It’s been four years since “The 20/20 Experience,” Justin Timberlake’s most recent full-length release. So when it was announced, in October, that Timberlake would be performing at this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, new music suddenly seemed imminent. In a video on Tuesday, Timberlake finally revealed a release date (February 2nd) and title (“Man of the Woods”). He gravely narrated the record’s themes: “This album is really inspired by my son, my wife, my family, but more so than any album I’ve ever written, where I’m from,” he explained in a voice-over. “And it’s personal.”

“Filthy,” the album’s first single, which was co-produced by Timberlake, Timbaland, and Danja, and released this morning, is a blithe bit of Prince-inspired dance-pop, with deep spiritual debts to Lil Johnson. It has a pudgy, reverberating bass line, and an arena-rattling bridge. “Look, I said, ‘Put your filthy hands all over me,’ / You know this ain’t the clean version,” Timberlake sings. His voice, which is thin and precise, takes on new depth when it bends mischievously, or ekes into falsetto: “And what you gonna do with all that meat?” he wonders. “Cookin’ up a meat serving.” Timberlake’s gifts are not in his tone—he winces through his vocals, which can make them feel too taut, like a rubber band that’s about to snap—but in his performance. Even when something unbearably goofy happens (when, say, after the lyric, “And what you gonna do with all that beast?” he samples some growling animal, making an already dopey metaphor infinitely more embarrassing) Timberlake’s comportment remains un-self-serious. He understands pop music as being chiefly about joy and release.

Timberlake was born in Memphis and raised in Millington, a woodsy Tennessee suburb along the eastern shores of the Mississippi River. He has always been strident regarding this part of his heritage. In 2015, he purchased a hundred and twenty-six acres of land in Leiper’s Fork, a rural community in Williamson County, Tennessee, near the Natchez Trace. Yet one would certainly be forgiven for assuming that Timberlake is a product of Orlando; besides possessing a certain Floridian je ne sais quoi, he is strongly associated with two Orlando-based institutions. At twelve, he joined the cast of Disney’s “The Mickey Mouse Club,” a giddy variety show for children, and by fourteen he was anchoring ‘NSync, a colossally successful boy band wrangled by the disgraced impresario Lou Pearlman, who died in prison, in 2016.

The hyper-stylized aesthetic of the teaser video for “Man of the Woods” incited a great deal of fretting online—was Timberlake was about to make a country record? “Younger Now,” Miley Cyrus’s recent experiment with a more earnest, country-tinged sound, peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100, and was off the charts entirely within eight weeks. Her transformation felt too pointed and deliberate; it cast her previous experiments with hip-hop and R. & B. as mercenary and appropriative.

The imagery in the “Man of the Woods” clip was geographically befuddling (was it really Tennessee? Or perhaps Montana, where Timberlake also owns an estate?). In it, a team of wild horses rushes a field, while Timberlake, wearing a leather motorcycle jacket, gallops after them. He descends into water, his shirt unbuttoned, as if reënacting a nineteenth-century river baptism. In other scenes, he moodily navigates a bonfire, a creek, a drying cornfield. Timberlake’s wife, the actress Jessica Biel, speaks: “It’s like Wild West, but now.” The producer Pharrell Williams, a longtime collaborator, offers his own commentary: “It feels so earthy!” Still: no matter how many times Timberlake collapsed to his knees in a snowy meadow, it felt ridiculous to suddenly accept him as a rugged frontiersman, rather than a practiced and professional pop singer who once wrote a very good R. & B. song about his necktie. (Besides, didn’t we collectively endure and defeat this exact strain of quasi-nostalgia already, several years back, when all the young men in cities started wearing work boots and cultivating beards?)

Unsubtle commercials for new pop releases aren’t especially unusual, though they are rarely so explicit about a record’s aesthetic and arc—this one was so unambiguous as to feel like a preëmptive epistle to any critic who might dare to make an interpretive leap. But “Filthy” sounds more like Bruno Mars (who also released a new single this week) than Johnny Cash, which makes Timberlake’s diversionary characterizations even more curious. Perhaps now, more than ever, the disconnect between what a record is doing musically and whatever meta-narratives are being slathered atop it is fully irrelevant. Maybe the album and the story about the album are, finally, two distinct and unrelated art forms.

The video for “Filthy,” which is directed by Mark Romanek, sees Timberlake playing a Steve Jobs-type executive (in wire-frame glasses, a dark turtleneck, and a headset mike), launching a dancing robot at something called the “Pan-Asian Deep Learning Conference.” Is the robot supposed to represent the sterile externalization of some deep and unspeakable lust? The outsourcing of desire? Our ongoing disassociation from our wild and imperfect bodies? I don’t know. It’s fun to watch it dance.