That! Feels Good! review: Jessie Ware follows her heart to give us best album of her career

About ready to give up on music, it was a podcast about food that ultimately proved her saving grace. Table Manners, which she began hosting with her mother Lennie in 2017, sees the pair cook for and converse with various celebrities and has been a huge hit; but more importantly, it instilled Ware with a new-found sense of confidence and the realisation that she could do, say and be more than one thing - both in her music and her life.

That tenacity was audible on 2021’s What’s Your Pleasure?, but Ware’s fifth album is her most self-assured and celebratory yet. While she has always been an emotionally intelligent songwriter, mining the deepest parts of her psyche to excavate the relationships in her life - with her husband, her father, her mother, her children - That! Feels Good! doesn’t necessarily dwell on such ponderous topics. This album is less about asking questions than it is about offering advice, both to herself and her listeners, whether it’s “Keep on moving up that mountain top”, or “Shake it til the pearls fall off”. Beautiful People playfully dabbles in superficiality: “I wake up in the morning and I ask myself what am I doing on this planet? / Might as well impress myself, I’ll buy a purple leather jacket.”

As with What’s Your Pleasure? there is tenderness in abundance, but this is a record to shamelessly enjoy at surface level. Working with two of the best pop producers in the game certainly doesn’t hinder that objective; James Ford (Gorillaz, Florence + the Machine, Haim) adds panache and zing to tracks likeBegin Again, one of the most joyfully uplifting and sophisticated pop songs you’ll hear this year. Stuart Price, meanwhile, brings a wealth of experience from working with Madonna, Kylie Minogue and Pet Shop Boys, helping to wrangle the soaring Donna Summer-esque Pearls and the ‘90s house-influenced Free Yourself to glorious fruition.

A song fromWhat’s Your Pleasure? was the touchstone for the direction this album ultimately went in: harnessing the golden, sun-dappled retro soul sound of Remember Where You Are, songs on That! Feels Good! are imbued with the same concoction of 1970s disco, soul and funk. Ware has mentioned Chaka Khan, Teena Marie and the aforementioned Donna Summer as key influences, and the title track is one of several brass-infused songs, including the brisk strut of These Lips, the quirky ode to carnality that is Shake the Bottle and the schmoozy gloop of Hello Love.

Truthfully, there isn’t a bad song to be found on a record that is, as she has put it herself, the result of “over 10 years of understanding who I am, and who I enjoy being as an artist and the thrill of performance”. By simply following her heart and doing - as the title suggests - what feels good, Ware has made the best album of her career.