Take Back the Night

The most direct song on a record otherwise devoted to seven-minute suites. Timbaland and Timberlake build "Take Back the Night" as an explicit disco homage — live-feeling bass guitar, chattering hi-hats, string stabs and horn punches lifted from the Off the Wall playbook, with a "get on the floor" propulsion that never lets up across six minutes. Timberlake sings mostly in his upper register, light and elastic, phrasing behind the beat like someone who studied the source material closely enough to know that restraint is what makes it swing. The lyric is plain by design: it's a call to a dancefloor, a night that hasn't ended yet, a claim on hours the working week wants back. There's no confession in it and no wound; the emotional landscape is pure momentum, the specific euphoria of a room deciding collectively not to go home. Released in the middle of Timberlake's 2013 dominance — the year of two albums, a stadium tour, and a saturation campaign — it drew a brief legal squabble over sharing a title with an anti-sexual-violence organization, which he resolved by donating. Its natural home is a kitchen at 1 a.m. with the lights low, or headphones on a subway platform when you're dressed for somewhere better.