Little Mix’s Jade steps out on her own with That’s Showbiz Baby. Fierce, inventive and unafraid of risk, it marks her as one of 2025’s most exciting voices in pop.
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If there’s one thing that the UK leads the world in, it’s producing stellar girl groups. In a lineage of the Spice Girls, Girls Aloud and the Sugababes, few groups have the longevity that Little Mix had. With this preordained legacy, the question has loomed – where do you go when the group breaks up? In the past, girl group members have often struggled towing the line between honouring their sonic roots and defining their own niche as a soloist. Sometimes this produces success stories like Cheryl or Beyoncé, but can just as easily go down in flames a la Jesy Nelson’s attempt to go solo. Jade, formerly of Little Mix, has made a bold choice to take the line towed and pave over it with a project, That’s Showbiz Baby, that is as commanding as it is dynamic.
The album rollout began just over a year ago with her solo debut, Angel Of My Dreams. With her debut single, which also served as the album opener, she asserted herself as a voice unafraid of her own artistic individualism and an experimentalist. She furthered this with appearances on Confidence Man’s Gossip, Kesha’s Boy Crazy, and with a cover of Madonna’s Frozen. These releases, and the subsequent five singles that followed Angel set the bar incredibly high. Without a doubt, she delivered.
We first have the previously released singles that take up the first half of the album. Across songs like Angel and others like It Girl she has an intentionally disjointed approach. By weaving together frequent sonic changes throughout her songs she creates a multifaceted dialogue about the themes of the industry, commodification and fame. With the Frankenstein style she’s adopted, Jade has created pop in a dialogue with itself, about itself. While some of these songs have been out for over a year, her strategic weirdness has ensured her music endures and retains a zest and freshness that doesn’t compete but instead harmonises with the new material on the album.
As I’ve mentioned, Jade has specific and considered things to say with this album. Refusing to align with simplistic and ultimately innocuous lyricism that often plagues debut records, she discusses the music industry, desire and the self with a pen that could double as a scalpel. No truer is this than with her writing on songs like Lip Service, Midnight Cowboy, and Fantasy, where she embraces intimacy without feeling forced or veering into a vulgarity in pop music that now just feels dated. Her approach to sexuality feels empowered and realistic. Jade sings about kink assertively and tastefully while not relegating the subject matter to subtext. It’s explicit but restrained, ultimately feeling relatable and authentic.
The same can be said of how she approaches subject matter around relationships. She is unafraid to position herself in her own words as “toxic” in the narrative of Plastic Box while addressing interpersonal blockages on tracks like Self Saboteur and Unconditional with maturity. Jade’s ability to weave a narrative together that feels deeply personal while also universal in its nature is a skill few are able to achieve with such precision.
Jade also made the creative decision to use this project as an opportunity to inhabit a laboratory of pop by mixing and matching disparate genres together into a sonically cohesive yet diverse album. Throughout the pop acid trip that is That’s Showbiz Baby we hear Motown, Disco, Clubland, purist Pop and sprinklings of Rock, Europop and RnB. Song to song, you are jolted from one sound to another but all are truly under Jade’s command. She negates the idea that for something to be cohesive, it has to be sonically minimalist. This is only possible coming from a creative force who is unafraid of risk and experimentation, positioning Jade in a pantheon of pop chameleons such as Madonna, Lady Gaga and recently emerged talents like Chappell Roan (who Jade recently opened for in Edinburgh). Ultimately, Jade is a pop girl’s kind of pop girl.
Particularly noticeable is her consistent references to the worlds of Disco and Motown. This is furthered by her strategic use of a Supremes sample on Before You Break My Heart, citing her sources and points of inspiration openly, asserting her understanding of pop culture history. Jade has, throughout her career, praised Diana Ross as a major influence on her as an artist and more widely as a person. This resonates across the album. With the context behind these creative decisions, it is rewarding as a listener to locate within the music where Jade is drawing her inspiration. Her fusion of older genres with extremely contemporary, even trend-setting sounds, demonstrates a spirit of innovation across the album. That’s Showbiz Baby feels ahead of its time and also timeless.
It would also feel remiss to ignore the direct attention given to a queer audience with this album. Jade has a long history of supporting the LGBTQ+ community and has made a point of producing music that almost feels inherently for us. Headache, for example, feels like it was written with gay bars in mind. In a year where it feels like our community is consistently being sidelined, it is both refreshing and necessary that artists like Jade are making music that is geared for queer escapism. During the recent promotion for the album, Jade has also used her platform to explicitly stand in allyship with the LGBTQ+ community and against the rise of flag-waving fascism that is taking serious root in the UK. That spirit of boldness and fearlessness emanates across That’s Showbiz Baby. Jade has created a collection of songs that feels empowering, inventive, and intrinsically experimental.
2025 has felt somewhat sparse for pop music that is innovative, this album will have a lasting legacy as a landmark release in the pop landscape. Jade could have easily rehashed sounds and styles from her Little Mix days and produced a body of work that would have been safe and serviceable. Instead, she dared to create an album that is nothing short of an instant classic. In years to come, I would not be remotely surprised to see future artists and industry veterans in equal numbers cite this as a foundational text.
Pop bibles don’t come around very often. With full confidence, I think Jade has delivered us one for the ages. That’s Showbiz Baby is the most daring, authentic and downright addicting album of 2025. With her sharp pen, excellent vocals, and ballsy production, this album sits alongside Charli xcx’s Brat and Lady Gaga’s ARTPOP as a monument to authentic pop experimentation. Truly, it is the foundational album of 2025.
