Majid Jordan Dropped a Perfect Pacific-Coast-Highway-Sunset Album, Just In Time For Winter

Majid Jordan have become unstuck in time. The duo—comprised of singer Majid Al Maskati and producer Jordan Ullman—have been making anachronistic music from the beginning; early in their career, the dial on their ever-mutating fusion of pop, R&B, alternative and easy listening often landed somewhere between 80s New Wave and R&B. Album number four—Good People, which dropped last Friday—is the latest product of a decade-long friendship. They’ve known each other since 2012, and have been making studio albums together since 2016; a decade-plus of being in lockstep and in their own creative bubble, has made time fold in on itself. And now they’ve found themselves back where they started.

Good People is a reference to the duo's original moniker, which they dreamed up when they were still just Toronto college students sharing and making music with each other. And the music is more reminiscent of the early stages free EP they released under that name (which you can still find floating around the internet) than the funky throwback tracks that took them to stardom. The vibes are less Don Johnson/Miami Vice, more like a warm bath at the end of an already relaxing day, or driving down the PCH at dusk. Majid’s soft croons and lilting falsetto have never sounded more ethereal; Jordan’s beats never more soothing. A sunset graces the album cover, a track titled “Sunset” closes the album, Al Maskati says they kept a picture of a sunset in the studio when they recorded in their decidedly not often warm and sunny hometown—you get the idea.

Was a full circle reset the intention when they set out to make the album? Al Maskati is hesitant to ascribe intention to anything they create. “It's just—we've been making music for 10 years now. And it still feels like it's just the beginning. I think our generation has so much pressure to find solutions, get results, discover, execute. And it plays with our perception of time,” he muses, sitting in front of a large impressionistic painting on our Zoom call, searching for the words to explain the work his and Ullman’s symbiosis yields. “I think 10 years between those two projects and them sounding similar shows that time is so much deeper than what we perceive it as. So, it feels like a full circle moment maybe because it's the same moment. We're just living it and thinking it's two different moments. Who knows?”

But where After Hours lived up to its name with late-night laidback songs, there’s an inherent maturity to the sound and lyrics of Good People that makes it clear these two moments aren’t quite the same. In conversation, Al Maskati and Ullman are even more disarmingly Zen than the music they’ve put forth; there’s an air of contentment and ease. They’ve won already. From getting that EP to the ever-searching ears of Drake’s creative right hand 40, to helping the 6ix God craft one of his first true-blue pop hits in “Hold On, We’re Going Home” and subsequently landing a label deal with him, to building up a sturdy, loyal fanbase. (“Hold On” is the mainstream smash single, but people of distinguished taste—including Tyler, The Creator and Drake himself—count “Feel No Ways,” the summery Views album cut that Majid co-wrote and Jordan produced, among one of Drizzy's best songs ever.) The hard part is over. They even got an elusive Diddy feature on their last project. Now they’ve arrived at the crucial inflection point for an artist: the moment where that solid footing becomes capital to either be complacent or start freely experimenting.

Their first two albums were like “Hold On” on steroids, or more true to the era of the sonic reference points, pure uncut powder. (There has not been a pop song in the past few years quite as effortless jiggy as their vastly underrated 2017 cut “Gave Your Love Away.”) Then 2021’s Wildest Dreams offered a slight departure, throwing in more dance-tinged songs and even an acoustic ballad. “We're 10 years into making music. We've had our success. We've built our core following. We have the freedom to do what we want. What are we going to do with that power?,” Al Maskati recalls pondering. “Are we going to manipulate it?”

Step one to answering that question was to touch grass. Music nerds though they may be, Al Maskati and Ullman are, especially at this comfortable stage, admittedly not studio rats. “We're not the type of people to be in the studio 24/7, seven days a week, 365. Some artists back in the day like James Brown would be like, ‘You got to make sure that you can get to the studio when inspiration strikes, because if I sing something one day, it won't sound the same if I sing it another day.’ That may be true,” Al Maskati says with a shrug. “And there may be so many great songs that we'll never know because someone didn't just jump right on and react to their inspiration. [But] for us, I think it was more so [about] meditation, slowing down.” That meant reconnecting with family and loved ones, indulging in romantic relationships, simply spending time. “It should be more apparent in people's lives that if you want to go home, if you want to reconnect with your family and your friends, and if you have the ability to do that in the first place… at that point you have to ask yourself, What does the word wealth mean? It's really the reason why we make the music,” Ullman says.

They went into that sabbatical with even more philosophical questions—“What are we doing? Why are we doing it? What does the world need? What do we need? What do we need so we know what we can give the world what we think it needs?”—and emerged with a predictable answer that’s nonetheless hard to debate or take issue with.

