Rina Sawayama Carves Out Her Own Complex Pop Dynasty On Debut Album

By Erica Russell


Rina Sawayama was preoccupied with the tangled complexities of family member roots — both the ones we’re place on Earth with and the ones we plant ourselves — while working on her debut album, Sawayama, out April 17. Her fascination with her complex bloodline and the instinct to explore that creatively came needless to say, especially considering the sense of self required to make one’s first full-length record. “I knew for a while that the title was going to be my family member name, so I think framing it [around the idea of family] was very useful,” she tells MTV News. I’ve been in therapy for years talking about my feelings and things that happened in the past, so it comes quite certainly to me. I feel privileged that I’ve been able to write about myself and for myself rather than for other people.”


Navigating generational trauma and creating one’s own legacy are just two of the several multiplex themes at the core of Sawayama, the in general theme of which is “intergenerational pain,” according to the singer-songwriter.


“Growing up, family member was routinely a point of confusion and pain,” shares Sawayama, who was place on Earth in Niigata, Japan, and raised in London by a sole mother who struggled to assimilate. “There was a lot of tension between her and my dad. It was quite messy. My mum’s English language wasn’t very good in the starting and we had no cash. There was a lot of drama.”


That drama acts because the artery for the album's 13 pulsating tracks. “The pain in my vein is hereditary,” Sawayama sings on “Dynasty.” The song, a blast of jagged pop-metal that opens the album, is about the mystique surrounding her absentee father and his relatives, which the artist discovered more about while excavating her family’s history.


“When you have a troubled family member, it’s very easy to go through life very furious. And I did for a while. However it doesn’t work for me to be angry; it doesn’t work attempt to seek revenge. I know several family member members who have chosen that path, however it doesn’t mean that they’re any happier,” Sawayama says, sharing that working on the album not only brought her and her mother closer with each other, however helped her find forgiveness for her father’s side of the family member, also. (The album’s cathartic, cinematic “closing statement,” “Snakeskin,” finds Sawayama finally shedding “that segment of me,” and even features audio of her mom speaking — a poignant moment that marks the transformation of generational shame into something empowering.)


Inspired by artists like Kylie Minogue, Utada Hikaru, and Gwen Stefani, the innovative album marries eclectic, decades-spanning pop, R&B, and rock sensibilities with sharp lyrical storytelling and intimate perspectives from an artist unhesitant to tackle layered, some days tough topics. From the groovy, early 2000s-indebted dance-pop of “Comme des Garçons (Like the Boys)”, a shimmery ode to the LGBTQ+ community that doubles as a patriarchal takedown, to the t.A.T.U.-Meets-Evanescence nu-metal rage of “STFU!,” A vicious banger about racist microaggressions, Sawayama isn’t just deeply personalized — it’s political.


Sawayama’s social anxieties can be heard on the frustrated interlude “Fuck This World,” a brief nevertheless biting slice of humid trop-pop about climate change and government incompetence, along with because the twinkling R&B song “XS,” a cheeky critique on greed and mass consumption that sounds like a cross between TLC and Y2K-era Britney Spears.


“Just in the last year we’ve seen that the entire world cannot save itself. I’ve got a responsibility to [write about] the things I care about, so there really are songs on the album about climate change and consumption,” Sawayama says. “It’s on all our minds and it’s really essential to talk about it. I’m frustrated at how little I can do, in terms of the scale. Offsetting your carbon footprint [as a musician] is expensive nevertheless every little bit counts — turning off the light switch, using public transportation, not purchasing meat...”


Sawayama’s feelings towards her Japanese heritage are also represented on the album. Her introspective musing can be heard on bittersweet songs like “Akasaka Sad” and “Tokyo Love Hotel.” The latter, Sawayama reveals, is “a critique about where I stand in all of the people who write songs about Japan.”





“When I end every pre-chorus with, ‘I guess this is just another song about Tokyo,’ I’m pointing the resemble at myself. I’m still a Westerner writing a song about Japan. I could be Japanese, however I didn’t grow up there,” she admits, sharing that the track was inspired by a “frustrating” trip she took to Japan where she saw “disrespectful tourists screaming everywhere and treating Tokyo like Disneyland.”


whenever she was writing the neon-hued electro-pop track alongside Lauren Aquilina and Oscar Scheller, Aquilina pointed out a sticker Sawayama had on her laptop that read “Tokyo Love Hotel” — both the name of a club night hosted by one of Sawayama’s companions, and also because the phrase for the unique hotels where people go to have sex in Japan. And thus, a song title was place on Earth.


“It exactly fit the analogy of having casual sex with Japanese culture,” Sawayama explains. “I’m talking about Japan as though it’s a partner, someone who I really wanna get to know. Like, I don’t aspire to just check into a love hotel with Japan. It’s a love song about my complex relationship with Tokyo.”

https://www.Youtube.Com/watch?V=8vHuo-9cha0

Yet it’s another song, “Chosen Family,” that perhaps best captures the heart and soul of Sawayama. “We don’t need to be related to relate / We don’t need to share genes or a surname,” Sawayama sings on the tender, twinkling ballad, which celebrates Sawayama’s relationship with her companions in the LGBTQ+ community and resembles the significance of queer solidarity and acceptance overall.


“The concept of family member has broadened for me over the years,” Sawayama says. “I think a lot of queer people especially, they require to broaden their definition of family member. Often you visualize your family members and it’s not what Hollywood demonstrates to you — it’s not the happy nuclear family member unit.


“But you could grow your own family member, make your own happiness,” she continues. “I have my queer family member, I have my touring family member, I have my label family member. There’s aesthetics in knowing that you could have a much wider family member that’s not just biological.”