Album Review: Backward by Jordan Ward
The Atlanta singer airs out his dislocation and doubt across Backward. He wants land in Georgia, a son he hasn’t had yet, and to break whatever cycle his father started. The wanting trumps the doing.
Somebody can’t find the way back. The path Jordan Ward thought he recognized has gone dark, and the cheat codes he tried left him deeper in debt than before. He pushed people away, couldn’t even figure out where to confide, and now stands in a place that doesn’t look like anything he asked for. This is where the record begins and where it stubbornly stays, returning again and again to the sensation of being unmapped in your own life. The weed helps, or seems to, though the help always comes with a catch. The apartment fills up with other people’s noise. The holidays arrive and there’s nobody around. A father met once at nineteen asked why he even showed up. A mother kept too much to herself while her son kept too much from her. A woman might be the answer, but the constant arguing exhausts both parties.
By teaming up with Lido once more, Ward orbits these pressures across Backward’s runtime, laying them out with enough plain language that you never wonder what he’s complaining about. “Stranger” names the disorientation directly: chasing money so hard he barely survived, ending up somewhere he doesn’t recognize, afraid to retrace his steps. “I’ve lost my fire,” he admits, before confessing he prayed for this life. The prayer getting answered and still feeling stranded marks most of what follows.
Weed doubles as intimacy ritual and crutch. “Smokin Potna” centers a relationship where the blunt becomes shared breath. When he’s out of town, she doesn’t smoke. SAILORR’s verse admits to getting choked up, spilling truth into the ash trays. “High Functioning” twists this into self-congratulation. Everybody else folds when they get high, but he keeps running, keeps going, brags he can’t be copied. The boast has cracks in it. A girlfriend who only hits the joint sometimes, who “can’t get none done” in the sunshine, suggests the functionality isn’t as stable as advertised. He tells you to know yourself before the comedown. Whether he follows his own advice remains unclear.
The apartment songs carry a different weight. “Noisy Neighbors” inventories the building. One tenant with a drug problem smoking up his stash, one sad and alone despite company, one watching porn instead of finding love, one eating because he moved far from family. Ward hears them all through the walls, but halfway through concedes it might be in his head. He pays a thousand-dollar HOA with no approved way of life, watches a Target open nearby while his crib’s value flatlines, and discloses a creative block that almost ended everything. The desperation for a place where he can sleep and feel pride runs straight into “Change of Scenery,” where he crashes on a friend’s bed downtown, rides the subway tunnel hoping to come home a better man. His father gave him three grand to get back on his feet, asked only that he remember how much it means. Ward buries his face in crowds trying to locate himself again.
Out of frame, “Juicy” dreams of pulling cash from a safe and buying land in Georgia with his baby, while stopping mid-verse to ask whether he’s been living in vain, chasing frivolous dreams that backburner the world into flames. “Themselves” demands a partner who continues making her bread regardless of his presence. “Crashing out with no brake pad” turned him into a sadge, he says, and he needs someone who matches that energy. The Vegas flights, the hustle talk, the insistence that a woman be “gamed up”—all of it reads as defense against the earlier confessions of aimlessness.
Family ruptures anchor the record’s second half. “Take-Out” pictures holidays alone, hunched over a paper plate on the balcony, asking to be remembered during grace. “Til Then” talks to a son Ward hasn’t fathered yet, promising to teach him car stuff and boxing, swearing to break the cycle even though nobody showed him how. The second half of that song travels back to 2014, when Ward met his own father at nineteen. The man asked why he even came. Ward calls it gaslighting, or maybe a mind left behind. A decade passed and the absence still makes him poor. “Champion Sound” extends this reckoning to his mother. Stages she went through while he was on his own stages, money he wasted that could have set them free by twenty-five, the time he sat in a cell and never told her. He asks what you hang on the wall when it’s all said. The question hangs unanswered.
“Y” attempts to pull the romantic thread tight. Ward concedes the back and forth and constant arguing exhausted him, owns up to neglecting what sparked the initial connection. When he tries to reassess, he says he feels more in line with his destiny. Whether that destiny includes her depends on the verse. “Cutti” and “Carsex” loosen the grip entirely, stacking flexes and hoes and Lamborghinis with a kind of detached momentum. Smino swerves through a verse about head so bad he needs ice from the get right. TiaCorine brags about juice mixed with tangerine. The tonal pivot doesn’t resolve anything; it just moves on.
Ward writes with enough precision that the evasions stand out. He’ll tell you about the HOA bill, the Target, the cell he hid from his mom, the three grand from his dad, the girlfriend’s baby daddy who smells the weed and wants to match. What he won’t do is push any of these admissions toward a harder conclusion. The cycle he promises to break stays promised. The land in Georgia hovers as fantasy. The son sits hypothetical. The father persists unreckoned. The honesty about the drift doesn’t interrupt it.
Above Average (★★★☆☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Noisy Neighbors,” “Til Then,” “Champion Sound”