Rina Sawayama announces new album, shares new countrified pop single "This Hell"

Genre-bending pop singer Rina Sawayama set her sights on metal with her 2020 debut album SAWAYAMA. Now, she’s hitting the honky tonk with her new country pop single “This Hell,” which arrives ahead of her sophomore album Hold The Girl.

The song from the Japanese-Brit is laced with Shania Twain twang, and it’s nod to the singer’s track “Man! I Feel Like A Woman!” In “This Hell,” Sawayama sings about the condemnation of the LGBTQ+ community, saying if we’re all going to hell, it just may the place to be.

In a statement released with the song, Sawayama writes:

I had so much fun writing “This Hell.” The past couple of years I’ve been listening to lots of female country singers and wanted to write a euphoric and tongue-in-cheek country-pop song. Country music at its core to me represents comfort, brilliant storytelling and authentic expression of the writer’s reality. I’ve been dreaming of working with Paul Epworth my entire career so I knew it was meant to be when we finished this song in a day. I put in as many iconic pop culture moments as I can, but the song is more than that.

It’s an important song for me given the human rights that are being taken away from minorities at a rapid rate in the name of traditional religious beliefs, more specifically I was thinking about the rights being taken away from the LGBTQ community when I wrote this song. When the world tells us we don’t deserve love and protection, we have no choice but to give love and protection to each other. This Hell is better with you.

Sawayama will perform the song tonight as she appears on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “This Hell” is the singer-songwriter’s first solo offering since 2020's “LUCID.” Since then, she’s recorded a cover of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” and appeared as a featured artist on the Charli XCX single “Beg For You” as well as Pabllo Vittar’s “Follow Me.”

Hold The Girl is set for release through Dirty Hit on September 2.