Rina Sawayama – Hold the Girl

Rina Sawayama's second album Hold the Girl feels like a love letter to Sawayama's younger self, like a promise that joy is coming

Album Review by Rho Chung | 12 Sep 2022
  • Rina Sawayama - Hold the Girl
Album title: Hold the Girl
Artist: Rina Sawayama
Label: Dirty Hit
Release date: 16 Sep

Rina Sawayama's first studio album, SAWAYAMA, defined one of her strengths as parodying and reinvigorating genres like Y2K pop and nu-metal. Now, two years later, her second album, Hold the Girl, cements Sawayama as a one-of-a-kind talent. Hold the Girl perfects the art of expressing familiar tragedies in a fresh, hopeful, and magnificently powerful way. It's the sort of music that's perfect for screaming along with in your car – the album is rich, diverse, and emotionally ambitious.

The album feels like a mixtape of familiar sounds from the early aughts, including more country, disco, and psychedelic notes than its predecessor. Standout tracks include Hold the Girl, along with Minor Feelings, which opens the album with a heartfelt, almost gospel-esque meditation on traumas that follow us into adulthood. Sawayama's unique point of view is developed further in Your Age, an equal-parts trippy and poignant symphony of non-Eurocentric sounds. The latter half of the album includes more ballads – Send My Love to John is particularly memorable in the way it highlights fractured relationships between parents and their queer children. The album loses some of its momentum through the last few songs, foregoing the weighty power of Minor Feelings for something more airy and nebulous. In many ways, this album feels like a love letter to Sawayama's younger self. It feels like a promise that joy is coming.

Listen to: This Hell, Frankenstein, Holy

http://rina.online