Majid Jordan: five albums in, the least resistant road

Majid Jordan's fifth album, out August 28, is their calmest. Fifteen tracks, a hair over fifty minutes. Hooks arrive on time, the space around them is deliberate, and almost nothing reaches for a reaction. Three years after Good People, the Toronto pair are in no hurry.

Jordan Ullman and Majid Al Maskati have been making records together since 2011, and they have become a fixture without ever becoming a headline act. Majid Jordan arrived in 2016, The Space Between in 2017, Wildest Dreams in 2021, then Good People in 2023 with the Afterhours companion that followed it. Two and a half years of touring behind that run is a long stretch on the road. Two Roads was started around June or July last year, once the touring stopped and they were back in the studio.

They took the work to London for two weeks and kept the room small. Clementine Douglas was there for the duration, with Alex Lestig alongside her, a friend and a producer the pair trust. The intention was company more than concept: they wanted to make music with people they knew and felt comfortable with. Ullman calls the result "the most transparent, honest album that Maj and I have made" and describes the sessions as "the one with the least resistance". You can hear that ease in the palette: a cool-blend R&B core, electro-pop and French touch inflections on top, and dusky post-rock guitar riffs left unsanded in the frame.

Most of it moves. These are R&B songs with a bouncy, liberating streak and an eye on the physical: the low end pushes, the drums stay light on their feet, and the album's optimism reads as tempo. What keeps it from being a summer playlist is the guitar. Post-rock riffs sit under the choruses like weather, dusky and unhurried, and they give even the lightest tracks a floor. The two modes do not always meet in the middle. More often they take turns, which is the record's charm and, later, its limit.

It opens on its own question. "Have I Gone Too Far?" is the second longest thing here, and the title alone sets the terms: doubt and the honest version of events. "Cold" lands two tracks later and carries the best origin story on the record. Al Maskati hummed a "no, no, no, no, no" into an otherwise empty room, Ullman heard the part and knew it mattered, and the song grew out of that alone.

Just past halfway, "Best Behaviour" hands Clementine Douglas the lead and takes its time about it, the longest cut on the album and its hinge. Later, "Island Time" brings Naomi Sharon in for the last stretch. The closing run of "Every Last Bit Of My Love", "Thank You" and the title track is the most patient sequence here, three of the album's longer songs stacked at the end, as if the pair knew where the weight belonged. They say "Two Roads" is the best thing they have ever made. It is different from the records that came before it, and it holds the claim up.

What does not work is the middle of the back half. "The Reason" is 2:14, the shortest thing on the record, and with "Look What You've Done" beside it the sequencing thins exactly where a fifteen track album cannot afford a lull. Neither is bad. Both are slight, and on a record this even-keeled, slight reads as leftover. The palette carries a similar cost: the post-rock guitar, the French touch inflections and the electro-pop stay in their own lanes and take turns, so the range never settles into one sound.

This is for the people who kept The Space Between in rotation and want that mood with sharper songs, and for anyone who plays R&B moving through a city at night. It will not convert anyone who found Good People too smooth: the temperature has barely dropped. The case rests on the writing, which is the best it has been, and on a title track that earns the confidence the duo have in it. Two weeks in London, five albums in, and the pair sound like they are walking at their own pace.

The tracklist

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