In person, the singer mentions her mother - details about the Japanese countryside where she’s from; stories about the haunted London house she used to live in where neighbours blasted EDM at all hours of the night - often, sometimes in response to questions about the record but also casually, to whoever she’s chatting with. It feels like her mother is a central figure in her life both because of how she represents the Japanese culture that Rina loves, but also because of how much she sculpted her interests and life choices in opposition to what her mother told her to do. When asked who encouraged her most to become a singer, she says in a perverse way it was her mother, who didn’t want her to be a singer professionally. “She knows that I would never listen to her advice growing up,” she notes, “so if she said one thing I’d do another. I feel like it was like her little plan to say ‘don’t do music as a profession’.”

After her parents’ divorce, Rina was raised primarily by her mother, with whom she shared a room until she was 15. Her mother, an interior designer, would sleep at 10pm and wake up at 2am to work on the laptop the two of them shared, and Rina says she has many memories from this period of just seeing her back from her bunk bed. “She’s a big part of this record,” she continues. “I felt like we had a really tricky relationship. I think a lot of people with single parents can agree it’s like you’re like their best friend, their worst enemy, their sister, their mum, and their child all at once. My mum had a really hard time with her marriage to my dad. I would hear about it a lot, and then my dad would say another thing. The record is about how I just didn’t understand who was right and what the truth is. And it was kind of about creating my own narrative.”

Rina’s relationship with her family grounds one of ‘SAWAYAMA’’s central struggles: to find peace at the intersection of her Japanese and British identities. The album begins with ‘Dynasty’, in which she vows to break the chain of intergenerational trauma she observed in her parents, and ends with a piano interlude her mother used to play at home. In between, songs are peppered with abstract references to her parents’ sadness, vocal samples of conversations, and lyrics that explicitly detail frustrations with her mother’s overprotectiveness.

This is the singer’s first time getting personal in her lyrics. Her debut EP, 2017’s ‘RINA’, was a multifaceted exploration of the many emotions social media users experience when scrolling through a feed; the lack of physical intimacy, the opportunity to form community, the exhaustion of wading through the facades other people create and project. The songs were written in the first person, but were universal to the point of being anonymous. They could have been written by any 20-something with a smartphone. When she released the EP, she even explicitly detailed her distance herself: “I can’t write about myself, so I write about other people and then make it academic.”

Having studied psychology, sociology, and politics at Cambridge, Rina still approaches songwriting academically. She prepares lyrics and melodies before going into the studio, today citing books such as Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart, Crystal Rasmussen’s Diary of a Drag Queen, and Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed as source material. But, as she’s gained experience as a songwriter and touring musician, she’s become more confident in the appeal of her own story. “A lot of people start writing songs in the bedroom when they’re young but I literally didn’t have that privacy,” she explains. “I was in my 20s when I started writing full songs, and [it’s only] in the last 3 years I started writing personal [stories]. Touring gave me the confidence to write about myself. When you see your fans and the kind of people that they are, you’re kinda like, ‘Oh I don’t have to do something more generic. They totally understand my growth and all want me to succeed’.’

Her fans, named ‘Pixels’ after her Internet-centric first EP, equally get support from her music, too. She publicly came out as bisexual through 2018’s saccharine pop song ‘Cherry’, a process she says was nervewracking because of how much ingrained biphobia she still grapples with. She wasn’t sure if anyone would care if she came out, but has found that, in fact, many fans care about the song deeply. Debuting the track before it was officially released, even from that first performance she recalls feeling like her audience connected with it instantly; since then, she’s received countless messages from fans explaining that it helped them come out. “I performed at a corporate show and I felt like it didn’t go very well. But then someone came up to me and she was like, ‘Oh I’m so glad I got to see you because last year I came out as trans and my name is Cherry and I was listening to the song when I was coming out’,” she smiles.

Rina wrote ‘Chosen Family’, the album’s only ballad, as a homage to her community of queer friends. They regularly meet at a dim sum place she won’t name because “that will ruin it” where they know other people who work in music and fashion won’t find them, and she’s effusive when talking about how much support they provide each other. “It creates this different narrative to Hollywood portrayals of amazing coming out stories,” she says. “My friends and I don’t have that story at all. I still haven’t properly come out to my parents. I never had that sit down moment with them. That’s not always possible and having each other for support allows us to create our own queer stories.”