FEATURE:
Behold the Girl
PHOTO CREDIT: Thurstan Redding for NME
Saluting the Modern-Day Icon Rina Sawayama
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IT seems like a good time…
PHOTO CREDIT: Thurstan Redding for NME
to proclaim a tremendous young artist whose latest album, Hold the Girl, marks her as a modern-day icon. In a music scene where the incredible Charli XCX stands alongside Self Esteem and Dua Lipa, there are so many incredible women who are headline acts producing some of the best and most inventive music around. Rina Sawayama, I think, is one of the greatest artists in the world. Born in Japan and based in London, the thirty-two-year-old released her second studio album on 16th September. One of the best albums of this year, it is guaranteed to pick up awards and mark her as someone who will continue to produce extraordinary music. 2020’s SAWAYAMA was a stunning debut album that should have been nominated for a Mercury Prize and countless awards. It was a travesty that she addressed. Seemingly ineligible from being included for a BRIT or Mercury Prize, rules have now changed. She is a British artist who was born in Japan, so she should not have any issues when it comes to Hold the Girl scooping massive acclaim and awards. I want to focus this feature on Hold the Girl and how Rina Sawayama has grown into this captivating and iconic artist. I will use some interviews and reviews that make the point. For anyone who has not heard Rina Sawayama or listened to her music, you will be blown away!
I am going to come back to a recent NME interview that traced things back to the earliest days and looked ahead to where Sawayama is heading next. The genre-defying artist definitely hit the ground running and cemented her own sound and style on her 2020 debut:
“Born in Japan in 1990, Sawayama moved to London when she was five. Raised by her single mother, she rebelled in her adolescence, sneaking out of the house to go to indie gigs. “Landfill indie was literally my entire identity for a couple years,” she says, recounting these heady teenage years. “I’d wear some white skinny jeans and Converse and go to gigs on my own underage. It was honestly the best time of my life.” She went on to study at Cambridge University, dropping her first track in 2013 (‘Sleeping in Waking’) after graduating, and hustling as an independent artist for several years.
2017 saw the self-release of mini-album ‘Rina’, a glittering collection of avant-garde production meshed with hooks Britney Spears would pine for. A string of singles followed, including fan-favourite ‘Cherry’, a searingly honest tune that sees Sawayama reflect on her own sexuality (“Even though I’m satisfied/I lead my life within a lie“). With these early releases Sawayama carved out a clear sonic world, and saw her fanbase grow into a dedicated community dubbed ‘Pixels’.
Signing to Dirty Hit to 2019 (home of The 1975 and Beabadoobee), her debut album, the critical smash ‘SAWAYAMA’, landed the following year. A savvy, smart collection of future-facing pop songs, it received the five-star treatment here at NME, hailed as a “deeply personal self-portrait [that] lays waste to genre constraints”.
Sawayama’s disregard for genre on her debut was fresh and exciting, particularly the use of nu-metal on the phenomenal single ‘STFU!’. The ferocious track saw her rage against racist microagressions, reintroducing a once-maligned sound back into the mainstream. Artists like Wargasm and Cassyette now fearlessly embrace the scene, but Sawayama is humble about the impact she’s had today, name-checking artists like Poppy who’ve also embraced and revolutionised nu-metal in recent years.
Work began on the follow-up to ‘SAWAYAMA’ during the early days of the pandemic in 2020; Sawayama is still coming to terms with the juxtaposition. “What I was experiencing during that time was…” she pauses. “On one hand it was the shared experience of everyone being under this very traumatic period in time where we were kept in our house.” On the flipside though, “nothing happened, every day was the same.”
On top of the universal dread and confusion, Sawayama was also faced with the strange experience of watching her debut album take-off from behind a screen. She reflects: “It was just this crazy, constant, absolute sensory overload on my screen, and then not being able to switch off from it whatsoever because there’s nothing else to do, and it really made me forget a lot of things. That whole time is a bit of a blur for me”.
I shall jump to some reviews of Hold the Girl soon. I wanted to select this Australian interview, as it does highlight some interesting points and questions. Sawayama is touring Australia in January, and next month sees her embark on a number of dates in promotion of Hold the Girl. It is no wonder that there has been such explosion of love and respect for her amazing second studio album:
“Crucially, Hold The Girl is profoundly personal. Lockdown was tumultuous emotionally for Sawayama – past trauma resurfacing. "It was really hard. Professionally, the pandemic was the busiest time for me. Things were going much better than I ever expected them to – and so that was amazing – and just seeing people listen to my music and react to my music during this horrible time was such a blessing. But, personally, I was really struggling with my mental health – like a lot of people I know have."
