Rina Sawayama - Hold The Girl

Rina Sawayama has always been her own kind of pop star, constantly defining and redefining what exactly the term means for her. The Japanese-born, London-bred musician has carved out her own niche within the pop canon as a new kind of artist, a kind who studied politics at Cambridge before deciding that she wanted to give the music thing a go. As an East Asian musician, she has refused to box herself into one label - and this is especially true with second full-length ‘Hold the Girl’. Her music touches on the struggles she’s faced with integrating herself into the immigrant diaspora and feeling marginalised as a British-Asian, while also covering the unique and profound yet lonely and fraught experience of being a daughter raised by a single mother. All this, of course, is threaded with further themes about embracing her queerness, acknowledging the alienation she felt as a child, and the welcoming of her “chosen family”. Rina has lived many lives, and in her music, reflects on the experiences of each while still acknowledging that her story is still continuing to be written, by her own hand.