Demi Lovato could have drawn from her own comeback playbook. The singer, whose battles with addiction and mental illness have been widely documented and dissected since they first sought treatment in 2010, has historically returned from rehab with a solemn message about their struggle. In 2011, it was with “Skyscraper,” a raw power ballad about rebuilding a collapsed life. In 2020, following a near-fatal overdose, it was with “Anyone,” a plea for compassion debutedthrough tears, at the Grammys. Both on that stage and in the video for “Skyscraper,” Lovato performed in a chaste white dress, signaling contrition and rebirth.
If you didn’t already know that Demi went back to rehab, she’ll be the first to tell you. “Demi leaves rehab again” is the opening line—delivered with a sardonic bite, like she’s trying to snatch the words away from haters and gossips—of “Skin of My Teeth,” the lead single from her eighth album, Holy Fvck. Sometime after releasing last year’s Dancing With the Devil…The Art of Starting Overan ultra-exposed document of self-reinvention after self-immolation, Lovato quietly went through another round of treatment. Seemingly, question marks still hover around the matter of their own survival, a central preoccupation of their music: “I’m alive by the skin of my teeth,” goes the refrain. But rather than don the white dress, this time Lovato suits up in latex and leather, grabs a spiky guitar, and borrows from Hole. Go to hell enough times and eventually you come back hardened.
Holy Fvck fulfills its promise of sweaty, angsty excess with a tour through pop-punk and adjacent genres. Opener “Freak” sets the tone with sludgy metal guitars and fits of guttural screaming, plus an appearance by YOUNG BLOOD—like Lovato, a Disney Channel alum with an alternative streak—whose gritty voice roughs up the track like sandpaper. Across the album, Lovato’s idea of transgression is working abrasive sounds into songs about pleasure and pleasurable hooks into songs about pain and death, plus some punctuating “fuck!”s, just because. Rather than tapping current pop-punk kingpin Travis BarkerLovato stuck with returning producer Warren “Oak” Felder, whose work for Alessia Cara and Lizzo is noticeably light on headbangers. But this is no half-hearted rebrand: On Dancing with the DevilLovato sang about rebirth, and on Holy Fvckshe enacts it by jettisoning the pop-R&B palette that has defined her records for a decade.
The sounds Lovato is gravitating to—hurtling, cymbal-heavy drums, rumbling electric guitars, bridge breakdowns—have regained their currency in recent years, as pop-punk has acquired new mainstream acolytes in Machine Gun Kelly, Olivia Rodrigoand Willow. Lovato positioned this album not just as her pop-punk album but as her homecoming—a return “to my roots,” as she wrote on Instagram. It’s true that her musical interests have long been edgier than her public persona might suggest. As early as 2008, Lovato confessed her fascination with metal to Rolling Stone; during press for Holy Fvckshe recalled crowd-surfing at a performance by the Norwegian black metal band Dimmu Borgir as a young teenager. The music she herself made around that time, with its lightly thrashing guitars and love-it-or-leave-it spunk, was about as raucous as she could get away with in the conservative Disney ecosystem.