Love Is Like (Deluxe)

Four years after their last full-length, Maroon 5 returns with their eighth studio album, showcasing what makes the group a mainstay in the pop-rock world. “I think it’s been the full-circle journey so far, as far as the ways in which we made music and how we did it and where it took us, the waves that we rode, and now coming back to feeling like it’s time to get back to the basics of what made it work in the first place,” singer Adam Levine tells Apple Music. On *Love Is Like*, Levine took a different approach than usual during his writing process. “I was so reluctant to get help, kind of like I used to be, but then I had these new phone-a-friend-type resources that I had never had before, so I was like, ‘Let’s call someone and get a little help,’” he says. “There was one line of one song that I hit a fuckin’ brick wall, and I was like, ‘J Kash, can you help me write this line?’” (The hip-hop producer co-wrote seven of the album’s ten tracks.) Buoyed by three singles (the upbeat and jazzy “All Night,” the suave LISA collab “Priceless,” and the subdued “California”), *Love Is Like* boasts two more high-profile collaborations as Lil Wayne and Sexyy Red add verses to the title track and “I Like It,” respectively. The band’s typical laidback danceability is present and accounted for, with a few retro vibes thrown in, like on “Burn Burn Burn.” Of course, here, Levine and co. do attempt to define what love is actually like. From “It’s been a little crazy here/We been a little anxious, you know” (“Hideway”) to “I know this behavior is beneath us both/But I think the fucked-up thing is how it brought us closer now” (“Jealousy Problems”), it’s messy, all-consuming, and confusing—a departure from the black-and-white sensibilities dotting the rest of their catalog. “It’s funny because the music that we wound up making feels really fresh and cool,” Levine says. “For better or worse, we’re proud of the thing we wound up having released because it’s just different.”