Nourished By Time’s blue

On “ 9 2 5 ,” the second single from his new album The Passionate Ones , the multi-hyphenate artist Nourished by Time is up-front about his own passions. The track is sparkling at first, its synth keys and sequenced drums sounding like a Whitney Houston song and a New Order song left in a pressure cooker to simmer together. But when Marcus Brown begins singing — his voice sounding lo-fi but tender, the way a bruise can be tender — you can feel the stinging vulnerability in every tugged-on syllable, as he weighs two forms of labor: “Working restaurants by day / Writing love songs every night / He can barely make it by.” Brown has been writing love songs for many years, and while distorted in the way all of his music is — raw yet accomplished, identity-forward yet sonically elusive