When Doja Cat decides to go Eighties, she doesn’t mess around. On Vie, Doja devotes an entire album to the pop and R&B sounds of the Hair Decade, an album full of pastels and neon and mega-cheese sax solos. She’s always had a thing for Eighties synth-pop, as in hits like “Kiss Me More” and “Say So.” But this time she goes all the way. The album opens in “Cards” with a sample from the Knight Rider theme, and closes in “Come Back” with a sample from the soundtrack of the Brian DePalma/Melanie Griffith erotic thriller Body Double. You can’t accuse Doja of not doing her Eighties homework.
On her last album, 2023’s Scarlet, she went for hip-hop aggression, out to prove herself as a confrontational street-smart rapper. But on Vie, she’s all about Eighties synth-pop — a lot of Prince, a lot of Janet Jackson, a lot of Klymaxx and Nu Shooz and Naked Eyes and Billy Ocean, plus basically every hit that Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis ever produced. You can practically hear the shoulder pads. She spends these songs in a romantic shake-you-down mood, boasting, “I smell like ice cream and pheromones.”
Vie might be an erratic listen, but that’s why it sounds like Doja Cat. She seems to take pride in building one of the most entertainingly maddening careers around — such high highs, such low lows. This year she’s dropped the excellent summer single “Jealous Type,” produced by Jack Antonoff and Y2K, but also showed up at the Oscars for the bizarre James Bond tribute, belting “Diamonds Are Forever” and nailing about .007 percent of the notes. She makes routine disasters part of her charm. She’s a fun pop star in a very old-school way — she doesn’t take herself too seriously, and is more than willing to fall on her face from time to time.
She brings back SZA, her most famous duet partner, for “Take Me Dancing,” which goes right for the faux-Prince funk throb of Ready 4 The World. (It’s a real achievement to sound like Ready 4 the World but NOT sound like Prince.) SZA is the only guest artist on the album, which is a surprise, considering it couldn’t be too hard to get some of her favorite Eighties one-hit wonders on the phone. It’s no “Kiss Me More,” but it’s frothy pleasure, with SZA on hand to boast “I’m beyond the drugs you need.” Doja coos the chorus, “You’re so raw, boy, you’re so romantic/You fuck me right and you take me dancing.”
“Come Back” and “Stranger” are standout Prince-style jams, dance-floor bangers with funk bass and sax solos that go off the deep end, somewhere in between early Quarterflash and Christopher Cross. She also pulls off slow jams like “Acts of Service,” where Doja reveals, “I just deleted Raya, that must mean that I’m your provider.” In the falsetto ballad “All Mine,” she drops another strictly-for-the-hardcore Eighties reference when she says “Grab him and take him” — a quote from Grace Jones, when she played a Bond villain in A View to a Kill.
Jack Antonoff is executive producer here, doing nine of the tracks, and this concept is right in his sweet spot, given that he’s a hardcore Eighties geek — as any Swiftie can tell you, he and Taylor knew they were destined to work together the first time they bonded over the snare drum sound in Fine Young Cannibals’ “She Drives Me Crazy.” Also, given that Doja dropped Vie a week away from The Life of a Showgirl, you have to give it up for her extremely Swiftian song titles: “Gorgeous,” “Stranger,” “Lipstain” (great title, that), “All Mine,” Take Me Dancing.” That’s half the lyrics of “New Romantics” right there.
So the production is impeccable, getting the period details right and exact, down to the last slap-bass throb, while also sounding fresh and up to date. The weak spot on Vie is the songwriting, since few of these tunes have a dynamic hook that you can imagine crowding the competition for a Top 40 rotation slot between Madonna and Gregory Abbott. Most of the songs work the same formula — featherweight pop tunes with brief rap interludes — so they tend to blend together even when they’re quality filler.
“Aaahh Men!” is an uptempo highlight, with Doja lamenting that she can’t live with ‘em but can’t live without ‘em, asking herself “Am I gay or am I just angry” while saying, “I feel shame because you’re such a pain / But my DNA wants your D in me.” Yet she holds out hope with her ideal of romantic bliss, promising, “You act right, you’ll get a movie, limo/Two chains, dinner, and a smooch down below/And all new fans yelling ‘You my hero!’” She’s playing remarkably nice with the boys here, as in “Make It Up,” where she reveals, “Did you hear about it? I’m a submissive top.” “Silly! Fun!” lives up to the title, with the Eighties synths and vocal chants straight from the Saturday-morning cartoons. “Lipstain” is her sultry ode to leaving hickeys on a man as a way of claiming her turf. As she says, “Every girl’s a queen but I’m the boss/We gotta mark our territory for them dogs, girl.” She often sings in French all over the album, as if paying her respects to Prince’s Euro-gigolo performance in Under the Cherry Moon.
Doja couldn’t sound further from the rap bluster she displayed on Scarlet. On Vie, she veers closer to the high-gloss pop of her breakthrough albums Planet Her and Hot Pink — yes, the albums she later repudiated as “mediocre pop” done as a “cash grab.” (Nobody renounces her own hit albums faster.) But it’s the sound of Doja Cat at her most playful and unpredictable.
