The Singles Jukebox

With one minor exception, the TSJ crew are well ahead of you there, Jonases.

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Natasha Genet Avery: “It’s messing with my head/how I mess with your heart” could be a fantastic line, depending on where you situate the speaker. In “Leave Before You Love Me,” Nick and Joe over-emote and croon and growl as they imagine the torment they are inflicting on last night’s conquest, who obviously must be lovestruck. My guess, though, is that the irony is lost on soft boi Nick Jonas as he’s speeding away the morning after his booty call. Pick up the damn phone! She’s probably just calling to tell you that you left your wallet on the nightstand, you self-absorbed dork.
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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: After the existential doom of 2020 made a proper song of the summer impossible, “Leave Before You Love Me” is the closest I’ve come to imagining what an heir apparent could be in 2021. It’s vapid, it’s bubbly, and it’s charming, and — if it’s allowed the right circumstances — it should receive pretty constant airplay. 
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Nortey Dowuona: The first thing the song has is velvet guitar, but it’s drawn away under the perfunctory 80’s drums and flattened bass faking as they’re singing Disco, with Nick and Joe’s voices cracking and writhing, struggling to keep up with even this bland groove, and the genuinely cruel lyrics make it all the worse. At least it’s short. 
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Tim de Reuse: The Jonas Brothers attempt to channel Julian Casablancas and succeed only in writing something that sounds like if what you’d get if you took every slow song by The Strokes and blended them together into a gray pulp. Marshmello doesn’t attempt much of anything, dissolving into the watery synthpop background. A sharp listener paying close attention to the snap of the snare drum might think, “That’s funny, it’s like someone involved in this track’s production used to make EDM.”
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Ady Thapliyal: Nick’s biting Abel Tesfaye a little too hard in the opening verse, but at least that sounds better than the chorus, where Marshmello blends all the Jonas’ voices together into a bland, unappetizing mush. And the lyrics are on some male manipulator shit. Still, one point for each of Joe’s deliciously thick eyebrows.
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Camille Nibungco: Honestly a strange combination of two very different artists that weirdly works? It’s insidiously catchy and I’m not sure if I can credit it to either the Disney boy band of my teens or the mildly famous EDM pop producer.
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Thomas Inskeep: Marshmello managed to somehow make the JoBros sound wimpier while putting none of his own musical “personality” in the record. Is that talent?
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Katherine St Asaph: Marshmello finally lives up to his eponymous marshmallow skull and makes a Daft Punk song, the closest approximation of Random Access Memories I’ve heard since… ever? (It’s about time that Influential Event Album became actually influential!) He’s very clearly patterning the song on “Instant Crush,” but the Jonas Brothers are a brighter vocal presence than autotuned anhedonic Julian Casablancas, and their songwriters far, far less oblique. Marshmello and his co-producers make the melody sweeter to match, and the whole thing comes off, pleasingly, as an ABBA cover.
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