FEATURE:
Modern-Day Queens
PHOTO CREDIT: Greg Swales
why I am featuring Doja Cat in this Modern-Day Queens. Firstly, her phenomenal new album, Vie (French for ‘life’), gained critical acclaim. It is a fantastic album and is her fifth album. It comes two years after Scarlet. I really love the physical and digital covers for Vie. The aesthetic of the album is wonderful. I have been following Doja Cat for a while now, but this is the first album of hers where I have immersed myself. I will end with a couple of positive reviews for Vie. Before that, there are some interviews that I want to get to. In August, NME reacted to an interview Doja Cat had with Zane Lowe about her upcoming album. I think that Vie might be among her best work, and it is definitely one of the best albums of 2025:
“Now, in a new interview with Apple Music 1’s Zane Lowe, Doja has shared her experience working with former fun. member and Bleachers leader Antonoff.
“I’m working with Jack Antonoff and working with a person that’s new in my life,” she told Lowe. “And so it’s the grappling with talking about something personal and creating something fresh, and then getting to know someone new, and then all of these things fell together really naturally.”
The musician has previously said that the album will be more of a “pop-driven” version of her previous LP ‘Scarlet‘. She went on to explain how the producer has helped in inspiring this sound, saying: “He’s just been such a wonderful person to work with,” adding: “But yeah, I think it’s just been nice to play.
“I really played through the whole thing … I think what I wanted to do was play with my voice in ways that are a little bit less unconventional. And so I’m shrieking a little bit on this album, and that’s been a lot of fun.”
In an interview with NME last year, Antonoff spoke about how he chooses which artists to work with: “If there’s ever something that sounds interesting to work on, I try to meet people and see if I can imagine doing things with them.”
“You know, the ability to make something with someone is so delicate that you could like someone, you could love their work, but it might not work. You just have to try and be very honest when it happens and when it doesn’t.”
“And I tend and intend to follow the things where I feel a lot of inspiration and excitement. It’s all kind of gut feeling, but yeah, it can be a bit awkward if it’s not there. Because you can’t really fake it.”
Doja went on to tell Lowe how events in her love life had shaped the record’s lyrical content. “There’s other things outside of myself that were inspiring me to write about these things,” she explained. “I had been in relationships that made me think about things in a different way, and I think naivety is a big part of this album too. I speak about rushing and love-bombing in a way.
“I think sometimes people don’t know that they’re doing it or they do, but giving excessive compliments and gifts right off the bat, that sort of thing,” she added. “I thought that was a really fun thing to write about.”
In April, Doja Cat began teasing her new era, which she confirmed was being titled ‘Vie’. Since then, she’s been steadily teasing the project, including the nostalgic pop tune ‘Jealous Type’. Earlier this month, she hosted a surprise album-listening preview party.
‘Vie’ will mark her first LP since 2023’s ‘Scarlet’, and while she hasn’t dropped a new album since, she did release a collaborative track with Jack Harlow titled ‘Just Us’ earlier this year, which was accompanied by a star-studded video featuring the likes of Matt Damon, John Mayer, PinkPantheress and Succession actor Nicholas Braun”.
To slightly detour, there is an interview from ELLE from the summer. Doja Cat was asked about the Met Gala, new music, and fronting Marc Jacobs’s pre-fall 2025 campaign. I think that Doja Cat is this modern-day icon who has this incredible music side but there is also her own style. I always think that Doja Cat would be an amazing actor, though there have been few opportunities put her way. She is this incredible all-round talent that I am excited to see where she heads next:
“When did fashion first become a way for you to express yourself as a performer?
Even in the beginning, I was always super visual, but I wasn’t good at styling for a long time. I definitely use clothing as a means of expressing different moods in a more campy and wild way. I think my fashion has become more sophisticated over the years, but it’s still out-there.
Is there a past look or style moment that stands out as your favorite?
I mean there’s so much, but I think one of the most inspiring moments for me was when I went to Schiaparelli’s couture show in 2024. I just remember how emotional that experience was. I mean, everything that Daniel [Roseberry, the artistic director of Schiaparelli] does is incredible. But I think that was just a very emotional show as far as the attention to detail, the light, and the way that it played off of the clothing.
Was there a particular piece from the collection that you especially loved wearing?
My favorite was definitely the pink jeans with the white T-shirt. I loved the little appliqués. It was just very comfy, but it was also very sexy, and I love anything that kinda rides low. I didn’t feel swallowed by the clothes, which can sometimes happen. It all felt right.
Do you think your style will become more girly and pop-inspired this summer?
I think in some sense, yes. But I’ve sort of been traveling toward things that felt quite a little bit more understated, sophisticated—things that have some accents in the deeper jewel tones. I really love smokier, sexier, sultrier colors, especially as far as my album rollout and the creative. It’s different from the campaign, but I think it’s nice before getting ready to [do the rollout] that I kind of step into something other than that”.
