By now, it’s safe to say Jessie Ware has found her lane. 2023’s That! Feels Good! cemented her status as a pop diva three years after her revelatory opus What’s Your Pleasure?, her fourth album at the time. The first singles from her latest, Superbloom, suggested she’s comfortable serving even more of that delirious, dancefloor-bound euphoria, to the point where many of the songs feel like they have direct antecedents in the last two albums. “I don’t know if I fucked myself by saying a trilogy,” Ware recently said, hinting that her next project might be “far more synth and electronic and kind of blue and crooner-y.” The new album affirms that Ware’s confidence has only been blossoming thanks to her adoring fanbase, but also feels torn between lifting her dance music up to the heavens and grounding it in domestic life, assuming the role of a goddess and staying clear of cosplay. Springtime, after all, is as joyful a season as it is transitional, and Superbloom closes a chapter as much as it opens up new lanes.
1. The Garden Prelude
A woozy, luscious instrumental prelude in the vein of Kali Uchis’ Red Moon in Venus intro, almost a minute of controlled breathing through the nose before the big exhale: “Wow.”
2. I Could Get Used to This
“This is what I know/ Step into my secret garden,” Ware sings, painting a picture of heaven that’s both infinite and just around the corner. How many times can Ware iterate on the same classic formula before it no longer feels like her own, losing steam? ‘I Could Get Used to This’ was early proof that Superbloom would not only hit the same pleasure spots, but sizzlingly suggest it’s only just starting to feel familiar.
3. Superbloom
Much of 2020’s What’s Your Pleasure? hinged on the tension of strangers crossing paths on the dancefloor; ‘Superbloom’ frames the eponymous album as a bid on the boundless possibilities of committing to a partner who knows you so well they could make you feel like a stranger for the night, where unpredictability means playfulness, not fear. The mix of “something classic, something new” that Ware alludes to has become her artistic MO at this point; it just so happens that part of the newness of Superblood is in reinforcing how all that euphoria might be coming from the same source.
4. Automatic
Colman Domingo steps in as the “voice of the love gods,” in Ware’s words, affirming what the singer herself asserts in the chorus: “You’ve got the perfect woman.” What’s entrancing about ‘Automatic’ is that Ware makes it feel as effortless as the love at its core, sprinkling in strings and woodwinds that swoon without weighing down the song’s groove. “And when I’m moving way too fast/ He’ll let me know to take a breath,” she sings of Mr. Right, making the track’s stylistic fusion sound like synchronized breathing.
5. Chariots of Love
Another interlude, this time comprising a flurry of angelic voices, punctuated by sultry intonations of the album title, that all quickly get sucked in by a rising pulse.
6. Sauna
The title alone raises the stakes, but ‘Sauna’ quickly satisfies as a mid-album standout. Whorling synths and layered vocals catapult the song into the sky, which wouldn’t mean much if Ware’s lyrics didn’t also get a little more lascivious, including the gasp-inducing “I wanna take off in the night and land in someone else’s arms.” When the album’s fantastical world-building merges with its most primal urges, it’s a fever you wouldn’t temper for nothing.
7. Mr. Valentine
The dance-punk stylings feel like a breath of fresh air on an album that’s stylistically locked in, which makes the more classically disco chorus come off surprisingly trite; the track could thrive off jittery energy alone, with no need to soar about a “beautiful madness.”
8. Love You
As a mid-tempo ballad, ‘Love You’ is finely placed, though its broad-strokes emotionality doesn’t do justice to the strength of its emotion. Ware has expressed pure adoration in more convincing terms in the past.
9. Ride
As the first song Ware wrote for the album, the disco-western flavour of ‘Ride’, which goes as far as to sample the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, belies the escapist tendencies that seem to have been somewhat buried later in the process. It’s a mix of cheekiness and glamour that’s almost too on the nose, but Ware’s performance is giddy enough to sell it.
10. Don’t You Know Who I Am?
Just as the drama seems to wear thin, Ware injects some much-needed stakes on ‘Don’t You Know Who I Am?’, remembering that classic disco was as much about the freedom of the dancefloor as the glimpse of a lifetime that might be born there. On ‘Don’t You Know Who I Am?’, Ware is intent on making it last. “I’m the love of your life,” she declares in a particularly swooning chorus, “Fool me once, kiss me twice/ We’ve been dancing all night.” She’s already revealed that she’s seen him dancing with someone else; the world might be torn apart, but planting regret in his mind is par for the course.
11. 16 Summers
Ware has been contemplating motherhood on record since at least 2017’s Glasshouse, where she found herself wondering what kind of mother she would be. Balancing her career with parenthood has been the subject of interviews, but here she delivers, for the first time, a stark piano ballad that those of us with no stardom to juggle might be able to relate to. It might be a tour keeping you away for the summer, or it could be anything, and Ware’s particularly expressive about the lip-biting tension that arises from stretching the truth: “I just close my eyes/ And now my life’s in double time/ Come hold these hands you’re slipping through,” she sings. “To live and love without regret” is the mantra, but ‘16 Summers’ lets some of that regret beautifully seep through.
12. No Consequences
Co-written with Tom McFarland (of Jungle), ‘No Consequences’ offers a funky, gospel-infused twist that’s more reminiscent of McFarland’s Brittany Howard remix than anything else on the album. It’s a bright, dizzying display of how Ware’s grooves might evolve past Superbloom, which feels like the closing of a trilogy.
13. Mon Amour
Superbloom wouldn’t ride off into the sunset without returning to the playful, disco-devoted sound of its singles, among which ‘Mon Amour’ could easily be. “We’ll talk in the morning/ But right now let’s find out what nights are for,” Ware sings, which is something classic; the “something new” is how she learns to weave her sensuality around things that bloom in the morning. It’s not always sunshine; just a couple of songs earlier, she was tuning into “the falling leaves, the cooling breeze”; ‘No Consequences’ demonstrated that waking from a dream can just as easily fill you with desire. But perhaps nothing offers reprieve from the ceaseless nature of time, nothing blurs the limits of “right now,” like a night that makes you want more of the same.
