he faces space – evokes Bowie’s ethereal, otherworldly style. The lyrics are strangely serious and zeitgeisty, while Jonas sings about feeling hopeless and like a zombie in the middle of the pandemic. But it doesn’t really make sense for the album’s theme.

The album begins with conflict, as he longs for a partner to stay on “Don’t Give Up on Us” and asks a girlfriend to work on his relationship in “Heights”. The latter is the most original song, combining synthesizers with an evocative beat of Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” as a melancholy backdrop for the lyrics about a guy who is not afraid of the ups and downs of the novel. “I’m not afraid of heights,” he sings, capturing a sense of fearlessness around the emotion characteristic of his best work.

In the album’s promotional material, Jonas said he was inspired by the sounds of favorite artists like Stevie Wonder and the Bee Gees. The influence of the disco group is more evident in the middle of the album, which also looks more like Jonas, narrating the joys of sex and romance. This Is Heaven, the second single, about the euphoria of being with the perfect woman, suggests the Bee Gees’ talent for exuberant melodies. “Deeper Love” has some convincing drum work and even some quirky flutes; when he falsifies a “wow”, you get the feeling that Jonas is feeling, unfortunately, a rare moment on the album.

There are tips from old Nick also in “Delicious”, where he sings about enjoying watching and describes a girlfriend “dripping in definition”, one of the less obvious metaphors in the lyrics. A more confident pop star may have made that song the lead single, rather than trying to awkwardly combine a dark moment in the culture.

Centrist pop stars usually do their best when they collaborate with different producers who reveal different peculiarities in their style, even if they remain faithful to their themes and sounds.

In this case, the entire album was produced by Greg Kurstin (who worked with Adele and Sia), and Jonas co-wrote almost all songs with Kurstin and Mozella (who co-wrote Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball”).

But the most notable part of the production is the lack of specific notability, since most of the songs, in addition to those that refer to the harmonies of disc synthesizers, sound like generic excerpts from contemporary big pop. The lack of diversity in the collaboration also appears in the lyrics, which are often repetitive and full of clichés, saying instead of showing. For example, no song with the title “Sexual” and the lyrics “I put sex on sexual” can be good. This is worse when the album comes out of sexual euphoria and the songs lack urgency. “Now I’m high as a ceiling,” he sings, “very drunk and I’m totally lost” in the song “2Drunk”. (Okay, but why are we hearing this?)

There is a lack of specificity in the lyrics, a problem that becomes especially striking when there are hints of a more defined narrative. “I remember speaking on the first night”, he sings in “If I Fall”. “I got cold because I realized / Everything before was a waste of time.” “This is caviar with some pringles”, he sings in “Death Do Us Part”, in one of the tacky moments that don’t work out. “Nervous”, a sweet song that closes the album, about the part of him that “always runs out of breath” when your wife speaks, is also ruined by lyrics so banal that they take you out of the song. (“You are the reason / My heart beats in my chest.”)

Jonas was at his peak in the “Jealous” era, which really set him apart as a pop star, thanks to the provocation of gay fashion and a willingness to be vulnerable and specific in his lyrics that made them universal. His goal at the time, he said in an interview, was “just to be me and not be afraid to say or do anything outside the realm of what I should be doing”.

But since that time, it has been more difficult for him to stand out as a pop star. Drake, for example, avoided growing pains by insisting on clinging to teenagers’ feelings. Jonas is willing to grow up, but has not found his sweet spot. (Even his fashion in the “Spaceman” video is more distinctive than the song, nodding to the space theme in a Bowie-meets-kid-style from Jersey more uniquely his: wearing a tight, shiny blue astronaut jumpsuit and leaving just enough neckline for chest hair.)

In its recent SNL appearance, he played Prince Charming and scoffed at himself, suggesting that his celebrity wife is out of his league. But it was all very obvious and calculated, as if the stardom itself was an angle. He needs to go back to the simplicity closest to home that gave us “Jealousy”. ●