Demi will be the first to let you know if you didn’t already know that she returned to rehab. The first line of “Skin of My Teeth,” the first single from her ninth album, Holy Fvck, begins, “Demi leaves rehab again,” and is delivered with biting sarcasm that makes it seem as though she’s attempting to grab the words away from critics and gossips.
Holy Fvck’s trip through pop-punk and related genres deliver on its promise of hot, angry excess. The album’s first track, “Freak,” establishes the mood with sludgy metal guitars, bouts of guttural screaming, and a cameo by YUNGBLUD, a Disney Channel veteran with an alternative streak who, like Lovato, gives the song a gritty voice that makes it seem like sandpaper.
However, there is something sweeter between the Holy and the Fvck of it all. Lovato tries to capture the heady sensation of falling in love with a new crush in the song “Wasted,” which serves as an extended metaphor. Although the love-as-drug cliché is undoubtedly laden for them, choosing to frame love in terms of their disastrous past vices reads as a sign of acceptance of oneself—a knowledge that who we formerly were is only a background for who we are now.
In addition to being her pop-punk album, Lovato positioned this one as a homecoming and a return to her origins, as she put it on Instagram.
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Check out the full album below.