Rebecca Black  - SALVATION

Rebecca Black’s trajectory from butt-of-the-joke meme to hyperpop gay icon need not be studied: anyone capable of producing the awkward, campy ‘Friday’ should be able to enter the same cabal that houses Dorian Electra. And it makes sense that Rebecca’s commitment to an idea persists as she careens through this left-field terrain, where the wrong moves are often the right ones. Leaning further into the boldness of the hyperpop and EDM that has shaped her adulthood, across ‘SALVATION’ - a no-skips follow-up project to her 2023 debut (the compelling pop cocktail ‘Let Her Burn’) - Rebecca makes louder her assertion that she does, in fact, know how to celebrate the end of a week. This record is huge, but not obnoxiously so, because its version of a party is compellingly torn apart into an industrial and emotional experiment, as best seen on the queasy, drum’n’bass melodrama of ‘Tears In My Pocket’ and the sickly sweet hyperpop of ‘Sugar Water Cyanide’. And then, at other times, it shakes the desire for difference, becoming an undeniable clubby feat that proves her brazen approach to becoming an IT-girl is working: it’s hard to imagine anything more massive than the bridge to ‘Do You Ever Think About Me?’; or the runway-ready ‘TRUST!’; or the moment of commerciality on ‘Twist The Knife’, which amalgamates something like the contemporary disco of Kylie Minogue with a spooky Kim Petras. Far surpassing ‘Let Her Burn’ in scope, quality, ambition and vision, ‘SALVATION’ proves Rebecca Black’s got guts, and that it’s time she got her flowers.