Some albums arrive with a quiet confidence, and some storm into the room, waving their arms, demanding you listen. Jordan’s The Tunnel + The Light somehow does both. It isn’t shouting, but it radiates urgency, like someone leaning across the table at 2 a.m. to tell you a story they have to get out, because if they don’t, they’ll drown. Written while caring for her mother through cancer, it’s Jordan Corey’s most personal work to date and annoyingly enough, it might also be her best.
What immediately distinguishes this album is its fixation on transition. Not the tidy, Hollywood version of “coming of age,” but the messier suspension between grief and healing, between who you were and who you’re clawing your way into becoming. It’s a record that doesn’t just acknowledge liminality. Rather, it inhabits it. Sonically, that comes through in the humid wash of indie electronica and alt-R&B, textures that feel tropical yet glitch-touched, like someone plugged a synth rack into a generator at the edge of the sea. The result is lush, sticky, cathartic, and strangely hopeful.
If you come in looking for detached irony or TikTok-ready cleverness, you’re in the wrong place. Jordan traffics in sincerity, that rarest of pop commodities, and she leans into it with unselfconscious courage.
There’s been plenty of talk about how this album balances groove and vulnerability, but the more interesting question is how. The production feels like Purity Ring if they ever stepped outside into actual sunlight: warm basslines sliding beneath ethereal vocal stacks, percussion flickering like neon bouncing off puddles. Imagine Little Dragon’s playful experimentation softened with Raveena’s tropical dreaminess, shaken into one cocktail. By rights, it shouldn’t work. But it does, and it works precisely because Jordan refuses to choose between alienness and intimacy, sunlight and shadow.
The opener, “Friend Like Me,” makes that balancing act clear. It doesn’t ease you in—it yanks. The beats have jagged edges, immediately recalling K.Flay’s more abrasive pop experiments. On first listen, the rhythm feels breezy, almost flirty, but pay attention and the lyrics snap into focus: longing, loneliness, the exhaustion of wanting someone who never quite shows up. It’s a bait-and-switch pop track, seducing you with danceability before hitting you with emotional weight. The brilliance is that Jordan never lets the groove erase the vulnerability—she makes them walk hand in hand, so you find yourself swaying and wincing at the same time.
If “Friend Like Me” is the warning shot, “Somethin Somethin” is the strut. It’s the showboat track and it knows it. From the moment that bassline kicks in; a bassline so slinky and infectious it might as well have been designed in a secret underground lab to irritate your neighbors, you know you’re in big territory. The song could slot comfortably alongside Demon Days-era Gorillaz, all funk and swagger with a whiff of menace. Yet Jordan keeps it grounded. Her delivery is conspiratorial, whisper-intimate, like she’s letting you in on a secret even as the production swaggers down the block in mirrored shades. It’s the rare song that proves groove and intimacy aren’t opposites—they’re accelerants.
The album’s heart beats most strongly in “Try Me,” “Feel Me,” and “Go to Bed.” These tracks lean heavily into R&B terrain, evoking the velvety intimacy of Yuna or Raveena. But Jordan isn’t content to stop there. She overlays a colder, crystalline edge that calls Purity Ring to mind: synths shimmer like glass, beats flicker with almost sterile precision, while her vocals bring warmth back into the mix. It’s this tension of lush tropicality against icy detachment that makes them feel so alive. They’re love songs written in the middle of a storm: fragile, desperate, beautiful, and just unsettling enough to keep you awake.
By contrast, “The Story” emerges as a sun-drenched reprieve. Funky bassline? Check. Breezy melodies? Check. Percussion that splits the difference between the precision of FINNEAS and the loose, playful touch of FKJ? Absolutely. It feels like golden hour bottled into four minutes; a bop that radiates warmth even as you sense it can’t last. Coming after the record’s emotional turbulence, it lands like a deep breath, a chance to unclench your fists. Jordan is flexing here, sure, but not with arrogance. It’s a flex of permission: the freedom to feel joy in the middle of grief.
The closer, “Earthbound,” isn’t a fireworks finale but a benediction. Its tropical undertones ripple softly beneath vocals that recall Little Dragon’s knack for balancing alienness and tenderness. This is less about resolution than presence. It lands gently, like a hand on your shoulder, reminding you that closure doesn’t always arrive with thunderclaps. Sometimes it comes quietly, as a soft goodbye that lingers.
What ultimately sets The Tunnel + The Light apart is that it doesn’t just sound good; it feels lived-in. Every lyric seems tested against actual grief, actual care, actual love. The result is music that functions both as escapism and as grounding.
Jordan isn’t reinventing the wheel here, and she doesn’t need to. What she’s doing instead is threading the needle between extremes: groove and vulnerability, tropical warmth and icy glitch, sincerity and experimentation. Where Little Dragon might drift too far into the esoteric and Purity Ring too far into the sterile, Jordan holds the middle with warmth.
In the end, Jordan Corey’s The Tunnel + The Light is an album for liminal spaces. It’s music for late-night drives when the freeway feels infinite, for dawn train rides when the world is too quiet, for those moments when you can’t tell if you’re falling apart or coming together. It insists that maybe both are true, and maybe that’s okay. It’s a record that doesn’t just accompany you through transition; it reminds you that transition is living.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for various publications around the world, the former lead writer of review blogspace Atop The Treehouse and content creator for Manila Bulletin.
