Lav's Music Corner

Rina Sawayama is a Japanese-British pop singer who first broke through with a Clarence Clarity produced EP and broke out into the world of elevated pop and critical acclaim with her 2020 debut Sawayama . Hold The Girl  features a familiar roster of collaborators but focuses on the more emotionally earnest elements of Rina's music. Review by Lav: Hype is a fragile thing. Coming into the year if you had told me we were in for new Rina it would have shot to the top of my list and after an excellent lead single my excitement had only gotten stronger. The continued releases since then were far from disappointing, in fact, I like most of them. But they seemed to serve as foreshadowing for Rina slipping from her pedestal as a creative pop innovator to just another of the genre's very solid and reliable voices. Far be it from me to complain about that level of quality given that Hold The Girl  could still be among the better pop records released this year. It's really just that two...