When Marcus Brown began promoting The Passionate Ones in 2024, he only had one song written. After absorbing the dominions of Meat Loaf, David Hammons, early Kanye, SWV, and The Blueprint, he exited his creative stupor with one of 2025’s best-articulated albums in hand.
Since first entering the conversation, Marcus Brown has been labeled an archaeologist. And maybe that is true, that the producer is gathering up the remains of now-outdated art and repurposing them. Listening to his debut album as Nourished by Time, 2023’s Erotic Probiotic 2, it’s certainly clear that his previous fascinations with a band like the Blue Nile have warmly warped into something more Lionel Richie proper—music fit for a bedroom or for the club, tranquil glories spinning unfathomable webs of cool. But when cast into an anti-nostalgia bastion of curators alongside Sudan Archives, Amaarae, Yves Tumor, Brown is, to me, an anthropologist nurturing the cultural behaviors linked between past and present. “I really like the idea of ‘post-R&B,’” he tells me. “I feel like no one ever uses ‘post’ for Black music.” His desire to push soul’s music’s lineage to its furthest corners, he elaborates, comes from Ai Weiwei’s shattering of a Han Dynasty urn. “I’m trying to do that. I love Black music, it’s what I grew up with, and my favorite artists always extrapolated and excavated the medium.”
On his new album, The Passionate Ones, Brown is absorbing the dominions of Meat Loaf, David Hammons, early Kanye, SWV, and The Blueprint—records that were “telling their story but also reaching back at the youth, or the people from their community, and telling them how they got there.” Brown calls himself a pattern-based listener; he remembers listening to a lot of Bat Out of Hell after watching its maker’s Behind the Music episode. “He was one top of the world, #1 record, and then he had this mental breakdown—this psychological thing where he couldn’t sing, but nothing was really wrong. And then he came back, like, 20 years later and did it again. The guy’s a legend.” Brown’s train of thought quickly grabs a new passenger. “It’s so sick, kind of what Clipse is doing right now. I don’t know how they sound better than they did 20 years ago.”
On tape and in conversation, Brown is a referential machine. When he began promoting The Passionate Ones in 2024, he only had one song written. I ask him why he began talking about the album so many months before it even got a release date. “I just knew there was something about this album I knew I needed to write,” he explains. “Muhammad Ali would do this thing where he would make this crazy claim that he was going to do something, and he would admit, ‘Yeah, I really didn’t think I could do it, but now I have to, because I said so.’ That was the energy that I had for The Passionate Ones.” But the identity of the record changed “probably four or five times” while Brown was making it. He wrote half of the songs—”9 2 5,” “Max Potential,” “BABY BABY,” “Cult Interlude,” and “Crazy People”—while he was still living in London, but the skeleton of “Automatic Love” dates back to 2023. In the months leading up to Erotic Probiotic 2’s release, he began road-testing “The Passionate Ones” during a tour with Dry Cleaning.
On Erotic Probiotic 2, Brown’s “Worker’s Interlude” included imagery of Black folks picking cotton. Two years later, “Cult Interlude” is The Passionate Ones’s chopped-and-screwed centerpiece about brainwashing—an intuitive bridge between the glass-half-full, “baby all I have is baggage and a vision of love”-concerning “It’s Time” and the starving-artist, exploited laborer motif of “9 2 5.” Interludes, like the great instrument of storytelling and sequencing that they so often are, help Brown give his albums more context and “make a statement but in a simpler way that doesn’t take up a lot of time.”
Inspired by reprises in musicals (“the music from Annie is one of my first memories”) and old hip-hop records by Madd Rapper and the Notorious B.I.G., Brown wanted to learn how to sample on The Passionate Ones’s glitchy respite. “For every record,” he says, “I like to do something different that I don’t really have much knowledge in.” Before Erotic Probiotic 2, he had never used Ableton, so he made that entire album using Ableton. “It’s a nice way of challenging yourself,” he argues, “but it also balances the odds.” Brown especially ascribes to the idea of having skill and having taste. “For sampling, I don’t have any skill but I still have taste,” he admits. “[But by] letting my taste and skill battle each other, and also learn and experience and see how others sample, I learned my way.” He not only took cues from 9th Wonder’s loops and Kanye’s sped-up vocals, but he began sampling himself, hoping The Passionate Ones and Erotic Probiotic 2 would sound different without breaking total continuity. Brown acknowledges that the two will always be linked. LP1 and LP2. The sophomore curse, slump language—mythological shit ordained by higher-beings, journalists, or both.
