Nick Jonas - Sunday Best
Nick Jonas’ first album in five years arrives like a sampler platter of everything Gen Z loves to mock millennials for.
A celebration for nostalgia seekers and former Disney loyalists: Jonas is back. His first release since 2021, Sunday Best (released via Republic Records), sounds exactly like an archetypal adult-contemporary record — polite to a fault, toothless in execution, and lyrically confined to a very narrow emotional range.
The album opens with “Sweet to Me,” where Jonas lists the things he finds comforting: his hometown, family time, gardening, even elevated blood sugar levels. It begins as harmless country-pop before mutating, in its final minute, into a Coldplay-style stadium chant — the sort of uplift-core crescendo many listeners exhausted years ago.
The parade of millennial-playlist aesthetics continues on “Handprints,” which resembles an even more anonymous version of Alex Warren’s “Ordinary”: the kind of song piped into coffee shops catering to the 35-and-up crowd, or tucked into your office accountant’s “favorites” folder.
From there, the record dissolves into a blur of love songs addressed to his wife, Priyanka Chopra. Is that inherently bad? No. Is it compelling? Also no. “I Need You” plays like the soundtrack to a disposable Netflix melodrama nobody will finish. On the equally vague “You Got Me,” Jonas compares their relationship to James Dean and white T-shirts. Musically, it recalls the soft folk-pop once aggressively licensed in early-to-mid-2010s electronics commercials.
“Gut Punch” briefly gestures toward something more interesting: Jonas confronting a creeping midlife unease and emotional uncertainty. It could have been revealing, but the performance — imagine Flo Rida’s “My House” delivery awkwardly transplanted into country-pop — drains the song of sincerity. Endless post-chorus “na-na-nas” seal its fate. Tell your inner child that they’re doing fine might be the most millennial advice imaginable.
By the album’s midpoint, its target audience becomes obvious: Sunday Best is engineered for adult-contemporary Top 40 radio. To younger listeners it feels overly cautious and lyrically bland, musically indistinct — background music for retail stores and cafeterias. Pleasant enough while it plays, yet impossible to care about once you leave the room. The only person it seems truly intended for may be Chopra herself, whom Jonas, at one point, compares to Aphrodite.
The album’s most enjoyable moment is “Seeing Ghosts,” when Jonas abandons suffocating balladry for bright pop-rock. Another love letter, yes, but one of the few tracks that actually lodges in your memory and sparks curiosity for a replay. But there’s more to come: “911” is unintentionally hilarious, thanks to its exaggerated “shit” ad-libs and siren-like backing vocals. Later, his brothers appear for the collaboration “The Greatest”: a reunion appealing in theory but negligible in practice — another generic piano ballad that evaporates as soon as it ends.
At its core, Sunday Best is not a careless album; it clearly has intention behind it. What it lacks is evolution and craft. The songs are simply dull, and the songwriting rarely provokes emotion. It’s the kind of record you hear once — and then promptly forget.
4.3/10
