Eli intends to be the biggest star in the world; right now, she’s unquestionably the most online. Her elaborate, deliberately low-budget American Idol homage; her verbose, catty public persona; her love of 2000s kitsch: Eli is the pop star of Stan Twitter’s dreams, even if she swears she never had a stan account herself. As she prepares to open for Zara Larsson on tour, she’s on the verge of getting, as SNL once put it, “gay famous.” But for an artist aiming this high, merely gay famous would be a failure; to quote her era of inspiration, Eli wants it all, and she just might get it.
As a middle schooler at all-boys Catholic school in Massachusetts, Eli secretly listened to Ariana Grande’s R&B debut Yours Truly and followed obscure American Idol contestants like Season 7 11th-place finalist Amanda Overmyer. After going viral on Vine as a young teen, she moved to New York for college, dropped out, and moved to L.A. to pursue music. Her commitment to ’00s Radio Disney pastiche reflects these tween- and teenage obsessions, representing reclamation as much as nostalgia. “I really have this deep yearning to give myself the best shot to get in front of people who don’t believe in me or don’t value me or my community,” she told ELLE. That’s an uphill battle for someone who also makes videos claiming “Taylor Swift, you will never be trans” or “Sabrina Carpenter, you are trans”—the kind of jokes that slay in group chats (I genuinely laughed out loud at the latter) but face severe context collapse outside the bubble. Still, she has proper marketing muscle behind her; visit a comment section and her pop music peers and/or labelmates are there, making her seem like she’s already a big deal.
She released her debut album, Stage Girl, last October, and its new deluxe edition gets a boost from a recent proof of concept: “Crush,” a remix from Zara Larsson’s Midnight Sun: Girls Trip, is also included here. Eli’s 16 bars are a crash course in her campy persona—referencing cringe comedy TikTok star Harry Daniels, drawing out the word “boobs” like it is three syllables—and her aspirations, concluding with manifestation-via-melisma “My name’s Eli and I’m about to change your life.” Beneath the swagger and the wonderfully loopy spoken-word bridge (“Where are we?” Eli asks, and Larsson replies, “We’re in the song!”), Eli recontextualizes the track: Larsson’s one-sided crush is now an unrequited T4C love song. Eli asks Larsson out at the end and gets audibly left on read, yearning over the outro alone.
Eli, with her co-producers Jason Vance Harris and Mike Wise, are clearly students of ’90s and ’00s R&B-pop, which means sharp new jack swing clap-snares, sparkling DX7 keyboards, and virtuosic vocal runs. Her music is a very intentional game of “name that reference.” The gloriously bombastic deluxe-edition opener “Fuck the DJ” is like a straightforward math equation: percussion from Toni Braxton’s “He Wasn’t Man Enough” + strings from Ciara’s “Like a Boy” + saw wave synths from Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro,” all multiplied by one-hit-wonder Willa Ford’s “I Wanna Be Bad.” The Addison Rae and Shawn Mendes namedrops are the only evidence this song wasn’t a summer hit two decades ago. This is clearly someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of the last few decades of pop; the chorus on “Stars (Lullabye)” brings to mind B*Witched’s “C’est la Vie” as much as Britney Spears. The ballads owe a lot to Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson—and those two, with gay pop trailblazer Sylvester, get a shoutout on “Like a Girl.”
The original Stage Girl was pitched as, essentially, The Rise and Fall of a Northeast Doll, with a narrative focus on Eli’s pre-transition life. Art about the angst of living closeted is unfortunately timely, and despite its glittery production, the record conveyed that pain. Yacht-rock revival track “Marianne,” in which Eli’s pre-transition narrator desperately pines after a woman who’s in love with “another” man, is like “Good Luck, Babe!” if Chappell Roan didn’t even know she was a woman yet. Meanwhile, on “Falsetto,” she whispers, “Sometimes when I’m inside of you/I wonder what it would be like to really be inside of you.” It’s a sentiment that may unsettle the ignorant (what, you’ve never heard “Fade Into You” before?), but in a sugary pop song, Eli makes it feel universal.
The deluxe edition mostly doubles down on the silliness, but muddies the sequencing with songs that, while frequently just as good as the original version’s, detract from the tight narrative. “Somebody I’m Not,” for example, is triumphant as a closer, but isn’t quite as effective as the third-to-last track. While they sacrifice the flow of the tracklist, the new songs further perfect her sound: “Feel Your Rain” and “Nobody’s Girl” are gloriously goopy, broad ballads that Eli performs with the urgency and intensity of her more personal music.
These are airtight pop songs, but with a foundation this strong, Eli could afford to be a little weirder and riskier. The biggest hits from the ’00s often have a “what were they thinking” quality to them (for proof, listen to the instrumental for “Single Ladies” without Beyonce’s vocals). Lyrically, Eli sometimes comes close to that level of this-shouldn’t-work-but-does, nailing lines like, “You should be his baby, not his babysitter” and, “For a man that’s such a child/You don’t know how to play with dolls.” But just as often, her lyrics aren’t as irreverent as they think they are: “iTouch (Da Da)” doesn’t distinguish itself from the long line of self-pleasure songs, and “Like a Girl” contains the clunker “make this pussy confirmed.”
Deluxe track “Beyond the Bend” encapsulates the greatest and most frustrating parts of Eli’s musical persona, putting the industry insider claiming, “I just signed a deal/Subtweet Brandon Creed/Tell Ariana I’m the girl of her dreams” right next to the aspiring role model who sings, “I do it for the boy stuck in the Bible Belt/I do it for the girl who couldn’t see herself.” But she doesn’t need the namedrops to be her most compelling. On “Love U Thru the DJ,” frequent collaborator Ayleen Valentine’s elongated, drifting vowels make a surprising contrast to Eli’s octave-hopping pyrotechnics; even if the production around them isn’t as punchy as on the biggest songs here, the track is perhaps the most beautiful in Eli’s catalog. On the outro, she diagnoses what’s holding her back: “Maybe I just am never sincere with myself,” she sings. Like the best American Idol contestants, Stage Girl and its deluxe version succeed when self-consciousness fades, leaving us to witness a pop star in all her idiosyncratic glory.
