The Singles Jukebox

No, we adore YOU…

[Video]
[6.50]

Alfred Soto: I’m bored with this streak of marvelous tracks. What happened to the uneven Jessie Ware of yore? A slowburn with plinky-plonky keyboard work, “Adore You” avoids the mawk of her recent work by honing a sound. 
[7]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: The rare Jessie Ware song wherein formal recitation coexists meaningfully alongside beatific coos. The titular line is repeated with awkward stiffness, but this act serves as important clarification. It’s Ware being sure that, yes, this is love. “Adore You” thus serves as inspiration — for the apprehensive lover, the previously hurt, the perpetually unsure. “I think I’m falling for you,” she sings, despite all signs pointing to the obvious. Deep down she knows it’s true, which is why she sings that he — we, even — can “tell everybody” before expressing such half-doubts. She intentionally expedites the public dissemination of her tryst, forcing herself to find shelter in the one thing that currently provides comfort: ecstatic thoughts of her infatuation. The undulating beat supports her every move.
[7]

Juana Giaimo: I really love songs about falling in love — Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Run Away with Me” or Rae Morris’s “Atletico” — and “Adore You” is a beautiful one. Jessie Ware’s voice sounds celestial while the dancing beat gives it a very physical feeling that makes it more earthly. It captures that moment when your head is up in the clouds thinking about your loved one, but you still have to keep going with the routine — because unfortunately, falling in love is not a societally acceptable reason to pause daily life.
[8]

Kat Stevens: Oddly melancholic bibble from the head girl at the Lisa Stansfield School of Dance Music for Grown-Ups. I say “odd” because lyrically, it’s a love song to her unborn baby, which you’d think would inspire strong feelings of euphoria (see Kelis’s “Acapella”) or perhaps anxiety (that Fever Ray album). It doesn’t feel like a topic suited to gloomy wind chimes? Maybe she’s just knackered?
[6]

Pedro João Santos: It’s like Kelly Lee Owens gone rogue, this affable post-disco ditty. And even if it fails to live up to the unrelenting anthem that is “Overtime,” it does further to secure us that Glasshouse 2 is as much of a possibility as that rumour tabloids press every two months about Rihanna being locked in the studio readying Loud Pt. II.
[7]

Ian Mathers: I suspect I may be in the minority here for strongly preferring the more ethereal first half to the more dancefloor ready rest of the track, but neither are bad… I’m just too enamoured by the way bits of the former evoke Julianna Barwick, just a little. 
[7]

Thomas Inskeep: This isn’t downtempo house, this is sleepytime house. And accordingly, I zzzzzzz
[3]

Iris Xie: The sound of an electric fan blowing makes me more excited than this. I know there are many things that are in here that are supposed to make me feel a certain kind of way: oscillating, silver house beats that set to “bouncy but not too intimidating, there are no demands here,” laying the landscape for a smoothly honeyed voice that coos and beckons effortlessly. That could be fine, but then “Adore You” takes it further, and all of those elements are dialed down to a 1 and caulked in gauze. It’s engineered for maximum inoffensiveness and doesn’t have the extra element that is meant to connect with me, the human aspect of this listener-singer collaboration. There’s so little to grab onto, that I feel I’m being duped into listening to this song to the end, and with Jessie Ware’s demands, I feel I am being softly coerced, not seduced, by Siri to give up my brain for AI research. “Lean in, move slow, Don’t go” — false reading, I already walked out of the room.
[3]

William John: Joseph Mount brings similar soft thrills to “Adore You” as he did to Robyn’s Honey, punctuating Jessie Ware’s voice with bells and whirrs that undulate irresistibly. Most critics are loath to defend the mawkish Glasshouse, but as one of its staunchest champions I am pleased that Ware hasn’t let go of all her sentimental tendencies even as she moves in this sublime, velvet-lined direction, where “the club” serves as synecdoche for escapism and sensuality.
[9]

Will Adams: The gauzy arrangement recalls “Honey,” but where that track throbbed, “Adore You” glistens like a lake dappled with sun. It’s the perfect space for Jessie to breathe life into sentiments — “I think I’m falling for you”; “I wanna tell the world” — that are otherwise rendered trite by the likes of The Bachelor. Here, they sound like the truest words ever spoken.
[8]