Bebe Rexha has had a strange few years. Her 2023 album Bebe got strong reviews and went gold, but the tour behind it ended with her getting hit in the face with a phone thrown from the crowd, an injury that required stitches. Not long after, she parted ways with Warner Records, the label she had been with for her entire career to that point. Dirty Blonde, out today on Empire Distribution, is the sound of her starting over without anyone telling her what that has to look like.
The Visual Album Approach
The most ambitious thing about Dirty Blonde is not really musical, it is how it was rolled out. Every single track on the album comes with its own music video, and Rexha has been releasing them one at a time for months leading up to today. She told Billboard she did not want to be conformed by a certain sound or certain boundaries, and the visual album format is basically her way of treating each song as its own complete statement rather than just another track on a list.
The rollout started in February with a teaser featuring a Diplo produced supercut mashing snippets of all thirteen songs together, which doubled as a kind of promotional trailer for the whole record. From there, singles arrived steadily. I Like You Better Than Me and Çike Çike came out as promotional singles in February, Hysteria followed in April, and Sad Girls, a collaboration with David Guetta, dropped May 29, just two weeks before the album itself.
New Religion
The clearest statement of intent on this album is New Religion, released back in March as the lead single. It is a collaboration with the British dance group Faithless and samples their 1995 track Insomnia, one of the most recognizable pieces of 90s dance music there is. Rexha has talked about how the song came together partly through fan input, and you can hear why it resonated. It sits in a diva house, dance pop space that feels like a genuine throwback without being a nostalgia act. Faithless gave her the green light to build around their sample, and the result is one of the strongest tracks on the record.
This is also Rexha leaning into a sound she has flirted with before but never fully committed to. Dance-pop and disco influences ran through Bebe, but New Religion goes further, putting the dance floor front and center in a way that feels confident rather than calculated.
The Rest of the Record
The production credits on this album are stacked. David Guetta, DJ Snake, Boaz van de Beatz, and a long list of others all contribute across the thirteen tracks, and that range shows. Sad Girls, the Guetta collaboration, leans into big room dance energy that fits his catalog well. Other tracks pull from different corners of pop and electronic music, which fits the whole ethos of the album not wanting to be boxed into one sound.
That approach is also the album’s biggest risk. Thirteen songs, thirteen videos, and a stated goal of not being conformed to one sound can result in something that feels scattered rather than cohesive. Dirty Blonde mostly avoids that trap because Rexha’s voice is the connective tissue throughout. Whether she is over a house beat or something more downtempo, it still sounds like her record.
Where It Lands
Coming off Bebe, which was well reviewed but did not hit the commercial heights of her earlier work, Dirty Blonde feels like Rexha betting on herself. No major label dictating the rollout, no pressure to deliver one obvious radio single. Instead she made thirteen songs, gave each one its own video, and let the whole thing roll out over months as one long statement.
It does not all land at the same level. Some tracks feel more like sketches than fully realized songs, which is almost inevitable across thirteen tracks each treated as a standalone moment. But the highs, New Religion especially, are genuinely strong, and the overall confidence of the project is hard not to respect.
The Verdict
Dirty Blonde is Bebe Rexha doing exactly what she wants, on her own label, on her own terms, after a few rough years that could have knocked the wind out of anyone. The visual album concept is ambitious and mostly pays off, anchored by New Religion as a genuine highlight. It is not a perfectly even record, but it does not need to be. The whole point was range, and on that front, it delivers.
Dirty Blonde is out now via Empire Distribution.
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