“Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist,” sang Taylor Swift in a line no one expected to hear on the title track of THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT—least of all Charlie Puth. The New Jersey-born musical prodigy made his name in the mid-2010s writing radio-ready pop hits, from “See You Again” with Wiz Khalifa to “We Don’t Talk Anymore” featuring Selena Gomez. But for his fourth album, Puth decided to do things differently, letting his real life inform the music rather than vice versa. Whatever’s Clever! arrives in the wake of not just the biggest performance of his career (singing the national anthem at Super Bowl LX), but the birth of his first child. “It’s the first time in my life where the music is lining up perfectly with my life,” Puth tells Apple Music. “This is the music that plays in the background of being a dad.” Few genres say “fatherhood” better than yacht rock, the proudly cheesy strain of soft rock that ruled the airwaves in the late ’70s and early ’80s. “My goal was to make a little bit of a Yacht Rock 2026-sounding album and pay respect to all the artists that came before me who pioneered that,” says Puth. That’s a bit of an understatement. In his living-room studio, Puth assembled a team of what you could call the Yacht Rock Avengers, among them Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins. The result is 12 tracks that sneak heavy themes about life and love into deceptively smooth ’80s pop and R&B numbers. Kenny G appears for a sax solo on “Cry,” while J-pop legend Hikaru Utada adds a verse to “Home,” a wistful city-pop ode to domestic bliss. Heartfelt lyrics about embracing the unknown feel like messages to Puth’s younger self, while on “I Used to Be Cringe,” he gives up trying to be cool and starts being himself.