Justin Timberlake’s single Filthy is his first new release since his ambitious, occasionally riveting but ultimately bloated 2013 double album The 20/20 Experience. Well, if you exclude his schmaltzy score for The Book of Love, and Can’t Stop the Feeling!, a single released in tandem with the animated Trolls movie – a fluffy, kid-friendly pop song that ended up being his biggest hit to date.
One wonders what Filthy might sound like in a live set alongside tracks from his new album Man of the Woods, which could well be a darker, gnarlier affair. The artwork features a photo ripped in two, one half showing him in jeans in a field, the other him in a suit in a snowy forest – big clanging signifiers for an artist trying to reconcile R&B and Americana, slickness and rootsiness, coldness and warmth.
The guest stars play out the split too: Alicia Keys and Timberlake’s old sparring partners the Neptunes on one hand, country star Chris Stapleton on the other. Trolls are unlikely to feature. So can Timberlake have it all – get serious again, last the R&B course and also, as The Outline neatly put it, “rebrand as a white man”?
On the basis of Filthy, he absolutely can. Beginning with some bombastic guitar rock, it transmogrifies into a beautifully dark, undulating funk track underpinned by a whiplash bass womp. This kind of wobbling bassline was made ludicrous by the American take on dubstep earlier in the decade, but here co-producers Timberlake, Timbaland and the latter’s protege Danja conspire to make it dangerous again. Alongside the blockbuster elements there are gorgeously subtle flourishes, like the fluttering intake of breath sitting low in the mix.
Vocally, Timberlake heavily channels Prince, particularly the exacting, scornful tone of When Doves Cry, while his “whatchu gonna do with all that meat?” is like an X-rated version of Bruno Mars’s “whatchu tryna do?” from 24k Magic. If this is Timberlake’s white rebranding, he’s not doing a great job of it. But it’s not a mere parroting of others, either – the chorus, which modulates into a sweeter, smoother key, is signature Timberlake.
The video meanwhile, with shades of Ex Machina’s cyborg dance scene, stars Timberlake as a Steve Jobs figure controlling a robot with his own moves backstage – a smart way of announcing his maturity, not putting himself front and centre, while still getting to essay his magnificent flair for dance.
The maximalist ending of the track might not be to everyone’s tastes – it boils a little of the taste out of the funk – but is still handled with brio, and the song sounds like nothing else in the pop landscape right now. With its relatively experimental bent, Filthy may only get a 10th of the 737m streams Can’t Stop the Feeling! has got on Spotify – but it’s riveting evidence that Timberlake can still be the R&B futurist he was at the outset of his solo career.
