Making a double album is a risky proposition for any artist. Plenty of the greats, from Bruce Springsteen to the Beatles to the Smashing Pumpkins, have stumbled into the pitfalls of self-indulgence and/or plentiful filler material en route to creating their own double albums, and those records are considered the classics of the medium. Imagine what a complete double album disaster could sound like. Expansive and interconnected musical projects hardly become easier when you break them up into separate releases and space them out across several months (just ask Green Day), and it all becomes a little bit trickier when you have nearly seven years of built-up anticipation waiting on the receiving end of your return.

Such was the perfect storm of intensity waiting for Justin Timberlake when he made his comeback earlier this year with the first part of The 20/20 Experience. Timberlake’s answer to handling the “double album” pressure was, unsurprisingly, to play it cool and not tell anyone he was actually making a double album: The 20/20 Experience 2 of 2 wasn’t even announced until well after the first part had scored a just-shy-of-a-million-copies first week of sales. Timberlake also subverted expectations with the music, inflating his song lengths to the five, six, or seven minute range (if not more), meaning that his two 2013 albums have ended up with a collective running time of 144 minutes, enough music for three or four records. Needless to say, the 2013 version of Justin Timberlake has been a guy with a lot of songs to share and plenty of surprises up his sleeve.