Jonas Brothers The Album Review: A Half-Baked Pu Pu Platter

The Jonas Brothers’s The Album takes a chaotic road trip through funk-infused popscapes, blue-eyed soul, Americana, and terpene-flavored West Coast rock. Unfortunately, it moves with the grace of a sputtering hatchback. While the album’s sheer eclecticism is admirable in theory, each foray stops short of reaching its full potential, leaving listeners stranded in a musical no man’s land of half-baked ideas and missed opportunities.

The Album’s second single, “Waffle House,” was an unfortunate foreshadowing of what would come. The song, which is coated with a glistening pop veneer, speaks of “deep conversations at the waffle house.” It is a misguided attempt to tap into an idealized vision of modern Americana, peppered with manufactured positivity ready-made for Instagram hashtags.

One could place much of the blame on the album’s production, which leaves the Jonas Brothers adrift. It’s not to say that artists should limit the number of genres they explore on a given album; indeed, some of the most memorable albums have been genre smorgasbords. The issue is when artists fail to put their own unique mark on their songs.

“Americana” tries to tap-dance in the footsteps of Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” but ends up tripping over its own shoes. It feels like the product of a ChatGPT experiment, tasked with creating a zesty country-pop sensation using a handful of the genre’s most successful songs in recent years. On the schmaltzy “Wings,” saccharine clavinets and vocoders soar as the brothers sing, “You are the wings I need to fly away.”

Elsewhere, “Little Bird” is a delicate serenade from Nick Jonas to his daughter, but lyrics like “So please just keep me in your heart/When you fly into somebody else’s arms, little bird” and “Walk down the aisle/Breaking my heart” turn his apprehension surrounding parenthood into something cringy. Growing up is depicted as a personal affront, which is ironic considering that the band has made a career out of immortalizing adolescent experiences in their music.

In fleeting moments across The Album, the brothers find their footing. “Miracle” pulses with a groove that recalls both Sly and the Family Stone and James Brown, with Nick Jonas’s falsetto nimbly navigating an energetic intro. “Montana Skies,” a tight pop-Americana track underpinned by 12-string guitars, weaves nostalgic tales of friends in various places and long nights in New York, while the refrain of “All I see is your silhouette” evocatively hints at a longing for deeper connection. Even with these glimpses of depth and musical variety, though, The Album is as lacking in curiosity as its straightforward title implies.