On 2020’s What’s Your Pleasure?, English singer-songwriter Jessie Ware found herself at Studio 54. This foray into retro disco, fused with Ware’s contemporary pop instincts, proved somewhat of a breakthrough for the artist who at that point, was four albums into her career. “I want people to have sex to it,” Ware said of the album, and that glitzy sort of seduction fizzes through the synthy disco-funk of What’s Your Pleasure? like bubbles in champagne. But where What’s Your Pleasure? was focussed on the libidinal, Ware’s much anticipated follow up That! Feels Good is far more concerned with making your body move in a different way: to the music.
Extending the disco of What’s Your Pleasure? past closing time, That! Feels Good continues Ware’s command over the genre. But here, the songs evolve from slow burning sex jams and sensual synthfunk siren songs ala-Goldfrapp into punchier, sweatier weapons made to be deployed on the dancefloor. That’s not to say sex isn’t still part of Ware’s nightlife odyssey, it’s just more about euphoria rather than seduction this time around. The album opens with overlapping voices exclaiming in ecstasy, ‘that feels good!,’ before kicking into snappy funk, Ware reminding us “pleasure is a right” in her signature come hither voice. It’s one of the few instances we get those sultry What’s Your Pleasure? vocals on this album, mostly relegated to snatches of hushed spoken word or spectral ad-libs. Ware’s breathy delivery is traded for full-voice diva house vocals and better still, camp theatricality. She swings from the robust belts of Pearls to something like Shake The Bottle, where she performs a hammed up spoken word about her ex-lovers like a monotone dominatrix dragging a Pal-Mal, and it’s this remarkable display of range that breathes life into That! Feels Good.
Free Yourself, the album’s early lead single, arrives at the top, largely as a blueprint for the night Ware has planned for us. The production on this track feels shinier in full album context. Its slick, trumpet licked nu-disco effortlessly and sumptuously swirls between moments of throbbing house and disco proper, a remarkably balanced formula that doesn’t rely too heavily on one or the other, as so much of nu-disco tends to do. It’s an approach that thankfully carries across That! Feels Good, making for some of Ware’s most dizzyingly joyous and tightly crafted work to date. Who could deny the groove stirring cowbell taps of the deliciously camp Beautiful People, where Ware’s only grievance is that she’s been dancing too much and still has more to do, with too little time to meet all the beautiful people around her? Even when approaching the maudlin, Ware does so with an ever brimming optimism. On Begin Again, she laments the direction of the world and expresses her desire to restart time by presenting a string-laden cabaret on the power of letting go and embracing new beginnings, like the sun rising on a new day.
Download and stream That! Feels Good here
The giddy optimism at the core of That! Feels Good is anything but superficial. It’s Ware’s form of protest. It’s tragic that What’s Your Pleasure? arrived amidst a global pandemic, and that the world since that moment has only seemed to unravel into further chaos and atrocity. It’s reason enough for Ware to drive her manifesto harder than ever before. Pleasure, whatever that might mean to you, is a right. We deserve to feel good, to experience the bliss of escaping into the music, to lose ourselves in the euphoria of a lover. Because only then can we confront the reality of our lived experience without descending into madness. Ware has always understood that disco is inherently political in this sense, and to an extent understands her role as a white woman bringing the sound of black queer liberation back into the pop lexicon. So Ware’s disco is, wisely, a touch at a distance from herself; it’s not personal, it’s pleasurable. Her’s is a disco to find yourself in, to lose yourself in, and to emerge stronger for it. And with that glorious voice as a constant reminder, “freedom is a sound, and pleasure is a right,” Ware is just there to guide you into the endless possibilities of who you are and who you can be. Now that really feels good.
Listen to the title track from That! Feels Good below.
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