The time is now

"Breezy tropical house, Latin-tinged stabs at replicating "Despacito," EDM-friendly drops, Auto-Tuned croons-David dabbles in all of it like a man half his age. Consider "For the Gram," a car crash of his most cringeworthy tendencies. Singing about Instagram, he awkwardly attempts to out-Drake Drake (whose own blend of hip-hop and R&B itself owes something to David's turn-of the century suavity) with lines about hashtags, emoji, and sliding into DMs. For an album called The Time Is Now, David spends too much of his time looking like he's trying to catch up".

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"Time Is Now contains notably less UK garage than its predecessor, and instead lives up to its name by mining trendy, but already quite tired, sounds from the charts. There's Latin pop, flutey synths, sharp, snappy h-hats, and, like much contemporary pop, a cold air of austerity whipping through it all (...). It's a shame that David barely draws on the genre he helped popularise, because here he often seems swallowed up by different styles: Going On begins with an outrageous Drake ripoff, while collaborators such as Bastille unduly influence the tracks they appear on. David may have worked hard to rejoin the pop firmament, but he seems slightly lost now that he's arrived".

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"The first three songs are superb, especially the blissfully silly acrostic Magic ("G for the girl that got me good/ I C the world the way I should"), but it's a glossily one-note album, an uncomplicated toast to desire sated, friendship reciprocated and love requited".

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