damn

The most R&B-leaning corner of his catalog, and it arrives with a swagger that the gentler songs don't attempt. The groove here is deliberate and slightly seductive, built on a pocket that leaves space — bass sitting back, percussion landing with precision, the whole thing breathing in a way that more densely produced pop refuses to. The English title announces an affect that the song delivers on: there's something knowing and slightly teasing in the energy, a raised eyebrow embedded in the production. His vocals shift registers with more obvious pleasure here, sliding between chest voice and falsetto with a fluency that reveals how deeply he absorbed American soul before filtering it through his own sensibility. The lyric plays with the word and its surrounding emotion — something between exasperation and admiration, the kind of feeling someone generates in you when they're simultaneously frustrating and irresistible. It showed his range at a moment when audiences might have assumed he was exclusively a piano balladeer, and the ease with which he inhabits the groove is the whole argument. This is late-night music, city-at-night music, the soundtrack to walking somewhere with a mild sense of purpose and the ambient pleasure of being out in the world.