Music Music Reviews Better Mistakes review: Bebe Rexha plays the angst-pop field By Leah Greenblatt Leah Greenblatt Leah Greenblatt is the former critic at large for movies, books, music, and theater at Entertainment Weekly. She left EW in 2023. EW's editorial guidelines Published on May 7, 2021 04:03PM EDT Photo: Jack Gorlin For nearly a decade Bebe Rexha has circled fame, a shiny satellite caught somewhere in the vapor layer between featured guest and name-brand celebrity. Strictly by the numbers, she's a superstar: Some 12 billion streams testify to a career heavy on far-flung collaborations (Florida Georgia Line, Nicki Minaj) and a kind of happy style-hopping opportunism. Her sophomore full-length Better Mistakes swings accordingly, opening on the woozy Warped Tour stomp of "Break My Heart Myself" with Blink-182's Travis Barker before seguing into the airy, angsty ballads "Sabotage" and "Trust Fall." The syncopated title track works down a YOLO laundry list of questionable choices ("I should dye my hair/I should f--- my ex/I should lose my phone") while "Baby I'm Jealous" roller-discos in on a squiggly rubber-band bass line and tart Doja Cat guest rap. The low-slung Lil Uzi Vert duet "Never Die For a Man" and loping "On the Go," assisted by Pink Sweats and Lunay, swear by a single-lady independence that the midtempo despair of "Death Row" and spiraling "Empty" almost immediately throw by the wayside. If there's a through-line on Mistakes, it's a sort of dear-diary fatalism invariably sweetened by pop sheen; crippling anxiety and self-sabotage, but make it slappy. (The singer has essentially said as much in recent interviews.) With her baby-woman rasp and hiccuping hooks, Rexha often sounds, to borrow the references of another era, like a Britney wrapped in the rebel-yell poses of an Avril or Pink. For all Better's stark confessionals, It's that mutability maybe that makes her still somehow unknowable — even as the hits keep coming. Grade: B