JADE - That’s Showbiz Baby!
The debut solo album from one of Britain’s biggest pop exports is at once a barbed industry critique, a study in bruised vulnerability, and an unrelenting disco fantasia.
For over a decade, Jade was the gravitational center of Little Mix — a group that, throughout the 2010s, held tight to the crown of “the world’s premier girl band”, at least until the global wave of K-pop acts shifted the tide. That history is important, because That’s Showbiz Baby!, Jade’s RCA-backed solo debut, feels as polished and unflinching as a star with something to prove.
Launching a solo career demands elegance, and Jade clearly understood the assignment. Her first single, “Angel of My Dreams,” sets a bar so impossibly high that the rest of the record rarely ascends to its stratosphere — though that hardly diminishes the whole. It’s a bold, stylish missive to the music industry, part love letter, part breakup note, interrogating the very notion of what makes an artist “better.” It’s nothing short of stunning: one of the finest debut singles in recent pop memory. Its only flaw is structural — it arrives first, leaving the rest of the album to orbit its gravitational pull.
The momentum continues with “It Girl” and “FUFN (Fuck You For Now)”. The former has enough neon energy to slide effortlessly into playlists next to Charli xcx or Slayyyter, while the latter drowns a solid hook in its own clichés. It is not a bad song, but easily the weakest of the chosen pre-singles. Redemption comes quickly in “Plastic Box”, a smoky, spectral anthem that feels like an isolation on a crowded dancefloor. Here Jade nails one of the record’s core motifs: melancholy moving to a four-on-the-floor beat. If “Plastic Box” braids anxiety with splendor, then the psychedelic shimmer of “Unconditional” channels Donna Summer through an MGMT lens, transforming grief for an ailing mother into ecstatic release. It’s devastating, transcendent, and utterly gorgeous.
The album keeps on toying with camp and intimacy. “Midnight Cowboy” drifts in like an afterparty confessional — languid, aloof, wrapped in hazy instrumentation. Just steps away, “Fantasy” opens its doors to a glittering disco ballroom that could sit comfortably alongside Jessie Ware’s recent catalog. Seduction here is playful, experimental, and knowingly indulgent. Later, “Before You Break My Heart”, which samples The Supremes’ “Stop! In The Name Of Love” for a new generation, pairing Jade’s crystalline vulnerability with the theatrical flair of Chappell Roan at her most disco-saturated.
But not everything lands on That’s Showbiz Baby!. “Glitch” buckles under its trap flourishes, more burdened than daring. “Headache” reads like a pallid cousin of “It Girl,” dragging down the midsection. Then comes “Natural at Disaster” — a melodramatic ballad aimed at a toxic ex — feels unnecessary, the sort of track that might have been better left as a bonus cut. Its chorus, unfortunately, veers into Eurovision semi-final fodder.
Still, Jade’s solo debut showcases undeniable creative firepower. Sonically, it’s expansive; lyrically, it brims with defiance, yearning, and a hunger for liberation — in love, in artistry, in selfhood. That’s Showbiz Baby! makes you dance, ache, and reflect, and even at its weakest, it never feels dull.
7.7/10
