Last month, the indefatigable Vice magazine published a piece on the “summer of British chaos”, documenting a scene of deranged social media provocateurs existing at the crispiest fringes of our nation’s cooked identity. Writer Clive Martin defined these graven images of the algorithm as being regionally specific, lurid, rowdy, funny and hedonistic. As a former member of Little Mix, a girl band popularised by public vote on The X Factor, Jade Thirlwall might not seem like the likeliest bedfellow of this unhinged movement. But the South Shields pop star’s debut solo single, last year’s Angel of My Dreams, dodged focus-grouped smoothness to present a sublimely whacked-out, thoroughly British pop vision that felt like spinning through someone else’s for you page and realising they exist in a markedly different universe from your own.
It started with a wound-up sample of Puppet on a String, exploded into a falsetto-spiked power ballad, then grinding electroclash paired with a withering rap, then sped through each mode again, variously at double and half speed. Its wild energy was fuelled by contradiction: Gucci glamour paired with lines such as “If I don’t win, I’m in the bin”. And while Jade dissed Syco and X Factor boss Simon Cowell (“selling my soul to a psycho”), the song’s vaulting soundclashes defying his bland vision of pop, Angel was also her love letter to the toxic paramour of fame: a status that might be easier to sustain with more conventional fare than whiplashing Sandie Shaw into growling synths. It was crackers and brilliant: no former boy- or girl-bander has come close to making such an arresting reintroduction since – and I mean this as the highest possible praise – Geri Halliwell burned bright through a short-lived fit of dadaist genius.
It set the bar extremely high for Jade’s long-awaited debut album, That’s Showbiz Baby! At least in its first half, ideas brawl for space and kick up thrilling novelty from the dust. The contrast between lavish balladry and techno wub on It Girl recalls Beyoncé’s brazen tapestry-like song constructions; the saucy, stalking Midnight Cowboy, about “givin’ you the Ginuwine”, imagines what it might have been like had her western-inspired Cowboy Carter been as much ribald, clubby fun as its predecessor Renaissance. The rhapsodic Fantasy is Jessy Lanza with budget, its lyrics about egging each other on to get freaky in bed mirrored by the song’s speeding momentum. FUFN (Fuck You For Now) is a dry ice-swathed Eurovision stomper that’s far more poised than Jade’s lyrics about the messiness of a drunken fight with a lover on a night out – but in its all-pistons-firing Gaga maximalism, it honours this particularly British display as a moment of high-diva drama.
Not all the experiments land so well. Unconditional is a tribute to Jade’s mother, who has lupus. “I thought: how can I write a really sad song that we’re all going to want to shake our tits to?” Jade has said. It’s an admirable aim, but the lovely shift from New Order-style melancholy electronica to Moroder adrenaline would work better without the slamming blasts of electric guitar and the distracting “pew pew” synths. And Headache, about knowing you’re sometimes a massive pain in the arse to your long-suffering partner, proves its point too effectively in its racket of thumping bass and dentist-drill vocals.
If there’s a theme amid the madness, it’s finding the freedom to be exactly yourself – at work, in relationships, in bed. Jade’s lyrics are spiked with very her, very British moments without overdoing it: Midnight Cowboy has the excellent triptych, “I’m a real wild bitch, yeah I’m mental / I’m the ride of your life, not a rental / I’m the editor, call me Mr Enninful.” And she nails some really lovely specific sentiments. Plastic Box channels Robyn’s pained electropop solitude as Jade struggles with the knowledge that her partner had relationships that came before her – she knows it’s irrational, but still honours those very real anxieties with solemn beauty. “Can I have your heart in a plastic box?” she asks. “Never used, fully clean, untouched / Like I’m the only one you’ve ever loved.” Disingenuousness gets short shrift: Natural at Disaster almost certainly reads former Little Mix bandmate Jesy Nelson her rights, after she burned through several metric tons of goodwill with a racially insensitive solo debut and kept slating her ex-bandmates for headlines. “‘Cos you were all snakes no ladders / You’re happiest when you make me sadder,” Jade sings, the delicate verses and dramatic, gospel-spliced choruses echoing Billie Eilish’s deconstructed classicism.
The force of Jade’s presence on these songs makes it disappointing when she disappears from view. Self-Saboteur is a bit Robyn, a bit Carly; Lip Service has a nice synaptic tingle but could be by anyone from Normani to Rihanna pre-Anti. Before You Break My Heart is chunky disco based around a Supremes sample that seems like a dated vestige of the sample-pop wave from a few years ago; Silent Disco channels Midnights-era Taylor Swift, its lyrical intimacy amid gauzy synths conveying the sense of a couple shutting out the world in a crowded room.
It’s in these moments that the album’s title seems like a shrug: hey, them’s the breaks when you need to be playlisted on Capital FM. But in its most bravura moments, That’s Showbiz Baby! sounds Jade holding a pose breathless in the spotlight after a dazzling turn, no idea how she quite pulled it off, letting pretenders know how it’s done.
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