Within the anger, there’s plenty of room for humor and irreverence. Friends lost to addiction wander through her mind, and the pressure of being a “ real model” weighs her down. They excoriate the much-older actor with whom they became involved at 17 (“Numbers told you not to/But that didn’t stop you”) and tear into the rigid standards of beauty and behavior to which women and femmes are held (especially oppressive for someone, like Lovato, whose gender identity is fluid). Frankly, there’s a lot for her to be mad about. It’s genuinely exciting to see Lovato enter chaos mode on Holy Fvck, opting to break shit rather than publicly mend herself.
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. As early as 2008, Lovato confessed her fascination with metal to Rolling Stone during press for Holy Fvck, she recalled crowd-surfing at a performance by the Norwegian black metal band Dimmu Borgir as a young teenager.
It’s true that her musical interests have long been edgier than her public persona might suggest. 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. 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 Rodrigo, and Willow. But this is no half-hearted rebrand: On Dancing with the Devil, Lovato sang about rebirth, and on Holy Fvck, she enacts it by jettisoning the pop-R&B palette that has defined her records for a decade. Rather than tapping current pop-punk kingpin Travis Barker, Lovato stuck with returning producer Warren “Oak” Felder, whose work for Alessia Cara and Lizzo is noticeably light on headbangers.
WASTED ON YOU CHORDS PLUS
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. Opener “Freak” sets the tone with sludgy metal guitars and fits of guttural screaming, plus an appearance by YUNGBLUD-like Lovato, a Disney Channel alum with an alternative streak-whose gritty voice roughs up the track like sandpaper. Holy Fvck fulfills its promise of sweaty, angsty excess with a tour through pop-punk and adjacent genres. Go to hell enough times and eventually you come back hardened. But rather than don the white dress, this time Lovato suits up in latex and leather, grabs a spiky guitar, and borrows from Hole.
WASTED ON YOU CHORDS SKIN
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. Sometime after releasing last year’s Dancing With the Devil…The Art of Starting Over, an ultra-exposed document of self-reinvention after self-immolation, Lovato quietly went through another round of treatment. “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. If you didn’t already know that Demi went back to rehab, she’ll be the first to tell you.
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