Heals Me exists in substance as what it is that JMSN’s self-made stylistic scope, suspended in artistry by slappy basslines and juxtaposed falsettos through a sort of spinning Neo-Soul spectrum reaching both back in time and setting an untouchable precedent for the future, means to his personal sensitivities. It is a culminative marriage between the man and the artist – an uncalculated expression of truths that define his duality. The wide-ranging artist who is probably best described sans the boxing of genre or label, has been crafting unapologetically unique and boundlessly timeless music for a decade, disenchanted by the sterile, overly produced, and ultimately cancerous nature of the big box edgings the music industry’s largest studios and brands tend to bring in tow. Instead, setting out on a direction all his own where he has explored himself at length as an artist, he has become one of the most behind-the-curtain influences on the direction of a more analogue and traditionally instrumentalized renaissance throughout R&B, Neo-Soul, Neo-Funk, and modern Rock. Heals Me, too, has healing powers that can cure – are curing – so much of the white-wall, plastic ambiguity that much of music has accepted for too long. This here has soul, and bottomless pools of it.

 

His leading singles alluded to that identity en route to the album’s release. First came Rolling Stone, anthemic in the atmosphere it floats within by tethering silky chimes and JMSN’s signature and seemingly endless vocal prowess to bass play that would make George Clinton proud. It is the kind of introduction that only JMSN – with his explosively emotional auditory aesthetic, and daunting endurance – could make fit snuggly at a project’s onset, where for any other artist of today it would have to exist as a profoundly volatile album apex. But with Rolling Stone, JMSN was just getting started. Love 2 U, too, is of the stature and enduring force that itself feels pulled from the marathoning length of many of the Funk era’s most notorious hits. Listen to Parliament’s P-Funk and the immersive, compositional structure it inhabits. Then, listen to the sultry, erogenous touch of JMSN’s 8-minute Love 2 U. Perhaps, that timeframe is simply his sweet spot; perhaps he aims for the track to soundtrack the heat of your next lucky evening; but whatever his intention, Love 2 U, the torching heatwave of a guitar solo that caps its runtime, and the visuals that accompany it, are arguably the best eight minutes of 2021.

 

As for the other 37 minutes that Heals Me brings into focus, each and every moment is also curated with the emotion, sex, and innovative genius that makes JMSN JMSN; that make JMSN – as an artist and a man – one of the most vibrantly individualistic figures of our now. And for the Detroit-born renaissance man of the old-school Soul and the new-wave reinvention, Heals Me is ultimately a new exploration of self. It’s an exploration of what it is that heals JMSN, and he achieves it by slow and steady explorations of his ubiquitous sound, broken down into emotionally debauched eruptions of color, with yet another series of twists.

 

A Spanish guitar, an affinity for the relaxed-fit pace of his meandering Soul, and a riddle-brimming pen round out the rest of the new artisanal bag he packs for Heals Me, bringing waves of reminiscence towards the Santana-led era of the 90’s where strums and hums defined anything sultry and sweaty. Replace the hums with hymns of a volatile high, and whispers that would in the hands of any other modern artist feel early 2000’s R&B kitsch. But here, with Heals Me, the well-rounded and deep pool of liquid musical details JMSN weaves into the fold are emotionally immersive and unendingly, effortlessly cool.

 

Top-to bottom, the album feels like a golden-hour walk through the streets of Habana Vieja, open to love, but searching for lust. That id at the album’s core certainly apexes at Dondé Estas where the search for lust, and the necessary, blatantly sexual existence of JMSN as a man intersects perfectly – bilingually – with the decade-long exploration of himself as an artist. And realistically, the whole of the album is perhaps the zenith – the musical, artistic, and human summit (to this point) – of his career – his life – because it’s such an honest artistic expression, that it could have only been born of his truest inner man. It is a reinvention of what we think of when any term – R&B, Neo-Soul, Funk, Rock – is brought to our ears, perhaps acting as a catalyst to destroy such terms altogether. Because, with the Spanish influence of the collective work, merging with the slowed touch of his pace and the genius of his existing foundation as already one of the most notoriously defiant and mysterious artists of our time, Heals Me is simply an exploration of JMSN’s peace – an auditory display of JMSN’s innermost id.

 

Masterpiece.