Nourished by Time Raises the Stakes on The Passionate Ones
Paste Pick: On Marcus Brown’s second album, each movement is staggeringly inventive in its own right, even as it’s whizzing by you. His interrogations of art, relationships, and late-stage capitalism make it his most considered, elaborate expression yet.

With less than a century of popular music as we know it under our belt, it seems there is only so much “original” work left to create—only so many notes on a scale, only so many sounds to make with widely available instruments. In that vein, so much of the nostalgia deeply baked into almost everything served to us now is a desperate grab for time lost or for a world dead and gone, which we either remember or missed the boat on completely—a time when we could experience something wholly new, tilting our world on its axis. Why would you imagine a new world, this practice asks, when it’s unlikely any of us will live long enough to see one? The past had its own blatant ugliness (and don’t worry, those aspects of it seem to be the ones coming back into style with full force), but I don’t blame artists for clinging to this wave of looking backward. There’s plenty worth grieving from a musician’s or a music lover’s perspective; the opportunity for said artists to get paid to live off their art, a general population where not everyone sees themselves as alienated—constantly performing in public, now alien to ourselves.
The music made by Marcus Brown, under the name Nourished by Time, is easily traceable through the medium’s history, from the instrumentation he uses, to the master artists he references, to the genres he’ll briefly dip into before springing out in search of different musical waters—all steeped in a clear love of house music, new wave, new jack swing, electronica, and R&B balladry. There are surely comparisons to be made (in his initial press, Brown was described as a cross between girl group SWV and cult sophisti-pop kings the Blue Nile, while Oneohtrix Point Never recently opted for “Arthur Russell meets Daft Punk, but deep R&B”), but there is a quality to what Brown does that cannot be compressed into easy PR-speak, that has rarely ever felt like imitation. The framework for what he’s created has existed before, so why does it feel like we’re listening to the future of the form every time he returns? Why does The Passionate Ones, his second full-length album and his first with storied label XL, feel like one of the most refreshing, vital releases of the year? It defies all we’ve come to understand about how independent music of all stripes works now, so why?
What makes the work of the 30-year-old “Baltimore songwright,” as he’s labeled himself on socials, so hard to pin down is how he’s melded all these influences, honed writing chops, and production trademarks into something distinctly his own. For those of us who have been riding the bandwagon as early as 2022’s Erotic Probiotic EP, if not earlier, there’s been a clear progression that you can track from release to release, as his music—all self-produced and self-written—has gone through gradual incubation stages, usually held by the same technological and sonic constraints while returning to the same lyrical obsessions. With those guiding limits to push up against, Brown has written himself a wider screen to play with in the songs themselves, making for more complex iterations on the winning template that’s become his trademark. If you’re a purveyor of any DIY music, you know it’s rare you get to see this type of self-contained artist elevate so consistently as they go. For those of us who’ve been hoarding shares of our Nourished by Time stock over the past few years, this is what makes him a voice worth dropping everything for.
Another thing that makes Nourished by Time feel so of our present moment is a seemingly complete lack of inhibition and embrace of full-throttle sincerity around his own societal role as an artist, all without ever seeming neutered or disingenuous, as so many younger artists do once forced to market themselves. These are topics he’s returned to in the lead-up to the record, including a 24-hour livestream on YouTube, during which he talked through his own journey and hosted conversations with other artists he admires as a first step towards foster future collaborations, admitting he doesn’t “really like a lot of people in the music industry.”
Yet, in a landscape where so many songs are described as “cathartic” or “personal” in order to catch your algorithm’s interest, The Passionate Ones’ titular cult calls for any of that intense emotion to physically spur change into action beyond the self—deploying Brown’s sheer charisma and the craft he’s developed over time, both required to be that change and bolster his call. “We don’t have to be so average,” Brown sings on album track “It’s Time,” delivering what might serve as the record’s most direct thesis statement through layered tracks of his unmistakable baritone, half side-eyeing the people in his field not willing to match that level of commitment, “and I say that with love.”