It’s all very well having one of British music’s most recognisable voices, but there comes a point when you have to ask what you’re doing with it. At least, that’s the question Becky Hill found herself asking when she embarked on her third album. The answer is less a reinvention, more a sudden reveal of the full picture: a pop album about what it takes to make a pop album, with a sonic blueprint best described as curated chaos.

“The golden thread of this album is, basically, my experience within the music industry,” Becky begins. She’s talking about songs like claustrophobic banger ‘More More More’ (“I’ve just got to keep running, what if I run out of time?”), existential crisis banger ‘Lost The Plot’ (“I’m just another popstar that lost the fucking plot…”), and ‘What Do I Have To Do?’ (“bending over backwards… And for what?”). “The whole thing fascinates me. Here’s this job where I’m willingly exploiting myself, where I’m absolutely losing my mind, but at the same time nobody’s making me do it, are they? I’m doing this to myself.”

All those strands - this particular artist, and that particular relationship between pleasure and pain - come together in one word, which also happens to be the word Becky’s chosen as the album’s title. “The original meaning of the name ‘Rebecca’ is to tie, or to bind,” she states, and you can probably guess where this is going. “And for me, the music industry is very BDSM.” On ‘Rebecca’, songs like ‘Hands On Me’ and ‘Tie Me Down’ (the latter ostensibly a song about married life) vividly capture the pleasure and pain of stardom: sensations that so frequently come hand-in-hand that they eventually become indistinguishable. For Becky, a decade of all this seems to have burned a neural pathway between the thrill of being wanted and the terror of being consumed.

Importantly, though, Becky’s self-aware, satirically toned lyrics ensure that ‘Rebecca’ swerves the obvious trap of turning into a complainathon. “It’s not me moaning about the industry,” Becky is keen to add. “I’m in a game, I know what the rules are and who the players are; I love the game, and I continue to play.”

She’s played it pretty well so far. Becky’s been having hits for over a decade as both a singer and songwriter, but her influence on electronic music reaches far beyond the charts. One of the defining voices in UK dance music, Becky has helped shift the landscape for female artists within the genre while carving out space for a new generation coming through. After first hitting the Top 10 with Wilkinson in 2013, with the 3x platinum single ‘Afterglow’, she reappeared in 2014 with the Oliver Heldens collaboration ‘Gecko (Overdrive)’ - an international hit, her first Number One, and her second three-times platinum vocal and writing credit.

Becky has since established herself as a lead artist and scored over a dozen platinum records in the UK alone, collaborating along the way with artists like Self Esteem, Chase & Status, Little Mix, David Guetta, Tiësto and Little Simz on songs that earned her a BRITs Billion Award. In 2021 Becky’s platinum-selling debut album ‘Only Honest On The Weekend’ led to the first of two consecutive BRIT Awards for Best Dance Act; by 2024, second album ‘Believe Me Now?’ was paving the way for Becky’s first arena tour. It climaxed with her first Wembley headline gig, although by this point, she’d long established herself as a festival headliner. Alongside all this, Becky has also become one of the most sought-after songwriters in electronic music, with her work performed by the likes of Jax Jones, Aespa, Craig David, Madison Beer and Zara Larsson.

“Very early on I made the decision to go two feet into dance music because when I was on stage, I wanted to see people dance,” Becky says of the distinct sonic palette that made her a household name. But she saw dance music moving on and didn’t want to find herself alone on the dancefloor when the lights came up.

To look forward, Becky looked to her own past and the music she’d grown up with as a teenager in Bewdley, Worcestershire. Alongside the house and drum ’n’ bass influences that made themselves known in the earliest stages of her career, Becky’s adolescence was soundtracked by bands like Blur and Biffy Clyro, alongside outfits like Pendulum and Prodigy, who seamlessly blended rock bombast with electronic production. “I started out playing guitar, using it to write my first songs, and I originally come from a band background,” she adds, referring to Shaking Trees, the band that gained BBC Introducing support when Becky was only fourteen.

As she explored sonic directions for her third album, Becky started wondering whether it was time to start putting guitars back in. Thinking less about genres and more about her own musical DNA, she found “all the things that add up to where I am now - key influences I haven’t had an opportunity to really explore yet. I knew the challenge was to combine all these influences and create something new in the process.” The sound she arrived upon was heavy electro: an edgy, just-the-right-side-of-shambolic collision of pop, dance and alternative that sounds both familiar and unpredictable. One particular seal of approval came when Pendulum’s Rob Swire took up the challenge of working on tracks like ‘Little Miss Nobody’ and ‘Daddy’s Range Rover’. “He’s one of the guys who was inspiring me back in the day - whacking huge guitar solos over drum ’n’ bass records,” Becky grins. “I took the demos to him and asked if he could make them more electronic. He went: ‘Well, this is already quite electronic.’ I was like, ‘Great, can you make it more so, please?’ He completely got it.”

As ‘Rebecca’ took shape, inspiration crossed Becky’s path in some unexpected locations. When she caught one of Everything But The Girl’s Moth Club gigs, she was struck by the breadth and vision of a band whose career spanned decades and genres. And more recently, when she saw Tracey Emin’s Tate Modern exhibition, something clicked about the powerful relationship between content and context. “A bed’s a bed, but when you know the story, the art makes sense,” Becky says. “It made me realise that, until now, I haven’t really ever given my own context. It lit a fire under me and I left thinking: there’s fucking life in the old girl yet. “

After years spent banging out hits to soundtrack other people’s lives, Becky’s now making music that’s unmistakably about her own. “I mean, I wouldn’t say I’m a particularly controversial character, but I do have opinions,” Becky says. “But after a while, of course, you find out that if you don’t say anything at all, people don’t like that either.” It was, as Becky puts it, “a case of I’m fucked if I do and I’m fucked if I don’t”, in an industry that says be yourself, but not like that; stand out from the crowd, but not like that; speak out about what you believe in, but not like that. And sure, you can win a couple of BRITs, as long as the host can make a joke about you being ‘the Wetherspoons Whitney’ so everyone can laugh at the singer with the audacity to have emerged from somewhere other than a major city. (For more on this, take ‘Daddy’s Range Rover’ for a spin.)

Anyway, Becky’s theory with this album was that she might as well move ahead authentically. “I’ve always wanted to be the people’s pop star,” she adds. “But that doesn’t mean having to please all the people all the time. With ‘Rebecca’, I kept in mind the fact that the problem with trying to appeal to everybody is that you run the risk of truly resonating with precisely nobody.”

There’s a version of all this where Becky plays it safe and makes a completely different album: business as usual, familiar sound, familiar lyrics, familiar names dropped in for collabs on every track. It wouldn’t be an obvious disaster - it’d do decent enough numbers to keep the show on the road for another couple of years. We all know that works, because we’ve seen it happen a million times before. But what we also know is that albums like that tend to come before a whole lot of em-dashes in the discography section of an artist’s Wikipedia page.

So much for the safe option. Instead, Becky’s created the album she knew she’d regret never making. “I needed to be headstrong,” she says. “I needed to say: fuck what everybody thinks of it, if the whole thing goes sideways then at least, I can put this album to my chest and say I’ve done it. I’ll always be proud of that.”