Rebecca Black on finding ‘Salvation’ after surviving ‘Friday’: ‘I’ve never felt more like myself’

It’s June 2024 in a swampy Brockwell Park at London’s avowedly queer music festival Mighty Hoopla, and Rebecca Black has just arrived on stage. She’s in a denim corset, tiny purple miniskirt, Brat-style sunglasses, and brandishing a silver diamante chainsaw. It’s 4pm. 

Despite the festival’s line-up spanning pop behemoths Nelly Furtado, Jessie Ware, and Rita Ora, Black kept up, and left an impression. Not bad for a woman whose name was once synonymous with viral infamy, but we’ll get to that. If it felt like a breakthrough moment, that’s because it was.

“I think there’s just been a very cathartic release of a lot of fear in my life, and really holding on to this idea of having nothing to lose that has really energised me,” Black says, calling from her home city of LA. “It feels really right, and I’ve never felt more like myself.”

It was at Mighty Hoopla where the popstar reborn was originally meant to debut “TRUST!”, her fizzing 2024 single which opens with hazy electric guitar thrums, before exploding into a balls-to-the-wall BDSM banger with the sound of a whip crack. Yet, beset by “classic industry delays,” the release was pushed back to October. Now, after another month-long delay owing this time to the recent LA wildfires, Black is dropping Salvation, a seven-track “project” which careers between sugary Y2K hyperpop (“Sugar Water Cyanide”), broody, industrial-strength EDM (“Do You Even Think About Me?”) and spooky horror-pop (“Twist The Knife”).

On the title track, the project’s strongest out-and-out pop number, Black belts: “I don’t need you to save me, I already saved myself”. Yet her journey to salvation has been hard won, after years spent, in her words, “learning who she is kind of backwards”.

The bite-sized Rebecca Black origin story is this: in 2010, aged just 13, she was introduced to the now-defunct production company ARK Music Factory, after expressing an interest in making music. For $4000, the company wrote and produced the song “Friday”, which was released in February 2011 to very little fanfare (it received approximately 1000 views in its first month). Shortly after, it blew up to astronomical levels. In weeks, the music video received 30 million views, becoming at the time YouTube’s most disliked video, and Black herself garnered an inexorable level of press and online attention. In that nascent age of social media virality, the response to “Friday” – dubbed by one publication as “the worst song ever” – was unprecedented.

As she’s grown through her teens and into her twenties, the now 27-year-old has had to untangle herself from the caricature the world painted her to be. Her relationship with the song has ebbed and flowed; in 2020, on its ninth anniversary, she reflected on being “terribly ashamed of herself and afraid of the world” following the fusillade of abuse she received.

Just a year later, on the 10th anniversary, she shattered the song’s legacy by dropping a brain-melting, pitched to high-heaven hyperpop remix featuring Big Freedia, 3OH!3, and her friend and “guiding light”, Dorian Electra. This month, she marked the song’s anniversary with the air of someone who has finally broken free of its shackles, pointing out that the song itself is older now than she was when she released it. “Old hag!” she wrote on X.

“I do really feel like the version of myself I am today is the closest to the version of myself I was when I was that age,” Black reflects now of her ascent since the “Friday” era. “In the sense that, maybe we’ve gotten a few more miles in our tool belt together and I’ve had a little bit more runs around the playground and know how this s**t works. But I think in the ways that I approach what I make, how I make it, what inspires me – I am playing so much more than I ever was post “Friday”.”

It’s true: in the wake of her derided debut, she dropped a string of soggy ballads, a few Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry covers, and her first attempt at reclaiming her narrative, 2013’s “Saturday”. Yet her 2021 EP Rebecca Black Was Here and ensuing debut album – 2023’s half sparky, half sultry Let Her Burn – indicated that Black was an artist with a seriously well-tuned pop inclination, and the nerve to experiment.

“I have so much further to go and I have so much to learn, and there’s definitely a lot of still untapped fear I have, but I think I’ve come as close to as I ever have been to that girl who was just so willing to put herself out there and try and learn and create,” Black says, her doe-eyes lined by her now-signature black bangs, “and that feels really good.”

