“The fun thing about being independent is you get to change the rules,” says Bebe Rexha on a car ride back from the airport, having just landed in her native New York.
As the Brooklyn-born pop singer-songwriter barrels down the streets of her home city, she’s also moving toward one of the biggest moments in her career. After years penning hits for other stars such as Rihanna, Eminem and Selena Gomez before embarking on her own path as a soloist — but never feeling like she could fully be herself within the major label machine — Rexha left Warner Records and signed a new partnership deal with EMPIRE earlier this year. And in just two days, she’ll formally launch her next era by dropping what she calls a “supercut” of Dirty Blonde, her upcoming visual album and her first full-length since going independent, on Thursday (Feb. 12).
“The most important thing right now is I’ve just been more motivated than ever,” she says. “I just feel like it’s a rebirth, you know? It’s the resurrection.”
As Rexha tells Billboard over the phone, the idea behind the supercut — which pieces together 20-second snippets of all 13 pulsing, EDM-infused tracks on the project and their accompanying music videos like a movie trailer — was to “cater to how fans consider music today.” The format allows listeners to pick out which songs they’re most excited for ahead of time, and, should they choose, become a part of the rollout by clipping, remixing or editing the preview footage.
“I just wanted to give every song its chance,” she says, noting that, essentially, every track on the Dirty Blonde will be treated like a single. “I worked so hard on this album. It’s been three years now, and every song is so important me. They’re like your babies, you know? I don’t want to be conformed by a certain sound or certain boundaries.”
Rexha last dropped an album in 2023, with that year’s Bebe performing slightly better than its 2021 predecessor, Better Mistakes, but not by much. The former peaked at No. 132 on the Billboard 200 while the latter reached No. 140, both well short of her 2018 debut album’s No. 13 high on the chart. Other than serving as a home to her 2022 “I’m Good (Blue)” duet with David Guetta, which reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and has been streamed more than 2 billion times on Spotify, Bebe didn’t exactly give Rexha what her fans think is a long overdue Main Pop Girl moment.
But, then again, the four-time Grammy nominee says it also wasn’t the most authentic showcase of her identity as an artist to begin with.
“I feel like a lot of people, they saw me through this lens of when I was trying to be, like, this perfect, clean-girl pop star,” Rexha explains. “When you’re signed to a major, it’s a little bit stressful, you know? ‘Cause you’re trying to always make everybody else happy. A lot of the big songs that I had, too, were always in my computer — I’d always written them — and they were all basically ‘No’s’ from whichever label I was at.”
“Honestly, I haven’t been able to show [this] side of me until now,” she adds. “Now I have a label, EMPIRE, that just is allowing me to be myself purely, and they celebrate that, and that’s really cool.”
Billboard has reached out to Warner for comment.
Feeling nothing but support from the San Francisco distribution company’s founder, Ghazi, its president, Tina Davis — whom Rexha says she first met at age 17 at a Pace University/Grammy career day — and the rest of the EMPIRE team, the musician says she finally feels free to “pay homage to that messy girl” raised by Albanian parents in New York. She references her upbringing in the Dirty Blonde supercut, especially during opening number “Chica Chica,” which finds her speaking Albanian and smoking cigarettes on a front lawn with older, bare-beer-bellied men.
“I was like, ‘You know what? We need to bring my culture into this,’” Rexha recalls. ”So we got all the guys out with the plastic chairs, similar to how I grew up. Everybody’s like, ‘You either have to fit New York, or you have to fit the perfect clean pop star, or you have to fit super-cultural.’ And I’m like, why can’t I do all of it?”
“She has an ability to craft records that resonate globally,” Ghazi said in a January statement. “What excites us most is that she’s still evolving.”
If there were ever a time for her to finally break free of the proverbial “khia asylum” — semi-problematic internet speak for artists who spend indefinite periods of time grasping at cultural relevance, a label many have cast upon Rexha — it’s with the release of Dirty Blonde on June 12. In the meantime, Rexha is having fun trolling people online about it, at one point jokingly asking for help escaping pop-star purgatory in a voice note she posted on X (“I heard Sabrina [Carpenter] got out. Zara [Larsson], Charli [xcx], they left. They never looked back. And my fat a–, flop a– is still in here,” she said at the time.)
In the past, Rexha admits that the “khia asylum” narrative hurt her feelings, but now, she thinks it’s “fun” and prefers to be “in on the joke.” Plus, she knows more than anyone online ever could how prior industry struggles may have prevented her from ascending to top levels of superstardom like some of her peers — which isn’t to say she’s had any shortage of major successes. Rexha has notched 13 entries on the Hot 100 — four of which were top 10s — and has written countless more for other artists. Meanwhile, her 2017 collaboration with Florida Georgia Line, “Meant to Be,” remains the record holder for longest time spent at No. 1 on the Hot Country Songs chart at 50 weeks total.
“There’s so much that you can’t tell people,” she tells Billboard of past obstacles behind the scenes. “But, look: I’ve had hits, I’ve written so many hits for other people, and… no matter what happens, the internet, [at least] they’re talking about me. Like, what are you gonna do? Cry and sit in my house all day and just be depressed? No, f–k that.
“I’m like, ‘I’ve been here,’” Rexha adds. “It’s been almost 10 over 10 years. I’ve been doing this s–t. And I’m not going anywhere.”
Check out Rexha’s Dirty Blonde supercut below.
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