I want to come to an interview with The New York Times from last month. On Vie, she pushes herself to the max. For Doja Cat, “that means leaning into her pop roots and “doing what I know I know how to do”. It is a fascinating interview that I have taken some parts from. Giving you more insight into Doja Cat and the amazing Vie:
“A very online 29-year-old technology addict, the musician born Amala Dlamini is trolling, usually — but she means it, too. Trailed since her 2019 breakthrough by a string of these micro-controversies — the bouts of brutal honesty but also her stubborn, subversive allegiance to so-called racial chat rooms and edgelord T-shirt choices — Doja Cat appears to find personal and artistic fuel in sparring, especially when shadowboxing with the mirror.
On “Vie,” out Sept. 26, Doja Cat marries the sleazy side of ’80s synths and up-tempo R&B (Prince, Janet) with the confidence and visual bombast of glammy rock.
“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 said behind blackout shades at her home in Calabasas, Calif., in between heated rounds of Fortnite on the big screen. “I remember making all those songs for ‘Planet Her’ and ‘Hot Pink’ and being like, ‘I don’t wanna listen to this.’”
“I’m doing things that people like,” she thought in recent years, “and I’m glad that they enjoy it. But now, I am going to veer off the edge of the [expletive] cliff, and do whatever I want to do, and listen to my intrusive thoughts,” she added, “in order to make me feel like I’m doing something productive for myself and not just the brand.”
The resulting follow-up album, the rap-heavy “Scarlet” from 2023, was supposed to be a corrective. Darker, more personal and shot through with the defensiveness of an M.C. who was sick of her technical skills being questioned, the album was less successful than the two before it, but still went platinum and delivered a No. 1 single, “Paint the Town Red.” For Doja, even a swerve proved popular.
More crucially, though, “Scarlet” taught Doja Cat that the chip on her shoulder was permanent. “Not to diminish it, but it was a bit of like, I just need to get this out — it was a massive fart for me,” she said of her attempt to be taken more seriously. “I thought fixing that would entail making music that was more visceral or more emotional or maybe more angry or more sad. And I enjoyed performing it onstage, but it didn’t get me all the way there. So I want to return back to what I know.”
And what Doja Cat knows are old-fashioned hits.
On “Vie,” her fifth album, out Sept. 26, the pop star is strutting back into the broadest of tents and hitting a split in a bedazzled leotard. Marrying the sleazy side of ’80s synths and up-tempo R&B (Prince, Janet) with the confidence and visual bombast of “cock-rock” glam — think Mötley Crüe, Poison, Kiss, “not that I even really listen to them, necessarily” — songs like “Take Me Dancing” and “Jealous Type,” the album’s lead single, are unabashed and unpretentious, even if they pull from a deeper reference bucket than the sparkly surface lets on.
“It’s overtly sexy and it becomes kind of silly, which is likable and fun,” Doja said. “I just always want to keep that sense of fun, but I never want to be too goofy.” She cited Nina Hagen, the German cabaret-punk throwback, as another inspiration — “a hot girl who isn’t trying to just be a hot girl,” Doja explained. “She has layers to her.”
Featuring production for the first time by the pop polymath Jack Antonoff, alongside Doja Cat’s go-to lineup of lesser-known studio hitmakers (Y2K, Kurtis McKenzie), “Vie” — French for life — is very much “a continuation of ‘Planet Her’ and ‘Hot Pink,’” she said. “I’m doing what I was perfecting in the beginning. I’m doing what I know I know how to do.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Chantal Anderson
The recording process for “Vie,” on the other hand, found Doja “more openhearted” when it came to “making music that other people can enjoy, she can enjoy, and it not being so heavy,” McKenzie added, noting that Doja once again wanted to show off her voice and perform the role of pop star. “‘Scarlet’ allowed her to miss that.”
The pair had never met before collaborating on the album, which started as a vague idea about R&B songs — or maybe the intersection between punk and jazz — at Brad Pitt’s Miraval Studios in France near the end of last year.
There, though, Doja hit on a theme lyrically, inspired by the cartoonish version of French romance — “the mustaches with the rose in the mouth,” she said. “I wanted to embody it in sort of a tongue-in-cheek way,” but also earnestly: “As a daughter of a single mother taking care of two kids, romance is something that I feel is my life lesson because it’s not something that was ever really there.”
She has long considered herself a sex writer. “Like that’s my whole thing,” Doja said. “I have floggers and whips all over my walls.” But “Vie” is different, she added, “because I’m talking about not only my own sexuality, but his.” (Having most recently been linked to the actor Joseph Quinn, Doja Cat said she is “just having fun” and “allowing things to happen,” while noting that she both loves men and loves “bullying men.”)
“I’m doing what I was perfecting in the beginning,” Doja Cat said of her new album. “I’m doing what I know I know how to do.”
The matching musical palette, Antonoff said, was a side of the ’80s that could be considered the opposite of yacht rock — “you’re not being tasteful,” he explained. “It’s a little bit more in that ‘4 a.m., driving around the dark’ kind of zone.”
