Song You Need: Mansur Brown’s “Fever” bubbles with the spirit of early-aughts rap

The FADER’s “Songs You Need” are the tracks we can’t stop playing. Check back every day for new music and follow along on our Spotify playlist.

Mansur Brown‘s guitar playing is a map, his flamenco-inspired melodies tracing each song like a river’s tributaries that all lead to one indescribable source outside of any one genre. The London-based musician’s compositions have always had an unapologetically space-age feel to them — his 2021 opus Heiwa was just as emphatic as it was virtuosic with its hybrid of jazz and R&B that felt ripped from the coolest bar on the Starship Enterprise.

For his new project, NAQI Vol. 1, Brown looked to the club of his youth for inspiration. “In my head, there’s a narrative that underpins it,” he says in a press statement. “The first volume had a summery feel — I think of it as being out at the dance.” “Fever,” a standout from NAQI Vol. 1, opens with kind of stuttering drums and ghostly flute you’d expect to hear from golden-age Timbaland. It’s a solid and intriguing foundation for Brown to loop and shift, adding licks of John Frusciante electric and some of his patented chrome-plated electric bass. The song’s intensity is not a full-on Missy Elliot-level flop sweat, though — more like a light and sexy frenzy too pretty to break.