Maroon 5 & Lil Wayne’s Love Is Like: Meaning & Review

Your love is like drugs, Adam Levine sings, and the line snaps like a rubber band against a sample that feels lived-in and familiar.

Love Is Like, the title track of Maroon 5’s new album, arrives with Lil Wayne in the passenger seat and a video that hits the streets a day before the LP.

It dropped August 15, 2025 on 222/Interscope, a compact 2:54 single that leans on classic soul DNA to get its sting.

What you hear first is the lift from Valerie Simpson’s “Silly, Wasn’t I,” a 1972 cut that gives the hook its soft-focus gleam while the rhythm section tightens around it.

The sample credit explains why Simpson, Nickolas Ashford, and Josephine Armstead sit alongside the contemporary writers.

It also changes how Wayne’s verse lands, because the guitar flicks and drum programming are arguing with memory as much as with a current fling.

The rollout is a neat one-two. The video premiered on August 14 at 9 p.m. Pacific, then the album hit.

Director Aerin Moreno stages Levine on a restless New York loop, pulled into a limo where Wayne waits for the hand-off.

There is a sly sense of performance inside performance, a band looking at its own myth while the chorus leans hard on appetite and abandon.

Moreno’s name is right there in the YouTube credits, and if you scan them you see Radiance Pictures and a roster of stunt drivers, colorists, and grips that tell you this wasn’t a quick shoot.

On streaming day one, the single posts 1.17 million global Spotify streams and enters the Daily Global chart at No. 191, with a U.S. Daily entry at No. 121.

Those aren’t victory-lap numbers, they’re a clean baseline for a track that will likely live or die on playlist stickiness and the video’s replay value.

On YouTube, the official video tallied about half a million views within 48 hours of premiere, a figure that will keep moving by the hour.

What the record is doing musically is more interesting than the raw stats.

The sample brings warmth, the bass sits high and rubbery, and Levine’s melody glides rather than belts.

Wayne enters like a smirk you can hear, stretching syllables over clipped guitars.

Wikipedia’s liner-note adaptation even lists him with a guitars credit, which squares with the track’s texture and his long history of dabbling with instruments when the mood suits.

That small detail helps the collab feel less like a bolt-on verse and more like a conversation held inside the arrangement.

If you have followed Maroon 5’s last decade, you know they excel at pop-rap chemistry.

Girls Like You with Cardi B is the obvious benchmark, Beautiful Mistakes with Megan Thee Stallion a later variant, but Love Is Like feels closer to their early, guitar-leaning instincts folded back into 2025 radio language.

You can hear the back-to-basics swing in the dry drums and the way the chorus refuses to over-sing its big idea.

Songwriting is by Adam Levine, Dwayne Carter, Jacob Kasher Hindlin, Rio Root, Bobby Love, Federico Vindver, Natalie “Naliya” Salomon and, via the sample, Valerie Simpson, Nickolas Ashford, and Josephine Armstead.

Production is by Vindver, JKash, Rio Root, Bobby Love, with engineering touches from Noah “Mailbox” Passovoy and Manny Galvez, mixing by Manny Marroquin, and mastering by Randy Merrill.

It is a modern credits stack that still points back to yesterday through Simpson’s melody.

The video helps the song’s argument. Watch how the city is cut to keep you slightly off balance, how the limo scene lets Wayne own the frame without dragging the tempo, how the final sequence pushes the hook to repetition without numbing it.

There is a quick visual grammar of detours, a day that can’t sit still, a love that won’t either.

Moreno has been carving a lane with sleek, artist-first pop visuals, and this one feels like a continuation of that streak.

Following a summer of breadcrumb teasers and the earlier singles Priceless with LISA and All Night.

The band’s U.S. arena run in October and November gives the campaign an obvious second wind.

This title track functions as the hinge between the roll-out’s glossy side and its live one.

What does it all add up to for the listener who isn’t counting?

A pop song about appetite that chooses clarity over mystery. A collaboration where the guest verse doesn’t interrupt the mood, it sharpens it.

A careful flirtation with the band’s older habits, heard through a sampler and a tight runtime.

If you came in for Lil Wayne, you will stay for the way the chorus sits in your mouth after the first play.

If you came in for Maroon 5, you may be surprised at how easily the sample turns a new line into old memory.

Play it once without thinking, then once while paying attention to the guitar scratches under Wayne’s entry and the way the drums tuck just behind the vocal. That is where the record really lives.

And if you strip the video of its city gloss and limo jokes, you are left with a plain idea sung plainly: want is a drug, and everyone thinks they have the dosage right until they do not.

Is Love Is Like a fling or a keeper in your rotation, and what does that answer say about your threshold for risk this year?