On Sept. 22, Doja released her fifth album, “Scarlet,” after much anticipation by fans. For weeks prior to the release of this album, Doja Cat has completely rebranded herself. She changed her appearance by shaving her head and altering her style, added red filters on the covers of her other songs, removed all previous posts from her social media and began posting unsettling things that included blood and spider imagery.
With all of these major changes Doja has made, people anticipated something new from the artist, and after the release of her single “Paint the Town Red,” which reached number one on the Billboard Top 100 chart, the buzz around her future release increased.
The songs on her new album have not met the expectations though. In this new drop, Doja experiments with many lyrics, tunes and beats that greatly differ from her past music, though different doesn’t necessarily mean better.
The theme carried through the album largely reflects the spooky imagery that Doja teased prior to its release. The album is centered around hatred, jealousy and vengeance with lots of demonic and violent imagery used. Before the album’s release, many fans speculated that Doja hated her fans because of things said and done in posts and on live streams. Despite all of her efforts to correct these acts, many believe that she isn’t genuine in her statements against this and her album might be more proof that Doja genuinely hates her fans and only upholds her fame for the sake of her career.
In her new songs, Doja expresses herself using very immature and surface-level lyrics, like in her song “Demons.” Her lyrics “We are enemies, we are foes / Who are you and what are those? You are gross” don’t reflect who she has been as an artist for the past years because of the low-level lyrics that she has transitioned to using in her new album.
Along with a change in her lyrics, Doja has moved from focusing on using tunes in her songs to applying more heavy beats, reflecting more rap-style music. In her previous hits such as “Woman” and “Kiss Me More (feat. SZA),” Doja uses more feminine, upbeat music and instrumentals but in her new songs like “Ouchies” and “Balut,” it is more difficult to hear that side of her.
Overall, Doja made many changes to her brand with this new album and while they might be exciting, they are also questionable and odd. The new face Doja has created for herself along with the new style of music she released isn’t very pleasant and does not compel me to continue listening to her music as I had in the past.
