Confessions on Jessie Ware's Dance Floor

After a career of romantic tearjerkers, she’s got everyone crying (for joy) in the club.

- JUSTIN CURTO

A ROLLER DISCO seemed within the comfort zone of newly minted dance diva Jessie Ware. Except this place is more like skate night at the school gym: a gray, concrete, sparsely filled pop-up in the middle of Brooklyn’s Atlantic Terminal Mall. And we don’t hear any actual disco—the DJ is spinning ’90s and aughts hip-hop for Throwback Thursday, which makes Ware, at 38, feel old. It’s been years since the singer’s Rollerblading days with her husband, and she’s admittedly out of practice. As we approach the rink, she trips forward and grabs my waist only to glide right past me; a few minutes later, she skates backward a few steps like it’s nothing.

Ware has become a master of getting bodies moving since turning her focus at the top of this decade from making soulful, confessional love songs to glistening party music. Her fourth album, What’s Your Pleasure? (2020), was a standout of the early-pandemic disco revival, one that conveyed the euphoria and sensuality of a night out. It led to the biggest successes of her career: her highest U.K. chart debut, her first Album of the Year nod at the brit Awards, a tour slot opening for Harry Styles.

For her latest effort, That! Feels Good!, Ware says she wasn’t pushed to make the same album twice. But, she adds, “I’m not stupid. I know what works.” The question became how to follow its path without retreading it. Ware found the answer in