Following her 2020 top 100 hit album SAWAYAMA, Japanese-British singer-songwriter Rina Sawayama has released her latest collection of work, Hold The Girl. First teased in April of 2021, the album was officially announced on May 19th, 2022 and was released on September 16th, 2022.
Inspired by conversations with her therapist, Hold The Girl follows Sawayama’s acknowledgement and acceptance of past trauma and the beginning of her journey moving forward. It is a recognition of trauma and reclamation of childhood, of sorts. She touches on trauma related to her Asian identity, specifically in relation to the violence towards Asian communities that became significant in 2020. She touches on the pushback she’s received about identifying as queer, and her troubled relationship with her parents. Any former catholic all-girls student (I speak as one myself) will immediately recognize the struggles and experiences related to gender, sexuality, and the church that she narrates in Holy (Till You Let Me Go). By the end of the record, Sawayama gracefully ties her collected recollection of past traumas into an anthem of recognition and reconciliation between her past and present selves.
Moving away from the strictly hyper-pop aspects of SAWAYAMA, she makes this storyline accessible through an intentionally put-together tracklist with genres ranging from punk-pop to folk. In the span of 46 minutes, Rina successfully fuses hyper-pop with alternative rock, folk, and country just to name a few [genres]. While track 4, Catch Me In the Air sounds like it belongs in an early Taylor Swift album, Send My Love to John feels like a Brandi Carlile classic. To contrast these classic genres and influences, Rina brilliantly composed Forgiveness and Phantom as almost Christmas carol adjacent waltzes, providing breaths of fresh air in the midst of what is undoubtedly a heavy record – both musically and emotionally. In the album’s 3rd single This Hell, Sawayama interpolated Bon Jovi, Michael Jackson, and Abba in what is a statement on fame and a love letter to the idea of chosen family.
The quick changes in genre make the album a little bit hard to follow; they all feel like they should be part of different collections of work. At the same time, the unsystematic variation in genres feels symbolic of the stages of grief Sawayama likely experienced while working through this record.
Being such a linear record both musically and narratively, it’s an album that, in my opinion, would thrive in concert. In discussing such deep and silently universal topics, it has the potential to bring people together in the context of a concert, or another communal, musical gathering. And luckily, fans will get to see the album come to life as Sawayama embarks on her Hold The Girl Tour on October 12th in Scotland, before making her way through the USA.
Overall, Rina Sawayama’s eclectic third album is one for the books. And whether listeners believe it’s deserving of two or five stars (though the latter is more fitting), Hold The Girl serves as a reminder for us all to hold our inner child close as we learn to recognize, accept, and reclaim our pasts.