Don’t Like the New Justin Timberlake Album? Just Wait Until November for the Next One!

Justin TimberlakeAs you may have already heard, The 20/20 Experience, Justin Timberlake’s first album in seven years, drops tomorrow. Pretty intense, huh? Releasing a piece of personal expression into a half-decade of mouth-foaming expectations? Eh, not really. Look, if you don’t like this one, just wait until November: JT might have another one for you then.

According to Questlove — via that time-honored news-breaking organization, the Okayplayer.com forums — Timberlake will give us Volume 2 of 20/20 right around Thanksgiving. Responding to a forum thread about the New York Times’s middling review of the album, Quest wrote “spoiler alert. 20/20 Vol 2 comes out in nov. (10 songs now … 10 songs later= 20 vision).” It’s a bit odd, of course, the news coming out this way. Did he really think he’d slide this forum comment past us?! By now Questlove should know that every word he says will be mined for golden pop culture info treasures. As for whether we can trust it: Seeing as Questlove has been DJ’ing for Justin, you’d assume he’s privy to these kinds of top-level discussions.

It’s also possible this is just a preliminary plan being batted around, of course, but if it does come to fruition, it would feel right: a staggered double album is just the kind of on-the-nose grand statement the lofty occasion of a Justin Timberlake comeback seems to call for. As for whether we can expect something vastly different on this Volume 2 — well, presumably these tracks are from the same recording sessions, right? But that’s not really the point. Right now, this new JT album is completely theoretical, and therefore, for all we know, might just be the greatest album of all time. In other words: Everyone thank Justin Timberlake (via Questlove) for gifting us with the wonder of eternal hope this afternoon.

Filed Under: Justin Timberlake, Questlove, The 20/20 Experience

Amos Barshad has written for New York Magazine, Spin, GQ, XXL, and the Arkansas Times. He is a staff writer for Grantland.

Archive @ AmosBarshad