If “Adorn” was Miguel’s breakthrough “I Wanna Be Your Lover”-style hit, “Coffee” was his “Dirty Mind”. I make the Prince comparison because…well, because it’s apt. It also means Miguel’s next album will make him a pop superstar. After all, Prince’s fifth album was 1999.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

“Coffee” was the lead single from Miguel’s third album Wildheart. It’s sludgy and smutty and delightfully dirty without being explicitly so. Miguel’s sultry murmur evokes so much erotic longing that he could be singing about actual coffee grounds and it would sound hot. And his using “gun play” as a metaphor for sex is pretty creative. At least I assume it’s a metaphor for sex. What else comes between word play and pillow talk? The usage of “gun play” also gives the song a homoerotic vibe. To my ears, anyway. Can you tell I haven’t been getting any?

“Coffee”’s sound leaned a bit more towards rock than R&B and was probably a bit too far left to be a big radio hit, even though Miguel’s label attempted to paste a guest verse by Wale to it, in the hopes that it’d be a bigger record. Didn’t work. And you’re better off without the guest rapper gambit, in this case.