{"id":350275,"date":"2026-03-17T06:21:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-17T06:21:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/350275\/"},"modified":"2026-03-17T06:21:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-17T06:21:07","slug":"jack-harlow-monica-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/350275\/","title":{"rendered":"Jack Harlow: Monica Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a meme I\u2019ve always found pretty funny but never took that seriously, some form of Niggas pushing 30 still tryna rap\u2026 it\u2019s time for jazz. You could easily replace jazz with neo-soul: The gist is, it\u2019s time for earth-toned turtlenecks, evenings spent in the crib with a glass of Merlot, and, above all, spiritual maturity. That to grow up is to exchange the niggas, bitches, hos, guns, sex, drugs, sagging pants, and ego-driven drum machine nonsense of hip-hop for real music with real instruments and moral integrity. As if, behind all of the burning incense and astrology of Mama\u2019s Gun<\/a>, Erykah Badu<\/a> wasn\u2019t talking cash shit; as if the nuanced yearn-fest of Raphael Saadiq<\/a>\u2019s Instant Vintage<\/a> wasn\u2019t also horny as hell; as if Bilal<\/a> didn\u2019t use his jazz-trained vocals on 1st Born Second to be nearly as obsessed with pimp culture as Too $hort. The best neo-soul is raw, prickly music that\u2019s way too emotionally complex to be reduced to a moodboard aesthetic.<\/p>\n

Jack Harlow<\/a> didn\u2019t get the memo. Apparently, the 28-year-old hitmaker\u2019s pivot from pop-rap player\u2014he\u2019s often compared to Drake<\/a>, but his feelings are nowhere near as extreme; I think of his recent<\/a> hits<\/a> more the way I do the kinda witty radio rap love joints of the 2000s like Fabolous<\/a>\u2019 \u201cCan\u2019t Let You Go<\/a>\u201d and Chingy\u2019s \u201cOne Call Away<\/a>\u201d\u2014to sultry and half-wounded R&B city boy was motivated by a change in lifestyle. Ahead of his new album, Monica, he moved from his home state of Kentucky to New York and started thumbing through James Baldwin paperbacks, dressing like Be<\/a>-era Common<\/a>, hitting up independent Manhattan movie theaters (watching stuff like Hitchcock and Luis Bu\u00f1uel and John Cassavettes, according to his Letterboxd account, conveniently made public in the weeks leading up to his album), and becoming the kind of guy who, as he told The New York Times\u2019 Popcast<\/a>, \u201cwould much rather go to dinner than go to the club.\u201d Admittedly, yes, it sounds cool to live like a character in Love Jones, but on Monica, Harlow tries to prove his emotional and intellectual depth with cultural signifiers rather than the music.<\/p>\n

No score yet, be the first to add.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt just struck me that I would want to do something a little more egoless,\u201d said the Jackman in that same Times interview, later adding, \u201cAs I\u2019m getting older, I\u2019m having more trouble reconciling being braggadocious on record.\u201d On to neo-soul, a genre that could only be seen as a vessel for humble, egoless artistry to someone who has engaged with the genre primarily through interracial couple TikTok accounts and Instagram slideshows. To his credit, though, on the album, Harlow\u2014along with Norwegian producer Aksel Arvid, known for his work with PinkPantheress<\/a>\u2014flexes the checkbook like a SEC football booster to recruit a team of jazz and R&B pros. Here and there Robert Glasper<\/a> is on the piano, every now and then Cory Henry brings his organ, and Jermaine Paul is on the bass with a whole team of session musicians. Meanwhile, overqualified singers like Ravyn Lenae<\/a>, Mustafa<\/a>, and Omar Apollo<\/a> do some of the background vocal riffs that Harlow\u2019s limited range won\u2019t reach. It\u2019s the sort of musical infrastructure so reliable and expensive that you could pull damn-near anyone off the street and prop them up like the boss in Weekend at Bernie\u2019s and they\u2019d still sound half-decent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s a meme I\u2019ve always found pretty funny but never took that seriously, some form of Niggas pushing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":350276,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[692,93,61,60,278,514],"class_list":["post-350275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-albums","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-music","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=350275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350275\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/350276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=350275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=350275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=350275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}