Genuinely finding some of this “Little Managers” style chat bizarre.
The woman is *everywhere* in a way that frankly I can’t recall for a pop group girl going solo. She has, clearly through her own charisma and talent, earned the love of some of the most important tastemakers out there (and yeah that’s potentially “the gay mafia” but hey).
The resource, planning, passion (and pain) that’s gone into this is surely about setting her up for the long haul. They’re not waiting to see how a single does before deciding if she needs to record a couple of new bops & get some features. It’s an intricate campaign already filled with spoilers and easter eggs that suggest a whole world has been assiduously mapped out, due to the buy-in of a lot of people who want her to succeed as a grown-up proposition. The investment seems accordingly appropriate: it’s all high-quality, artistically-driven content but it’s not at the multi-million pop sheen expenditure level; presumably in line with the kind of £££ they hope to get back.
Fantasy, and it’s Jools Holland-linked launch, feels like it’s about giving middle-aged gays and their community a slinky number that’s sat there waiting on her Spotify for the holiday drinks party season. It’s about ensuring the most affluent end of the pop consuming market see her as an intelligent offering, and indeed someone they might even shell out money to see live (where the real £££ is now for an artist!) without fearing it’d be a gig full of 12 year old Ella’s like a Little Mix show. They absolutely want people who’ll buy deluxe vinyl with high-fashion photography too.
Seen through that lens, Fantasy’s “underperformance” feels more like an intentional move to filter down to a mature audience for whom her Little Mix background isn’t necessarily a positive.
And I assume that’s coming from Jade herself: she clearly wants to get out and do shows to crowds she can chat to about Motown and butt-plugs; not young people who’ve learned the choreo and whose parents will flood MumsNet with “WHAT WAS THIS FILTH!!!” once they’ve got home.
Basically: this album’s happening, the more important question for anyone currently in panic mode might actually whether it’s gonna be the album for you?
A *second* solo album might be the thing to worry about. It doesn’t seem like the label expectation is ridiculously outsized like Roisin’s “Overpowered” though (which is actually a decent comparator, although with the proviso that Moloko wasn’t a complex heritage for Roisin, the way that Little Mix potentially has to be handled carefully for Jade); and she feels absolutely on track for current Roisin & Jessie levels of success. Fantasy performance included!