If all the pieces means nothing to Doja Cat, what really issues? Followers, stans, and informal listeners are actually simply as conversant in the pop/rap star’s chaotic provocations as they’re along with her music. In Might 2023, she dismissed her breakthrough albums, unprovoked: “Planet Her and Scorching Pink had been cash-grabs and y’all fell for it,” she wrote. “Now I can go disappear someplace and contact grass with my family members on an island whereas y’all weep for mediocre pop.” Months later, she disregarded her hard-edged 2023 hip-hop album Scarlet with equal irreverence: “To not diminish it, however it was a little bit of like, I simply must get this out — it was an enormous fart for me,” Doja informed the New York Instances earlier this month.
Doja Cat’s expertise has by no means been a query, however somewhat how she chooses to have interaction with it. She has traditionally been deeply unserious in her assessments of her personal work — however with Vie, it’s clear that she’s looking for to know herself a bit extra broadly this time round. “Jealous Sort,” the album’s New Jack Swing-inflected lead single, not directly illustrates the battle of Doja as an keen artist who feels each overexposed and misunderstood: “Boy, let me know if that is careless, I/ May very well be torn between two roads that I simply can’t resolve/ Which one is main me to hell or paradise?”
Duality has all the time made Doja Cat a extra compelling artist, and Vie proves she thrives when she’s embodying each model of herself. As an alternative of committing to 1 lane, she treats the album as an experiment in mixing eras and kinds. She stands below the neon haze of the ’80s, fusing sleazy synths with the shiny pulse of R&B of the period and the grandiosity of glam rock. Vie additionally doesn’t neglect that rapping continues to be in her arsenal — even when used sparingly.
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After spending the final album cycle hyper-focused on hip-hop, Doja returns right here to the comparably softer area of pop — however she doesn’t abandon the grit she picked up alongside the best way. She lastly appears much less involved with selecting between her inventive instincts and extra comfy letting them co-exist, treating her full vary of abilities as equally legitimate instruments somewhat relating to one or one other like an affliction she must shake off.
On the opening monitor, “Playing cards,” saxophone bleeds by way of the left speaker earlier than night out and increasing to a soundscape that may be match for electro-funk band Zapp & Roger. Doja Cat slinks and prowls as she vacillates between singing and rapping, setting the thematic tone of the album: “Possibly in time, we’ll know/ Possibly I’ll fall in love, child/ Possibly we’ll win some hearts/ Gotta simply play your playing cards.”
It’s a generic mission on its floor — deconstructing and rebuilding love in all its iterations — however it’s direct in its simplicity, which has typically powered one of the best pop of the previous and current. Which is sensible, as Jack Antonoff, the purveyor of dominant, era-crossing pop, has his fingerprints throughout a Doja Cat album for the primary time, producing on 9 of the 15 complete tracks.
Along with “Jealous Sort,” Antonoff’s contributions sparkle most on “AAAHH MEN!” Sampling the theme from the Eighties program Knight Rider, the music inserts itself into the lineage of hip-hop songs which have lifted the memorable synth, becoming a member of the ranks of Timbaland & Magoo’s “Clock Strikes” and Busta Rhymes’ “Flip It Up (Remix) / Fireplace It Up.” As averse as she appears to the pure “rapper” label, Doja can spit her ass off, and she or he demonstrates that almost all clearly right here: “Males must cry extra, boys must work/ However not when he beg his worker to flirt/ Ain’t no one finna pressure me to twerk/ Whenever you’re completed together with your goon sesh, be a part of me in church.”