"I still haven't gone back to Japan to see my family. I was feeling pretty isolated. I think it was an opportunity to really reflect on, like, the stones that have been left unturned in my therapy. So I kind of went back to therapy."
"I guess the things that were all brought up made it to this record – and it would be pretty tumultuous. It was pretty intense. But, obviously, the therapy and also creating this record really helped push that out. I feel pretty happy and healed."
PHOTO CREDIT: Olivia Lifungula for The New York Times
Hold The Girl has a resonant overture in Minor Feelings – the symbolic title borrowed from a collection of essays by Korean-American poet Cathy Park Hong. The song represents the LP's "thesis" – Sawayama, a Third Culture Kid, contemplating her identity and life as a minority (the longtime UK resident successfully challenged exclusionary eligibility criteria for British awards like the Mercury Prize).
"At the time, I was really seeing a lot of Asian hate going on and kind of not enough furore around it – people weren't saying it loud enough. It was just this kind of symptomatic-ness of the Asian experience – about feeling lots of things, having lots of micro-aggressions and now real proper aggressions and hate crime happening during the pandemic and the rhetoric around the pandemic not being helped by Trump, obviously… It just felt like, these have been minor feelings and now they're majorly getting me down… I guess it was kind of like to address these deep-seated issues that I needed to address."
Early in the pandemic, Sawayama enrolled in an Oxford online writing course centred on biography. "I always try and draw inspiration from things other than music," she says. "I always think of myself as a storyteller first and then songwriter." However, Sawayama didn't complete the program. "I did a little bit of it," she demurs. "I chickened out in the bit that I had to reveal my stories."
Latterly, Sawayama has ventured into acting. "Again, I love telling stories. I love getting into character. I wanted to get into acting, because I just loved doing that for my music videos." In 2019 Sawayama appeared in Idris Elba's Netflix sitcom Turn Up Charlie – Elba portraying a DJ-cum-nanny. "He's so great!"
Travelling with a Kindle, Sawayama has lately read bell hooks' "beautifully written" 2000 tome All About Love: New Visions. As far as films, she recommends the absurdist comedy Everything Everywhere All At Once – Michelle Yeoh leading an Asian cast. "It just completely blew my mind," Sawayama stresses. "Most people who've watched the movie can't even explain what the movie is about, because it's such a multi-genre movie."
Musically, Sawayama admired Lorde's Solar Power – "a controversial choice," she concedes. "I really loved the world that she and Jack [Antonoff] created. Also, I saw her live and then it kind of made it make more sense. I thought the satire behind the whole thing was very clever. It just shows how capable Lorde is as a lyric writer, a songwriter – it was fantastic."
Plus Sawayama has a new hobby in mind. "I like to try things I'm scared of," she divulges. "I don't really have time to do it at the moment, but I would love to try horse-riding. I'm really scared of horses, but everyone says they're like big dogs… and I love dogs."
Alas, Sawayama is less sanguine about reality – her concerns the UK's cost of living crisis, exacerbated by Brexit, and prevailing religious conservatism Stateside. "I try and be positive, but I'm not really," she rues. "I'm not very hopeful for the politicians in power to get anything right, to be honest." Sawayama "fumes" about political corruption, particularly vested interests. "But," she pivots, "what I do have faith in is community… I really think that, with the lack of support from the top, always grassroots is the only thing that's left." Privately, Sawayama gives to charity. "But, what I can do as an artist is to – even if it's 1000 to 3000 or 5000 people in a room, if I can make them happy and leave them feeling empowered, then that's really all I can do."
Auspiciously, Australian Pixels can anticipate a Hold The Girl tour. "We're definitely working on it right now, yes," Sawayama teases. "Australian fans have been so kind to me, and I've never been to Australia, so I would love to come”.
One of the best-reviewed albums of the year, Hold the Girl is a modern-day classic. I would advise that you go and get Hold the Girl on vinyl and treasure it. So many different sounds and genres fuse and wind together in these amazing songs. It is the way Sawayama utilises and experiments with varied sounds makes her music so memorable, nuanced and standout. This is what CLASH wrote in their review:
“Rina Sawayama is an artist consistently pushing the boundaries of what pop music can be, blending a myriad of styles from hyperpop to nu-metal, all while juggling collaborations with everyone from Elton John to Charli XCX. Debut album, 2020’s ‘SAWAYAMA’, encapsulated this genre-fluid ideology and was executed extremely well. Critical acclaim ensued, among Mercury Prize dramata. 2022 delivers (the dreaded) sophomore LP ‘Hold The Girl’, which is once again an album that refuses to play by the rules and has Rina Sawayama doing whatever she wants. And the result is one of the best pop records of the year.
