Album Review: MORELUV by 3ee
3ee’s third album in two years runs hot on desire but thin on what to do with it. The songs that admit confusion matter more than the dozen that don’t.
Sometime between late 2024 and early 2025, a pocket of Brooklyn R&B coalesced around a shared studio, a shared taste, and a compulsive need to keep putting songs out. Kenji, Norah’s World, waytoofresco, jsilos. Vocalists and producers who kept circling one another’s projects, guest-spotting, co-signing, releasing at a clip that felt less like strategy and more like people who simply could not stop recording.
When bbyblu dropped “561” in January 2025, and the streaming numbers climbed past 800,000, the connective thread ran back to one address, one ear, one person doing the bulk of the production. 3ee, born Austin Keller Broadway, Dallas-raised, now planted in New York, had already burned through two solo albums across 2024: LSTN!!! in the spring, LUVSNGS by November. Before any of it, he was a trumpet kid with designs on the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a classically trained musician who veered sideways into beats that borrow their bounce and syncopation from Timbaland’s fingerprints, Pharrell’s counters, and Scott Storch’s keyboard warmth. MORELUV is the third album in under two years.
A dozen of those songs want the same thing, and they’re not shy about it. “COME2ME” and “DIGITS” are both pickup records at different stages of the night, one inviting someone over, the other still working up to getting a phone number, and neither pretends the interest runs deeper than “When you coming by to my room?” “GIRLLIKEU” puts it plainly enough with “it’s something physical, I can’t explain it,” and that line could sit above most of this album’s first half as a motto—the attraction is there, the explanation isn’t coming, move on. “STCKSHFT” runs its sex metaphor through car imagery with zero pretense about where it’s headed, first gear to second, roof or bedroom, “Are you ready for how I’m about to make ya come and lock it down tonight?”
The uptempo stuff keeps a similar temperature: “INNAMINUTE” brags about stamina, “FLASHES” chases a girl through a strobe-lit room, “1OAK” flatters without specifics, and “LYKFIRE” burns through its desire imagery in under ninety seconds before vanishing entirely. These songs bounce, and they bounce well, in a way that recalls the JT-circa-Justified sweet spot 3ee has been chasing since his first record. A confident guy singing “do you like it when I touch it like that?” on one track, “I just wanna know you, girl” on another, and “can we link up, need a one on one” on a third will eventually blur together, no matter how tight the production is. You can ride the feeling, or you can start noticing that seven of these tracks could swap verses without anybody catching the difference.
3ee gets more interesting when he lets a song go crooked. “CLCKWRK” carries real irritation about someone who flips from affection to hostility without warning, and a narrator who knows he’s lost the wheel but keeps riding anyway. “I’m not in the wheel, but you’re driving me,” he sings, and the line sticks because it admits powerlessness without dressing it up. He’d rather stay and live inside the lie than say the truth out loud. The admission has weight, and the song sounds like it. “EVEN” goes further by handing the mic to Tyler Lewis for the second verse, letting the person who cheated speak. “Caught me in my lies, you worked me out,” Lewis sings, then pivots with jarring casualness: “It was one night, one time, but no mistakes were made. Can’t a girl have a little fun?” That’s the single most alive lyrical moment on MORELUV, somebody refusing to apologize while simultaneously granting permission to retaliate, and neither person wins. It just lets both people be furious at each other, which is how that situation actually plays out.
Breakups now register in small public deletions. Someone scrubs your photos off their page and the absence says everything the conversation couldn’t. “KEEPMEINMIND” lives in that specific wound, 3ee admitting he said things he didn’t mean and knowing that asking for another chance only risks making it worse. The desperation in that chorus sits apart from anything else on the album. Elsewhere, the features do targeted work without overstaying. Joyce Wrice’s presence on “MASTERPIECE” sharpens the flirtation into something with teeth, her call-and-response pushing 3ee past charm into a register where “nothing untouched” sounds like a dare. Casey Jones II drops the raunchiest verse on the record during “BACK2BACK,” all “back dimples, fat ass, it’s that simple,” and at minimum he says plainly what several other songs keep circling without committing to.
The 2000s production DNA suits the uptempo material well enough. 3ee knows how to build a drum pattern that nods to Timbaland’s hiccupping rhythms, and his ear for vocal stacking gives the hooks a warmth that a colder mix would flatten. The same palette that keeps the party cuts bouncing can sand down the edges of the tracks that need roughness. A song like “CLCKWRK” could hit harder stripped down to sparser elements, and “EVEN” would sting more if the beat gave Tyler Lewis’s confession a little less polish to hide behind. When the production fits the mood it disappears in the best way; when it doesn’t, the bounciness starts to feel like a uniform.
Eighteen songs is a lot of real estate for an artist whose strongest material depends on a sudden flicker of honesty in between longer stretches of wanting. MORELUV could have lost five or six tracks. “LYKFIRE,” “1OAK,” “STOPNGO,” possibly “INNAMINUTE” could have gone, and emerged tighter, with the ratio tilting toward the cuts that have something to chew on. Somebody needed to say that a thirteenth song about physical attraction, no matter how well-produced, gives the listener less than one more song about confusion or regret. 3ee can write both. He just wrote more of the easy one.
“DOYA?” might be the most honest thing on the record.
“I want you here in my arms
If we’re good, why’s it feel wrong?
Your friends still play my songs
But you don’t hear any of that.”
Each time through the chorus, the gap between wanting someone and knowing they’re wrong for you gets wider without closing. By the bridge he’s just repeating “I want you, I want you, I want you,” and the phrase stops meaning desire and starts meaning something closer to habit, or panic. “THERESTOFTHENIGHT” ends the album with a question that never gets answered—“If I told you I hate it whenever you go, would that make you stay? Or would you run for the door?” He pleads for patience, for a little more time, then lands on a line about a bullet-sized hole shot through his heart, doomed from the start, and begs one more time if she’ll just come lay in bed with him and let him speak his mind.
Above Average (★★★☆☆)
Favorite Track(s): “CLCKWRK,” “EVEN,” “DOYA?”