Is this just another troll? Doja Cat’s new album is titled Vie – French for “life” – and the original artwork (changed at the last minute) features the 29-year-old Angeleno surrounded by roses, ever the picture of congeniality. Doja has become known, in recent years, as mainstream pop’s master agitator: she tells her superfans to “get off your phone, get a job and help your parents with the house”, disavows her own hits before they’ve even left the upper echelons of the charts and is totally unapologetic about what can be described, charitably, as edgelord behaviour. Doja’s 2023 album Scarlet – a prickly, antagonistic record designed to prove her bona fides as a rapper – seemingly shut the book on her time as a pop hit-maker with a bracing, refreshing meanness.
So there is precedent for the notion that Vie’s lead single Jealous Type – a piece of slick, cinematic 80s pop of the kind Doja used to toss off with abandon – was a fake-out. It’s not exactly that: Doja’s fifth album does find her returning to the sugary, aerodynamic well of her 2019 LP Hot Pink and 2021’s Planet Her. This time around, it feels as if she and producer Jack Antonoff have found a more comfortable middle ground between the gloss of that world, which she’s criticised over and over again, and the desires of the brilliantly snarky fire-starter who tore her way through Scarlet.
