We live in dizzying times, in which cognitive dissonance seems like a default state. When Rina Sawayama’s debut album, Sawayama, landed in April 2020, it not only chimed with the mood of the day, it coincided with the intensity of lockdown. Sawayama was a head-spinning record that itself turned a fair few heads. Its big emotions and post-ironic sonics called to disrupted lives everywhere. It was often very good. It was also often bad, particularly when it was pointlessly tendentious.
The singer eloquently itemised the pain of her childhood and her vexed relationship with her mother, a Japanese woman raising her daughter alone in Britain in straitened circumstances. Sawayama went in hard on racist microaggressions, and she sang about her sexuality (she identifies as pansexual) and finding her chosen family in a set of songs that thumbed their collective nose at genre – nothing wrong there – but also at all subtlety. The album paired scything violins with hokey metal riffs, melodies from Broadway musicals with edgy digitals. Fortunately, Sawayama’s big voice and searing intelligence – she is a Cambridge graduate – also threw itself at 90s pop structures, wrapped itself around retro R&B.