Not that you’d know it watching the “TRUST” music video – which features that bedazzled chainsaw and a choreographed court room scene that Britney wouldn’t sniff at – but Salvation was born of Black’s lack of self-confidence. “I have struggled greatly over the years to have the confidence to be exactly the version of myself I know exists in my head,” she confides.

She channelled the energy of people she knows in LA who live unflinchingly with “delusions of grandeur”. “I’ve always looked at those people, without wanting to directly emulate them, just being so envious of that freedom that they have to just take up space.

“This album was me challenging myself. How much space can I take up as someone who is inherently a people pleaser?”

Among tracks about the steamy highs and dangerous lows of relationships – Black came out as queer in 2020 – a standout is the multifarious “American Doll”, a biting takedown of expectations put on women, particularly women in the music industry. “Did you like me better then? Do you wanna hate me now? Playing pretty and pretend,” she coos on the pre-chorus. Today, she’s surrounded by a team who have her best interests at heart, but the industry has swallowed her up before. “The experience that I have now and the freedom I have now feels like something I would’ve only hoped was the truth about the industry when I was a kid,” she says. But “that was not a truth that I experienced for the larger half of the beginning of my career”.

Her candour is pleasantly disarming. We touch on a label her fans have bestowed upon her since that 2021 “Friday” remix dropped: that she’s “underrated”. She describes it as a double-edge sword. On the one hand, it’s the “coolest label anyone could ever give you… because you would so much rather be underrated than overrated”, but “from a logistical industry perspective”, it’s tough. Today, she’s frustrated by big boss industry “gatekeepers” who corner artists with the pressure of success, but refuse to put their hands in their pockets to facilitate the work.

“The amount of risk that the people who have money in this industry are willing to take is so little these days,” she sighs. In order to get the sorts of flashy visual treatments that “TRUST” and new single “Salvation” have, Black has had to invest her own money, which she does “because I love to do it, and because I know it works well. Who would’ve thought!” She pulls her face into a sardonic grimace and throws her hands into a shrug. “The art you can create with a budget!”

We’re talking two days after the Grammys, where Lady Gaga premiered her typically showstopping “Abracadabra” music video – one that will undoubtedly be remembered as a year-best. “It is definitely frustrating as an artist for labels or anyone to go, ‘OK, so do that, but with $0.’ It’s like, the pressure that creates is sometimes nauseating, I think. That’s where the underrated thing becomes… less fun.” She laughs. “I’ll do it anyway!”

Besides “Abracadabra”, this year’s Grammys offered another delightful spectacle: the sight of women who have been wronged or dismissed by their labels, flourishing after executing the vision they had for themselves. Artists like RAYE, Charli XCX, and Chappell Roan – the latter of whom called out labels for failing to provide artists with a “liveable wage”. “It’s almost like they’re in the room with their fans more than anybody else in the world,” Black quips.

Though she may not have found the awards-sweeping success her fans would want, Rebecca Black has undoubtedly found her space to thrive, at festivals like Mighty Hoopla, or at her upcoming slot on Trixie Mattel’s tour (“My girl!”), or on her own tour, which kicks off in March. For years before she came out publicly, she had time to reckon with what it means to be an out queer artist, and the atmosphere she wants to create when she engages with her fans, on or off stage.

“Genuinely, some of the most emotional and meaningful things that people have said to me that have stuck with me over the years is, ‘I felt like when I was at your show, I was in the most idyllic place of what humanity could be’.” She says that she wants to take the responsibility as an artist with an audience of largely young, queer people seriously, particularly in the wake of anti-LGBTQ+ hostility. “That’s all you could hope for because yes, making meaningful art is worthwhile and a beautiful practice, but being able to create safety for people, especially when my journey of my life has been about creating safety for myself, is the greatest gift.”

On Donald Trump, as a queer woman of Mexican heritage, she understands more than most that right now is an “odd time,” and puts it down to Republicans being “scared of… communities at large that have been purposefully repressed, finally finding their power.”

Now, she’s found her power – her salvation, if you will – even if she had to fake until she made it. In the face of Trump’s messy second term, she wants to pass a little of that energy, that ability to take up space, to her fans. “If I can do one little [thing] to get those b**ches up?” she laughs. “Let’s go!”

Salvation is out now.

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