Justin Timberlake Is Back And He’s Feeling ‘Selfish’: Stream It Now

Justin Timberlake is back, and this time he’s in a selfish mood.

The pop star dropped his new single “Selfish” on Thursday morning (Jan. 25), marking JT’s first solo release in more than five years. The video for the song opens with Timberlake bowing to a clapping audience and then slipping behind a curtain into a rehearsal studio as the mid-tempo song’s warm keyboard and subtle beat bubble up.

“If they saw what I saw/ They would fall the way I fell/ They don’t know what you want/ And, baby I would never tell,” he sings in the song about endless devotion, pledging to never let his lover go. “‘Cause Your lips were made for mine/ And my heart would go flatline/ If it wasn’t beating for you all the time,” Timberlake adds in the pre-chorus of the song he co-wrote with Louis Bell (Taylor Swift), Cirkut (Maroon 5), Theron Thomas and Amy Allen and which he co-produced with Bell and Cirkut.

The pensive, Alice in Wonderland-style video directed by Bradley J. Calder (SZA) focuses solely on Timberlake, who enters a small door on the soundstage that transports him into a perspective-skewed hallway in which he appears as a giant scrambling to answer a red phone on the far wall.

“So if i get jealous, I can’t help it/ I want every bit of you, I guess I’m selfish,” he sings in his signature falsetto on the smoothed-out chorus. “It’s bad for my mental, but I can’t fight it/ When you’re out lookin’ like you do/ But you can’t hide it, no,” he adds. The low key song stays in the same mellow gear throughout, while the video finds a frustrated Timberlake repeatedly stomping the miniature sets to pieces and stepping outside into the rain looking pensive before cutting to the singer in a custom suit on a dimly lit stage showing off his signature smooth dance moves.

The singer has teased the cut several ways in recent days, including a hometown live debut and a post with what appeared to be the official cover art, shot by photographer Charlotte Rutherford. Then, a snippet which pictured JT from behind the stage curtain, thanking an audience over the sound of an old school analogue drum machine and lo-fi organ, lifted from the video’s intro.