3.3

Afrojack: Forget the World

Music Reviews
Afrojack: Forget the World

For years, dance music was seen as largely incompatible with the album format—perfect for singles, sure, and lucrative club and festival sets, natch, but not always for the measured pace of a full-length record. As with any great bubble, though, the EDM explosion has gradually loosened this thinking, and as record labels try to wring every last dollar they can out of the genre, the star-powered studio album has become a ritual no DJ/producer can afford to forgo. Even Skrillex finally released a proper LP this year, as did Norwegian disco heavyweight Todd Terje, who gave his long-awaited debut a title that doubles as a nod to the new status quo: It’s Album Time.

The glut of 2014 debuts continues with Forget the World, the inaugural full-length from Dutch house superstar Nick van de Wall, better known as Afrojack. He’s already one of the best-known and highest-paid DJs in the world; suffice it to say that he doesn’t need to sell albums to keep the lights on. Forget the World, then, is the kind of opportunity for pure creative expression that few artists will ever be lucky enough to get—which makes it all the more disappointing that van de Wall lets the moment go to waste. When people used to say that dance albums don’t work, they had in mind records like this one: cash grabs with a surplus of energy and hype, and a total lack of ideas.

No one has ever mistaken Afrojack for an innovator. He made a name for himself as a reliable source of the uptempo electro-house bangers that are mainstream dance music’s bread and butter, but on Forget the World he plays things even safer, retreating into the feature-heavy dance-pop territory ruled by the likes of David Guetta and Calvin Harris. You know the drill: heat-and-serve 4/4 beats, saccharine synth patterns and soaring, over-enunciated choruses. Build, drop, repeat. Every one of Forget the World’s 12 tracks features a guest performance, a hodgepodge headlined by Snoop Dogg, Wiz Khalifa and Sting—yes, Sting—and rounded out by C-list vocalists like Jack McManus and Matthew Koma. (Atypically for a big-time electronic musician, van de Wall almost never collaborates with female singers.) Only “We’ll Be OK,” one of the record’s many paint-by-numbers house anthems, clocks in at longer than five minutes.

It quickly becomes evident that Forget the World is less an album than a haphazard collection of B-sides and leftovers that were for whatever reason deemed unmarketable as singles. There’s no through-line here, no structure, no message or theme to speak of—just empty fist-pumping and beer-commercial party-people vibes. There’s no craft or musicianship on display—just predictable rhythmic templates and shallow catch-and-release synth melodies. Even Afrojack’s collaborators can’t save the day; Wiz Khalifa, in particular, is badly misused on “Too Wild,” one of the album’s most subdued cuts, and the less said about the awkward Sting vehicle “Catch Tomorrow,” the better.

“Dynamite,” the album’s lone standout, lurches forward with an acid-tinged electro rattle that’s propulsive and catchy enough to make up for a pair of phoned-in verses from Snoop Dogg. It’s the only track on which Afrojack manages to have it both ways; Forget the World is otherwise an album caught between dance conventions and pop ambitions. If van de Wall wanted to go full Guetta, he’d have been wise to recruit better talent. If he wanted to show off his production chops, he needn’t have stuck to such rigid pop formulas. In trying to do both, he ends up doing neither, and the result is a tepid, forgettable mess that will probably sell like gangbusters anyway. Call it pop; call it EDM. Just don’t call it art.

Share Tweet Submit Pin