Rebecca Black - Age of the Exhibitionist
Glossy magazines, posters on the walls, and parties that last until sunrise — Rebecca Black’s second studio album blends nostalgia for the 2000s with the sounds of pop music yet to come.
It’s been 15 good years since the release of “Friday” — the song that split what was hardly the most good-natured corner of the internet into two camps. Not that the sides were particularly evenly matched: the majority of internet users at the time seemed to genuinely hate Rebecca Black. But she never gave up, and made a very loud comeback in the 2020s, winning over fans of pop music that would never find its way into the Top 40. Her second studio album, Age of the Exhibitionist, is arguably the strongest work in her discography to date.
The album opens with the bass-heavy “Anaheim Star”, a love letter to Los Angeles where Rebecca Black’s pop-star persona seems to be born in real time. It’s bright, loud, and overflowing with fun, setting the perfect tone for everything that follows. The stunning “Hot Wet Delirious”, which sounds like Rina Sawayama’s “XS” on steroids, reimagines the celebrated sound of 2000s pop and delivers one of the finest musical moments in Black’s catalogue. Here, the artist is quite literally staging a massacre on the dance floor.
The glossy sheen of Frutiger Aero collides with skull-rattling Jersey Club beats on the sparkling “Exhibitionism”, where Black’s delicate whisper places the need to be seen and heard at the very heart of the record. “Every part of me on display for you / You know what to do”, she sings. It’s difficult to resist her. Mind-bending “Corsetry”, as though it had wandered straight off Addison Rae’s debut album, hypnotizes the listener through its first half before transforming midway into a neon trip through a half-empty party. The never-ending night out continues with “Miss Delicious”, one of the album’s most infectious cuts. Here, Black pays tribute to Fergie and her ultimate party anthem “Fergalicious”, while weaving explosive hyperpop elements into the track’s structure.
One of the greatest strengths of Age of the Exhibitionist is that you genuinely have no idea what’s coming next: take the trip-hop-soaked “Pistol” and its more restrained follow-up, “Backstage Baby Interlude”, or the track that comes after it, “Michael” — a progressive-house ode to the fiancé of… Lady Gaga… Michael Polansky…? There are enough left turns like this to make Black’s work feel wonderfully alien, even when it sounds strangely familiar. The desire to let loose eventually leads the listener to “Waschesalon” — a fictional club where, amid pounding beats and suffocating smoke, Black imagines the perfect place for all the inhabitants of her bizarre, glossy pop universe to collide.
Age of the Exhibitionist has a charm all of its own: the songs sound as though you’ve heard them somewhere before, yet there’s something unmistakably fresher about them. This kind of musical Mandela effect fits the album’s apparent concept perfectly — by combining a longing for the parties of the 2000s with the forward-looking sound of contemporary pop, Rebecca Black has finally found a style she can truly call her own. It’s a meticulously crafted, effortlessly stylish record that invites you to a party that may never have existed in the first place.
8.0/10
