I was reading DIY’s recent review of Rebecca Black’s new album, SALVATION, and I had to pause, shut my laptop, do a lap around my house and then come back and double-check that what I’d read was actually on the screen. But there it was, a great fear plastered on a webpage, a writer making the worst comparison of 2025: “It’s hard to imagine anything more massive than…the moment of commerciality on ‘Twist the Knife,’ which amalgamates something like the contemporary disco of Kylie Minogue with a spooky Kim Petras.” Sorry, DIY, I was unfamiliar with your game, unfamiliar with how audacious you were willing to go, unfamiliar with your reckless abandon.
The truth is, Rebecca Black is not Kylie Minogue. Now, I’m not here to predict whether or not Black will ever reach the same highs as any of Minogue’s albums—she certainly could make a Body Language or a Fever sometime later in her career, if she surrounds herself with the right collaborators—but I don’t think it’s too early to say the quiet part out loud: SALVATION is the first great pop failure in the wake of Charli xcx’s BRAT supremacy. The fun is over; the party is dying down and the only people left are the worst people you know. BRAT’s global takeover in 2024 was a net-positive, but records that create a superstar, build a season-long trend and penetrate the cultural walls of politics don’t simply have legacies immune to catastrophe, no matter the size.
SALVATION is a catastrophe, but SALVATION is not a BRAT imitation, let’s make that clear. It’s just a bad pop album that doesn’t have juice, or any semblance of an “it factor.” So much of this music pulls from the exciting new bastion of K-pop music coming out right now, like the work of Aespa or TWICE, yet it’s all so generic, out of vogue and woefully misguided, rinsing contemporary pop music’s strongest laurels with half-hearted, half-baked gestures of drum’n’bass and hyperpop. It’s sticky but far from sweet, as songs like “TRUST!” and “Do You Ever Think About Me?” could pass for any raggedy dance track spilling out of department store stereos. This is pop excess without any density; the kind of music that doesn’t bore you, because you were never paying attention to begin with.
SALVATION is big-budget and in-your-face, but its hugeness doesn’t quite fill up a room. Synths stack on top of each other, strums of guitar trickle in and out, drum programming throbbles and scuffles—but there’s never a real sense of cohesion, especially on “Sugar Water Cyanide,” which oscillates between a collage of tempos before settling into a mid-song mangling of pitch-shifted vocals. Black’s normal singing returns to center, but not for long, as the producers cut up her voice just slightly enough to keep it blurred. The glitching synths of “TRUST!” are especially white-bread; the production behind “Tears in My Pocket” is disorienting, as Black’s presence gets completely drowned out amid the noise of clashing, migraine-inducing electronica that zig through pockets of cringe.
I was 13 years old when “Friday” came out, the same age Rebecca Black was when she made the viral pop song, which reached 167 million views on YouTube in the three-ish months after coming out in March 2011. Black wrote it with co-producers Clarence Jey and Patrice Wilson, the two men responsible for Ark Music Factory, an LA production company that claimed to employ industry figures with clients like the Backstreet Boys and Miley Cyrus, only to disband barely two years after beginning and just a year after “Friday” memed Black into one of pop music’s most loathed figures. I remember this being a unique time in American culture, an era where I thought the greatest mark of comedy was Tosh.0, a show that, along with the rest of the internet, rebuked “Friday” into a hellish oblivion of negativity. In fact, “Friday” was once so dismissed in pop’s lexicon that it made songs like “Cups,” “Rude” and “Marvin Gaye” almost listenable. Emphasis on the “almost.” But the industry didn’t totally abandon the song, and artists like Katy Perry, Todd Rundgren, Odd Future and Justin Bieber were said to have covered it, as did Glee in its second season.
The good thing is: Rebecca Black is no longer defined by “Friday.” She’s 27 and a full-fledged singer now, having released her debut album, Let Her Burn, in 2023. Let Her Burn wasn’t a good album, but good songs weren’t absent from it, with “Crumbs” being a standout. And Black sounded confident on the project, which counts for something! But she also sounded like the type of performer who makes the most soulless pop rubbish in exchange for being a star. The results are cookie-cutter and woefully reheated. There are thousands of albums like Let Her Burn, albums that faded into irrelevancy as soon as they were available for streaming. But there are not thousands of albums like SALVATION, because most stars learn their lesson and get better on LP2. I suppose Black is a star, to some degree, even if her songs often suggest otherwise. You don’t get a million social media followers if you’re a nobody, and you don’t get a million social media followers just because you made a really bad and really memed-out song almost 13 years ago.
If the oxymoron of Let Her Burn—a debut marketed as a comeback—proved just how resilient Black has been in the decade-long face of critique, then SALVATION is her attempt to mask her lack of talent with bizarre beat choices, forgettable melodies and a dulled edge. Black told Apple Music that the album is based around “this idea of letting some of the less-safe, less-poised, less-sweet versions of myself into my world.” If songs like “American Doll” and “Twist the Knife” are meant to be risky, I pity whoever gets duped into thinking any of this sounds ground-breaking or envelope-pushing. It’s nonsensical, too, with lyrics like “American doll / Smashin’ her head into the wall / What? / She don’t want money, she don’t need friends / Blades in the honey, confusin’ the men.” To borrow a phrase from Black herself: What?
“Twist the Knife” is an even greater blemish on the English language, beginning with a phrase like “I pray to vengeance on the sixth string of a guitar” before trying to spin “I’ll sing it out for karma’s sake / I would rather burn myself alive / Dancing till I die” into a tattooable moment. Oddly enough, “Twist the Knife” is the best-sounding song on the album, and I have returned to it more than once. Its dubby arrangement does flirt with disco gestures, but in a less auto-generated, faceless way. “Tears in My Pocket” offers flashes of profundity, too, especially when Black gets vulnerable, admitting: “I wish I could be different / God, I wish that I was different.” “Tears in My Pocket” zigs and zags through moments of intrigue but otherwise proves that flashy arrangements used only for the sake of causing a racket isn’t a dangerous choice or all that brainy. It’s just gaudy, indecisive, regressive and a waste of time to sit with.
Considering how artists like Dorian Electra (who remixed “Friday” for its 10th anniversary), Glaive and Shygirl have all put together far more compelling bodies of work in recent memory, I can’t put Black in the same league as those pop/EDM linchpins yet—and she especially doesn’t belong in conversations with Kylie Minogue or even Kim Petras, the latter of whom’s influence can be heard all over “Twist the Knife.” Black’s no-skips attitude collides head-on with a masterfully executed cornball vision—lyrics photo-copied into barely-coherent phrasings by the mouthful (“I locked his wrists into the chains of my revengeful vision,” “We etch the words in our own minds”), flimsy, obnoxious attempts at industrial and house expressions, and a forced sense of weirdness I can only describe as that video of Kelsey Plum eating popcorn at a basketball game personified into music.
But this is not Rebecca Black’s failure to shoulder by herself; there is more than enough blame to go around. Out of the seven producers and 13 writers credited, not one of them pointed her in the right direction. And, considering how good at DJing she is—a vocation that has earned her Boiler Room and Coachella sets—there’s no denying that her curation can be terrific, which makes the crash-out of SALVATION all the more frustrating to witness unfurl. On the cover of the album, Black is holding a bedazzled glock. If I was her, I’d start pointing it at the people who told her it was a good idea to release these songs.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
