Superstar Rina Sawayama’s Stunning Debut Album

Oct 29

Oct 29 Superstar Rina Sawayama’s Stunning Debut Album

No one is better at making songs you want than Rina Sawayama. A razor-sharp mastermind, Rina Sawayama is an explosive vision, a phoenix to behold. To say her work is meaningful is not enough; she cuts deeper and closer to the soul than any modern musical artist. She exposes the core of her Asian immigrant experience in the Western world, fixating unrelentingly on the psychological impacts of her identity and her unstoppable, authentic personality.

Rina Sawayama’s much-anticipated debut album SAWAYAMA blazed into existence on April 17 against a milieu of political clashes, the COVID-19 pandemic, and society’s rush to salvage 2020. For a precipitous age, SAWAYAMA is an iconic staple of pop music. Emanating from every corner are underlying tones of familial pain, struggle, and finding herself—from the self that studied at a historic, privileged institution like Cambridge to the musical, exploratory, creative, and rebellious self. The Japanese-born British artist’s incredible talent has grown since she began taking over the global music scene with her critically-lauded Rina (2017), one of the best debuts in recent pop history and the highest reviewed album of the year. On October 27, Rina Sawayama made her U.S. television debut with a performance of the smash single “XS” on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon:

SAWAYAMA consists of 13 tracks full of her criminally deep and soulful voice and standout lyrics that take advantage of a bold rock-pop sound, with highlights like “Dynasty,” “Comme des Garçons (Like the Boys),” “Snakeskin,” “XS,” “Bad Friend,” and “Chosen Family.”

The emotional core in her lyrics makes her art different and more meaningfully complex than just pleasing hooks: “Dynasty,” “Bad Friend,” “Commes des Garçons,” “Chosen Family,” and “Fuck This World” all tell stories about her intergenerational trauma, a painful friend breakup she initiated, the double standards of female confidence, the joys of finding an LGBTQ+ family outside of her blood family, and the complications of the improvable but disappointing state of our world.

“Snakeskin” sounds like Rina is her own pop group, full of confidence, edge, and addicting beats—the composition sounds a lot like Blackpink’s, for example—and features her mother speaking in Japanese. Pixels, as Sawayama’s fans are known, embrace Sawayama’s tendency to “make decidedly uncool things cool,” including her visuals.

“When I was starting out, I remember looking around being like ‘There's not a single Asian pop artist that I can name.’ Hayley Kiyoko was sort of coming in a bit, but I was like "I can't name people who have pushed their Asian-ness to the fore and made art out of it." There's so many artists now. The first step was me talking about the fact that there's no representation, and then the second step was just being as successful as possible doing something that I would be proud of.” Quote via

Among many highly talented, driven Asian artists who are looking to impose their creativity upon the world and spread representation and their art, Rina Sawayama obviously feels pressure, but her results despite fear and anxiety are a testament to her distinct talent and passion. “Being east Asian and trying to be a pop singer in the UK where there is no precedent has sometimes been quite hard,” said the South London-based Niigata-born musician and model. “There aren’t many east Asian singers in the western pop world.” She emerges bruised but triumphant like a phoenix amidst a new generational set of difficulties that comes from one narrative of birth and origin in the East and growing up most of her life in the West.

You need to listen to the shiny joy that is SAWAYAMA. From personal experience, discovering her album six months after its release after waiting and many singles, listening will bless your Zoom fatigue away like it did mine. I love the pop rock ballads the most for their thoughtfulness, soothing sound, and the feeling that she is letting us into her consciousness, but there’s truly something in it for everyone.

Her work is so personal that it’s emblematic of a bright future where we can all be ourselves: not necessarily a standard canon of the Asian experience but simply art that is sourced from her, a Japanese-British woman. It conveys essential helpful truths lacking in global musical discourse, like her experience of her native Japanese culture with a Westernized gaze and her critique of the latter, how her confidence as a female is held to a double standard in my favorite track “Commes des Garçons,” as well as her fights with her mother. Sawayama’s greatest asset is that she is unafraid to be honest and faithful to herself; she lyrically, sonically, and visually embodies a necessary disregard for fear and irrelevant judgment, like in her luminous “Bad Friend.”

“[My music] is so fueled by thinking about what I and my mom would be proud of me doing because it was such a big risk to be a musician that I didn't want to sit around and do fluffy pop songs and hope it cut through. I knew that it took something like this to cut through, because there's just so much music out there now. Like so many things in life, it's driven by parental approval; so annoying.” Quote via

“STFU!” addresses Sawayama’s annoyance with microaggressions towards Asian women, yelling out her pain with grating nu-metal aggression. Her experience in the UK, which doesn’t have the American—albeit complex and confusing, à la model minority myth—narrative of the power of immigrants or as active of a national discussion around issues like racism, has helped her achieve new levels of race-related realizations that are groundbreaking. Sawayama studied psychology, sociology, and politics as a Philosophy, Politics, and Economics undergraduate and had to rationalize parts of her experience being othered by the Cambridge community despite living in the UK for 25 years. More recently, she’s challenged her citizenship-based disqualification from the BRITs and Mercury Music Awards, as she is British and has experienced most of her life in England though she has retained sole citizenship in Japan.

Such active xenophobia, stereotyping, and blatant racism prevalent in the music and fashion industry—plus the structurally ingrained sexism inflicted on young female artists—are challenging and inevitable but nevertheless could not stop Sawayama’s drive. Her music truly stands on its own as hyper-creative, visionary, and genuine in a way that speaks to the soul. Her endless chain of accomplishments like invitations to madebygoogle and Wimbledon, and her army of celebrity fans like RM, Jorja Smith and Charli XCX are mere testaments to her effort, skill, and success in achieving her goals.

“Ultimately, I want a young ‘me’ to be able to feel like they can be the next east Asian model and singer with red hair and tattoos,” she said in an interview with Dazed.

Sawayama was born in 1990 and started dropping music in 2013 at exactly the same time as many third-generation Asian artists like international sensation BTS. She shares a similar drive and unrelenting strength in the face of countless obstacles, and even wrote a currently unreleased song virtually with BTS leader RM, who is a professed fan of Sawayama.

These comparisons between Asian diaspora artists and artists in Asia are to disprove the childish illusion that artists of Asian descent are in any way the same. BTS, with its utter global dominance despite tremendous financial obstacles and universal industry doubts, in fact stands as a good contrast for the differences in being an Asian immigrant as opposed to living in Asia. Sawayama had to create a songwriting and fashion career against a completely different set of challenges than BTS because of her unique context, such as racist producers who stereotyped her work as an expression of just “a general Asian story,” as well as rampant sexism since the earliest days of her songwriting career.

Rina Sawayama and collaborator RM of BTS via

However, some commonalities BTS and Sawayama share despite much difference is a habit of firmly denouncing any prejudice in their professional lives and striving towards Grammy nominations.

Sawayama doesn’t just want to make people dance, and cannot simply produce pop that is inauthentic to her because of her personal stakes and standards. Her music grips you with its energetic sound to make you listen to a compelling and stunning narrative, teaching you about what it means to find your own on your own. Anyone is welcome, she sings in “Chosen Family.” It’s your duty to hear from such a legendary teacher. She has unique values, strong personal emotions, and a nostalgic yet cutting edge pop sound. She is Rina Sawayama, and she can’t stop blazing blindingly bright.