Vie

“I believe the weirdest ones survive,” Doja Cat sings on “Stranger”—a line that just as easily applies to her unpredictable trajectory as it does a shimmering power ballad for misfits in love. With her world-conquering third album, 2021’s Planet Her, Doja Cat completed her evolution from viral internet oddball to full-on pop-rap star. Well, sorta: Ever the contrarian, the musician born Amala Dlamini announced in early 2023 that she was leaving pop music behind; months later, her fourth album, Scarlet, showcased her formidable rap skills with flinty songs that rejected the terms of her mainstream success. But when she began to conceptualise her fifth album last year, the pendulum swung the other way. “I think I love talking about love,” Doja tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “And I also think music is just such a door for expressing love in its different forms.” On Vie (the French word for life, or the phonetic interpretation of the Roman numeral five), Doja pulls up via DeLorean with a whole new sound and style. Artfully grounded in the decadence of the ’80s, she spiffs up songs about love-bombing and limerence with skittering drum machines, punchy basslines and the occasional sax solo. She channels Queen on “AAAHH MEN!”, an ode to the maddening, demoralising, irresistible pleasures of men, and brings new jack swing into the 2020s on lead single “Jealous Type”. Naturally, what she called “that ’80s tacky romance sort of spin” demanded Doja’s first meet-up with pop’s premiere nostalgist, Jack Antonoff. “And so it’s the grappling with talking about something personal and creating something fresh, and then getting to know someone new,” she tells Lowe of their collaboration. “All of these things fell together really naturally.” More playful than its predecessor, Vie relishes in its campy mood board and dishy subject matter: On “Silly! Fun!”, a punch-drunk R&B throwback about romantic delusion, the honeymoon’s over nearly as soon as it starts (“I know it could be a blast