That could be a visual metaphor for James Worthy’s music. The texture is silky — the artfully muffled beats, softly luminous synthesizer, echoed percussion, and gently melodic bass guitar all conjure an atmosphere of romantic indulgence and late-night seduction. Then there’s the singer himself, who has one of the sweetest pipes to grace contemporary R&B in quite a while. Yet wade a little further into Worthy’s sound, and the deadly undercurrents become apparent. This is deep, unplumbable music, music that tugs and whispers and intoxicates, and once it’s got you, it doesn’t let go.

All of those qualities lurked in the grooves of “In The Dark,” James Worthy’s dream-shadowed April 2021 single. That track — which has now been streamed more than two million times — was so gorgeous and so immersive that the pain and psychic destabilization at the heart of the song was easy to miss. On “Tick Tock,” he’s taking no chances. He’s joined forces with one of the straightest talkers in hip-hop: the reliably incisive Big Gipp of the legendary Atlanta rap crew Goodie Mob. On Goodie Mob’s classic records, Big Gipp was always the rhymer who cut to the chase and delivered the brutal truths in unsparing, epigrammatic couplets. He’s brought that same energy and talents to “Tick Tock,” and his verse is a tough, muscular counterpoint to James Worthy’s winsome singing.