Albums of the week: Reneé Rapp, Debby Friday, The New Eves, Ashley Monroe

Bite Me

Reneé Rapp

(Interscope)

Reneé Rapp doesn’t suffer fools gladly. The campaign for the appropriately titled Bite Me, the 25-year-old American’s follow-up to 2023 debut Snow Angel, has seen her rail against politicians, her own fans (for getting tipsy at a recent Q&A event) and herself, while the album’s first single,Leave Me Alone, fires bon mots at her management and former colleagues over a bratty take on Joan Jett’s punk rock. As she later sings on the Sabrina Carpenter-esque At Least I’m Hot: “Life’s a bitch? Well so am I.”

There are further moments of grandstanding across Bite Me’s 12 songs. Kiss It Kiss It is playful and lascivious, Why Is She Still Here? is full of slow-burning rage at being sidelined. But Rapp is smart enough to balance it out with pockets of vulnerability. The delicate That’s So Funny strips everything back to her rich and supple voice, while the mid-tempo I Think I Like You Better When You’re Gone channels the breezy pop-R&B feel of Beyoncé’s 2000s kiss-off Irreplaceable.

Occasionally those reference points – Alanis Morissette, Olivia Rodrigo, a dollop of Katy Perry are also channelled – become a bit too obvious, but Rapp’s megawatt personality always manages to squeak through. By Michael Cragg

The Starrr of the Queen of Life

Debby Friday

(Sub Pop)

In a post-Brat world, you might expect Debby Friday’s pleasure-centric, genre-morphing electronic pop to have found a wider audience than the relatively cult following Canadian artist has experienced.

Her 2023 debut, Good Luck, won the Polaris prize (Canada’s equivalent to the Mercury) but failed to chart. However, follow-up The Starrr of the Queen of Life seems primed to enter the slipstream created by Charli XCX, where the sounds of the underground now live on the world’s biggest stages. Much of its first half is directed to the dancefloor, nodding variously to hyperpop (All I Wanna Do Is Party), Madonna’s Ray of Light (slow-building opener 1/17) and pulsing, uncompromising electronica (In the Club, Arcadia).

Friday dances between moods and modes freely, playing with melancholy autotune on Leave and serving up a more R&B-adjacent love letter on Alberta before becoming fully sexually charged on PPP (Interlude) – short, naturally, for “pussy pink princess”. It’ll likely be the hedonistic highs that get The Starrr of the Queen of Life noticed, but when Debby Friday steps away from the club, there is plenty more to dig into. By Lisa Wright

The New Eve Is Rising

The New Eves

(Transgressive)

If you’re distraught at the dissolution of indie band Porridge Radio – and frankly you should be – the debut from Brighton’s the New Eves could offer some comfort. They’ve been playing live with similar feral fury to Porridge Radio for years, yet their recorded output has been meagre – until now. This debut album delivers on some of the promise of their ferocious shows. The all-female quartet caw acrid, searing vocals amid brutish guitar work, livened by Nina Winder-Lind’s scraping, lowing cello in the grand tradition of John Cale’s contribution to the first two Velvet Underground albums.

Opening song The New Eve is a manifesto for the band, their followers and women of all types, and sets the tone for a collection of lyrics that aim high without always hitting. Even if repeated references to fire and blood seem a bit obvious, when they lock into a belligerent groove – as on Fall or Bad Seeds – they conjure worlds beyond words with their aggregate intensity. There’s genius in Highway Man’s wired folk horror or the lugubrious, loping Cow Song, during which the Eves hoot and cackle terrifyingly, like butchers about to dismember their fleshy reward. By Damien Morris

Tennessee Lightning

Ashley Monroe

(Mountainrose Sparrow)

After Ashley Monroe received a cancer diagnosis, the country star “stopped hearing melodies and thinking about songs”, and concentrated on a recovery that brought “a profound perspective shift” along with a deluge of material. The result is this 17-song sprawl that celebrates such simple pleasures as a “Tallahassee crab shack” alongside the redemptive power of love and what Monroe calls “transcendence over struggle”.

The 38-year-old first won her Nashville spurs in 2011 with the gleeful female trio Pistol Annies (alongside Miranda Lambert and Angaleena Presley). Since, she’s maintained a solo career on country’s pop wing, though her last album, 2021’s Rosegold, was spartan, synth heavy, and barely country at all. Here she mixes up styles with a range of co-writers and guest stars. Opener I’m Gonna Run arrives with a canyon-deep twang courtesy of T Bone Burnett, but the guitars soon soften. StandoutThe Touchis just Monroe’s affecting vocals allied to Marty Stuart’s acoustic guitar. Teen nostalgia drives the funky Bitter Swisher Sweet, and a suite of simple, at times cliched, love calls presage Moon Child, a tribute to her son, plus there are takes on Leonard Cohen’s That’s No Way to Say Goodbye and Albert Brumley’s Jesus Hold My Hand. By Neil Spencer

Photographs by Zora Sicher/Julija Trifonova/Katie Silvester