After a year of waiting—and a thorough investigation into its whereabouts, conducted by Inspector Yours Truly just days before—Jennifer Lopez has finally announced the status of her next album, This Is Me...Now. The notice flagging fans to stay on their toes came Saturday morning in the form of a video, saying that more news would be revealed Monday. (In Britney Spears-like fashion, Lopez announced that she had an announcement.)
This teaser arrived just hours after The Daily Beast’s Obsessed published its piece wondering what the hell was going on with the album. Yet it would be obnoxiously self-important to assume these two things were related, as fans have been growing anxious for months. Lopez and her team had crossed the one-year mark since the album’s announcement and had yet to release a single snippet of music beyond Lopez crooning, “This is me……noooooooohhooowwwwww!” (which, to her credit, has been stuck in my head for 365 days). “Girl, where is the album? It’s been a year, get it together,” one desperate JLover recently commented on the sole Instagram post about the record.
Those of us who spent a year in anguish won’t have to wait much longer to find out what Lopez is like… now. This Is Me... Now will be released on Feb. 16, 2024, just two days after Valentine’s Day. The release date is fitting for an LP that includes song titles like “Dear Ben pt. II” and “Midnight Trip to Vegas,” which both allude to Lopez’s husband Ben Affleck. Though all of that lovey-dovey mush was to be expected, what wasn’t so predictable was that This Is Me… Now would be accompanied by what looks to be a high-octane visual album component.
I hesitate to speculate whether This Is Me... Now will be a true visual album, a la Beyoncé or Fergie’s Double Dutchess—which, yes, I and five other people (Fergie included) do consider to fit the bill. It’s not that I don’t believe Lopez is up to the task of creating a video for all 13 songs on the record. I just know that, when it comes to J.Lo, I have to see it to believe it. I’ve been burned too many times before (we still can’t stream “Fresh Out the Oven” or “Louboutins”), so I’ve learned to keep a steadfast wall up between myself and Miss Lopez.
But I’m ready to give her some credit here: The scale of the album’s visuals does look quite impressive—even if their grand stature is largely the work of CGI on a green screen. The 30-second album teaser that accompanied Monday’s announcement begins with Lopez sitting in a sprawling penthouse, curled up by a roaring fire. It looks like a cut scene from 2004’s Catwoman, which is one of the highest compliments I can give any piece of media. Over the instrumental from “Still,” a song from her 2002 sister album This Is Me… Then, Lopez’s tears fall onto a letter, which she tosses into the fire.
“When I was a little girl,” Lopez’s narration begins, “when someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer was always… in love.” When I first watched the teaser, I finished Lopez’s sentence before she could. That level of melodrama is a constant in Lopez’s work, and anyone even semi-versed in her oeuvre could tell you how that sentiment would end. A quick glance at the letter burning in the fire reveals its contents, a scrawled-out note reading: “Life’s tough, but you’re sweet. Thanks for the gift. Hope you like the flowers, you told me you could never have enough. I believe you. B.”
Whether or not this letter, dated Dec. 24, 2002, is a real piece of correspondence ever sent from Affleck to Lopez doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s a sign that Lopez might actually have something remarkable up her sleeve come February. The letter’s final lines echo the title of the album’s first single, “Can’t Get Enough,” which allegedly drops Jan. 10 of next year. (I’ll believe it when I hear it.) Dedicated JLovers will remember that the initial This Is Me... Now announcement promised an entire album in 2023. I guess when you’re working with Avatar: The Way of Water-level computer-generated graphics, these things just take a little more time.
A quick-cut compilation of scenes follows this histrionic opening. A man riding a motorcycle on top of what appears to be water (perhaps this is Jesus; J.Lo loves God!); Jennifer the Riveter, clad in a jumpsuit doing a full musical number during her shift working on an assembly line; Lopez walking down an aisle in an ugly orange dress before another cut to her doing choreo in a more traditional wedding gown! This Is Me… Now has everything, as long as your definition of “everything” includes a lot of strange circumstances and intricately choreographed dance numbers. But that’s what Lopez excels at, and it’s precisely what I want from her at this stage.
Lopez is positioning This Is Me… Now as “a musical experience.” If I had to wager a guess, I’d say that, by that definition, we can expect a nine-minute compilation of a handful of songs from the album, crafted into one full video vignette. I could, however, still be proven wrong. Less than a week ago, I was convinced that this album had been shelved entirely. Now I’m at least sure that it’s real but less confident that it won’t get pushed back several times over the next few years. Seeing as J.Lo is clearly going for Bollywood-meets-Cloud Atlas with a dash of The Lovely Bones, an Avatar-style delay would be a perfect fit for this cinematic project. After all, you can’t rush great art, even if we were promised it a year ago.