“The world needs more love,” is the conclusion Al Maskati recalls arriving at. “It needs more love in a big way. It needs more humanity in a big way. It needs more compassion and understanding, less apathy. Not everything is a joke. There's a lot of suffering. When you can sit down and really, really reflect on that, it takes privilege to be able to do that.”

The result is their most earnest album yet, with lyrics and a vibe that hews more Adult Contemporary than some of the other ‘70s and ‘80s zones they’d tapped into previously in their career. They’ve approached this level of raw tenderness before—their debut’s aching album cut “Love Is Always There,” the sunny album closer “Sweet” on their last project—but this is the first time it’s maintained across an entire project. Miscommunication of some sort was a loose recurring theme in early Majid Jordan songs. On Good People, Majid is direct from the intro, promising “I’m not playing games with your love, thankful for the way it lifts me up.” When he croons “I need you, need you in my life,” it isn’t to plead, beg or convince, but rather just an open statement of fact. This is music only for, as Jay-Z once coined it, “the grown and sexy.”

It’s in glaringly stark contrast to most of contemporary popular R&B—definitely a key strain in their DNA if not the dominant gene—where toxicity is still the reigning emotion. Once again, the guys are hesitant to call any creative choice an intentional decision or kneejerk reaction, but Ullman notes his friend just naturally radiates good energy. Where most artists dig deep within and come up with demons, Al Maskati always appeals to better angels. “I think the thing that I've always really admired with Majid's writing is how, when he is introspective, it's actually very positive. A lot of [artists], when they're introspective, especially today, I don't think it's necessarily a positive way of speaking to yourself. I think if you really spoke to yourself the way that some of these songs read… I don't know if it's great for you,” Ullman says. “It might be fun to listen to, and it might be something that you relate to at some point. I'm not taking any credit away from that. I'm just saying that I really appreciate that in Majid's writing, he's saying things that I'm feeling. And so if two people are feeling that, then Frazier's going to feel it. And it kind of has a ripple effect from there. Love is a huge theme that is all encompassing of so many different things that you can speak about. And you can make it as intricate or as vague as you want to.”

Choosing when to be intricate or simplified applied to the sonic approach to Good People as well. The only time the boys bristle is at the mention of “synth pop,” the dreaded music writer descriptor that’s been used as an easy contextualization of their music for as long as they’ve been around. “I didn't even know what synth-pop was until people said [it.] I get it's a catchy title for a genre,” Al Maskati says, “And I think it adds, I guess, a point of reference for people who aren't that musically inclined. It's like a categorization method. We were, I think, looking for ways in general in our life in everyday experiences to categorize less And so, perhaps that shift within ourselves has resulted in this project shifting sonically as well.”

Just don’t call it a hard reset. Since their college days, when they first met—on Al Maskati’s 21st birthday—and recognized twin musical spirits within each other, the songs they traded were never contemporary. But they insist the idea of traveling back to their musical roots was just as organic as they synth, dance-heavy vibe they fell into as they blew up. “The music that we've been making since the beginning doesn't necessarily sound like the stuff that people might recognize us for, in the middle of our careers,” Ullman says, “[But] it wasn't like ‘We're not going to do that [this time].’ It was more about, What are we going to do? Why are we going to do it? If we already enjoy it, then why would we add a synth?” “Nothing is as fixed as we think it is,” Al Maskati adds with full Hits Blunt dubiousness. “Even you—the way you are today is not the way you're going to be tomorrow. Some things may affect you and carry on, but slowly you'll forget and move on. And they'll wear off, the effects. Some things you carry forever, but the way you deal with them changes. And that's kind of how our music's developed.”

The goal, as with Al Maskati’s lyrics, was to pare back as much as possible, in service of being direct. “Simplifying and stripping things back was just a natural process that occurred while making this project, because as Jordan was just saying, you can dress something up in so many ways. And we just weren't trying to dress anything up in a way that got ahead of what we were actually trying to say.”

“Dress up” is a phrase they repeat often; Good People is truly their album with the least frills. But minimalism to Majid Jordan still means a seven-minute odyssey of courtship (“Violet”) that serves as the album’s crown jewel, or a song like “Hands Tied,” a tense track that finds Majid in storyteller mode over a moody bassline that would’ve fit right in with early 2010s indie rock.

At the end of it all though, the relationship at the center of the album is still the one between the bros themselves, going eleven years strong and still finding new pathways. “When we made this album, we didn't want to dress up that special thing that we have with one another,” Ullman says. “It's an ability for us to rely and compromise and learn from each other at different times for different meanings. It was really important for us to make this album. And it doesn't matter when it comes out, to be honest with you. If it's available to put out to people, then we will put it out. But it's not necessarily where our heads are at.”

It’s not always clear where, or even when, Majid Jordan’s heads are at—in their world, the only constant is good vibes.

Originally Appeared on GQ