‘Hold The Girl’ ignites with sombre opener ‘Minor Feelings’, which shows Sawayama crooning over delicate guitars and synths, before exploding into an anti-climax. No loud drums or screaming guitars solos like we’ve become familiar with (see debut opener ‘Dynasty’), but a choral-tinted outro (very of the time). It transitions into the title track ‘Hold the Girl’ via some fountain sounds, and the title track has Sawayama kicking the pop factor to one hundred. Centred around a 2-step rhythm and classic garage vocal chops, Sawayama blazes through some of her best vocal performances to date and the track delivers hooks galore. ‘This Hell’ also delivers infectious hooks and is clearly a track created for a live environment.
While Rina Sawayama continues to rule as Dirty Hit’s pop princess, she is also refusing to do only that. Cuts like ‘Catch Me In The Air’ and ‘Forgiveness’ lean more into soft and pop rock territory, without ever losing her pop polish. ‘Forgiveness’, especially, crashes into a raucous breakdown, balancing delightful theatrics with crunchy guitars and synthesisers. Contrastingly, she also knows how to write a great ballad. ‘Send My Love To John’ is the token ‘slow song’ on the record but supplies arguably Rina Sawayama’s best studio vocal performance ever. ‘Send My Love’ balances folky guitars, and has some amazing riffing work vocally from Sawayama. The Cohen-esque melody lifts adds a nostalgic element, an unexpected but welcomed juxtaposition to the high-intensity modern sounds of the rest of the record.
Closer ‘To Be Alive’ seems to a track that is bridging the gap between hyperpop and mainstream pop – an event that many have been awaiting. The melodies are inherently pop, but the glitchy and beautifully jarring aspects of the beat tease the realms of hyperpop. The sporadic snare hits toward the back end of the track are reminiscent of the late SOPHIE’s incredible work, and the plucky synths wouldn’t be out of place on a PC Music project.
‘Hold The Girl’ is a record that holds something for everyone. Rock riffs, club beats, saccharine melodies, 2000s pop… it truly covers a lot of ground. Like debut record ‘SAWAYAMA’, this sophomore LP does a bit of everything, but this time around feels more refined, consistent and polished: exactly what a follow up should be. And on a label roster saturated with enormous amounts of talent, Rina Sawayama is making a pretty good claim to being the ruler.
9/10”.
Before wrapping up and including a career-spanning Rina Sawayama playlist from Spotify, there is a five-star review from DIY that shows so much love and admiration from such a wondrous and instantly impactful album:
“Rina Sawayama has always been her own kind of pop star, constantly defining and redefining what exactly the term means for her. The Japanese-born, London-bred musician has carved out her own niche within the pop canon as a new kind of artist, a kind who studied politics at Cambridge before deciding that she wanted to give the music thing a go. As an East Asian musician, she has refused to box herself into one label - and this is especially true with second full-length ‘Hold the Girl’. Her music touches on the struggles she’s faced with integrating herself into the immigrant diaspora and feeling marginalised as a British-Asian, while also covering the unique and profound yet lonely and fraught experience of being a daughter raised by a single mother. All this, of course, is threaded with further themes about embracing her queerness, acknowledging the alienation she felt as a child, and the welcoming of her “chosen family”. Rina has lived many lives, and in her music, reflects on the experiences of each while still acknowledging that her story is still continuing to be written, by her own hand.
Across ‘Hold the Girl’, Rina is her most candid yet about the experiences which led to her having to grow up more quickly than most. The record is anchored by a certain sense of sadness that comes with mourning the childhood she feels that she lost, but the understanding that life is an ongoing journey - and learning to accept feeling hopeful for the future and chapters that have yet to be written. Rina curated the track listing as a way to guide the listener through the reflective journey of identifying and processing her childhood trauma as an adult going through therapy.
Opener ‘Minor Feelings’ takes its title from the book by the poet Cathy Park Hong that centres on the marginalisation of Asian Americans - “Minor feelings are getting me down” - with Rina speaking on feelings of otherness and loneliness she had long harboured, speaking frankly of her want to acknowledge emotions that she had long repressed. The song’s reflective nature sets the pace for the rest of the record, which combines an eclectic palette of bombastic, heart-on-sleeve euphoric pop and angsty dancefloor fillers whose influences range from Garbage to Avril Lavigne; Kacey Musgraves to The Corrs. The tracks rage with emotional depth; the heartfelt ‘Catch Me in the Air’ is a tribute to the very particular relationship between a single mother and her daughter who constantly have to take turns “catching” each other, while the club-ready queer anthem ‘This Hell’ openly embraces being eternally damned (with a nod to Shania Twain in the opening).
