JADE sets the stage with audacity. ‘Angel of My Dreams’, a kaleidoscopic single co-written in Los Angeles with Mike Sabath, pivots on a Sandie Shaw sample and recalls the daring, genre-bending pop once championed by Girls Aloud. The track’s restless architecture, electronica laced with disco-funk flourishes, establishes JADE as an artist capable of absorbing history while writing her own. Its successor, ‘It Girl’, is slyer, almost bratty, a talk-sung flex over coiled bass. It’s the “cunty little sister” to her debut single, and though its vocal delivery veers towards monotone, the production’s fizz ensures it feels less like a misstep and more like deliberate provocation.
But JADE is not content to live on provocation alone. ‘Plastic Box’ is her finest moment, an aching, synth-pop meditation that places her in conversation with Robyn’s lineage of melancholy dancefloor catharsis. It is here that she strips back the theatre of her persona to reveal vulnerability, and the effect is magnetic. Similarly, ‘Fantasy’ offers another high, its disco-house exuberance landing somewhere between Diana Ross and Dua Lipa. The track’s shimmer is both homage and declaration: JADE intends to own her place in the pop continuum.
Elsewhere, the album thrives in its variety. ‘Midnight Cowboy’, with a spoken cameo from Ncuti Gatwa, seduces with its slinky late-night textures, while ‘Unconditional’ rides a storming guitar riff into anthemic territory. ‘Self Saboteur’ teeters on the edge of breakdown, its fluttering keys circling JADE’s carefully restrained vocal, suggesting the tension between collapse and composure.
The second half of the record is slightly uneven. ‘Headache’ and ‘Glitch’ never quite achieve the electricity of the album’s earlier peaks, their experiments feeling more tentative than triumphant. ‘Lip Service’, despite its cheeky premise and the pedigree of collaborators like MNEK and Tove Lo, risks blending into the broader R&B-pop landscape. Still, these are less failures than palate cleansers, moments that allow space before the record reclaims its drama.
That drama is delivered in spades on ‘Before You Break My Heart’, a gleaming Supremes interpolation that marries retro homage with JADE’s powerhouse restraint. It is one of the album’s great triumphs, an object lesson in how pop can fold the past into the present without collapsing into nostalgia. Closer ‘Silent Disco’ ends on a fragile note, her whistle tones carrying a bruised tenderness into the fade.
‘That’s Showbiz Baby’ is not just flawless, but it is a daring debut. JADE offers herself as both camp icon and confessional diarist, aware that pop stardom is always a performance yet insistent that performance can be profound. This record is an opening act: messy, thrilling, uneven, and unapologetically ambitious. In short: exactly what pop needs right now.
Image: Harry Carr for Rolling Stone UK
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