Photo credit: Jack Grange 

For the past few years, Jessie Ware has been split between things, both a Gold-certified, four-time Brit-nominated musician and the host of a hugely successful podcast “Table Manners” alongside her mother, in which the pair chat charmingly about food and family. She’s aware of how the public have come to perceive her: “Nowadays, people come up to me and say ‘We love your podcast’, ‘We love your mum’ or ‘I love your first album’,” she says. In 2020, she’s ready for that perspective to be shifted to the music she's making right now.

It is, however, no surprise that many of her fans revert back to Jessie's debut LP in conversation. Hair styled high, she stood stoic on the artwork for 2012’s ‘Devotion’; a record on which she sang funk-laced, languid songs about love, sadness and seduction. This is how we first knew her: an artist with an ultra-refined, almost impenetrable aesthetic who knew how to make the most simple of emotions feel rich and multifaceted. It was a critical and commercial success, and earned her a reputation as one of Britain’s most beguiling voices in music. In its follow up, 2014’s ‘Tough Love’, pangs of desperation and first flutters of real, grown up love and heartbreak were threaded throughout it. 

It was the third record, the ruminative ‘Glasshouse’, that saw Jessie's sonic worldview widen. Her list of collaborators grew grand and international in scope (Norway’s Cashmere Cat and super producer Benny Blanco made appearances here), bringing with them a coterie of pop sounds she'd not tapped into until then. 

From the summer of 2018 onwards, Jessie would wake up, leave her house and cross Hackney Downs to James' studio, spending hours holed up in the attic of his house. Together, with the help of a handful of trusted friends, they created a sonic space that helped Jessie become the artist she’d strived to be from the beginning. She wanted to go back to what she’d started with, sticking to London rather than jetsetting to mismatched sessions elsewhere. 

Inside that attic, magic was made. The baggage of what preceded those sessions musically was completely disregarded. For this record, she wanted “filth and innuendo; something fun, light, flirtatious and feminine.” Which is exactly what ‘What’s Your Pleasure?’, offers up. A club record rooted in the freedom of imagination. A record – like the title suggests – to touch, wink and tongue kiss to.

Her collaborators were hand-selected by Jessie using their previous work as a blueprint for their brilliance. For album four, she wanted to pay homage to a golden age of funk and dance, obsessing over Earth Wind and Fire, and Teena Marie. On that same level? Songwriters like Kindness, her close friends Danny Parker, Shungudzo Kuyimba Clarence Coffee Jr., and the unmistakable guitar twangs of Metronomy’s Joseph Mount 

"It was a world I felt like I'd neglected," Ware says of her sound today, "and had been caught up in the lure of people pulling you away from it. But it was the first scene that really embraced me."

So her return to it in 2020, in the form of the rhythmic and flirtatious ‘What's Your Pleasure?’ feels like Jessie Ware regaining control. She's made a record – both rhythmic and flirtatious – entirely on her own terms, and is finally ready to pull back the curtain and unveil the sensual fantasy world she's created. It's a thank you to those long-term fans for sticking by her. “Let’s have some fun now,” she says. “I’m tired of being melancholy. I’m not scared anymore.”