DnB artists are rarely known for their experimentation. They may lay down sick beats that get a whole crowd bopping their heads, but once they have achieved that, they so rarely escape their comfort zone. With her third album, Rebecca, EDM icon Becky Hill has proven that trope wrong with her most eclectic and deeply personal album yet.
Or at least, that is what you can gather from her stripped-back performance at the O2 Academy Bournemouth, part of an album launch tour debuting many of these brand-new tracks. In a sharp pivot from the customary DnB stage setup, she spends most of the set sitting on a chair onstage alongside four very talented musicians. “It’s great to play with actual musicians,” she says in one of her emotional dialogues to the crowd. “Rather than jumping around to computer synths and stuff”.
Rebecca is a demonstration of exactly what Becky is capable of, but as she tells the crowd, this U-turn meant overcoming lots of risks and challenges. She notes how none of the new singles reached the UK top forty charts, or got anywhere near as high on Spotify’s New Music Friday playlists as the songs on her previous two albums, but also the backlash to her TRNSMT Festival set during which she decided to play all new previously unheard material. She also says that though all these things are seen as very important for a label, nothing compares to playing the songs live in an environment like Bournemouth’s O2 Academy.
“I’ve often been told my songs wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if it wasn’t for my producers, or people like David Guetta and Chase & Status,” she says, yet this short but sweet album launch show proves her wrong. Though acoustic versions of old gems like Afterglow and Disconnect provoke the biggest crowd reactions, the tracks she debuted here demonstrate her finest songwriting to date. She cites the ‘pop girlie movement’ of the past few years – the ability for female artists to put honesty and messiness before commercialism in their work – as the key inspiration for the new record.
Which is a big risk, especially for somebody of Hill’s gargantuan reputation. She is one of the big players on the British dance scene, and not all of her die-hard fans will love this new record, but that’s okay. These songs come from the heart, and fifteen years after The Voice introduced her to the nation, she proves in just an hour-long set that she has what it takes to remain a fresh, phenomenal talent for a long time to come.
