Jessie Ware, That! Feels! Good!, review: A carnival of carnal pleasure

Jessie Ware's new album cracks the disco whip and demands you submit to it. It's a frisky, flirty riot

Jessie Ware’s confidence is writ large across her new album (Photo: Jack Grange)

April 27, 2023 2:55 pm(Updated 6:28 pm)

Pleasure is having a real moment in music and it’s about time. While artists like Self Esteem focus on “prioritising pleasure” through spry orchestrals and rousing sermons, Jessie Ware cracks the disco whip and demands you submit to it, commanding you to feel yourself from the very first seconds, in which a chorus of breathy voices (including Kylie Minogue and Roisin Murphy’s) tell you “That feels goo-ood”.

It is a kind of second act, the first being 2020’s What’s Your Pleasure?, released into lockdown and facilitating a thousand kitchen discos. This record can’t be contained by the kitchen: it needs sweat and flesh and sequins and pearls. It’s a frisky, flirty riot. It feels so good.

More than once I found myself thinking, “What does this song remind me of?” and the answer each time was the Spice Girls. The party chatter and 90s timbre of “Beautiful People”, in particular, has the ping-ponging energy of five people delivered here by just one.

Perhaps it is partly the influence of Stuart Price, legendary producer who is no stranger to the glitz of a Madonna hit, the wryness of a Pet Shop Boys song, the glamour of Dua Lipa’s last album. But more likely it comes from Ware herself, whose confidence is writ large across the record.

The horns on “Begin Again” (arranged by KOKOROKO’s Sheila Maurice-Grey) are the perfect accent to the carnival of carnal pleasure, and the way Ware sings “Baby don’t you stop” on “Free Yourself” sounds like a woman transcending. “That feels good – do it again,” she commands. You will have no choice but to comply.