Maroon 5: Love Is Like review – Bland on the run

Irish Times

21 hours ago

Love Is Like
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Artist
:
Maroon 5
Label
:
Interscope
Assuming they don't start chucking guitars at one another, there's every possibility of
Noel and Liam Gallagher
carrying on their Oasis comeback into 2026 and beyond. If so, don't expect Maroon 5 to be in the running for a support slot. Noel Gallagher once called them 'f**king shit' and, after the Americans' bassist confessed his fandom, said he was ashamed to have inspired the group. Liam added that they sucked.
The Gallaghers have feuded with everyone – starting with each other. But when it comes to hating the music of Maroon 5, theirs are hardly voices in the wilderness. In an era when pretty much every band gets a shot at redemption – it's okay to like Coldplay, we all have a favourite 1975 song and so on – Adam Levine's soft-pop poseurs remain perhaps irredeemably beyond hope of rehabilitation.
Why that should be so is complicated. It's partly to do with their early spearheading of a pop-rock crossover sound that would eventually lead to One Republic and The Script. Then there is Levine's perceived smarminess – though when I interviewed the singer (years ago) he couldn't have been nicer or more plain-spoken and bore no resemblance to the ubertwerp of popular perception.
They have also championed both saxophones and stubble as signifiers of pop stardom. This was fine so long as George Michael was at it, but with Maroon 5 it feels transgressive in all the wrong ways.
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There have been moments, moreover, when even Maroon 5 appeared to be fed up with Maroon 5. That was the message of their previous album, Jordi, from 2021, on which the band seemingly did everything in their power to sound like someone else, to the point of roping in guests as varied as Stevie Nicks, of Fleetwood Mac, and, on a remix, the late rapper Nipsey Hussle.
But you can only run away from yourself for so long. On the mopey and underbaked Love Is Like they go back to sounding like Maroon 5 in the worst way possible.
It isn't cataclysmically awful, which feels like a missed opportunity, as a truly dire LP would at least have been memorable. Instead it's bleary and bland, its 10 tracks ranging from squidgy and sappy to infuriatingly perky. (By the end you'll be urging the UN to declare zesty sax runs a crime against humanity.)
It begins, as all Maroon 5 records must, with a lukewarm chunk of woozy R&B crossover, powered by Levine's falsetto and a chorus that sounds like Coldplay trying to sound like Justin Timberlake. The tune is Hideaway, and it's a fitting introduction insofar as you want it to be over as soon as it begins.
The cheese factor rises higher yet on the title track, an ersatz soul number with springy bass and Levine once again singing as if in mild pain. Plastic soul gives way to cod reggae on Jealousy Problems, a funk foray mired in cliched lyrics ('Don't you know I got jealousy problems? / Uh, I don't know how to solve them') and a listless groove.
Levine goes from bland to Bieber on Burn Burn Burn, an insubstantial chart-chasing workout that doesn't have the melodic edge to qualify as pop yet is much too weedy to be categorised as rock. The sense is that Maroon 5 have slipped between stools and found themselves in mid-career purgatory.
Restricting themselves to that tidy 10 tracks, there is no space for their traditional Rolodex worth of cameos. That said, the Blackpink rapper Lisa is wasted on Priceless, while Lil Wayne's contribution to the aforementioned Love Is Like underwhelms.
Some bands make for irresistible punching bags – you have your list, I'm sure. Then there are those, including Maroon 5, for whom cultivating genuine hate doesn't seem worth the effort. On this underwhelming album they're lost in a blizzard of blandness, annoying no longer, merely terminally and achingly anonymous.