Bebe Rexha - Expectations

The Quietus

Bebe Rexha has established herself as a hitmaker - featuring on singles like David Guetta’s ‘Hey Mama’, Louis Tomlinson’s ‘Back To You’ and G-Eazy’s ‘Me, Myself and I’. The lead single for this debut album, ‘Meant To Be’, hit big and there’s plenty more where that came from.

Rexha wrote or co-wrote all the songs here, and she knows how to sprinkle playful elements in every track. She brings the same ‘Meant To Be’ energy to the pure-pop chorus of ‘2 Souls On Fire’; acoustic guitar riffs help create a soulful pop ballad on ‘knees’; ‘I Got You’ and ‘Self Control’ are playful electropop that will be leaping into DJ playlists as I write. She flexes her vocal dexterity and hits the high notes for ‘Don’t Get Any Closer’, ‘Grace’ and ‘Pillow’.

A few tracks do lack energy: on ‘Mine’ and ‘Unsteady’, the battle between pop and soul is lacklustre; she struggles to find her rhythm on ‘Shining Star’; ‘Sad’ feels sketchy where it should be soulful.

But Expectations hits a lot more than it misses. Bebe Rexha is no ordinary singer. She’s a chameleon who can switch vocals, blend with any sound, and find rhythm with any tempo. She is an artist that can make other genres pop.

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(Warner Bros)

UK audiences will know Bebe Rexha on the strength of her collaborations: with meat-headed country duo Florida Georgia Line, Dutch DJ Martin Garrix, rapper G-Eazy, and with Rita Ora, Charli XCX and Cardi B on Girls, a song about the joys of making out with women that drew condemnation from those who thought it trivialised queerness for a male gaze. These disparate hookups indicate an artist in desperate search of an identity, an impression the 28-year-old’s fiercely trite debut album confirms. But then, what self-respecting modern pop star needs anything so quaint as an identity when there are genre-specific Spotify playlists to grace? Expectations ticks every box on pop’s checklist in admirably perfunctory style: there are the songs about anxiety (I’m a Mess, Sad), the one that sounds like Migos (Mine), the one that features one of Migos (2 Souls on Fire), the Latin one (Shining Star), the tropical house one complete with “dolphin whine” (I Got You) and so on. The only remotely distinctive song is Ferrari, a song about how “living in the fast lane’s getting kinda lonely” that lands somewhere between Maren Morris’s (much better) My Church and Rag’n’Bone Man’s (much worse) Human.

As Ferrari proves, Rexha can belt in that strained, bluesy fashion that connotes authenticity – so it’s baffling trying to work out why her vocals are often lagged in Auto-Tune: she sounds like she’s drowning on Self Control and malfunctioning on the horrid Mine. The songwriting – about bad girls and good boys in miserable, moneyed relationships – is precisely as deep as you’d expect. Poptimism finds its hard ceiling.