Everything I Thought It Was

Timberlake doesn’t reconcile with remorse across the suitable yet uneven “Everything I Thought It Was”; rather, he quickly gestures towards it on opener “Memphis” and moves on.

Clocking in at a slither under 77 minutes, ‘Everything I Thought It Was’ is a slog enlivened by some surprising moments.

Everything I Thought I Was is certainly not the career defining masterwork Timberlake seems to think it is, but nevertheless it’s enough to get him over that mid-life bump.

If the album were 10 tracks rather than 18 – many of which could in turn lose two minutes from their runtime – Timberlake’s musical redemption might be more of a home run. Invariably it sags.

Some focus and editing would have really helped because there's a great album buried somewhere in here.

Ironically, though, the high points on the album are the songs that sound like old JT. This isn’t to say the new creative path he’s on won’t sprout new favorites for new fans and new generations, but for longtime fans, it’s hard to see how this will have any replay value.

Though it’s larded with glib disco-funk tracks and morose, One Republic-style pop-rock tunes, “Everything I Thought It Was” contains a handful of gems in “Love & War,” a Prince-ish ballad with his prettiest falsetto singing, and the spacey slow jam “What Lovers Do”; “Selfish,” the album’s coolly received lead single, is another highlight, this one with echoes of Bieber’s underrated “Changes” from 2020.

With an abundance of material, one could never fault Everything I Thought I Was for being too conservative, but it’s an all too clear case of quantity over quality, resulting in quickly diminishing returns.

Abandoning the folksy aesthetic of “Man of the Woods,” “Everything” returns to Timberlake’s comfort zone: Gleaming, lightly profane disco jams that imagine dance-floor seduction as a kind of interstellar odyssey. The results are mixed.

It could have stood to cut five or six entries, starting with “Memphis.” That would have left “Fuckin’ Up the Disco,” an homage to his own “Let the Groove Get In,” as the album’s opening track — a starting point that motions towards what does work about the album versus the places in which it completely falls flat.

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.

Everything I Thought It Was feels less like a terrible Justin Timberlake album and more like wasted potential. Man of the Woods was terrible, but at least he took a risk. This one is fine, frictionless, and overwhelmingly safe.

For as poor as Man of the Woods was, at least it was ambitious…unlike whatever this amorphous clump of hackneyed trends is.

It’s another long album – if there’s one conclusion to be drawn from this record, it’s that Justin Timberlake desperately needs an editor – but it’s a return to the slinky RnB pop that made his name. The problem is that there’s not much of the sparkle that was evident about 20 years ago.

The record’s sprawling R&B slow jams are more likely to inspire snoozing than shagging. Weighing in at a bloated 18 tracks, it’s got the soggy dead weight and wonky springs of a fly-tipped mattress.