BROWN GREW UP in Baltimore, frequenting the Ottobar and Metro Gallery before leaving for college in Boston at 17 and then again for Los Angeles in his early twenties. He made music under the names Riley On Fire and Mother Marcus before putting out his first Nourished by Time single, “De Ja Vu,” in 2019 and then an early version of the Erotic Probiotic 2 track “Rain Water Promise” a year later. At 26, after stints on both coasts and before departing for London, Brown returned to his hometown and began releasing songs like “S2,” “Bombs,” and “The Wall.” But don’t mistake him for some Ravens jersey-clad talking head. Like the work of fellow Baltimore native serpentwithfeet, Nourished by Time’s dancier output invokes the city’s club scene and pays tribute to an ancestry scuffing up the marleys. “It’s really impossible to not feel connected to my roots when I’m there,” he says. “It’s nowhere near as dangerous and violent as it was when I was growing up, which is really beautiful to see.” His studio is still in Maryland, because he always comes home to write. “It’s a place I understand.”
But the real beginnings of Nourished by Time are interwoven with images of work. Brown wrote Erotic Probiotic 2 while juggling a significant breakup with his various day jobs, most notably a stint at Whole Foods. He made $17,000 in 2023, the year of his debut album, he tells me. Actually, he didn’t make any money until 2024. “The first couple of tours that I went on, I was just using the money to get from point A to point B,” Brown says. “I wasn’t profiting on anything, but that’s what you have to do.” But all of that album’s critical acclaim—including a “Best New Music” designation from Pitchfork, a perfect score from The Guardian, and placements on both Paste’s year-end and mid-decade lists—hasn’t changed Brown’s identity. “I’m still a laborer,” he continues. “I’m just a working-class artist now. I don’t have to bag groceries anymore, I don’t have to scale buildings, and I don’t have to build fences anymore. I went from making music in my basement to being in the music industry. But I’m always going to be working in some kind of way, that’s the only way to make money in this country.” His time at Berklee helped him navigate the label “circuit” with a life-vest, but he still fears for those who are unfamiliar with “some of the deals, some of the language that’s used, and the way a lot of industry people play to your ego.”
Brown isn’t forgetting his old hustles. Rather, he’s acknowledging that his place in the workforce has changed: “I’m not gonna act like I’m still working at Whole Foods, because that would be disingenuous. But I still care, maybe even more than I did before. I know more about the world because I’ve seen more of the world now—I’ve seen that everyone is dealing with similar things across the country. You’re either benefitting from colonization or you’re a victim of it.” Brown wrote “9 2 5” after watching his best friend move from Atlanta to New York, because it reminded him of his decision to leave Baltimore for Los Angeles in his early twenties. “I wanted to write a song for artists who are moving to big cities and how you’re juggling two different labors, a labor of love and your actual job, and how hard that can be,” he says. “You often have to choose one or the other, and that’s how a lot of people stop [making music].” For that, he’s grateful, and it’s allowed him to seek out what merit-based gestures still exist in the music business. “You can have a million streams but you still gotta sell tickets. Humans have to still, with their bodies, come to the show. That is harder to do than getting a million streams.”
I tell Brown that the relevancy of music journalists and their impact on trends reminds me of a video Home Is Where vocalist Bea MacDonald recently posted online of themselves taking out the garbage at a BP with the caption “pov: pitchfork said you wrote one of the best songs of the decade.” “It’s dope that they got that, it means you’re doing something that’s bigger than all of it. But success is a funny thing. I think the praise is cool, because the praise makes everything easier,” Brown supposes. “It makes everything a little simpler when you’re trying to sell something.” But the music industry is not what it used to be, I suggest. “There’s probably as much money, but that money is not being distributed in the same way it used to be—that upward transfer of wealth affected the music industry, as well,” Brown furthers. “Artists got left out of it, and writers are getting left out of it. I was still working when I got Best New Music.”
