Review: Joji’s Nectar Creates a Mollifying Vibe That Feels Removed from Reality

George Kusunoki Miller’s successful rebranding from the uncouth YouTube memelord known as Filthy Frank into chart-topping artist Joji speaks to the appeal of his sulky, hi hat-accented R&B, which is tailor-made for a Gen-Z audience that came of age during the trap wave guided by such brooding auteurs as Drake and the Weeknd. On his 2018 debut, Ballads 1, the Japanese-Australian singer’s heartsick lamentations blended together in a mass of chilled-out piano and sleepy falsetto, but at the time it seemed that Miller, stripped of his outrageous internet persona, lacked an artistic identity. With his follow-up, Nectar, Miller flaunts improved vocals and expands his sonic palette with the accouterments of synth-pop and alternative rock, but he comes up short of filling that void.

The album’s opening track, “Ew,” finds Miller exploring the uncomfortable feelings that arise from losing in love. A cascade of piano arpeggios and clouds of sentimental violin shore up ruminations such as “Teach me to love just to let me go” and “I can’t believe that I’m not enough.” “Gimme Love” is as pleading as its title suggests, while on “Run,” Miller confronts an evasive lover, smoothly shifting between morose belting and light-as-air head voice. Glimpses of idyllic love are momentary, their inevitable end always in sight, as on the doting “Like You Do,” where Miller worries, “If you ever go, all the songs that we like will sound like bittersweet lullabies.” At the risk of wallowing, he braves such powerlessness, which similarly informed the best tracks on Ballads 1.

But while the subject of Miller’s intense focus hasn’t changed since his last album, his music’s sonic reach has expanded on Nectar—at least to the extent to which he’s assisted by featured artists. An outlier in Joji’s discography, the Diplo-produced “Daylight” is a soaring, summery post-breakup anthem. Taking singer-songwriter Omar Apollo’s lead, Miller settles into a soul-adjacent groove on “High Hopes,” and experimental producer Yves Tumor leaves his fingerprints all over the glitchy, distorted “Reanimate.” Throughout, the album’s collaborations come off less as inventive genre-bending and more like a hesitation to commit to a genre. What’s more, Miller’s presence on these songs doesn’t display the range of a chameleonic workhorse so much as relegate him to second-in-command.

On his own, Miller is comfortable rinsing and repeating, soporifically drifting over three-minute-long verse-chorus structures. With the exception of the Brockhampton-esque “Tick Tock,” which is enlivened by an off-the-wall sample of Nelly’s “Dilemma,” the songs unspool uneventfully, founded on hazy synths and hollow drum machines. At an excessive 18 tracks, the album ends up feeling like a big-budget version of the nondescript, vaguely hip-hop-flavored study mixes that proliferate on YouTube. This is perfect background music for anyone wishing to emulate those videos’ studious anime girls—which is to say, Nectar is palatable enough to summon a mollifying “vibe” yet uninvolved enough to ensure that listeners maintain their focus on the task at hand.

Miller’s transparency remains his greatest strength. On “Modus,” he seems to address the failures and numbing effects of antidepressants: “I don’t feel the way they programmed me today.” On the page, this lyric’s forthrightness could have the potential to draw blood, but Miller’s unexpressive delivery has a dulling effect. Clearly, Miller doesn’t balk at transporting listeners to his lowest moments through his lyricism, but his placid performances and dime-a-dozen soundscapes fail to do the same. Nectar largely feels removed from its inspiration in reality, so that it’s tantamount to the relatable but rote sadness of a Tweetdecked epigram, the equivalent of a half-hearted “it be like that sometimes.”