From the moment he emerged with the biggest joke of 2013, Baauer has yearned to be taken seriously. The Brooklyn-based producer was diplomatically gracious about the ubiquitous dance challenge that skyrocketed his “Harlem Shake” into the ears of every normie with an iPhone camera. But for artist who grew up studying BBC 1 Essential Mixes and idolizing Daft Punk, breaking out with a song closer to the cultural lineage of “Gangnam Style” than “One More Time” wasn’t the big arrival he’d envisioned. He attempted reroutes with a 2016 debut laden with brash trap production and features from hip-hop royalty, then a climate change concept album that envisioned an alien invasion on earth. Luck hardened into trudgery; meanwhile, dance challenges and viral marketing became essential for any aspiring big-room dance artist. Baauer seemed caught in a paradox, trying to outrun his biggest song while still beholden to the fried attention spans that made it a hit.
On U, his first new album in six years, Baauer is off trap and back to basics: pulsing house built around chopped up vocals of eras past. Throwback funk, disco, and soul samples are the backbone of U, which Hudson Mohawke executive-produced for his British imprint LuckyMe. But despite Baauer’s reverence for old-school fare, many of these tracks prioritize catering to ultramodern snippet industrial complex over actually building a groove. Most of the flips here, regardless of their origins, deploy core house music directives—get wild, get down, move your feet, let it all out—over beats far too tired and anemic to walk the walk. Where 2020’s Planet’s Mad was so self-serious it looped all the way back around to goofy, U is so eager to please the generic you that it’s hard to connect with. After all, you only cringe if you care.
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Press has billed U as Bauuer’s interpretation of a drive-time radio mix—one inherently engineered to give the most casual channel-surfers maximum delight—and this approach sometimes results in music that’s better fit for absentminded head-nodding than genuine juking. For all the “freaky” behavior opening interlude “Do U Wanna Get Down” promises to encourage, the sequence that follows is painfully tame. “Kno U” is diet Fred Again.., “Way U Do It” is diet Tiki Disco, and “Supersonic” is The Prodigy if you clipped their pincers: sanitized, shortened versions of other signatures. This issue pops up throughout the record, although the nadir arrives on “Meldy (Want U So Bad),” which takes a dead-horse sample from PlusTwo, adds nothing but a phoned-in Jersey club pulse, and peaces out after less than 90 seconds.
On the bright side, the sequencing here lends to a quality surge in the back half, where the run-times have some breathing room and the compositions feel as lively as the sung commands around which they unfurl. If you consider the Aluna and Brazy-featuring “Kiss on the Lips” and “One Last Time” as one track (which, frankly, it should be), the movements are jerky and interesting, switching up pace and texture to create something that almost feels like a mix within a mix. Centerpiece “Better” channels Daft Punk at their most girl-who’s-going-to-be-okay without copy-pasting, whipping a flip of the Kuhina Serenaders’ “Let Me Have Music” into string- and electric-guitar-driven catharsis. “Somebody” finds a way to bring out the heavier, bluesier tones in a hype song, à la “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now).” The standout here, by far, is the gorgeous closer “Follow U,” which pares back Baauer’s archetypal piano house into just a minor chord progression and a vocal from reclusive Nigerian funk musician William Onyeabor. The highlight bottles the emotional impact of a post-peak-time farewell into what feels like a classic in the making. But for a record positioned as a return to the dancefloor writ large, a troubling percentage of these tracks suffer from creaky joints.
