Description
Maroon 5 – Red Pill Blues – Compact Disc
Maroon 5’s Red Pill Blues is the band’s sixth studio album, released November 3, 2017 on 222 Records / Interscope. It’s the point where Maroon 5 fully commits to a feature-heavy, producer-driven pop/R&B approach—less “band in a room,” more “modern pop project,” built out of tight hooks, sleek low-end, and contemporary beat programming. It was recorded across 2015–2017 in a wide spread of studios (California, New York, London, Stockholm, and more), which fits the way it sounds: highly modular, polished, and assembled from multiple creative rooms rather than one core setup.
The album’s title is a direct reference to the “red pill / blue pill” idea popularized by The Matrix, and Adam Levine explicitly framed the record as emotionally connected to the band’s early era—though sonically it’s clearly rooted in late-2010s pop trends rather than early-2000s pop-rock. One major “band history” detail: this is the first Maroon 5 album to list Sam Farrar as an official member (after years as a touring and recording contributor), and it’s also the last album to feature bassist Mickey Madden as a full member—making it their only studio album released as a seven-piece.
A big part of the album’s identity is its guest roster, which is unusually large for a Maroon 5 record: SZA, Kendrick Lamar, Julia Michaels, A$AP Rocky, LunchMoney Lewis, Future, and Cardi B all appear across the broader album campaign/editions. The features aren’t just decoration—they’re used to steer the project through different lanes: SZA helps anchor the bright, contemporary pop-R&B feel of “What Lovers Do,” A$AP Rocky brings a cooler, rap-adjacent mood on “Whiskey,” and the later Cardi B remix of “Girls Like You” turned that song into one of the era’s biggest mainstream singles.
The singles rollout is also part of why people remember this era so clearly. “What Lovers Do” and “Wait” were major pushes from the core album, but the campaign’s biggest commercial moment came later when “Girls Like You (feat. Cardi B)” was issued as a remix single; it hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for seven weeks, becoming the dominant “late-cycle” hit attached to the project. The album also exists in multiple configurations (standard and deluxe/expanded), which matters because some well-known Maroon 5 singles from that general period show up depending on edition and market.
If you’re coming to it as an “album listen” rather than a singles collection, Red Pill Blues is Maroon 5 optimizing for late-2010s pop reality: short runtimes, immediate choruses, lots of outside producers (Diplo and others are in the production credits), and a tracklist that moves quickly through different textures while keeping Adam Levine’s vocal presence as the constant. It’s the record that most clearly documents the band’s transition from their earlier guitar-and-groove identity into the streaming-era, collaboration-forward version of Maroon 5—clean, hooky, and designed to live in playlists as much as on a front-to-back spin.
Brand new, never played and still in the factory plastic
Track Listing
Maroon 5 – Best 4 U
Maroon 5 + SZA – What Loves Do
Maroon 5 – Wait
Maroon 5 – Lips On You
Maroon 5 – Bet My Heart
Maroon 5 + Julia Michaels – Help Me Out
Maroon 5 + LunchMoney Lewis – Who I Am
Maroon 5 + A$AP Rocky – Whiskey
Maroon 5 – Girls Like You
Maroon 5 – Closure
Bonus
Maroon 5 – Denim Jacket
Maroon 5 – Visions
Maroon 5 + Kendrick Lamar – Don’t Wanna Know
Maroon 5 + Future – Cold