Streaming stripped music publications from being “king-makers” and the algorithm is different than it was in, say, 2017. A million views on YouTube or playlist features on Spotify mean less in a pay-to-play environment. The rules have been changed. All that’s left to do, Brown argues, is make the art that you like. “We should be striking and helping each other strike and paying for working-class people to strike. We should be doing a lot more. It’s a sign of the times, unfortunately, but I do think we live in a time where there’s more cult successes than there ever have been. If you just focus on your fans and your supporters, I think that’ll take you way farther. If you focus on your people, you can really do anything.”
Brown has revealed in previous interviews that he didn’t start thinking about genre until he read reviews of his music. There’s this saying I heard all the time in undergrad workshops, I tell him, that “reading makes you a better writer.” I then ask if he ever feared that interpretations of his work would influence his direction on The Passionate Ones. “I was really worried that I would start making music that people wanted to hear,” he says, before reflecting back on his process: “It’s so subconscious. I listen to everything I like, in my fucked-up filter that I put everything through.” Maybe if he didn’t write his first song until now, when he’s 30 years old, things would be different. “I know how the creative process works and I know how the critical process works, and I know my job is to just make art.” There’s a separation at play, sure, but Brown is paying attention to all the feedback, good or bad. “What people say they don’t like about it and what people say they do like about it are both right.”
He continues, “Everyone’s opinion is right, because it’s art. It’s an opinion-based medium. People have something negative to say about the songs they like, too. People are always mad that I didn’t arrange ‘Hell of a Ride’ a certain way. They love the song but they’re mad I didn’t go back to the first part, and they don’t like the bridge. I’m just like, ‘Bro, I wrote that song because that’s how I wanted the song to sound.’ Maybe they’re right, but I think all those criticisms are trying to make it into a pop song, and that’s not what the song was meant for. But I do appreciate the criticism, and I’m lucky to be able to be disconnected from it. Mostly, I’m just fascinated that people are so much about my music, because I remember when no one cared. And now there’s Reddit pages about it.”
EROTIC PROBIOTIC 2, with its smattering of freestyle, Miami bass, house, and new jack swing, juggles sex and socialism couched in substantial metaphor. The concept of “retro music” has been a plague on art for decades (some critics relegated Blondie’s first record to a dusty, girl-group hodgepodge 49 years ago, after all), but if there was ever a contemporary musician whose imagination is the antidote to such reductive labels, it would be Nourished by Time. Marcus Brown writes songs that make hypnagogic anaphora feel haplessly hopeless, and the tapestry he gifted to us in 2023—swirls of august loft caught between the writing of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and the pedals of my bloody valentine, like “Daddy,” “Shed That Fear,” “The Fields,” and “Rain Water Promise”—featured a story of elastic, mixmastering pleasure and R&B bon mots injected with chillwave crumbs, humid boy-band harmonies, and a swaggering bedroom baritone. Love may be the great distraction, but few albums this decade have been good enough to pull any focus away from Erotic Probiotic 2.
Though he had some leftovers from those sessions, 20-ish songs that may or may not see the light of day if (and when) he releases a deluxe edition, Brown pivoted towards new material on his 2024 EP Catching Chickens. “I felt like Erotic Probiotic wasn’t who I was anymore even when it came out,” he reveals. The release was superb, confirming what we’d all gathered a year prior: Marcus Brown has the fucking juice. “Poison-Soaked” was a head-spinning tangent from the dramatic, collaged vibrancy of “Hand On Me,” while “Hell of a Ride,” which clocked in at #6 on Paste’s year-end best songs list, was a “tongue-in-cheek” wedge of sarcasm written in the afterglow of Erotic Probiotic 2’s revered fury. “It’s not a flex,” Brown contends. “But, at the same time, it is, because I’m having a lot of fun. Sometimes I’m having a really good time. Most of it is just really hard to process.”
