EP Spotlight: Neptune by Gallant
On his self-released 2021 EP, Gallant stops performing pain and starts cataloging the specific ways he’s failed at love.
R&B had split into camps. Giveon was mining a baritone croon for big-tent heartbreak ballads. Summer Walker had turned romantic misery into a franchise. Jazmine Sullivan released Heaux Tales and rewrote the rules for how Black women could talk about desire on a major label. Everybody was owning their dirt, and the genre’s younger guard had figured out that admitting to your worst impulses could be a commercial asset, not a liability. Gallant arrived at this crowded table from a stranger position than most. He’d spent the previous five years on Warner Bros., where his Grammy-nominated debut Ology earned critical goodwill but modest sales, and where his 2019 follow-up Sweet Insomnia barely registered outside devoted circles.
In the meantime, he parted ways with Warner and his management team in 2020. He’d also lost a headlining tour to the pandemic and had to cancel a second run of dates for the second time in three years. He went back to his living room in Los Angeles with a cello he hadn’t practiced in four years, a producer named Stint he’d been working with since the beginning, and pages of late-night notes he didn’t really want anyone to read. Neptune, self-released in March 2021, came out of that solitude. Eight songs about screwing up a relationship, written mostly during quarantine by a man who’d been cut loose from the apparatus that was supposed to make him a star.
“Comeback” opens with Gallant doing something unusual for a guy whose instrument can reach stratospheric pitches: he keeps his delivery conversational, almost flat. He confesses that he was unfaithful, or at least negligent, and then frames his apology as an invitation for the other person to come back on his schedule. He was distant to monogamy, he admits, and tried to break up the monotony. There’s a sly self-awareness in collapsing those two words together—monogamy and monotony living in the same breath, as though boredom and betrayal are practically synonyms. But the contrition curdles fast. He isn’t begging so much as predicting that she’ll come around eventually, and when she does, he’ll be waiting. It’s the logic of someone who believes his own charm enough to confuse an apology with an offer.
After that calculating opener, “Chemical Romance” catches Gallant off guard. He allows himself to sound genuinely rattled by attraction, singing about butterflies being justified, a goofy and tender concession from someone who just spent the previous cut positioning himself as untouchable. His character is watching his own body betray the cool detachment he’d been performing. This finds him ambushed by his own need for someone. When interviewed by Billboard, he rewrote the song entirely for Neptune, stating that the original version was a different animal. Something in the final cut does feel like a late-night revision, a draft where the guard drops. Then “Dynamite” with Brandy punctures the interior monologue by adding a second perspective. Brandy sings about a lit fuse creeping up, a guilty conscience in overdrive, the two of them restless in the cosmic bed they made. They’re both asking the same absurd question: wouldn’t it be nice to just blow everything up, abandon the obligations and pretense, if only to stop lying? Gallant wrote the piano-led arrangement thinking of Brandy specifically, sent it on a long shot through a mutual connection, and somehow got her.
Gallant’s character deteriorates across the second half. On “Julie,” he’s pleading for someone to stay until morning, promising he can fix whatever’s broken, claiming her presence is the only thing anchoring him when hallucinations set in. The song skews toward an ‘80s psych-funk that feels appropriate for a man losing his grip. There’s a moment near the end where a voice screams “it’s happening, it’s happening!” and the track dissolves into the transition for “Third Eye Blind.” He concedes his moral compass was broken, that he’d been telling himself the lie about being better off alone, that what he thought was a castle was actually a moat. The most revealing line is buried in the second verse: he raps about an ego with a lit fuse and a lukewarm-blooded recluse, someone sure to misinterpret everything until the kamikaze mission doesn’t seem insane. And then: “Shouldn’t take disaster to decide/When the truth is in the bloodstream/Even through the morphine, I can tell.” He’s owning up to the fact that he needed catastrophe to snap him into seeing what he’d been doing.
VanJess arrives on “No More Tries” to broker something like reconciliation. The sisters’ harmonies split the difference between warmth and resignation. It’s a track that could be a slow dance or a goodbye. “Scars” sits mid-EP and works as Gallant’s most direct reckoning with consequences, the one place where he drops the relationship saga and just sits with the damage. And “Relapse” closes the loop by doing the worst thing it could do: undoing all the growth. Gallant’s guy successfully talks his partner into returning, knowing it’s a repetition, knowing her happiness will be temporary, calling the reunion a relapse to her face and still going through with it. He’s being truthful about a cycle he has no intention of breaking, and the truthfulness becomes its own kind of manipulation.
Gallant told SPIN that “Relapse” was the first song he wrote for the project, composed right after realizing his label situation was falling apart. He wanted it to feel like the safety of summer break, a suspended afternoon with no obligations. That the EP’s most selfish, most circular moment is also its most comforting is a contradiction Gallant never resolves—and shouldn’t have to. Neptune ends where plenty of real relationships end: with two people who understand each other perfectly, falling back into the same patterns because understanding was never the problem.