Album Review: Rina Sawayama, ‘Hold the Girl’

Two years ago, Rina Sawayama exploded onto the pop music scene with a behemoth of an album that parsed through generational trauma with the same dexterity that it used to fly through arena rock, metal, and new jack swing. Sawayama, which The Bulletin named the best album of 2020, was a truly remarkable effort. Rina’s sophomore album, Hold the Girl, is an exercise in softening the maximalist tendencies she revealed on her debut record. The intensely autobiographical lyrical bent remains, but this time around, Rina prioritizes healing her inner child and searching for a place where she can reconcile the different Rinas that have appeared throughout her life. Nonetheless, Hold the Girl falters because Rina softens and flattens the dynamism of her debut’s soundscape in order to emphasize her increasingly reflective and introspective songwriting. Thus, we’re left with an album that feels far too bland considering the caliber of Rina’s previous offerings.

Hold the Girl attempts to strike a balance between a dark pop/UK garage sound and an elegant blend of country and soft rock. The album is able to float between the two sounds with relative ease, but the folksy moments like album standout “Send My Love to John” are infinitely more impressive. “Saw the way the kids treated you every day at school / I should've blamed them, but instead I hid behind the Bible's rule,” she sings over pensive acoustic guitar licks. Rina’s ability to inhabit the mind of different characters and maintain such a distinct feeling of honesty is second to none. Hold the Girl features some of her strongest songwriting set against some of her most mundane production.

Sonically, Rina would have done well to further explore the Shania Twain-indebted country-pop of Hold the Girl’s lead single, “This Hell.” That song, which The Bulletin, hailed as one of the best songs of 2022 (so far), is Hold the Girl’s slickest example of a song that brings the bombast of Sawayama into this record’s pursuit of wholeness and closure. This pursuit is the driving force behind much of Rina’s songwriting on this record, and “Phantom” and the title track are some of the strongest examples of how much Rina’s pen has grown. She has an almost virtuosic ability to shrink monstrous topics like the tenuous dynamics of single immigrant parenthood into saccharine pop hooks. Album opener “Minor Feelings,” which calls to mind Cathy Park Hong’s insightful book of the same name, and the frantically paced “Frankenstein” are two heart-wrenching pit stops on Rina’s journey to self-reconciliation. “Put me together, make me better / Love me forever, hold me tight,” she pleads. Rina’s vocal performance across this album outpaces the ones on her debut, and the drama she brings to her performances accentuates the helplessness of her lyrics.

Hold the Girl finds Rina reuniting with longtime collaborator Clarence Clarity. For Rina’s sophomore record, the pair went for a more subdued soundscape on Hold the Girl that largely strips the album of its color. “Catch Me In The Air” is a beautifully nuanced look at how a parent’s tiredness and their own struggles can impact their relationship with their kids and their capacity to be fully present caregivers. Unfortunately, Rina’s lyrical ambition is stifled by dull pop-rock instrumentation that recalls one forgettable OneRepublic song or another. “Holy” is another standout thanks to its stark look at the lasting impact of high school bullying on one’s self-perception, but the early Lady Gaga-esque synth-laden instrumental lacks the punch that made Sawayama so delectable. Similarly, the agonizing “Your Age” is another lyrical standout but, in an uncharacteristic move, the song feels incredibly stagnant. That flatness reappears on tracks like “Hurricanes” and “Imagining,” songs that sacrifice their potential to soar for a mix that feels deflated.

In typical Rina fashion, Hold the Girl expands the seemingly boundless sonic profile of one of the most arresting pop stars of the young decade. The album swings big and misses more often than one might hope, but its commitment to openness and expanding the conventional subject matter of pop music is still commendable.

Key Tracks: “Hold the Girl” | “Holy” | “Send My Love To John” | “Minor Feelings” | “This Hell”

Score: 73