“Late Night Feelings”, Mark Ronson’s new album, is a delight

By M.H.

THE FIRST single from “Late Night Feelings”, Mark Ronson’s new album, was released back in November. “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart”, a terrific, Dolly Parton-esque track featuring Miley Cyrus, was an instant hit, and has scored nearly 250m plays on Spotify to date. A number of interviews followed in which Mr Ronson talked about the album: with the BBC in November, the Sunday Times in December, the Guardian and Interview magazine in February. One of the themes of those pieces was his discontent with a world in which artists were forced by their paymasters to churn out hits of diminishing quality, making records to appeal to algorithms rather than to satisfy their own artistic urges.

It seemed an odd thing to say as “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart” racked up the streams. Then the four subsequent singles did not come close to matching that success—the second most popular, “Find U Again”, has 225m fewer streams on Spotify—and “Late Night Feelings” did not appear. The official line from the Ronson camp is that the album was always scheduled for June, and that it wasn’t announced until April. Yet all those interviews talked about the album in some depth, and the interviewers had clearly heard it.

Mr Ronson became a superstar in 2015 with the release of “Uptown Funk”, a catchy funk-pop song featuring Bruno Mars, and one of the best-selling singles of all time. It turned Mr Ronson into the kind of artist on whom major record labels rely to generate revenue, and to prove to other artists that they know how to sell music by the truckload. Labels want their superstars to carry on being superstars: if someone makes them a great deal of money making party hits, they tend to want more of the same. So while the official line is that “Late Night Feelings” was always meant to be coming out now, it wouldn’t be a huge surprise if at some point in the future Sony reveals that it had wanted more obvious hits on one of their marquee albums for 2019, and had offered Mr Ronson more time to make them.

Luckily “Late Night Feelings” is worth the wait. It is both very old-fashioned and very modern. Mr Ronson has said that it is an album of “sad bangers”—meaning songs both heartbroken and catchy—which happens to be one of pop’s more notable trends (Robyn, the current critical darling, is a queen of the sad banger). It is also a notion that is at the heart of some of the very best pop music of the 1970s: ABBA, especially, and huge tranches of disco (see “I Will Survive”).

It might seem a curious move for Mr Ronson, who is best known for party music: “Valerie”, with Amy Winehouse, from 2007; the all-conquering “Uptown Funk”; “Electricity”, the single he and his friend Diplo made in 2018 with the singer Dua Lipa. The one word you wouldn’t have used to describe Mr Ronson’s past work is “personal”, but this time it is inspired by his own despair after the breakdown of his marriage (even if he is just one of scores of writers on each track, and as ever, it is guests—Lykke Li, Camila Cabello, King Princess, Yebba, Alicia Keys, Ms Cyrus, Angel Olsen, Diana Gordon, Ilsey—doing the singing).

Indeed, this is a rather lovely album. In theory putting a number of very good writers, musicians and singers together on one record will produce something worthwhile, but in reality that is not always the case. Mr Ronson, though, has a gift for synthesising the contributions of others into something coherent, and he clearly sticks with people he trusts. “Late Night Feelings” features members of the Dap-Kings, a soul group which played on Winehouse’s “Back to Black” (produced by Mr Ronson), Kevin Parker of Tame Impala, and the Parisian production duo The Picard Brothers. Between them, they’ve made a gorgeous, lush, melodic record, the kind that—and this is meant as praise—you can imagine popping up in bar scenes and montages in decent romantic comedies for years to come.

The shame is that “Late Night Feelings” deserved all those big interviews this month, to give it the biggest push. Its big hit single should have come out two weeks before release, rather than seven months before, to maximise momentum. It is a terrific album—even if it doesn’t include another “Uptown Funk”.