‘Age of the Exhibitionist’ review: Rebecca Black has found her sound

Rebecca Black’s Age of the Exhibitionist is a sweaty, self-aware electropop spectacle about fame, desire, and what it means to be constantly watched.

Most of Rebecca Black’s adolescence was her trying to outrun a song that millions of people knew better than they frankly knew her. “Friday” turned a 13-year-old into an internet punchline in 2011, back when viral fame still felt novel enough that nobody had established much etiquette for surviving it. Black eventually did something stranger than disappearing into the wind, though. She stuck around. Her hyperpop-adjacent 2021 EP Rebecca Black Was Here, 2023 debut album Let Her Burn, and last year’s SALVATION steadily recast her as a serious pop musician. Though her growing command of the form came with an obvious question. Black had developed excellent taste in sounds. When would those sounds become unmistakably hers?

Age of the Exhibitionist, her second full-length album, answers by turning the circumstances of her fame into an aesthetic. Black fills these 12 songs with cameras, mirrors, stages, windows, clubs, costumes, spectators, and bodies begging to be looked at. “I need you to see/Every part of me,” she sings on “Exhibitionism,” which could double as the album’s mission statement. Black spent half her life under unwanted observation and scrutiny. Now she wants to understand why she still craves an audience at all. Her answer is to make some of the year’s most gloriously excessive dance-pop since Madonna’s Confessions II. It’s music that demands attention while wondering what happens to a person who gets too much of it.

Where the girls go.

Black establishes the album’s “big idea” immediately on “Anaheim Star,” an autobiographical rush about a suburban teenager desperate for whatever waits beyond Orange County. “Locking my bedroom door so I can fantasize,” she remembers before the chorus resumes its relentless command. “I wanna go where the girls go/Go, go, go, go.” The repetition is ambition by way of percussion.

Black keeps moving because movement itself promises transformation. From high school to Hollywood and from bedroom fantasies to queer nightlife. By the end, however, forward momentum has mutated into compulsion. “Demoralize me and change my name/How far I’ll go once you gave me a taste.”

That conflict between liberation and appetite powers Age of the Exhibitionist. Black draws from electroclash, bloghouse, hyperpop, progressive house, and the sleazier corners of Y2K radio pop. She piles distorted bass and chopped vocals atop melodies that sometimes seem one kick drum away from disintegration. “Hot Wet Delirious” channels forbidden attraction into a gleaming, physical groove with Black matching “this beat to the swing of your kiss.” “Miss Delicious” goes further into cartoonish excess, reducing its protagonist to hair, clothes, breasts, and the “beat that I’m banging.” Its incessant repetition makes the joke work: Miss Delicious essentially is the beat, a pop persona with every private thought squeezed out in favor of something louder, hotter, and easier to consume.

Everybody wants a show.

“Exhibitionism” exposes what all that performance costs. Black imagines a red velvet rope taped to her back and windows thrown open for curious neighbors before submitting the album’s most vulnerable tension: “My image is vivid, I’m losing me in it/I am the camera when I’m alone.” Exhibitionism has moved beyond strangers watching her. Black has internalized their gaze so completely that she can perform Rebecca Black without anybody else in the room.

Her production makes the anxiety somewhat tangible. Black rarely leaves her voice alone for long. It’s processed, multiplied, chopped, pitched, and folded into arrangements engineered to overwhelm the senses. The synthetic sheen is yet another costume, particularly on “Corsetry,” where beauty itself constricts her. “I would take a deep breath,” she sings, “but my lungs are tied down.” The beat presses forward while Black orders herself into position: pull her back in, turn the lights down, keep her bound. “This stunning face won’t show it,” she promises while the production maintains its immaculate composure.

“Pain will make the idol,” Black eventually declares, crystallizing an album fascinated by the conversion of private discomfort into public entertainment. It’s a transaction she knows well. After all, her career began with millions of strangers consuming her humiliation. On the delirious “Waschesalon,” she flips that history into a boast: “Just made a million off my so-called mediocrity.” Crunching bass and abrasive synths make the reclamation feel appropriately obnoxious. If people insist on watching Rebecca Black be Rebecca Black, she’s learned how to even more fully control the show.

