Marcel Winatschek

The Conditional

Jessie Ware spent most of 2012 being impossible to categorize, which is the best place to be. If You Love Me, produced by BenZel, strips everything back to the question in the title and then declines to answer it—just the conditional hanging there, her voice moving around it like she already knows what the silence means. The production has that quality that either sounds effortless or sounds like someone worked very hard to make it sound effortless; with Ware it’s usually both.

Devotion is one of those albums that arrived fully formed and didn’t get quite the attention it deserved. This track is a good reason to go back.