Single, sad and highly sexed, Nick Jonas wrote his third solo album in the wake of a breakup and the dawn of his dating exploration. It ushers in a sound best described as bachelor pop. Much like Zayn’s R&B debut, the Disney channel graduate and former Jonas Brother maintains mainstream music’s flirtation with melancholy and leftfield lyrics. Champagne Problems is a tale of excess that banishes Drake’s “trouble at the top” narrative to a neon-lit skyrise Dubai club. Bacon, meanwhile, is an ode to bacon. One of the complications he seems to have encountered in 2015 was the burgeoning parity of womankind: “When did all these good girls decide to be bad?” he laments on Good Girls. There are many quirks to this glossy, compelling record, but unlike Justin Timberlake, who forged his name as a solo act by his affiliation with the Neptunes, it’s not savvy or strange enough to stand out.
