New Religion

Here is a woman who wrote hooks for Eminem, Rihanna and Selena Gomez, blew up the planet with I'm Good (Blue), and still spent a decade being treated by her own label like an intern who keeps almost getting fired. Dirty Blonde is the sound of that intern finally quitting, walking out of Warner, signing to EMPIRE, and screaming about the Khia asylum on the way to the parking lot. Thirteen tracks, every one of them shot as a music video, produced by a Diplo and Hit-Boy and DJ Snake conga line, marketed as a visual album because calling it a regular album would not have justified the budget. New Religion, the lead single with Faithless, is the thesis statement: a thumping, churchy dance record built so you raise your hands at a festival and feel something vaguely spiritual while a kick drum punches you in the sternum. It works. Of course it works. Rexha has never once forgotten how to write a chorus, which was always the cruelest part of her story, the hits were never the problem, the gatekeepers were. So the new era is here, the independence is real, the Albanian heritage is finally on the record sleeve instead of buried in an A and R note, and she is, audibly, having the time of her life. The frustrating bit is that genre-hopping across pop, EDM, country and hip hop in one tracklist can read as freedom or as a woman with no one left to tell her no, and Dirty Blonde flickers between both. But when she locks onto a hook, the case for letting Bebe Rexha be Bebe Rexha makes itself.