Following her on social media can feel like you’re on a journey together. While Sawayama has reached critical acclaim and made a few historical changes, she still has yet to break into the mainstream (“If you keep preordering, something very slay might happen, Pixels…it might chart,” she excitedly whispered in an Instagram video posted Wednesday).
So far, her only US charting single is 2022’s “Beg for You,” a collaboration with Charli XCX that reached No. 10 on Billboard’s dance chart. But she hopes that might change. “I’m very realistic about the fact that my music is unusual,” Sawayama told me. “It’s not normal pop. I’m also not signed to a major label. At the same time, my team works so hard, and when their work is not being valued, I get sad for them, because I feel like it’s not being reflected in numbers.”
“I feel so lucky that I get to do this as a job anyway,” she said. “So much of what I’m talking about would have been unthinkable to me two years ago, four years ago. The goalposts move constantly, and I have to rein that in. Otherwise, I’ll never be happy.”
Though she refers to herself as a pop girl, Sawayama’s music has been lauded by critics specifically for embracing nu metal, R&B, electronica, and rock. The mission, she said, is to make uncool music cool again. “It’s about authenticity and storytelling,” she said. “I never think about genres in a commercial way like that. It’s just so much fun for me to play with genres. And that’s kind of why my music sounds the way it does.”
Hold the Girl continues to fold in all kinds of “uncool” music. There are the country ballad overtones on “Forgiveness,” the house textures of the title track, the epic tween rock vibes on “Hurricanes” that give you automatic Disney knees. But it makes sense: Sawayama mixed loud, brash genres with lyrics condemning hyperconsumption, cultural appropriation, and toxic masculinity. Hold the Girl selects the musical genres, like country and midtempo tunes, that best express the introspective and powerful turn Sawayama is taking in this era — reflecting on her relationship with her mother, battling with the fluctuating feeling of forgiveness, her connection to religion despite Catholicism’s blatant anti-LGBTQ prejudice.
“It’s really nice that we are in a more honest phase now of pop,” Sawayama said. “People know that it’s not all shiny. I feel so lucky that I’m in an era where people can really speak honestly about their mental health struggles or like how they’re feeling that day.”
Sawayama said she wrote this album with live shows in mind, having attended so many as a teenager. I asked if she remembers any faces or images in her mind from performing IRL. “It’s the diversity for sure. It’s the queerness for sure,” she said. “I only see queer people in my audience. I remember thinking when the first show of [the Sawayama tour], I thought, The audience has gotten bigger, so maybe there’ll be, like, less queer people. And then I was like, oh, no, it’s just more queer people. It’s so nice. I can hear them heckling me between songs, but in a nice way — ‘yes, bitch, slay.’”