Jonathan Bernstein
View all posts by Jonathan Bernstein September 25, 2026 Add us as a Google Preferred Source
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Joshua Kissi* The throughline of Leon Bridges’ decade-plus career has been his voice. Because Bridges’ honeysuckle tenor lends itself so naturally to early-Sixties soul, Bridges got pegged as a Sam Cooke incarnate with his 2015 debut Coming Home. He’s since proven that his smooth-crooning vocals are just as expressive whether he’s toying with contemporary R&B (2018’s watermark Good Thing), waxing poetic about his home state of Texas over Khruangbin’s chilled-out surf rock (2020’s Texas Sun) or singing about his Nintendo-64-filled youth (2024’s opus “Panther City”).
But Bridges’ latest — a collaborative album with the British trio Jungle — might be the most daring vehicle yet for his sui generis instrument. Bridges has a knack for picking like-minded collaborators; like Khruangbin, Jungle are vibes-forward revivalists interested in synthesizing sounds, styles and textures from their crate-digging record collection, which ranges from Fela Kuti to Bowie to bossa nova. But unlike any of Bridges’ tightly focused, largely song-oriented records to this point, Jungle provide Bridges a backdrop of extended grooves and broad landscapes for him to use his voice more as a paintbrush than a storytelling device.
At its best, Happiness Anytime finds Bridges stretching out as a singer, leaning into the trance-like rhythms provided by Jungle’s Tom McFarland, Josh Lloyd-Watson and Lydia Kitto. See “Illusion,” the bossa nova number more fit for a dance floor than the seated theaters Bridges typically plays. As Bridges repeats the refrain “I’m here in the present/One step at a time,” he’s discovering new shades and shapes in the timbre and tone of his own voice, stretching out the final words of each line until they become part of the groove.
“[Making love] to the rhythm,” as he puts it in that same song, is the point: Happiness Anytime feels like, among other things, an escape for Bridges. Even if his music hasn’t always been seen this way, Bridges follows in the traditional singer-songwriter model, an approach he took to new heights at the best moments of his 2024 self-titled LP. This time around, conventional narrative takes a backseat; the writing is more abstract and less often the point. On a song like “Watch You Dance,” Bridges lets the chugging bassline do more scene-setting than any of his impressionistic lyrics could.
