The Bite Magazine - Spring/Summer 2022 - Issue 31

A fter the release of her recent single ‘This Hell’, mul- ti-dimensional pop sensation Rina Sawayama quick- ly followed up with ‘Catch Me In The Air’ from the highly anticipated sophomore album Hold The Girl , due Sep- tember 2022 via Dirty Hit. The pop anthem premiered as Zane Lowe’s New Music Daily pick on Apple Music 1 and arrived paired with a visualiser created with fan-submitted footage of Rina performing the previously unreleased track across her recent UK and US tours. The song is a tribute to her mother, who raised Rina as a single parent. “I wanted to write about this weird relationship with single parents – you catch each other in the air,” she explained. It was written between the lockdowns with Oscar Scheller and Gracey. “I wanted the whole song to sound like it was on an Irish coastline, like a Corrs video. We put in a key change to go into the chorus at the end of the pre-chorus to make it lift and soar like a bird.” Rina’s forthcoming album Hold the Girl also features the lead single ‘This Hell’, a joyous and roaring slice of pop-meets- country. It is paired with a glamorous Ali Kurr-directed music video and debuted with a performance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon . It follows her debut album Sawayama with similar juxtaposed intimate storytelling of arena-sized songs and the magic of long-term collaborators Clarence Clarity and Lauren Aquilina. She also enlisted the help of the legendary Paul Epworth, Stuart Price and Marcus Andersson. Sawayama became one of the most critically acclaimed al- bums in 2020, landing on over 50 Album of the Year lists, in- cluding The New York Times, The Guardian and Rolling Stone. In the last 18 months, Rina has advocated for changing rules such as the Mercury Prize and the BRIT Awards’ eligibility rules to allow non-British artists to apply if they have been permanent residents in the UK for more than five years. Last year, Rina and Elton John joined forces to release a spe- cial rendition of ‘Chosen Family’, a powerful and emotional ode to her LGBTQ+ family. She injected new life into Lady Gaga’s instant club classic ‘Free Woman’; next year, we will see the singer in her acting debut in John Wick 4 alongside Keanu Reeves. Following her sold-out UK and US headline tours and packed-out sets at Coachella and Primavera, Rina will be taking to the stage again this October with a run of UK and Ireland dates. www.rina.online bitenewmusic Rina Sawayama – Catch Me In The Air Images courtesy of Satellite-414