And I think I did a lot of that,” she said. “When you’re a teenager, you put yourself in precarious situations, not because you want to but because you want to fit in.

The only difference now is that while her style and sound may have turned heads with curiosity, she’s now ready to keep them looking.Īmong all that Sawayama watched during the making of Hold the Girl, the influence of Bo Burnham’s 2017 feature Eighth Grade, about a 13-year-old’s last week of middle school, is the most tangible throughout the record. After years of work pursuing a music career, she was never going to be content with limiting herself. But for Sawayama, all of these changes are par for the course. It was like hearing, I suppose, the Mothers of Invention in the late 1960s,” John says of Sawayama’s music.) She’s also branching off into an acting career she’ll make her film debut next year in John Wick: Chapter 4. She had to promote Sawayama from afar due to its release during major COVID-19 lockdowns, but since then she’s collaborated with Charli XCX and Elton John, the latter of whom did a joint feature with her in The New York Times. While her unpredictability has carved out a niche of fans, whom she calls “pixels,” Sawayama is on the verge of breaking out in an even bigger way. “I feel like we’re almost at a point where every single genre is being represented in popular music.

“I just think good rock writing is great pop writing,” Sawayama says of mixing genres. “I’d imagine when even a casual fan sees that Rina’s got a new track out, you’re going to go and listen to it just out of curiosity because you know that it’s different every time,” Clarity says. Let’s have a listen to some of that and just smash that together with No Doubt or something.’ And she’s always super open to doing that.” This process yields a mixed bag, and that’s not an accident. I might be like, ‘Well, that kind of sounds a bit like mid-’90s Radiohead, what you’re talking about there. “She’s not so much, ‘Oh, I’ve been getting into this tiny subgenre, let’s try doing something like that,’” British multi-instrumentalist Clarence Clarity, who has production credits on Rina and both her LPs, says. The wealth of knowledge she’s gained as a pop fan gives her the tools to create something new. A crunchy guitar, sweeping synth, or Carly Rae Jepsen reference could all be markers of a Sawayama original-and it helps that she often pairs it with bright blue eyeshadow or a bedazzled cowboy hat. Disparate, yes, but that’s the point: Genre-bending is her genre. Next up is the country-inflected Hold the Girl.

The R&B-inspired Rina led to her first full-length album, the nu-metal tinged Sawayama, which was met with rave reviews and high placement on year-end lists from The New York Times, The Guardian, and NME. The neon-orange-haired Sawayama crooned the surreal R&B track about online life, and since then she’s carved out a distinct lane in pop music by never repeating herself. To them, the Japanese-born British vocalist has been a boundary-pushing artist since the dreamy video for “Cyber Stockholm Syndrome,” off of her debut EP Rina, dropped in 2017.

To a certain type of online pop fan who would appreciate her current Twitter display name (“RINA SLAYWAYAMA”), Sawayama’s variety of influences shouldn’t be a surprise. She loves 2000s nostalgia and once pretended to pitch an idea to Gwen Stefani as a songwriting exercise. Pop culture references even come up in her music-on her recent single “This Hell” she borrows Shania Twain’s famous “let’s go girls,” and criticizes the paparazzi’s treatment of Britney Spears, Princess Diana, and Whitney Houston. In the run up to her second studio album Hold the Girl, out Friday, she watched “movies about Asian life immigrant life” like The Farewell, Everything Everywhere All At Once, and Minari read Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart and listened to Kacey Musgraves’s Golden Hour. Rina Sawayama is a student of pop culture.

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