Bebe Rexha’s Dirty Blonde; Finally Dancing to Her Own Beat
POP TINGZ RATING
7.2/10
For much of her career, Bebe Rexha has occupied a strange position within pop music. She has accumulated an enviable collection of hits as both a songwriter and performer, yet has rarely been afforded the same cultural cachet as many of her contemporaries. While artists like Charli xcx and Dua Lipa have become symbols of specific pop movements, Rexha has often found herself framed as a reliable hitmaker rather than a defining pop figure.
Dirty Blonde, her fourth studio album and first independent release through EMPIRE Distribution, feels like a direct response to that narrative. Free from the pressure of chasing another crossover smash, Rexha turns inward. The result is an album that embraces club music not as escapism, but as a vehicle for self-examination.
Dance music has always functioned as a space where euphoria and despair coexist. Dirty Blonde understands this instinctively. Its world is built from pounding house rhythms, EDM crescendos, trap-inflected detours, and flashes of Eurodance nostalgia, yet beneath the album's relentless momentum lies an artist wrestling with insecurity, loneliness, self-image, and the psychological cost of life in the public eye.
The album establishes that duality immediately. "Hysteria" erupts from a brief guitar introduction into a frantic EDM rush, while "Tokyo" drifts through a haze of pounding electronic beats and fleeting romantic encounters. Both songs move at breakneck speed, yet neither sounds carefree. There is an underlying restlessness to them, a sense that Rexha is chasing something she cannot quite catch.
The album's strongest moments emerge when those tensions collide. On "i like you better than me," shimmering pop-EDM production gives way to some of the most revealing writing of her career. Lines like "I get off on being insecure" and "there's something wrong with me for sure" refuse the language of empowerment that dominates contemporary pop. Instead, Rexha documents the exhausting self-comparison that often accompanies fame. The production mirrors that instability, collapsing from pulsating dance-pop into a dreamlike haze that feels almost detached from reality.
Similarly, "the way I want you" exposes the cracks beneath the album's glossy surface. Beginning with restrained strings before exploding into one of the album's biggest dancefloor moments, the song transforms therapy sessions, medication references, and emotional exhaustion into club catharsis. The drop does not feel engineered for streaming playlists. It feels earned.
Elsewhere, Rexha broadens the album's scope by incorporating elements of her Albanian heritage on çike çike. Too often, artists treat cultural influences as aesthetic accessories. Here they feel integrated into the album's identity. Traditional melodic flourishes, brass instrumentation, and contemporary house production coexist naturally, creating one of the few moments on the record that feels genuinely distinctive within today's crowded dance-pop landscape.
That distinctiveness is ultimately what separates Dirty Blonde from many of its peers. Rexha is not reinventing dance-pop. Nor is she attempting to position herself at the forefront of whatever trend currently dominates streaming platforms. Instead, she is drawing from decades of club music history and filtering it through her own experiences. The Faithless interpolation on "New Religion" illustrates this particularly well. Built around pulsating synths and euphoric house energy, the track reframes nightlife as sanctuary and music itself as a form of faith. It is both a club anthem and a mission statement.
The album's quieter moments prove equally revealing. "Night Falls" strips away much of the surrounding spectacle, allowing Rexha's voice to carry the emotional weight. Meanwhile, songs like "One day" and "Time" slow the pace considerably, exchanging peak-hour dancefloor energy for reflection and longing. They are reminders that underneath the producer instincts and festival-ready drops sits a songwriter still searching for certainty.
Not every experiment lands. Some of the album's weaker material leans heavily on familiar EDM structures without providing the lyrical specificity needed to elevate them. "$.H.I.T." occasionally mistakes repetition for attitude, while "Sad Girls" featuring David Guetta feels oddly detached from the emotional journey that precedes it, arriving less like a conclusion and more like a standalone single appended to the end of the tracklist.
Still, the album benefits enormously from Rexha's experience. She understands the mechanics of pop songwriting better than most of her peers, and that craftsmanship is evident throughout. The songs are concise, direct, and rarely linger longer than necessary. More importantly, she understands that dance music works best when the emotional stakes are real.
What makes Dirty Blonde resonate is not its pursuit of perfection. It is the sense that Rexha has stopped trying to prove herself. The album does not sound like the work of an artist attempting to secure relevance or manufacture a comeback narrative. It sounds like someone finally trusting her instincts.
That confidence may not result in the biggest album of her career. It may not alter her standing within the broader pop landscape. But it produces something arguably more valuable: a record that feels entirely comfortable in its own skin.
For an artist who has spent much of her career being underestimated, that feels like a victory in itself.
