Titled simply Perrie—a move that signals either radical honesty or a refusal to overthink—the album isn’t chasing reinvention so much as reintroduction. Across a tight set of stadium-sized choruses and serotonin-delivery systems, Edwards leans into a mode of pop that’s increasingly out of fashion: melodic maximalism, emotional legibility, vocals you can actually hear.  It lands somewhere between the post-millennial catharsis of Kelly Clarkson and the heart-on-sleeve shimmer of artists like MUNA—music built for both car stereos and that one scene in every coming-of-age film where someone finally runs toward something.

Perrie doesn’t mark a break with the past so much as a recalibration of its terms. After a decade enmeshed in the choreography of stardom, Edwards claims a space as a soloist that’s both familiar and stubbornly hers. The album’s an exercise in controlled release: anthemic choruses and confessional moments alike, calibrated for maximum emotional impact without conceding to the disposable demands of streaming-era pop. This is an artist wrestling with what it means to be “authentic” in a genre that packages identity as product.

Perrie caught up with RANGE to talk about shedding the burden of performative compliance, embracing creative agency, and why the hardest freedom is simply being unapologetically herself.

Perrie is your debut album as a solo artist, and it’s self-titled. How do you feel like this project shows people who you are in a way that Little Mix couldn’t?

I think it’s just really authentically me. The concepts, the lyrics, the sounds… even sonically, it’s so me. It’s the music that I love the most: that anthemic pop with big melodies and big vocals. I think it’s very autobiographical as well, which is why I wanted it to be self-titled. My stories and experiences were put into these songs, so it just made sense for it to be called Perrie, and I’m glad that I did now, because I think that it just works.

Speaking of anthemic pop, this album is very cathartic, almost like a release. Did it feel that way when making it?

Absolutely, I feel like when I was in the studio writing the music, stadium pop was very much in my head. I wanted the melodies and the choruses to have a payoff, almost like a reward that you get. If I wasn’t getting a serious serotonin hit through the chorus, I was like “That’s not it. We need to change the melody.”

I love when music makes you feel something, and it makes you feel that lift off of energy. I think that that’s what a lot of my choruses do, which I’m really proud of. I know that’s not necessarily like the trend at the moment or whatever… but I just love music that feels like it could live forever.

Did you have a hard time translating that feeling into the music? Or did it come naturally through the process?

Most of the sessions would start off as a conversation about a concept that I wanted to do, and then we’d come up with lyrics from the conversation itself, if that makes sense. There’s a song on there, “Sand Dancer,” that stemmed from me wanting to do a song about growing up and why I developed a love for singing. I think that most of the concepts just kind of stemmed from these conversations happening, and that felt good.