‘Forgiveness’ and ‘Holy’ further chart the continuous and arduous path to healing from long-felt wounds, while ‘Frankenstein’ marks one of the record’s darkest moments. It’s an honest and visceral look into more painful moments that come with processing past pain: “I’m trying to be normal, but trauma is immortal… This is so unbearable, make it stop, this is more than medical / All I want is to feel beautiful, inside and out.” Phantom’, meanwhile, addresses the ghost of past selves and the mourning of the loss of innocence: “I’ve been trying to find her since / She gave a little too much away… I don’t wanna do this without you / I don’t wanna do this if you’re just a ghost in the night.”
The metaphors for healing continue with ‘Hurricanes’, in which Rina takes it upon herself to find betterment in growth – “I’m not the girl I tried to be yesterday” – with the emotional arc finding a positive resolution with record-closer ‘To Be Alive,’ where the imagery of storms and thunder are replaced with blue skies and newfound clarity. “It’s just temporary pain,” Rina reminds herself with finality. Rina makes it very clear that the roadway to a better tomorrow takes constant work, but with every three-minute euphoric pop banger, she gets a little closer to it”.
It is worth looking forward to seeing what is coming from Rina Sawayama. I have said for a while how she would make a phenomenal film star and captivating screen presence. She will appear on screen soon, and I hope that we see a lot more from her in that sense. Coming back to NME, and they asked her about recent screen work and plans:
“Another superstar Sawayama has worked with recently is Lady Gaga, collaborating with producer Clarence Clarity on a rendition of ‘Free Woman’ for Gaga’s 2021 remix album ‘Dawn of Chromatica’. Both Sawayama and Gaga are ground-breaking artists, forging their own sounds without compromise, and both dominating when they’re on stage, it’s not hard to see why Sawayama has received comparisons to the pop juggernaut. Is this a career trajectory she’d aspire to at all?
“Definitely,” Sawayama says. “I love Gaga. I loved Gaga the most, and I respected her the most, when she did [2016 album] ‘Joanne’ because it was so not what people expected. It’s one of my favourite albums by her, which I know is a controversial opinion, but I think ‘Joanne’ is so emotionally in tune and so incredible and the way she played those tiny gigs was amazing. I think that she likes to keep it fresh. Definitely that’s something I want to pursue.”
Like Gaga, Sawayama is also making steps in other creative realms, including an acting gig in 2023’s John Wick: Chapter 4 alongside Keanu Reeves; the sort of acting role that could see Sawayama add Hollywood A-lister to her resume. “My team are all just so shook by the idea that we even got offered John Wick, so I think… none of us really know what’s gonna happen,” she says honestly, considering the right words to describe how she feels about her next adventure. “We’re just like, ‘What does happen to people in movies?’”
“I will say that the movie is amazing,” she adds of the flick. “I’m so excited for people to see it in the cinema, because it’s definitely, 100 per cent the best John Wick that’s ever been, and I’m not being biassed, like honestly, the scale is insane this time.” Sawayama confirms she’d “definitely” take on further acting roles in the future, enjoying the alternative creative practice. “It’s such a different process to music, and even though you have control over your character, it is someone else’s movie so you have to really work in a team. It’s nice to not have that responsibility sometimes,” she says.
For now, though, she’s gearing up for her upcoming tour. Working with a huge team that includes costume designers, tour and musical directors, and her band on “the most insanely big production”, with natural performer Sawayama at helming the show it’s sure to be a spectacle. Her 2021 shows received rave reviews, paving the way for her Best Live Act win at the BandLab NME Awards 2022 earlier this year.
“I used to post on the back of NME to recruit for band members. So it’s so surreal to even get an award from NME. It was really, really weird…one of the things I haven’t fully processed, but it makes me want to keep working on my live shows. I’m really, really passionate about it, the audience experience most of all.”
This excitement for the tour, and aspirations for these upcoming shows, is something that’s abundantly clear when talking to Sawayama. As she explains: “You can remember a gig you went to when you were 15 forever, and I always want to make that moment for people.” Time to strap on those Converse and skinny jeans and launch yourself into the pits, as Rina once did: these memories, after all, will last a lifetime”.
A peerless talent whose second studio album seems to (somehow) exceed the brilliance of her debut, SAWAYAMA, Hold the Girl is one of my favourite albums from this year. I do genuinely believe that Rina Sawayama is a sensation who will go down as a legend. An icon of the modern times, it will be truly exciting and curious what she does for album three and where her music takes her next. At the moment, she is readying herself for international travel and a hectic end of the year. Let’s hope that she gets a chance to reconnect with family and take a breath soon, as burn-out and exhaustion would be the last thing she needs. Having released a celebrated album, so many eyes are on the stunning Rina Sawayama. She is truly one of our…
GREATEST treasures!