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Is this just another troll? Doja Cat’s new album is titled Vie – French for “life” – and the original artwork (changed at the last minute) features the 29-year-old Angeleno surrounded by roses, ever the picture of congeniality. Doja has become known, in recent years, as mainstream pop’s master agitator: she tells her superfans to “get off your phone, get a job and help your parents with the house”, disavows her own hits before they’ve even left the upper echelons of the charts and is totally unapologetic about what can be described, charitably, as edgelord behaviour. Doja’s 2023 album Scarlet – a prickly, antagonistic record designed to prove her bona fides as a rapper – seemingly shut the book on her time as a pop hit-maker with a bracing, refreshing meanness.
So there is precedent for the notion that Vie’s lead single Jealous Type – a piece of slick, cinematic 80s pop of the kind Doja used to toss off with abandon – was a fake-out. It’s not exactly that: Doja’s fifth album does find her returning to the sugary, aerodynamic well of her 2019 LP Hot Pink and 2021’s Planet Her. This time around, it feels as if she and producer Jack Antonoff have found a more comfortable middle ground between the gloss of that world, which she’s criticised over and over again, and the desires of the brilliantly snarky fire-starter who tore her way through Scarlet.
Hearing the push-and-pull between those sides of Doja is enormous fun. AAAHH MEN! is like a sinister take on Chic’s Le Freak, its blown-out, sleazy strut a perfect soundtrack for Doja’s conflicted internal monologue: do I want to take a guy home for sex, or just to lambast him? It’s hard to tell which she’s leaning towards: “I have too much tolerance / You ugly and fine as shit / And if I had more common sense / Then I would grab my ride and dip,” she raps, clearly relishing the opportunity to trifle.
More often, it’s a sweeter side of Doja taking hold, although rarely the uncomplicated sexpot of early singles such as Say So. On Silly! Fun! she raps with flustered abandon about being in love for the first time over the kind of dazed, lovesick production that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Chappell Roan record. When she raps “I’m in love” or “let’s have kids,” the final word of each phrase is sung by a disembodied backing vocal, like she wouldn’t dare say it out loud – a charming, canny detail. Doja has said she probably wouldn’t listen to this music herself, but she’s locked in nonetheless, applying the same detail to frothy pop songs as she does to one-liners such as: “He ain’t hungry for money / I told him: ‘Come eat the rich.’” (See seventh track All Mine.)
Can a leopard change its spots? That seems to be the question Doja is trying to answer musically and lyrically across Vie. She is smart enough not to give any clear answers, ending the album with Come Back, a glowing, bitter love song that shares a strand of its DNA with Donna Lewis’s I Love You Always Forever. “I’m pleased I ain’t the bitch you was hopin’ for / If we keep this up and you hold my doors / And you take my bag, and you hold me more / I don’t think that would make up for the hope I lost,” she raps, weariness coating every inch of her voice. There’s no trolling here – just an earnest relationship postmortem, set to production that’s so twinkly and lovesick it would make even Carly Rae Jepsen blush. A leopard can’t change its spots, but maybe Doja Cat can.