For Doja Cat, the choice was as much physical and visual as it was musical. “I know who I am and how I want to perform,” she said — all out and in-your-face. “I wanna move, I wanna dance.” In preparation for bringing the full spectacle of “Vie” to audiences around the world this fall and through next year, she has been working out harder than ever, taking ’80s fitness to the max. “It’s an excuse to look great,” she said.
As for the songs, Doja is “a lot more” forgiving now than she has been of her own music, especially in the recent past. But it’s a process. “Do I wanna listen to it? No, I turn it off still,” she said. “But I can appreciate it”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Chantal Anderson
I will end with a couple of reviews for Vie. One of the best albums of the year in my view, The Guardian said that Vie finds a softer and more openhearted Californian artist who has not lost the fun and mischief. Vie is an album of balances and varying emotions. We hear both the sugar and the spice:
“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”.
Even though some have stated how there is Pop pastiche on Vie and there is a sense of it being unfocused at times, I would disagree. I think that it is a solid work that showcases her brilliance. She even received criticism for the album cover. I think that it is a standout and striking cover. Rare in a year when there have been precious few memorable album covers! This is what NME wrote for their four-star review of Vie:
“If 2021’s ‘Planet Her’ is a sparkling fantasy world of glossy pop and alien allure, then Doja Cat’s fifth album ‘Vie’ is meant to be its “masculine” musical sister: an intimate, sensual ride threaded with zappy synths and funk bass. The album rarely feels assertive in a traditionally male-coded way; instead, it thrives on texture, groove and vocal fluidity, creating a seductive, immersive experience that refuses to sit still. Doja’s metamorphic vocal delivery – shifting from fluttery falsettos to animated rap scratches – is the glue, scratching, spinning and looping over the beats like a turntablist teasing vinyl.
Early missteps highlight the album’s tension between intention and execution. Considering the album’s ’80s inspirations, the lead single ‘Jealous Type’ is a cliché interpretation with shimmery, upbeat melodies paired with romantic despair, making it feel like a weak introduction to the album. Similarly, ‘Couples Therapy’ and ‘Stranger’ slow momentum, offering quality production but little that compels movement.
But these minuscule slips are overshadowed the moment ‘Gorgeous’ blasts through your speakers – when groove, sensuality and clever playfulness reach full force. It exudes debonair confidence, making you want to slink around the world like you’re Jessica Rabbit. ‘All Mine’ demonstrates Doja’s vocal dexterity, her high, jazzy, bluesy register floating above the beat before she cuts back into it like a DJ spinning vinyl. In ‘Take Me Dancing’, the album’s sole feature SZA arrives as a cameo rather than a crutch, lending a multigenerational joy reminiscent of Cameo’s ‘Candy’ and ‘Word Up!’ but never overshadowing Doja’s command of the track. Across these songs, she proves that her vocals are both instrument and performer – seductive, playful and endlessly inventive.
Throughout ‘Vie’, Doja doesn’t lean into brute masculinity in the way you’d think; instead, seizing dominance through feminine-coded moves like jealousy, seduction, and emotional manipulation. She’s still authoritative, just cloaked in softness rather than swagger. There’s a glimpse on ‘Lipstain’, which is a perfect snapshot of women’s playful, biting power as she snarls over the nostalgic beat: “Every girl’s a queen, but I’m the boss / We gotta mark our territory for them dogs, girl.” But when she finally flirts with trendy casual misandry on ‘AAAHH MEN!’, she taps into something closer to true attack-dog masculinity, battling with the push-and-pull of being attracted yet repulsed by the male species.
Doja’s production choices amplify this effect. Powerful ’80s-style synths, slapping basslines and occasional modern 808s combine to keep the album moving and engaging. ‘Acts of Service’, ‘Make It Up’ and ‘Silly! Fun!’ layer lush, bluesy chords over warped synths to create sultry, body-forward grooves. By the cinematic closer ‘Come Back’, it feels like the credits rolling on an ’80s coming-of-age film: reflective, glimmering and full of resolution after a kaleidoscopic journey through love and desire.
‘Vie’ proves that Doja Cat remains pop’s ultimate shapeshifter, offering an album that moves, seduces and entertains on its own terms. Now using nostalgic power-pop as her vehicle, Doja’s voice – morphing, scratching, fluttering and crooning – drives it with full throttle, keeping every track alive. It’s intimate, playful, and downright fun, and once it gets its tenterhooks into you, it won’t let go”.
Another reason why Doja Cat makes it into this Modern-Day Queens is because she turns thirty on 21st October. Many happy returns to her! With a brilliant album out and plenty of tour dates booked for next year, it is an exciting and busy time. Go and follow Doja Cat and listen to Vie. She is no doubt a modern-day queen and idol. Someone who inspires so many others and stands out from her peers. This truly amazing artist is going to keep putting out great music…
YEARS from now.
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