Charlie Puth has spent most of his career being underestimated, and he has spent most of Whatever’s Clever! deciding he no longer cares. The result is his best record, which is both a genuine compliment and a slightly surprising sentence to write.

The album came out March 27 via Atlantic, and it is a full commitment to a specific aesthetic: late-1980s soft rock, yacht rock, smooth R&B, and lounge jazz, with BloodPop behind the boards and a guest list that includes Kenny G, Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, Ravyn Lenae, Coco Jones, Hikaru Utada, and, improbably, Jeff Goldblum. That lineup tells you everything about the vibe Puth is chasing, and also how unafraid he is to be exact about his references. This is not an album that gestures vaguely at an era. This is an album where the saxophone solo on “Cry” is played by the actual Kenny G, and where that feels like a completely natural choice rather than a stunt.

What makes it work is that Puth’s personal circumstances give the aesthetic purpose. He’s recently married, recently a father, and the album is built around the strange emotional territory of arriving at a life you actually want. “Changes” opens the record with gospel choir and that ’80s-adjacent production, and it works because Puth sounds genuinely relieved rather than performatively content. The difference matters. Pop artists who sing about happiness often sound like they’re trying to convince themselves. Puth sounds like someone who has figured something out and wants to write it down before the feeling passes.

The collaborations are uniformly good, which is not a given on a record this stacked with guests. Ravyn Lenae on “New Jersey” is exactly the kind of pairing that makes you wonder why it took this long. Coco Jones on “Sideways” is easy and warm in a way that suits both artists. Hikaru Utada on “Home” makes the track feel quieter and more personal than it has any right to be. Even the Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins pairing on “Love in Exile” lands, which should be impossible and somehow isn’t.

The record is not without its limitations. Lyrically, Puth occasionally retreats into familiar territory when the subject matter gets too close. Some tracks feel like they’re circling an emotion without quite committing to it. “Beat Yourself Up” is the clearest example: the production has real swagger, the sophisti-pop swing is nailed, but the words underneath don’t fully earn the arrangement. It’s a minor issue in the context of a record that gets so much right, but it’s there.

What Whatever’s Clever! ultimately demonstrates is that Puth has been right about himself this whole time, even when that was a difficult case to make. The self-produced perfectionism of his earlier work always pointed toward a musical intelligence that couldn’t quite escape its own anxieties. Here, he’s loose. He’s having fun. He’s brought in the saxophone legend and the yacht rock icons and the Grammy-winning K-pop producer because he wanted to, not because anyone told him it was a smart move. It is, in fact, a very smart move. But more importantly, it sounds like someone finally making the record they actually wanted to make, rather than the one they thought they were supposed to.