Someone finally gets backstage.

For all its voyeurism, Age of the Exhibitionist keeps reaching toward something darkly intimate. “Pistol” casts Black’s lover as a dangerous object of devotion, spinning her “like a disco” while she willingly hands over control. The playful “Backstage Baby Interlude” then brings that person into Black’s professional fantasy. “Have you ever held a pop star close like this?” Even romance initially requires a branding exercise. Black struggles to imagine someone holding her without also imagining them holding a pop star. How sad is that?

That said, it does make the comparatively straightforward “Michael.” surprisingly affecting. Black propositions a woman who already has a boyfriend through the hilariously simple question, “What if Michael could be me?” Her spoken come-on briefly punctures the album’s studied cool, leaving Black to sound awkward, overeager, and human.

“Metamorphia” imagines that freedom on a much larger scale. Black welcomes listeners into a club where “no one’s recording ya.” It’s a small detail that carries enormous weight on an album obsessed with documentation. Inside, everybody can become someone else for the night. The track responds with sensory overload—stuttering vocals, pounding electronics, commands to surrender to the moment—as if anonymity has opened a pressure valve. Yet Black still presides over the fantasy as its ringmaster. Even her escape from spectacle becomes another spectacular Rebecca Black production.

Putting her heart on speakerphone.

The aforementioned contradiction reaches its funniest and bleakest expression on “Speakerphone.” “Videotape me, I don’t care,” Black announces before offering herself behind glass: “I wanna be perceived, break off a piece of me.” The speakerphone itself makes a perfect metaphor for her relationship with vulnerability. An intimate voice blasted outward until everybody can hear it.

The arrangement obliges. “I’m putting my heart on speakerphone/Beats louder than loud and then explodes,” Black sings as the music uses emotional disclosure to blow the whole damn room apart. Throughout Age of the Exhibitionist, Black experiences every inch of herself through sound. Bodies keep rhythms, lovers become records, kisses sync to beats, and bass vibrates through flesh. Pop music gives her a language for self-discovery. It also provides another layer between the person and whoever wants to know her.

Still, Black often leans a bit too heavily on the machinery. Her fondness for slogans and repeated phrases can leave songs like “Miss Delicious” dependent on production for their personality. While the constant vocal processing occasionally obscures the expressive singer lurking underneath. Yet those excesses also belong to the album’s thematic argument, for what that’s worth. Age of the Exhibitionist sounds crowded because Black has made a record about living inside an identity crowded by spectators, expectations, fantasies, and previous versions of herself.

Anaheim looks different from here.

Closer “Visions Again” finally returns Black to where she started. “Anaheim came and left with better days,” she sings, remembering when Los Angeles felt impossibly distant. The teenager from “Anaheim Star” wanted only to go, and its chorus hammered that desire into something of a mantra. Here, Black considers the consequences. “Years only come as fast as you go/Blink and you’ll miss it, memories go cold.”

The album’s entire vocabulary of repetition changes with her. Earlier, “go, go, go” sounded exhilarating. “Beat, beat” sounded horny. “Exhibition, exhibition” sounded defiant. Now Black loops “I get ’em again” and “question your point of view” until her certainty starts breaking apart. In that the same compulsive instinct that once pushed Black toward the life she wanted now traps her in questions about whether she ever wanted the right things.

“You wanted the world, you gave it everything,” she tells her younger self. She got remarkably close. The career, the audience, the artistic rehabilitation. The freedom to make something as gleefully strange as Age of the Exhibitionist in the first place. Then comes the question that gives all this glorious noise its melancholy center.

“What if I was satisfied instead?”

Black never answers this question. Maybe she understands enough about exhibitionism to know that satisfaction would ruin the whole show. Might as well save it for the third album. For now, she’s content to let this album be about the exhausting consequences of needing everyone’s attention. And how she can succeed because she’s exceptionally good at getting everyone’s attention. Go figure.

So after years of proving that Rebecca Black could make good pop music all along, Age of the Exhibitionist finally presents the more interesting proposition. Nobody else could make any album quite like this one.

“Age of the Exhibitionist” is available now.

---

Images courtesy of Rebecca Black.