When 2025 began, Rebecca Black was feeling “impatient” to drop ‘Salvation’, her new alt-pop project that she describes as “loud, bright and colourful”. The seven-song collection was originally due out on January 24 – well ahead of her tour kicking off in March. But when the Los Angeles wildfires “devastated” her hometown, the 27-year-old singer-songwriter made a “very obvious” decision to postpone its release by a full month.
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“Some of my closest collaborators, who are a huge part of this project in their own right, lost their homes. The entire city was essentially momentarily displaced,” Black tells NME over Zoom in mid-February. She spent her unexpected downtime “on the ground” helping friends and fellow artists to begin the lengthy rebuilding process. “It definitely put everything in perspective for me,” adds the singer, who moved to the city around a decade ago.
In a way, Black’s career has been an extended exercise in reading the room and playing the long game. She could have remained a punchline – the teenage girl who went viral with ‘Friday’, supposedly “the worst song ever” – but instead she reinvented herself as a credible independent musician. With her 2021 EP ‘Rebecca Black Was Here’ and 2023 debut album ‘Let Her Burn’, Black displayed a real flair for catchy and cathartic dark-pop.
Her origin story will evoke nostalgia in anyone who was even moderately online at the start of the last decade. When she was 13, Black’s mother paid indie label Ark Music Factory US$4,000 to produce a single and music video for her driven daughter. “I was always in theatre corps and performance groups – you know, really embarrassing forms of putting myself out there,” Black recalls with a laugh.
Ark asked Black to pick between two pre-written tracks. The first, titled ‘Super Woman’, felt too “adult” for a 13-year-old, so she chose ‘Friday’, which proved to be a fateful decision. In March 2011, around a month after its music video was quietly uploaded to YouTube, ‘Friday’ went viral in the most overwhelming way imaginable.
Trolls and wags on Twitter (as X was then known) became obsessed with every aspect of the endeavour: its excessively Auto-Tuned vocals, crushingly mundane lyrics (“yesterday was Thursday, Thursday / today it is Friday, Friday”) and low-budget video showing Black singing awkwardly in the back of a car and at a party.
‘Friday’ was also eviscerated by critics – one branded it “mind-meltingly horrific” – but Black received sisterly support from Lady Gaga, who said sweetly: “Anyone that’s telling her she’s cheesy is full of shit.” Still, the song’s viral notoriety and undeniably catchy chorus turned it into a surprise hit that climbed to Number 58 on the Billboard Hot 100.
A few days before she speaks to NME, Rebecca Black quote-shared an X post marking the 14th anniversary of ‘Friday’ with the droll comment: “Girl this video [is] officially older than I was when it dropped. Old hag!” Today, she says brightly: “I have a lot of fun with the way I interact with that song. That’s how I keep it from feeling like I’m bringing up an old middle school yearbook photo.”
But for many years, the song was Black’s albatross. “I felt this pressure of, like, never being the person to mention it because I didn’t want to be known for just this one thing,” she says. When ‘Friday’ turned nine in 2020, Black shared a heartbreaking Instagram post in which she expressed empathy for her “13-year-old self who was terribly ashamed” and her “15-year-old self who felt like she had nobody to talk to about the depression she faced”.
In the same post, Black got real about the song’s long-term impact on her career, revealing that “almost every producer/songwriter [told] me they’d never work with me”. But, just a year later, Black took full ownership of ‘Friday’ by marking its 10th anniversary with a teeth-rattling remix produced by Charli XCX collaborator Dylan Brady, one half of influential hyperpop duo 100 gecs.
The remix’s featured artists – offbeat hip-hop duo 3OH!3, queer pop alchemist Dorian Electra and Beyoncé-endorsed bounce icon Big Freedia – also reflected the cooler alt-pop sound Black would pursue on subsequent releases. Later that year, she dropped her immensely entertaining ‘Rebecca Black Is Here’ EP, which NME praised for “knitting together the weirdness of hyperpop with the melodic heft of mainstream pop”.
Released in 2023, Black’s sardonically named debut album ‘Let Her Burn’ found her expanding her sound – Gwen Stefani-style new wave on ‘Look At You’, arena-ready anthemics on ‘What Am I Gonna Do With You’ – and writing more sophisticated lyrics. “I’m a performer, got myself cornered / Put on my armour, just like my mother and father,” she sings on ‘Performer’, deftly blending her backstory with hints of generational trauma.
She describes ‘Salvation’ as more “cohesive” sonically but “really quite different thematically”. On the brilliant, Britney Spears-esque ‘American Doll’, she satirises the way female pop artists are expected to be docile and flawless. “It’s safe to swallow me, take my autonomy,” she sings in an intentionally robotic voice. “The best girls are made up of grace and apologies.”
Black says this song channels “a lot of frustrations” she feels as a young woman navigating the music industry. “It feels like you’re consistently backed up against the wall in terms of not fulfilling everyone’s expectations,” she says. “You might feel like you’re at your most competent and [at a] beautiful moment, but people will still find ways to pick it apart”.
The religious imagery of the title track, on which Black sings about finding “salvation” and “paradise” with a girl, is equally evocative. “The idea of making a song about celebrating your own queerness in a religious context felt like taking back power. It also felt really fun,” she says. The song climaxes with a nonchalant parting shot aimed at anyone who disapproves: “I’ll stay hot and you stay judgy.”
Black says that coming out as queer in 2020 was a pivotal moment in her personal and artistic development. “It was me taking matters into my own hands for the first time and trusting my instinct, which has led me to where I am now,” she says. “This project was borne out of me really harnessing the ability to trust my own instincts.”
She loves calling herself “gay” because it’s another way of taking back power. “I don’t know how I’m gonna say this without sounding like a twat, but gay is a way of life,” she says. “Gay is an energy that’s so much bigger than how people have used it [negatively]. If you want to get down to specifics, I am queer, I am bi, I am pan – I am all of those [things]. But I am also gay.”
At 27 – still decades away from any kind of “old hag” era – Black sounds comfortable in her skin and less fussed about external judgement. “I just hope that people can see [my career] for the full journey.” she says. “I don’t really care whether people think about anything I’ve done in the past, but it’s nice to think they might appreciate the full context.”
Rebecca Black’s new project ‘Salvation’ is out February 27.