Album Review: Monica by Jack Harlow
An album named after a ‘90s R&B icon, made by a rapper who can barely sing, Jack Harlow scrapped four singles, abandoned rap entirely, and focused on women who have already moved on.
In the voice of Deborah Cox, paraphrasing: “How….. Did….. We…. Get here?” Between Jackman. and Monica, Jack Harlow released four singles and scrapped all of them. “Hello Miss Johnson” was a bossa nova-inflected rap about his girlfriend’s mother. “Tranquility” was a YouTube-only track where he said, flat-out, “I ain’t lookin’ for no hip-hop credibility” and “I don’t think I’ve really made nothin’ incredible.” “Set You Free” was a breakup song about drinking again. “Just Us” with Doja Cat came and went. None of them appear on this album. He moved to New York, recorded at Electric Lady Studios, and posted a teaser video where he sat petting a Labradoodle while a group of women (including Taylor Rooks) discussed whether men lose power by saying “I love you.” He mostly listened. Then, on his 28th birthday, he put out nine tracks with no rapping on any of them.
Monica is named after the R&B singer, but no woman named Monica appears anywhere in the lyrics. The women on this record are described in careful, specific terms: independent, employed, sleeping on their own, checking into hotels, making their own money. Not one of them is waiting around for Jack Harlow to show up. On “Lonesome,” the woman he’s fixated on works on her own projects and stays to herself. On “Prague,” an ocean separates them, and he’s glad, because otherwise the feelings would swallow him whole. On “Living Alone,” the woman he’s addressing has built an entire life in solitude and seems content with it. He tells her he hates to impose, that he can’t postpone, that he wants to love her until his name is etched on the stone. She says, “What are you on?” He says, “My fault, I’m just gone. So gone. Off you.” That exchange is the whole album in miniature.
His friends think he has a problem. On “All of My Friends,” they tell him he comes on too strong, too fast, and falls in love too often. They tell him to slow down and be cautious. He hears them and does nothing about it, insisting this time is different, calling it intuition, promising that if he had this one person, he’d never want love again. On “Against the Grain,” a woman looks right at him and acts like she doesn’t feel anything, keeps talking about the trouble he’ll bring her. On “Move Along” (five lines sung by Cory Henry, not Harlow), the message flips entirely: move along, my love, you’ll find trouble if you wait for me. It won’t be long before I break that heart you gave so easily. That song sits at the center of the record like a warning label he wrote for himself and then ignored on every other track.
Aksel Arvid produced seven of these nine entries, and the consistency pays off. The drums stay muted and unhurried, the bass lines are smooth, and Ravyn Lenae’s background vocals appear on four cuts without ever calling attention to themselves, which by the way should’ve sung the entire record. She blends into the mix the way a second voice in a room blends into conversation. Cory Henry plays organ and piano on “My Winter,” and the neo-soul inflection there is the warmest the record gets, a drowsy late-night sound that suits the song’s subject. Rogét Chahayed co-produced “Lonesome” with Angel López and Clay Harlow, and that cut has the most sophisticated melodic structure on the LP, its chorus built around a series of clipped observations about the woman (sleeping on your own, staying to yourself, working on your own projects) that function as both admiration and lament. Harlow’s voice isn’t good. He can carry a melody, and he phrases well enough that the thinness doesn’t become a liability, but he’ll never be the reason you return to these cuts on vocal merit alone.
“My Winter” is the sharpest song here. He’s telling one woman that she’s his winter and another is his summer, and when one comes around he craves the other. He admits he lies next to one and thinks about the other, calls it a curse, says conventional wisdom tells him about the grass on the other side of the fence, although the real reason is the production standing out more than he is. “Lonesome” earns a similar weight in its second verse, where the timeline of a relationship gone sideways compresses into a few lines. He was trying to have his cake and taste it too, she discovered one of his traits, took the elevator out of his place. The image is physical (a woman literally descending away from him) and it says everything without commentary. He’s been standing still ever since.
The spoken outro on “Against the Grain” is the most surprising moment on Monica. After nine tracks of women declining him, a real couple recounts how they got together: met on Friday, called Saturday, went out Sunday, went to a movie, then dinner, then Thursday, then Saturday, then Tuesday, then every day, then got married. No drama, no resistance, just proximity that became permanent. Placed at the end of a record about all the ways that doesn’t happen, it isn’t a happy ending so much as a reminder of what the other eight tracks keep reaching for and missing.
Where Monica reeks beyond his singing voice is in the distance between its best ideas and its weaker ones. “Say Hello” has a pretty chorus but little underneath it; “I’m giving up control of you” repeats without gaining any new meaning, and the verse is too skeletal to compensate. “Living Alone” rambles past its own point, circling the same request to meet, the same apology for imposing, the same declaration that he can’t postpone. The ‘earnestness’ that makes the stronger material feel honest starts to feel aimless when the writing doesn’t tighten. And “Prague,” for all its good intentions, the third verse about waking up and taking up petunias, admitting he might be a few years younger, never quite lands a melody strong enough to hold its own ambition. It’s not the songs are bad, but it’s hard to take them seriously hearing him sing them as he’s wasting great production with musicianship attached to it. They’re songs that each needed one more idea, and that is finding a legit vocalist to execute, and the name is not Jackman Harlow.
Subpar (★★☆☆☆)
Favorite Track(s): “My Winter,” “Move Along”