On Hold the Girl, Rina Sawayama Epitomizes the Healing Power of Pop Music
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The introductory track of Rina Sawayama’s sophomore album, Hold the Girl, is a two-minute song called “Minor Feelings.” Within it, the Japanese-British pop artist tells us exactly what kind of record we are about to hear.
“Writing my own fairytales, building forts between the sofa and the windowsill/ Dreaming of the day I’m tall enough to save myself/ But I was just a child,” she sings.
Sawayama hasn’t just grown into a dynamic, poetic, and inventive adult — she’s grown into a pop star, and Hold the Girl (arriving Friday, September 16th via Dirty Hit) confirms that she’s one we should all be listening very closely to.
The thread that runs most visibly through Hold the Girl is a dialogue Sawayama is having with her inner child, beginning with “Minor Feelings,” increasing with urgency on the title track, and appearing as white-hot rage on “Your Age.” The artist herself has been vocal about the epiphanies she’s experienced in therapy and how they might have influenced her vision for the album — when “Hold the Girl” was released as a single in August, she shared in a statement that it was the first song she wrote for the album, back towards the end of 2020. “I was crying before going into the studio to write about it,” she revealed.
Sawayama’s fantastic 2020 debut album, SAWAYAMA, is clever, biting, and big, and sees the artist filtering Y2K aesthetics through a prism that yields rock, dance-pop, and R&B sounds. Where many pop artists might have preferred to use a second album to continue to self-mythologize, Sawayama instead seizes Hold the Girl as an opportunity to strip any persona she may have started to build back down to the blueprints, peeling away layers with a dogged fearlessness.
Yes, there’s certainly a touch of that early Lady Gaga spirit woven through Hold the Girl — Sawayama doesn’t play when it comes to visuals — but the direction she chose to go with this LP is her own.
Rina Sawayama has been vocal about her place within the LGBTQ+ community; she identifies as pansexual, and mentioned in a 2018 interview that the subject of her songs has never been a man. She works through a healthy heaping of religious trauma over the course of Hold the Girl. “I took your stones and built a cathedral,” she cries on “Holy.” Her stellar summer single, “This Hell,” approaches the topic from another, more upbeat perspective, poking fun at sign-wielding protestors who disguise their hatred as an afterlife concern.
“All my life I’ve been out of place,” she confesses on “Minor Feelings.” “I don’t want to be a monster anymore,” she shares on “Frankenstein” — it sounds like her heart is breaking, and it’s hard not to feel your heart crack alongside her.
While the subject matter of Hold the Girl feels more contained and focused than her debut effort, this album, too, has that genre-spanning magic that made SAWAYAMA very re-listenable. “Imagining” has a hyper-pop chorus akin to those from a recent collaborator of Sawayama’s, Charli XCX; alternatively, the melody of “Catch Me In The Air” is dripping with pure “end credits of an early 2000s movie energy,” and “Holy” feels like a worthy descendant of Cascada-era Euro dance-pop.
Like Taylor Swift, another great songwriter, Sawayama understands that production touches can completely shift the feel of a song. (In an interview with Rolling Stone UK, she specifically mentioned Swift’s folklore as a major songwriting influence throughout this recent era.) Some of the stories Sawayama tells here — and others that she only just hints at — are devastating in their detail and honesty, and she often chooses to package these moments in bright beats or glossy instrumentals. Fellow Brit-pop singer Mabel said “ain’t no crying on the dance floor” in her 2022 record, but Sawayama demonstrates how that doesn’t always have to be the case.
What Sawayama has successfully captured with Hold the Girl is the healing power of pop music, and the catharsis that can come just as easily with an arena-ready banger as it can with a feral scream. She gives herself the space to be vulnerable and armored in equal measure, thereby inviting the listener to do the same.
By the time we reach the end of the record, we get the sense that there’s still plenty of work to be done — healing rarely looks like a neat transition from point A to point B, but Sawayama has brought us along for these intermediary steps of her journey. Through the storm, she emerges triumphant with closer “To Be Alive.” There are many great moments on the album that allow Sawayama to flex her vocal skills, and the optimistic, sweeping finale is one of the best.
“Flowers still look pretty when they’re dying,” she observes on that closing track. But as the song slowly fades out, the album ending with it, one thing is certain: Sawayama is just beginning to bloom.
Essential Tracks: “Hold the Girl,” “Holy,” “Imagining”
Rina Sawayama will be hitting the road this fall; tickets are available via Ticketmaster.
Hold the Girl Album Artwork:
On Hold the Girl, Rina Sawayama Epitomizes the Healing Power of Pop Music
Mary Siroky
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