The throughline of Leon Bridges’ decade-plus career has been his voice. Because Bridges’ honeysuckle tenor lends itself so naturally to early-Sixties soul, Bridges got pegged as a Sam Cooke incarnate with his 2015 debut Coming Home. He’s since proven
that his smooth-crooning vocals are just as expressive whether he’s toying with contemporary R&B (2018’s watermark Good Thing), waxing poetic about his home state of Texas over Khruangbin’s chilled-out surf rock (2020’s Texas Sun) or singing about his Nintendo-64-filled youth (2024’s opus “Panther City”).
But Bridges’ latest — a collaborative album with the British trio Jungle — might be the most daring vehicle yet for his sui generis instrument. Bridges has a knack for picking like-minded collaborators; like Khruangbin, Jungle are vibes-forward revivalists interested in synthesizing sounds, styles and textures from their crate-digging record collection, which ranges from Fela Kuti to Bowie to bossa nova. But unlike any of Bridges’ tightly focused, largely song-oriented records to this point, Jungle provide Bridges a backdrop of extended grooves and broad landscapes for him to use his voice more as a paintbrush than a storytelling device.
At its best, Happiness Anytime finds Bridges stretching out as a singer, leaning into the trance-like rhythms provided by Jungle’s Tom McFarland, Josh Lloyd-Watson and Lydia Kitto. See “Illusion,” the bossa nova number more fit for a dance floor than the seated theaters Bridges typically plays. As Bridges repeats the refrain “I’m here in the present/One step at a time,” he’s discovering new shades and shapes in the timbre and tone of his own voice, stretching out the final words of each line until they become part of the groove.
“[Making love] to the rhythm,” as he puts it in that same song, is the point: Happiness Anytime feels like, among other things, an escape for Bridges. Even if his music hasn’t always been seen this way, Bridges follows in the traditional singer-songwriter model, an approach he took to new heights at the best moments of his 2024 self-titled LP. This time around, conventional narrative takes a backseat; the writing is more abstract and less often the point. On a song like “Watch You Dance,” Bridges lets the chugging bassline do more scene-setting than any of his impressionistic lyrics could.
Then there’s the call and response between Bridges and Jungle on “Talk It Over,” in which the band and Bridges repeat some version of the line “all we do is talk it over” over an up-tempo beat and soaring organ for the better part of three minutes. It might be one of the more emotionally effective stories Bridges has ever told.
The only catch: Songs that don’t break as clearly from Bridges past records (“Your Love is Electric,” “Please Don’t Say Goodbye”) risk feeling like fodder as background music for a chic café soundtrack. That’s hardly Bridges’ fault: the great tension of his career is that his music is often regarded for its surface level genre gestures rather than its substance. That someone with a voice as communicative and constantly evolving as Bridges is often reduced to a retro aesthete is a shame. So while Happiness Anytime is another iteration of Bridges’ knack — like a roots music Drake — for tapping into tastemaking musicians in his orbit, it ultimately shows that beneath all that, he’s an artist continually challenging himself to find entirely new ways to tell his story.
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