If there is any justice in the world, Rina Sawayama, the prodigious British-Japanese pop singer, is well on her way to being a top-billed, household-name pop star. And Sawayama's set atSaturday was her putting in the work to get to that point, an athletic, all-encompassing hourlong performance that sated her stans, named the Pixels and welcomed newcomers to her multitude of charms.
"I got three questions for you," she told the crowd with a winking grin several songs in."Are you ready to dance? Are you ready to slay? And are you ready to scream?" This was a threat and a promise. Sawayama's set started with brutish, hard-rock riffs and ended with a Lady Gaga dance party . And the hour between melded the two dissonant styles with ease, an act of alchemy that hits even harder on a live stage than on-record. Her voice can shift on a dime from Y2K-era pop girl coos and Evanescence's operatic frontwoman Amy Lee, and often fits somewhere along the middle.
But that's not what draws her most devout of fans in; it’s her songwriting. The songs she writes are heady, emotionally and intellectually intense things put through the pop factory. Her most popular song is a lampoon of"Material Girl" capitalism; the topic of intergenerational trauma and inherited mental illness recurs often in her music and shows.
All this is to say: Whether her new material, which spins country pop, or the big hits of her breakthrough album “Sawayama," her gaggle of fans were adoring, worshipping her every move. They were rewarded handsomely, too: She performed the U.K. garage-meets-power ballad"Hold the Girl,” a resonant number about healing your inner child, for the first time at Outside Lands; she also debuted a new, yet-to-be released song titled"Hurricanes.
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