Throughout her solo career, Jade Thirlwall has positioned herself as an awe-struck romantic, her songs capacious enough for both high camp and heartfelt examinations of selfhood and love. On long-awaited debut LP That’s Showbiz Baby!, the singer and Little Mix member tackles a flurry of personal contradictions: yearning and rupture, ambition and anxiety, broken promises and intimacy. She knows how to conjure a whole universe of emotion and lose herself in it.

The album’s 14 tracks traverse deep psychological wounds borne from Thirlwall (known mononymously as JADE)’s early days as a returning teenage X Factor contestant, through to the rewards and rigors of her time spent in one of the best-selling U.K. girl groups of all time, in service of pure pop melodrama. The resulting music is preci

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