Doja Cat has form for teasing the potential genre of her next project before we get to hear it. In 2022, she suggested that her new music would have a “‘90s German rave kind of vibe” - though subsequent 2023 album Scarlet didn’t quite fit this billing - and, after that, she said on Twitter that she was done with making pop music.
That doesn’t appear to be true either, though, as the star has now told V Magazine that her upcoming new album - titled Vie - will indeed be part of the pop landscape.
“I do want to be self-aware enough to admit the fact that this is a pop-driven project,” she says. “I know that I can make pop music, and pop is just that it’s popular.”
What Doja Cat does appear to have an issue with, though, is the idea that pop is somehow less worthy than other musical genres.
“It starts to become a bit of a thing that’s viewed as a sport by people who are just bystanders to it, who enjoy it, but maybe also don’t respect it or what it is, which is just music,” she argues. “There are some people who don’t see it as music. They see it as if this is some kind of football for girls and gays.”
Elsewhere in the interview, we learn that Vie draws inspiration from the slightly bland, anonymous office buildings that she remembers her parents working in. “I wanted to play with that nostalgia by using these lo-fi sounds and samples and things that reminded you of something from your childhood, but it wasn’t on the nose ‘80s,” she explains.
Doja Cat has also been stretching herself vocally: “Sometimes I’m surprised by what I can do now,” she admits, “because I could not fucking sing.”
“I have a lot more knowledge of how to use my voice as an instrument, more than I ever have in my life,” she adds.
In addition to these creative ambitions, Doja Cat says that she wants to avoid obsessing over streaming numbers and craving ‘success’ for its own sake - something she recently encouraged her fans to do when she told them in a now-deleted X post that “The amount of streams on a song isn't indicative of the quality or effort put into it.”
“I want to focus more on: how does the mix sound? Do I even need these instruments here? Do I need to recut this verse? It’s how things sound that makes the music worth listening to,” she says now. “I would not be an artist if I didn’t care, right?”
A release date for Vie has yet to be confirmed.
