Rina Sawayama Is Too Smart to Stay in One Lane, Thank God
Rina Sawayama released “Comme des Garçons (Like the Boys)” on January 17 alongside the announcement of her debut album SAWAYAMA, due in April, and if you needed another reminder that pop does not have to choose between concept and pleasure, here it is.
What I admire about Rina is that she makes maximalism feel rigorous. That is not easy. Plenty of artists throw references, genres, and aesthetics into a blender and call the result boundary-pushing. Rina actually curates her chaos. The songs are full of ideas, but they are not messy in a careless way. They are composed like arguments: sharp, layered, and very aware of what each stylistic choice is doing.
“Comme des Garçons (Like the Boys)” is fascinating because it works as a club track and a critique at the same time. It is fun, but it is not vacant. It plays with performance, confidence, gendered expectation, and desire without sounding like it was reverse-engineered from a think piece. That matters to me. I am all for pop being political, intelligent, and self-aware, but none of that counts for much if the song itself is dead on arrival. This one is alive.
Rina’s great strength is that she understands performance as language. She knows that a glossy surface can be part of the message, not the opposite of one. The way she borrows from early-2000s pop excess, dance music, fashion-world sheen, and theatrical self-staging does not feel like empty cosplay. It feels analytic. She uses those forms to reveal something about how power and aspiration move through pop culture.
And yet, for all that conceptual sharpness, the music still hits in the body first. That is what keeps her from drifting into art-pop homework territory. Too many ambitious pop projects want to be admired before they want to be enjoyed. Rina, crucially, wants both. She wants the hooks, the spectacle, the tension, the camp, the emotional exposure, the politics, the absurdity. She is greedy in the best way, artistically speaking.
If there is a possible drawback, it is that her music can be so densely referential and intentionally constructed that some listeners may struggle to find the unguarded center of it at first. But I suspect that is less a flaw than a challenge. Not every artist owes you immediate transparency. Sometimes the thrill is in watching someone build a world so complete that you have to step toward it on their terms.
Also, and this is not a small point, Rina Sawayama is just exciting. Genuinely exciting. Not “interesting on paper,” not “one to watch” in that faintly patronizing industry sense. Exciting in the way pop artists should be when they are really operating at full capacity. She makes you curious about the next move.
Right now, before the debut album has even arrived, she already feels more fully formed than artists three cycles deeper into their careers. That does not mean she is finished evolving. It means the foundation is serious.
And if SAWAYAMA delivers on even most of what these songs suggest, we may have to stop calling her emerging and start calling her essential.