2018 is the year that Rita Ora finally got to play the popstar she was meant to be for so many years. Six years since the release of her debut album Ora, released by Jay-Z's label Roc Nation and Columbia, she's found a home with Atlantic Records and her second album Phoenix is finally out in the wild.
Even though Ora was on a sort of musical hiatus, due to label complications and contractual restrictions, the 28-year-old never stopped working. For most of this time, she has been the butt of many jokes. She was the pop star with no music, famous for nothing and everywhere but Phoenix should change all that. Now starts the Justice for Rita campaign and the first piece of action is to nominate her as this week's VBF.
Never in my life did I think that I would be celebrating Ora. I used to be one of the people making jokes about her but this year I was on the judging panel for the Popjustice Twenty Quid Music Prize and fought vehemently for Ora's song Anywhere. The Twenty Quid Music Prize is the alternative to the Mercury Prize, that happens on the same night in London, and the title of the best British pop song of the year is decided by a drunken group of 30 music fans in a pub and the winner gets twenty quid*.
Up against Dua Lipa and Calvin Harris's One Kiss, Anywhere won, mostly because we felt that One Kiss was not Lipa or Harris's "best work". Starting off in ballad style – and sounding a little bit like Robbie Williams's Road to Mandalay in the bridge – Anywhere explodes in an instrumental chorus where Ora's voice is warped and manipulated into robotic pitches. Even though Ora once claimed that she doesn't know what she's singing in the chorus, the lyrics are apparently "Fun, little less fun, Little less, over, over, over, over, me. Oh!". Even reading those words, it still feels like a lyric-less chorus because Anywhere is a post-chorus song, which is very now.
The six-year break between Ora and Phoenix wasn't a choice. In 2015, the Londoner filed a lawsuit against Roc Nation, claiming that her original contract was impossible to work from thanks to California's seven-year rule, where no personal contract can tie up an employee for more than seven years . . . except for recording artists. Fun.
What could have been a longer legal battle and an even lengthier hiatus from music, Ora reached a settlement with Roc Nation in 2016 and was now free to record music elsewhere. With so much to prove, it's so bloody evident that a lot of work went into Phoenix. Filled up with mostly upbeat bangers and big collaborations with Rudimental, Cardi B, Avicii and Julia Michaels, Ora paints a picture of someone whose life is made up of bad choices that can be easily portrayed as having a good time. Between the sexual exploration on Girls and the one-night stands on Lonely Together, the headrush of love on Your Song, the self-sabotage on Let You Love Me and the regrets of Velvet Rope, the aptly titled Phoenix is the story of a woman who's trying to figure out who she is, even if she occasionally looks in the wrong places.
It might take a while for pop fans to warm to Ora (we're a cruel bunch, really) but forget all that you once assumed about her and go into Phoenix with fresh ears. In the past, she may not have been the pop star we needed her to be but she's definitely one now.
*It’s not confirmed if Ora has picked up her £20 just yet.
