Nourished by Time - The Passionate Ones (2025)
saved for the fire - december 10, 2025
I think it’s fair to say that a lot of us are checked out of the dream. We live in a global system that is stumbling, bleeding, and trying to off itself via as much austerity as possible. We live on margins that are constantly shrinking and stretching thin. The only thing keeping the great superpower of our age afloat is an AI bubble-of-all-bubbles, and everything else is actively crumbling. We have moved past cultural overproduction into slop hyperproduction, and the default mental state is being either locked in a cycle of despair and doomscrolling or so desensitized you’re completely jaded. And yet, we still live. We still love, and we still dream, even with the hellfire that erupts around us. Marcus Brown, under the name Nourished By Time, looks at the wreck, at the callouses in our hands and the sleep in our eyes, and laughs. A sincere, light-hearted laugh. It’s sorely needed.
The Passionate Ones is learning how to love in spite of the grind. Marcus is no stranger to using R&B textures to explore societal malaise (see the masterful “Hell of a Ride” from last year, which includes everything up to the lack of third places for kids!), and so the types of love seen here are of a much different quality than you might expect. In the era of working nights, taking two or three jobs and desperately trying to not let isolation take you over, love is a support structure. It’s to help you and your partner withstand the burdens of life and, potentially, someday, surpass them. What you’re working towards isn’t the capitalist American Dream, but it exists nonetheless. You might get there, and the person next to you will definitely help with that.
Speaking of the textures on this album, the bedroom R&B Marcus creates thrives with its limitations. This thing is fuzzy and warm like a blanket right out of the laundry. Synths and samples tend to flow right over each other, but it’s all beautifully constructed for how rough around the edges the sound is. And, like, fuck, Marcus’s songwriting is utterly immaculate. You would not believe how much mileage the earworms in your brain will get out of a track like “Automatic Love” or “Max Potential.” Some of these tightly-wound, waterproof hooks might be with me for the rest of my life. I don’t think I have a problem with that.
Truthfully, The Passionate Ones shines a mirror right back at me. I’m trying to escape the crushing holding pattern pressing me down any chance I get. It’s annoying, it’s stressful, and it definitely would have killed me if it wasn’t for the boy I have by my side. Somewhere along the way, my dream became our dream. Hopefully, some day soon we’ll make it work, and I’ll be writing these from an apartment in Chicago rather than while cooped up in the same house I’ve been in since I graduated. I do know, though, I’m gonna be blasting “9 2 5” the whole time through.
thank you felix