In the publishing world, catalogues are currency, and Brown recognizes how good it is to have a body of work to call his own—though he’s hesitant to give too much of himself away so soon. “I don’t want to put music out super frequently. I don’t want to over-saturate the market, but I felt like I needed to when I was first starting out,” he says, before admitting that he’s met his goal of putting out a record four years in a row. In 2022, it was Erotic Probiotic and then it was the sequel. Then, Catching Chickens and The Passionate Ones turned into a challenge: Brown wanted to prove to himself that he could even make another record after Erotic Priobiotic 2. “It was like, ‘Man, can I do this again? Are people gonna appreciate it the same way? Maybe this is just a time capsule thing,’” he recalls. “I wanted to make another record to prove to myself, like, yeah, I can make a record. I can make anything. I can make a record that sounds nothing like the biggest records from the first album and people can enjoy them the same.” Now, he’s planning to chill out on releases.
Nourished by Time is a one-person affair. Brown writes, records, engineers, and masters all of his own music. That DIY approach was a necessity at first, but then it became too “weird to not make my own music.” He calls it the “second step” in his songwriting process, refusing to separate each method. “It’s just so fun to get lost in production. I’m grateful that it’s never been hard for me. It’s always clicked. That’s probably what I’ve stressed the least about in my music career. Ever since I was a kid, it just made sense to me.” Songwriting, however, took more practice. “I had to write 1,000 songs before I had a good one,” he admits. “I had this friend in college, and his first song was so amazing. I was like, ‘Bro, my first 500 songs were so trash.’” Brown, a certified yapper, tosses asides into our conversation like they’re samples or interlocked textures in his music. But one feels particularly relevant. “If you don’t have a certain synergy with your producer, it makes it harder to sound like yourself,” he says, before shouting out Grimes, St. Vincent, and SOPHIE’s influence on him and making a call to action:
“I think one of the biggest areas of misogyny in the music industry is barring women from being producers. It’s not even like anyone is saying ‘You can’t do it.’ It’s more like, you don’t see it ever. You mostly see dudes at the laptop. I’ve been in sessions like that, where it’s just a dude and a laptop, and women are just writing lyrics. It’s collaborative, but it could be more collaborative. It’s getting better, but when I was in school, it wasn’t like that. More women should have control over their sound.”
An obvious standout on The Passionate Ones is “Jojo,” a collaboration between Brown and Tony Bontana that’s not just comparatively urgent to “Unbreak My Love” from Erotic Priobiotic 2, but bedecked with an opulent guitar riff that melts into “BABY BABY.” “When you don’t trust dreams and you don’t trust time, it could fall through your fingers and won’t know why,” Brown sings, before weighing in on drinking, labor, possession, and the miraculous. “I talk about addiction in that song, and that’s one of the things that I don’t really know how to talk about, because it’s such a personal thing,” he says. “I’ve struggled with it. If I like something, I just do it a lot. That’s not always a good thing. I was drinking a lot more than I ever have. I see how the things artists use to cope end up killing them. It was important for this album that I was a little more personal than I was on the first one.” He calls the lyricism on Erotic Priobiotic 2 “metaphor poetry.” He doesn’t have a similar phrase for The Passionate Ones, but he remembers, often, how the energy from “Jojo” felt so emotional and singular—thanks, in great part, to Bontana’s concluding verse, which sews up the album’s biggest implication: “We hard-wired for love.”
And that love reveals itself in different colors: “BABY BABY” cites Palestine (“the evidence was haunting, the world kept revolving”); “The Passionate Ones” speaks the language of ghosts (“a million arms were always waiting to pull me back from the future, from the past, because I gave myself to both”); the churchy, soulful “Max Potential” boats the year’s best hook (“I know paranoia consumes you”); and “Automatic Love” is a potent, sensual omen (“my body won’t feel nothing until my skin touches you”). Brown balances a language of affection while clutching a vulnerable, clear-eyed assessment of destruction, holding love, war, and government equally accountable. The Passionate Ones is, undoubtedly, one of 2025’s best-articulated albums. “The whole point I’m trying to make is that we’re just distracting ourselves,” Brown stresses. “We all know what our main purpose here is. We all know that we just want love and to be loved, and to give love. Outside of all this other stuff—these imaginary things we created—at the source of it is love. That’s the only real truth.”
