At a concert in his hometown of Memphis on Friday night (Jan. 19), Justin Timberlake live-debuted the new song “Selfish” — his first new solo material since his fifth studio album, 2018’s Man of the Woods.
“So if I get jealous, I can’t help it/ I want every bit of you, I guess I’m selfish,” JT sings on the silky-smooth R&B track (listen to a snippet in the TikTok video below). “It’s bad for my mental, but I can’t fight it.”
And that’s not all: Also on Friday night, Timberlake unveiled a trailer for his sixth album along with the project’s official title: Everything I Thought It Was. This comes after the pop star’s Instagram teaser on Wednesday was captioned “EITIW,” leading fans on an Easter egg hunt to decode the acronym.
The album trailer has a sort of Wes Anderson, Asteroid City vibe about it, with a model car driving toward a desert gas station. It also has an A-list narrator in Benicio Del Toro.
“What do we have here?” Del Toro says as the video opens. “Ooh, that’s a nice car! Wait, it’s a model. Did that say JT? OK, that sunset is definitely not real. Oh, there’s Justin! Why won’t he turn around? What the f— is he staring at?”
The trailer — which you can watch below — ends with yellow words against a black screen that read: “Justin Timberlake Presents: Everything I Thought It Was.”
A series of clues had hinted at new Timberlake solo music, starting with the star wiping his Instagram clean in early January. In addition to the mid-week Instagram teaser, Timberlake was also announced as a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Thursday next week and the musical guest on Saturday Night Live (alongside host Dakota Johnson) on Jan. 27. While we don’t have an official release date for “Selfish” yet, you can pre-save the song on Spotify now.
In September, Timberlake reunited with *NSYNC to release “Better Place” for the Trolls Band Together soundtrack, marking the group’s first musical release since 2002 (when the Neptunes remix of “Girlfriend,” featuring Nelly, arrived). That same month, Timberlake reunited with longtime collaborators Timbaland and Nelly Furtado on the song “Keep Going Up!”