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Brooklyn producer JWords makes chill beats to worry to. While her propulsive tracks are technically danceable, and rappers are her most frequent collaborators, her music tends to evoke the nervy spaces contiguous to the dancefloor: the bathroom, the line for the club, a laggy livestream, the back alley where smokers and exhausted revelers take five. There’s an undercurrent of isolation to her scrambled blends of footwork, techno, and Jersey club—a sense that even when heard in a crowd, music is solitary, sounds rattling around a single skull. Her last album, 2022’s Self-Connection, culminated in “Anxious,” six minutes of rickety percussion and throbbing synths occasionally eased by soft melodies. Interior dance music, one might call it.
JWords takes a different tack on Sound Therapy, embracing gentle synth melodies and pads that take the edge off her skittering drums and pounding basslines. “I started making this album more so to calm my nervous system and just bring some calmness into my life,” she told Cabbages. “So these beats did that for me.” She leans into that soothing quality by laying vocals on most of the tracks, often singing of inner turmoil. But the album feels slight and anonymous compared to her past work.
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The flat vocals are the biggest problem. Though she’s primarily a producer, both on her own songs and in her work with maassai in their duo H31R, JWords has occasionally stepped behind the mic for a hook or a loop without issue. In those cases, her voice served as an accent, texture, or point of contrast. Here, it’s the main element on over half the songs, with underwhelming results. Her murmured lines on the downbeat “void 222”—“Tryna figure out what the void is/I’m tryna find it in my senses”—lack any expression. It’s clear she’s trying to channel the song’s theme of depression, but she sounds more bored than despondent. Her delivery on the sleepy “LoveCrime” is just as flat, and features even duller lyrics. “Yes I’ve cried/Getting back to myself/What a ride/Emotions take me high/It’s like a drug,” JWords says, offering zero sense of that emotional flux.
Assists from guests only highlight the weakness of JWords’ vocals. Frequent collaborator Nappy Nina’s racing cadences fit perfectly with the percolating drums and burbling synths on “Clarity,” saving the song from JWords’ shaky flow. And the icy, minimal percussion of “Break Me” grows nippier as Kingsley Ibeneche movingly pleads for a lover to keep her whole.
Thankfully, the songs without vocals soften the letdown. She generates a sticky groove on highlight “FELT,” pairing rolling percussion and ringing synths. And the steady thump on “Gr8ful” buoys the spacey melodies and clicking drums she lays on top. But the contrast between JWords’ rippling, purposeful arrangements and her affectless singing only highlights the weakness of the latter.
