As Nourished by Time, the Baltimore-bred singer and producer Marcus Brown keeps exuberance at arms length, and never more than on this balmy anthem from his debut album, Erotic Probiotic 2, a raw melange of R&B, deep house, new wave, and hip-hop. “I say, I love you, you say, whatever,” goes the chorus, but nothing about this dynamic club jam is ambivalent. Brown has said the class-conscious track describes feeling unable to compete with a girlfriend’s sugar daddy. In spite of this rejection, the song is, as Brown shouts throughout it, a “connector.” –Jenn Pelly
The Inescapable Hits We’d Nonetheless Like to Escape
Morgan Wallen: “Last Night”
To properly assess “Last Night,” the first No. 1 hit by Morgan Wallen, let’s teleport several years into the future and imagine how we might look back at its 13-week reign over the charts. Maybe we will see this as a turning point for country-pop, the moment when the genre hit mass popularity with a minimalist, hip-hop influenced sound rather than the arena-rock theatrics that characterized its previous decade. Maybe then we’ll be able to reassess the 30-year-old Tennessean’s career, distanced from the controversies and overlong albums and abrupt show cancellations, and we’ll have no choice but to respect his consistency in dominating the masses’ collective attention. Or maybe we will hear that seamlessly looping acoustic guitar lick and feel haunted by a strange moment in American history when everybody was apparently depressed enough to let this man’s melancholy beer hangover dominate our airwaves, unchallenged and unrepentant. –Sam Sodomsky
Miley Cyrus: “Flowers”
