Nourished By Time Beats the Sophomore Slump With “The Passionate Ones”
by Ben Rosielle
A Spotify profile can be many things: a neatly manicured showcase of one’s good taste, a nearly anonymous brick wall, or an overgrown, tangled array of playlists and followers. Marcus Brown’s Spotify profile is fortunately in the latter camp, a (seemingly) all-encompassing archive of his playlists dating back to 2015. It’s an ecosystem where Arthur Russell, Ennio Morricone and Outkast rub up against each other amongst a whole host of alt-rock, hip-hop and contemporary R&B artists. This blend serves as a solid reference for the music he makes under the moniker Nourished By Time, straddling many sounds at once to form his unique brand of left-field pop music. The Passionate Ones, the sophomore album from the Baltimore-born singer, songwriter and producer, sands down the superfluous rough edges of his prior work, leaving a focused, immediate collection of songs that are as timeless as they are relevant to the present moment.
The Passionate Ones, like prior Nourished By Time releases, is full of beats and sounds that wouldn’t be out of place on a Saint Etienne record. Brown relies on delightfully artificial sampled drum programming and lush backing synth tones to serve as the backbone for his songwriting, recalling some of the best production-forward pop music of the late 80s and early 90s. Where the production sounds the most modern is in little sonic flourishes such as his spare use of pitch-shifting (classic Ableton producer trick), giving the record a faux-retro feeling that references the sounds of 80s and 90s pop, dance and R&B while letting the listener know that they’re hearing a record produced in 2025. The album is dotted with little moments where instruments briefly rise above the texture of the song, such as the spurts of flanging, overdriven guitar on “Idiot In The Park” or the tiny synth riffs spread throughout “Tossed Away.”
Like most great songwriters, Brown pens deceptively simple tunes that effortlessly worm their way into your brain. Every instrument in his focused arrangements slot in perfectly with each other, making his production feel full without feeling busy, clear without feeling hollow. Brown’s heavy, straightforward usage of basic effects such as reverb and delay adds the right amount of color and space to flesh out the instrumentals, particularly in the spacey openers of songs like “Max Potential” and “When The War Is Over.” There’s a swelling, ecstatic quality that permeates The Passionate Ones, like Brown had applied a magical Nourished By Time veneer to every song.
The Passionate Ones flirts with the uncanny, from the buzzing, brassy, retro synthesizers that find their way into nearly every song on the record to the stilted electronic drum fills that bookend album opener “Automatic Love.” This uncanniness reaches its zenith on the aptly named “Cult Interlude,” which opens with low synth strings, chiming guitar and a cheesy synthesized flute patch, all drenched in ringing, expansive delay. Just as the song settles into this texture, a choppy, stuttering spoken word sample enters the mix alongside a disembodied, vocal-like backing drone. Brown plays around with the sample, having it double back on itself and playing the very beginning of words before they are immediately cut off. As “Cult Interlude” progresses, a watery, swirling tinge of pitch-shifting enters the vocal mix, stretching and contorting around the unmodulated vocal chops. The top layers fall away, leaving the sample alone with a plodding, repetitive bass synth and the unsettling vocal modulation. The synths come back more vivid than ever before, then the song fizzles out, ending with a chorus of voices chanting “The Passionate Ones.” You could easily make a similarly detailed analysis of any track on The Passionate Ones, but “Cult Interlude” stands out as the only song to not feature Brown’s voice, leaving his production chops to do the heavy lifting.
Speaking of vocals, a Nourished By Time review wouldn’t be complete without a mention of Brown’s rich, distinctive voice. Stronger and more expressive than his vocals on previous Nourished By Time releases, Brown even expands his baritone vocal range to break out into a falsetto at the end of closer and title track “The Passionate Ones.” While one could get lost in his voice alone, it’s his lyrics which seal Brown’s status as one of the most interesting singer-songwriters of our generation. As basically any Nourished By Time interview will tell you, he is an unabashed, outspoken socialist concerned with improving conditions for workers in the here and now. While his songs aren’t exactly political tirades, a leftist ethos bleeds into his writing, occasionally boiling over into overt statements.
The most striking lyric on the album comes during the upbeat “BABY BABY,” where Brown sings “If you can bomb Palestine, you can bomb Mondawmin.” Mondawmin was the neighborhood where the uprising in response to the 2015 murder of Freddie Gray by the Baltimore police began, so its invocation in relation to Palestine links the twin liberation struggles of Black Americans and Palestinians against a state system more than willing to use indiscriminate violence against them. “9 2 5” is the album’s most dancefloor-ready track with its joyous descending piano intro and four-on-the-floor kick drum, but it doesn’t interfere with Brown penning a brilliant ode to the working-class anti-establishment musician grind, a piece of autobiography that simultaneously speaks to the experience of people around the world.
The best moments on The Passionate Ones are when all the aforementioned elements come together in a storm of musical momentum, threatening to swallow you in their euphoria. Thankfully for the listener, there is no shortage of these moments, from the fluttering synthpop bridge of “Crazy People” to the arpeggiated piano-led outro of “Jojo.” It’s that “oh my god” experience that got me and most other music fans into the artform in the first place, and what keeps us coming back, searching frantically like a junkie for the next hit of unadulterated musical bliss, the next perfect song or perfect moment to obsess over. To have an album that manages to repeat this again and again is a sign of something special. The Passionate Ones is sublime, uplifting music that transcends mere nostalgia and cements Brown a place in my personal canon of Most Important 21st Century Musicians. Give it a listen. You might be obsessed too.
