The cat that called her old hits “cash grabs” is back in character, sporting a new coat. This time, she’s trying on a Jack Antonoff–assisted rebrand of ’80s synth pop. If you weren’t waiting for that with bated breath, you might’ve also spotted her on a late-night junket or a livestream in one corner of the internet or another. The singer, MC, and troll known as Doja Cat has, in recent weeks, lurched around like the undead in leopard print on SNL, done the “song scramble” in shoulder pads for Fallon, and played Fortnite in front of a few hundred thousand viewers during a promotional run for her new, fifth album, Vie. The vibes, hair, and sound have all been in service of a certain revivalism. Results have, so far, appeared equally mixed and compelling.
The record may or may not pan out, but it’s not one without recent precedent. Donald Glover went from a polyglot backpacker to an aspiring P-Funker on 2016’s Awaken, My Love! Bruno Mars bedecked himself in silky, new jack fineries on 24K Magic. Drake and Beyoncé both dabbled in dance tributes in 2022 to vastly different results. If the past is an indicator, nostalgia is a genre escape hatch and selling point. Doja’s just the latest to tap the well. What sets both her and Vie apart is the fact that at 29 years old, she’s spent most of her public life both searching for her sound and showing an uncanny aptitude for the forms of post-internet pop formalism that she so often rebels against.
In less than a decade, she has gone double and triple platinum, cemented herself as perhaps the most plainly talented hitmaker of a generation, and been haunted, externally and internally, by the eternal pop bogeyman of authenticity. Doja Cat’s so adept at shape-shifting, and so averse to embracing the ground she’s already walked, that even relatively impartial listeners end up devoting close to the same amount of time parsing through the genuineness of her work as they do the actual nature of it. Consider: She just got off describing her last album—the seething, rap-heavy, and deliberately anti-commercial Scarlet—as self-sabotage in the form of gastrointestinal distress (???). On Vie, she’s skilled enough to occasionally sidestep the same ole gilded cage but still has yet to find her way completely around it.
It might not be her best work, but it is the album that springs with the most sonic intrigue. Executive-produced by New Jersey songwriter and superproducer Jack Antonoff, Vie is a lustful mélange of permed and glammed-out influences: Prince and his erstwhile protégés-cum-rivals Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, coming-of-age Janet Jackson and peak Sade, P-Funk in winter, and a touch of Nile Rodgers. (You’ll peep the percussive snaps of “Sexual Healing” on the bassy opener, “Cards.”) There are moments when all the influences combine to overwhelm—drowning out Doja’s magnetism—but in general, there are worse things than a limited Purple One imitation.
Particularly in the first half of the album, Antonoff’s production is lusher, bouncier, and sharper than anything on Doja’s previous records. His allegiance to a saxophone riff may be unrivaled, but Antonoff is ultra-’80s literate and has a knack for synth and vocoder work, not unlike his longtime bandmate (and Kendrick Lamar collaborator) Sounwave. Mixed mostly by Neal Pogue—the engineer behind every Outkast album and all but one of Tyler, the Creator’s post–Flower Boy records—Vie contains strikingly clean peaks that open a whole range of space for Doja to probe and coast as both an MC and a vocalist.
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In August, she told Zane Lowe that she hoped to “play with” her voice on the Knight Rider–sampling, funk-rave “AAAHH MEN!” The same effect courses through the entire album. As a singer, Doja sets out for notes she’s never hit: squeaking out a pointed, little “right” after every stanza for the hook on “Cards,” dancing in dream pop falsetto up and down “All Mine.” Her vocal pacing is consistently revelatory—she parcels the chorus on one track (splitting “overtired” in two on the passive-aggressive ode “Jealous Type”) while slow-walking a string of couplets on the next (see: the opening verse on “Silly! Fun!”). Throughout Vie, there’s beaucoup pun usage and a few nifty pockets existing somewhere between rapping and singing, one of which results in a splendid bow tie that starts with “mon chéri” and ends with “hosiery.”
Of course, the pattern here is that most of the tracks that hit the hardest are on the front half. Vie loses both steam and cohesion as it strays from its ’80s palette over the final stretch. The pace slows down. The risk-taking disappears. The vibes feel less Minneapolis funk and more department store fodder. Doja’s too adept at thumbing online touchstones for her own good, and the trick begets more than a few duds: Cooing a line like “You love this, but you so anal about it” is always going to come off as corny, no matter how Prince-ish your adjoining wallpaper is.
Doja’s long had a sense of the kind of artist she wants to be as both a rapper and a pop maven. But, even at her peaks, she’s long appeared unable to get to those spaces, and when she does, folks seem more prone to cast doubt on the sincerity of it—by virtue of her shitposting, disparate musical background, and very public faux pas. Once more, this ain’t exactly novel to her. Whitney Houston got booed at the Soul Train Awards for the crime of going pop. Doja spent a couple years trying to flee the pedestal to mixed results and is back now with flawed, inspired work that’s hard to judge in part because she won’t stop judging it herself. “I listen to so much good music, and when I do that, I beat myself up and think that my music should be better,” she recently told The New York Times. “I remember making all those songs for Planet Her and Hot Pink and being like, ‘I don’t wanna listen to this.’”
Is the new-age pop girl shedding old skin, or is she trapped in a whole new one? On Vie, she takes risks until she doesn’t, churning out TikTok catnip and playing ’80s synth songstress, belting out paeans to love and lust and also struggling with how to make art about those feelings that’s not exactly derivative. For most of the album she’s good enough to make it work. That’s got to count for something, especially these days. At the moment, Doja knows what she doesn’t want to listen to. Vie might not make the cut, but it might get her there eventually.
