JADE Takes Centre Stage
On THAT’S SHOWBIZ BABY!, the pop debutante makes pandemonium her stagecraft.
By Cam Delisle
Photos by Conor Cunningham
- Published on
Her debut solo single, “Angel of My Dreams,” landed in July 2024 like a ripple in still water—grabbing the ears of both loyal Little Mix devotees and curious newcomers alike with its jagged, left-field experimentalism—a daring sound that the group was often boxed out from exploring. “Care if I cry, care if I die, you only care about money,” she talk-sings, the bass a seismic release fracturing beneath her words—a mirroring of stifled truths and the cold machinery behind the group’s glittering façade. The track teased a descent into noise-drenched confessionalism, but the album swerves instead—each song written in a different room of the same burning house.
“It’s obviously big, pop, maximalist, more-is-more energy, and a bit all over the place… but I am too,” she admits, not so much explaining the album’s whiplash as embodying it—a disco ball spinning just fast enough to splinter the light. “I wanted that element of surprise. I think, as a new artist, I liked the idea that people who maybe weren’t Little Mix fans or didn’t like my previous song could hear something else and be like, ‘Oh, I’m into this.’”
Though never outwardly labeled a concept album, the record’s restlessness—reflected in its playful visuals and constant shape-shifting—renders it undeniably conceptual, born from JADE’s instinctive command of pop’s theatrical DNA. “I grew up loving super conceptualized pop records, and I think for this first album particularly, coming out of a successful girl band and trying to make a mark on my own, the truth is simple… I was experimenting,” she says, attuned to the power in revealing her softer edges as well. “It was about striking that balance… even the sadder songs (“Unconditional,” “Natural at Disaster”) have that JADE-ified chaos to them, which I think has become my thing.”
THAT’S SHOWBIZ BABY! pulls its title from “IT girl,” the album’s second track—a voguing acid trip that channels Azalea Banks’ swagger while distilling JADE’s love-hate affair with the music business. “I had my heart set on a title from the minute I even thought about a solo project,” she starts, though hesitant about sharing it for now—leaving the door open to use it down the line. “And then I dropped ‘IT girl,’ and my fans loved the line ‘That’s Showbiz Baby.’ So I thought about it, and realized that all of my visuals, even the more vulnerable songs on the album, have that running thread of being in the industry.” It’s no revelation that time in the trenches of pop leaves marks you can’t scrub off, but JADE’s music carries those stains without ever succumbing to bitterness or cliché.
The title wasn’t the only element that JADE left in the hands of her listeners. “Sometimes, my fans’ ideas are better than mine,” she shrugs—half in jest, wholly sincere. It’s a sly nod to the hive-mind mechanics of modern pop, where some of the most radical A&R work happens not in boardrooms, but in group chats and Twitter threads. JADE, being the pop scholar that she is, knows better than to gatekeep the process. Why not hand the mic to the people who’ve been living and breathing the genre since they were twelve? “I think, now more than ever, you really have to listen to your fanbase. You can put all this money into marketing and pushing a song… but it’s the fans that will snowball it. It’s the fans that will buy tickets to the shows.”
JADE knows exactly what she’s doing. That’s the plot twist, the confetti cannon going off at the end of the ballad. She’s studied the blueprint, flipped it inside out, and bedazzled the seams with her own insecurities. The trick up THAT’S SHOWBIZ BABY!’s sleeve isn’t that it reinvents the wheel—it’s that it doesn’t have to. The melodrama, the elasticity, the mess, the knowingness of it all—it’s pop in its purest, most self-aware form. JADE gives her fans what they want, yes, but also what she wants, which might be an even bolder gesture. It’s not rebellion. It’s camp. It’s devotion. It’s an act of surrender to the genre she grew up worshipping—and an open dare to anyone who thinks they’ve seen the show before. Spoiler alert: you haven’t.
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