Bebe Rexha Maps the Personal Geography of a Playlist Ahead of Dirty Blonde

A playlist is rarely just a list. For Bebe Rexha, whose album Dirty Blonde arrives June 12, it’s a map of thresholds. The songs that pulled her forward, the ones she had to leave behind, and the inherited rules she eventually broke.

The terrain starts early. She pinpoints Ariel’s Part of Your World from The Little Mermaid, watched repeatedly on VHS around age five or six. The wanting in that song, the ache for a different life, landed even then. It’s a clean, unsentimental admission from a writer who understands that pop’s reach often begins in childhood.

That reach took physical form at a Times Square record store, where an aunt bought her Christina Aguilera’s What a Girl Wants on cassette. The first CD purchased with her own money was Lady Gaga’s Just Dance. These aren’t nostalgic trinkets in the telling. They mark the shift from receiving music to choosing it.

A more complex transaction anchors the new record. Rexha calls herself skeptical of sample-based songs, but Insomnia by Faithless had a pull she couldn’t ignore. Clearing it for her track New Religion proved surreal. At brunch with Sister Bliss, she asked for the files. The reply was disarmingly direct: the recordings exist on tape. That analog warmth, irreproducible, made it onto a 2025 pop album. It’s a small, precise story about the texture of sound and the strange collisions pop enables.

Loss enters the geography too. Trampoline by Shaed is now unlistenable, bound to a former relationship. She still loves the song, but the route back is closed. Meanwhile, Adele’s Easy on Me opens something raw in the present tense. The playlist acknowledges that songs accumulate personal debris and sometimes become inaccessible.

There’s also a quiet correction of taste. Growing up, the household rule was clear: you didn’t play Bon Jovi. That was parent music. She now calls that stance nonsense. Livin’ on a Prayer, played at full volume, has become the answer she’d once hide. The karaoke picks, At Last by Etta James or No Scrubs by TLC, work because they pull a room together. And then there’s New Religion, which she nominates as her own best party track with a shrug that knows exactly what it’s doing.

Dirty Blonde is out June 12.