BROWN ADMITS THAT the barriers human beings put up—whether it’s mentally, physically, or militarily—frustrates him. His songs, as a result, are expressions of how labor takes time away from love, or how there is exploitation in labor, which is taking time away from our creative interests. “Your time is really important,” he says. “It’s your inventory.” “BABY BABY,” which features a church-vocal spinout and synths chugging like the OG Batman theme song, was his attempt to compare Baltimore to Palestine, because “Americans don’t see the commonality.” “A lot of us in the leftist community, especially Black leftists, do see that streamline,” he elaborates. “There’s been a long, long history of Black Americans and Palestinian solidarity, going back to Malcolm X or even further. To me, that’s hip-hop. That’s punk—anything that has roots in standing against oppressive systems.” He doesn’t want every Nourished by Time song to be like that though, because there is love and freedom and existentialism to be pondered beyond organizing, but, after spending his twenties protesting in a way that “I don’t really think changed anything,” Brown has spent more time with other leftists, anarchists, socialists, and communists in different countries and his education is now sprawling. “I want to help build something to actually, physically, help people’s lives—whether it’s helping other people strike, or setting up a mutual fund. We’re going to do a livestream where we give away gear to musicians who need it.” Brown pauses for a moment, before donning a fatherly affectation. “It’s like what Jay-Z said, ‘We need to move towards actionable items.’”
When you surround yourself with pro-Palestine, anti-ICE, pro-organizing, and anti-fascist people, it can become a vacuum. The artists you listen to hold these beliefs, and that can skew the perspective outside of your circle. I suffer from this narrowness, and perhaps you do, too. But the truth is, “most artists are leftists” is a common misconception. The percentage of leftists in America, let alone the music industry, is modest if not microscopic—and yet the population is the biggest it’s been since the New Deal coalition of the ‘30s trickled into mid-‘60s legislation. “I think a lot of [indie musicians] might just be liberals,” Brown concedes. “I try to find metaphors that fit into something I care about. It’s like how you can’t not make a statement about your clothing. You can’t hide with your music. You’re gonna tell me something, regardless of what you do. I’m gonna have an opinion and I’m gonna learn something about you. And if I listen to the whole album, I’m gonna learn your strengths, your weaknesses, your insecurities, what you’re guarding. You can’t hide in the music, and I think that’s the beauty of it. I’m gonna learn how much money went into it, I’m gonna learn how much the label cares, because labels don’t care about every record.”
Though he’s recently started radicalizing his mom (“And it’s working! It’s that bad, that my mom is agreeing with me”), Brown acknowledges that not every Nourished by Time album needs to be a “leftist album” and spells it out as such. “I love bullshit. I’m very much an idiot American. I’m just like, ‘Have a heart and a brain.’ But I’m still working to correct a lot of things that’s wrong that I’ve learned from being an American and being a man. I never want to appear holier than thou. It’s more just, ‘This is how I see this. I don’t understand that. I’m searching for meaning in this way and that makes no sense.’”
That search for meaning pushed Brown to distort the lens on The Passionate Ones, writing “9 2 5” from a second-person perspective that doesn’t just make the “May they multiply you, may the river guide you” lyric all the more pat, but broadens a precedent set by the album’s title. “I’m talking about a collective of people that anyone can identify with, regardless of age, race, sexual orientation, anything,” Brown says. “It’s about being a human. It’s important that my cup is full, so I can pour it in other people’s.” Nourished by Time, of course, is a proletarian reverie—an album about taking care of yourself and the people around you.
Later, Brown decenters himself on “Tossed Away,” singing lines like “the movie stars and the people playing parts, may it lead you to who you are” while the album suspends in its own excess. “It was important for me to write [‘Tossed Away’], because, yeah, I’m in a different place,” he explains. “I’m more successful. I have more attention. But I still care, and I’m still conscious of my past and how I got here. I’m one of millions, there’s nothing special about me that got me here. I didn’t work that much harder than anyone elese. A lot of it was right time and right place.” Brown takes a brief moment to himself, before clarifying that, yes, he does have a “psychopathic work ethic” (see: the “four records in four years” of it all). “But, at the same time, my best friend Carrington works just as hard as me,” he carries on. “John Baldessari says it’s luck, timing, and being possessed.” If Baldessari’s words are to be taken as scripture, and they certainly ought to be, then The Passionate Ones is the work of a fucking madman.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.
