Midway through “BABY BABY,” a highlight of the excellent new Nourished by Time record, there is a sudden, descending synth swell, coupled with a delirious groan: Baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby! This refrain, “baby, baby,” is the centerpiece of the song, and up to now, it has been mellow: a muttered coo, spoken like a groggy lover. As a vocalist, Marcus Brown is dynamic and world-weary, his elastic range spanning the hope and heartbreak of life in a withering empire. Weightless as his music may sound, it is burdened by capitalist rot, which is what makes it wrenching—pinpointing the precise moment you realize, like many Americans, that you are fucked. This despair floods “BABY BABY,” and at this specific juncture, when he trades his mutter for a moan, it curdles into something agonizing. No longer tender, “baby, baby” becomes a cry for mercy: the tipping point between having everything and having it taken from you.
Brown, an outspoken 31 year old from Baltimore, makes music for the things our dystopia steals from us. The moniker “Nourished by Time,” which borrows from “Guided by Voices,” is a statement of process: a “reminder,” Brown explained last year, “that if you put your energy and put your love and heart into something, it has no choice but to bloom.” As in his music, there is a bleak subtext to this beautiful sentiment. Energy, love, and heart—human things—are incompatible with late-stage capitalism, a system where time is not nurtured, but ground, along with people, into profit. His debut, 2023’s Erotic Probiotic 2, had a mournful varnish, a memorial service for hopes crushed and dragged away on conveyor belts. On “Workers Interlude,” when he pleaded “Don’t make me wait so long,” it felt like a meta-commentary: For Black, working-class Americans, time may never arrive to nourish you at all.
The history of revolution, in America, is peppered with cries of Wait! Be patient with the system. Brown’s music is inextricable from this history, which almost makes “Nourished by Time” feel winking, sarcastic. The feeling is more biting than ever on The Passionate Ones, whose titular characters, weary of waiting, wrestle for their humanity in a dehumanizing era. Unlike Brown’s prior releases, The Passionate Ones renders oppression as materially grimy, earthbound, suffocating. Where Erotic Probiotic 2 was hypnagogic in spirit—drawing from ’80s pastiche, sports-television samples, echo-heavy harmonies—this LP foregrounds rawer, more physical elements, without sacrificing Brown’s booming, atmospheric textures. For a musician so adept at concocting dreamscapes, this renewed iteration of post-R&B, punk-tinged and apoplectic, feels bluntly anti-escapist, as if to say: No, this is not music to dissociate to. These times call for urgency.