By Robert Moran
Japanese-British singer Rina Sawayama, pictured performing at the NOS Primavera Sound festival in Porto in June. Credit:Getty
The evidence, weirdly enough, is right there in the online comments sections. Look at the missives posted under any of the YouTube clips from Rina Sawayama’s new sophomore album Hold the Girl – the distinctively stylised music videos, or her recent Jimmy Fallon performance – and you’ll see her fans, affectionately known as Pixels, having polite pissing contests over who has followed her the longest or who noticed her world-conquering potential first, every commenter a proud parent watching their talented daughter blossom.
For years already, publications have hailed the 31-year-old Japanese-British singer as “the next Lady Gaga” (the UK’s Times) or a “cemented superstar” (The Guardian), but there’s a palpable sense that Hold the Girl, with its personal, emotional, radio-made anthems, might be the one that sends her supernova. She’s increasingly feeling the prevailing mood.
“I mean, I never used to get recognised or anything before, but then, lo and behold, after the pandemic, when I already had a lot of social anxiety, I started to get recognised – and I actually had to go back to therapy because of it. It was like, ‘Oh my god, this is really triggering my anxieties,’” Sawayama laughs, almost apologetically. “It’s weird when people are, like, just looking at you, even when they’re only being very kind.”
Hold the Girl is Sawayama’s second album for indie label, Dirty Hit.
Seated at the London office of her UK indie label Dirty Hit, a sort of taste-making, overachieving A24 of pop music, Sawayama – wearing all black, big glasses, an even bigger silver chain, tattoos poking around her sleeves – already looks a pop icon, even while clutching a post-lunch green smoothie.
“Someone was telling me this thing, ‘input goal and output goal’,” she says. “Output goal might be something like, ‘I want as many people to listen to this song as possible!’, but I can’t control that. All I can do is the input goal, which is, you know, I need to make a good video, I need to make a good record, I need to do a good photo shoot; just bring my best self to things. That’s what I’ve been focusing on.”
Sawayama, her debut album released in 2020, signposted the singer’s boundless potential. Remarkably genre-bending, the album veered maniacally from ’90s new jack swing to Y2K-era nu-metal and beyond, all anchored by her personal songwriting. That anything goes mentality peeks through on Hold the Girl – from the Shania-referencing country-pop of This Hell to the breathy Corrs-esque drama of Catch Me in the Air to Imagining’s slightly goth-y, very British two-step garage – but it’s mostly timeless, anthemic, pop songwriting, full of stirring key changes and soaring crescendos. There are at least a couple of guaranteed stadium-ready, torches-up moments in the incredible Hurricanes and Phantoms, but to be honest, any one of its tracks could win Eurovision, and I mean that as a compliment.
“I f—ing stan Eurovision so thank you,” Sawayama says, excitably. “It’s definitely a shift and it was conscious, because even though I know people enjoyed that kind of ricochet of genres, to me that wasn’t challenging anymore because I’d done it. The fun challenge for me was to create big songs and to keep telling personal stories but try to make it as universal as possible. I always think about Elton John songs – they’re so specific and so poetic but millions of people connect to them. That was my challenge.”
Perhaps belying both her Cambridge education and her advanced age in the lexicon of pop music (Sawayama only made music her full-time vocation at 27), Hold the Girl is a thematically hefty, and intensely personal, pop album. Much of its ideas came out of inner child work therapy, Sawayama explains, with songs like Phantom and the sublime title track speaking to some personal breakthroughs around childhood trauma, as though she’s giving some overdue kindness to her younger self.
“I’ve done therapy since I was, like, 15. I love therapy so much. But this was a more kind of intense therapy,” she says. The “pressure cooker” of the pandemic, spent in her London home with her partner, “driving each other crazy” (“I’m not talking about that,” she briskly shuts down when I start querying about her mysterious “partner”), prompted the radical therapy sessions. “I don’t want to go into the details of it,” she says, “but it was really helpful. It gave me so much insight into things from my past.”
Born in Japan, Sawayama moved to England when she was five, when her father – like her mother, an employee with Japan Airlines – was relocated for work. Her parents later separated and her father moved back to Japan, with Sawayama raised by her single mother, a tense relationship partly exacerbated by the immigrant divide, which she touched on in Paradisin’ on the debut album, where she revealed her mum used to hack her MSN Messenger. The songs on Hold the Girl delve into personal re-parenting, the myriad ways kids have to work through the trauma of their elders’ discomfiting, or stifling, or just uneasy orthodoxies.
Sawayama’s songwriting is uniquely pointed throughout the album. As a teen she attended an all-girls Church of England high school, a complicated experience she revisits on the Madonna-meets-Pet Shop Boys, Holy (“I was innocent when you said I was evil, I took your stones and I built a cathedral,” she sings). Around the same time, she entered the modelling world, with its predators and opportunists, which partly informs the post-#MeToo, Your Age (“It’s about the things we used to accept, about looking back and thinking, ‘What the f— were adults doing?’” ). At uni, she came out as queer (she identifies as pansexual), which drives much of her songwriting perspective, playfully on This Hell and more dramatically on Send My Love to John (“It’s about a homophobic parent accepting a new lover into their child’s life, and realising they’re giving them what they, the parent, never could”).
These are pop songs of both fury and grace. Forgiveness is a maximalist power-ballad sensitive to the rollercoaster road to self-worth, while the soaring single Catch Me in the Air, with its shifting POV from young mother to ageing daughter, embraces the empathy that comes with grown-up self-acceptance.
“Late 20s, early 30s, it’s an amazing age because you genuinely become quite comfortable with stuff – like, you just know yourself. But then, you’re also maybe at the age when your parents had you, and so you can put yourself in their shoes as well, and it’s really insightful to be able to flip those narratives – to look back and look forward and look at your parents too, to what the deal was there,” says Sawayama.
“I always think about Elton John songs – they’re so specific and so poetic but millions of people connect to them.”
“Especially during the lockdown, when so many people around me became parents, I was just thinking, ‘God, I wonder if so much of, like, bad parenting or parenting mistakes are made just because you’re so f—ing exhausted and you’re trying to do your best but you just can’t?’ Like, you know, everyone feels exhausted from just working, I can’t imagine having to care for a child as well.”
Perhaps that’s for the best right now because Sawayama’s moment is circling. Besides increasingly making famous friends – getting “girl boss” tips from her friend and would-be mentor, Charli XCX; enthusiastic text messages from Kacey Musgraves; and holidaying with fan (and collaborator) Elton John at his home in Nice – she will also star in John Wick 4, to be released next March, as the female lead opposite Keanu Reeves, after the film’s director Chad Stahelski spotted her in her video for 2020 single, XS.
“That was so crazy,” she says of the experience. “I got the offer to be in it on a Wednesday and by Friday I was committing to go spend two-and-a-half months in Berlin. It was the best and the hardest thing I’ve ever done, I would say. But I really enjoyed getting into character – even in song I love doing that, embellishing it all with visual details – so I would love to keep doing it, maybe in-between albums.”
Well, she’s started at the right level, right there with Keanu. Sawayama laughs. “It’s like, where do I go from here, right?”
Hold the Girl is out on September 16. Rina Sawayama will be performing in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane in January.
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