Nessa Barrett Reached for Portishead and Massive Attack on Tough Love

The first thing you hear on Bad Girls Never Die is not a synth. It is a string section and a strummed guitar, recorded with enough room tone that the arrangement sounds played rather than programmed. That is a deliberate choice, and on a major-label pop single released in 2026 it is close to a statement of intent. CJ Baran and Arthur Besna produced the track, Victor Verpillat mixed it, and between them they built something with more grain than gloss.

The single landed on 24 August as the second trailer for Tough Love, Nessa Barrett’s third studio album, which Warner Records will release on 25 September. Taken with July’s lead single, it points at a record assembled from live-sounding parts and vintage signal chains rather than the stacked, quantised presets that dominate her streaming-chart peer group. Barrett has been explicit about where she went looking, and the list of names is not the one a 23-year-old pop singer is expected to produce.

The Production Choices That Set the Record Apart

Both singles are built the same way underneath: a drum part with real dynamics, a string arrangement carrying the harmonic weight, and guitars placed forward in the mix rather than buried under pads. On Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, the beat drives and the strings answer it, mournful in the classic sense, while the guitars sit urgent and close. On Bad Girls Never Die, the same components tilt darker, with the goth-leaning atmosphere that comes from letting reverb tails run instead of gating them tight.

What is absent is as telling as what is present. There is no obvious side-chain pumping, no hyperpop pitch-shifting, no maximalist top end. The arrangements leave space, which is a production decision with consequences: it puts the vocal in the middle of the frame and makes the writing carry the song. It also raises the stakes on the performance, because a sparse mix has nowhere to hide a flat take. EUPHORIA. heard the mid-century influence in it too, reading the strings and the guitar figure as pulling from the 1960s and 1970s rather than from anything contemporary.

The Names Barrett Put Behind the Record

Asked what shaped Tough Love, Barrett named Massive Attack, Portishead, Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles and Alice in Chains. Two of those are the founding acts of Bristol trip-hop; two are American rock institutions from opposite ends of the 1970s; one is a Seattle band whose defining records came out before Barrett was born. It is a genuinely unusual set of coordinates for a Warner pop release, and it explains the production far better than any genre tag does.

The trip-hop reference in particular does real work. Portishead and Massive Attack built their sound on slow, heavy drum programming, string and Rhodes textures, and vocals mixed intimate against a large room. That is recognisably the architecture of both singles, scaled down and sped up for a pop runtime. Barrett has described the album as “a sonically dark romantic experience”, with each track representing a different form of tough love, and the reference points are consistent with that framing rather than decorative.

How the Lead Single Set the Terms

Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die arrived on 18 July and established the palette. It is mid-tempo, angsty pop-rock rather than pop with rock signifiers bolted on, and Barrett phrases it, as EUPHORIA. put it, like a 1960s love song. The lyric runs “I know it’s dangerous / but I don’t mind / too fast to live / but we’re just too young to die”, which sets up the album’s recurring position: the narrator can see the warning signs and proceeds anyway.

The accompanying video matched the audio, cut in dramatically paced sequences and graded to hold the same moody register. It is a coherent package, and coherence matters here. Barrett’s earlier work moved between registers quickly enough that a listener could reasonably ask what the through-line was. The two 2026 singles do not have that problem.

The title itself is doing some of the work. Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die is a phrase with a long pedigree in rock iconography, and choosing it for a lead single signals the register before a note plays. Paired with a string-led arrangement and a vocal delivered at conversational volume, it sets up a tension the album seems designed to hold: rock imagery, pop structure, and a production approach borrowed from records that predate the streaming era by two decades.

Grunge Textures and a Callback to the Debut

Bad Girls Never Die pushes further into rock. The production leans grunge, and the vocal carries a swagger the lead single kept in reserve: “I’ll be young forever, so I’ll put on a show / I’m crazy, but whatever, yeah, that’s just rock ‘n’ roll”. The title comes from the hook, which flips a familiar formulation into “If good girls go to heaven, then bad girls never die”.

There is a self-referential layer as well. The track calls back to her earlier song Black Haired Madonna and to young forever, her 2022 debut album, which reached 80 on the Billboard 200 and 13 on the US Rock Albums chart. Warner released the single without a video at launch, which for a second single suggests a campaign pacing itself towards the album rather than front-loading everything into the announcement.

The EP That Cleared the Ground

Tough Love does not arrive cold. In March, Barrett released the eight-track EP Jesus Loves a Primadonna through Warner on CD, vinyl, download and streaming. It was trailed by High on Heaven in January, which she performed on Triple J the day before its release, then Stay with Me in February and Buffalo 66, featuring Jesse Rutherford, on the day the EP itself appeared. Stay with Me was directed by Kristen Jan Wong with Barrett; Claire Bishara directed Buffalo 66.

Commercially the EP was a modest but real result, charting at 41 on the ARIA Albums Chart in Australia and 67 in Scotland, per Wikipedia’s compilation of its chart runs. Critically it was received as a step up, and it did the useful work of establishing the darker, more electronic register before the album committed to it. Barrett also toured it in a stripped-back format billed as an intimate evening, which is a low-risk way to test whether material of that weight holds a room.

The sequencing of that campaign is worth noting on its own. Three singles across nine weeks, each with a distinct visual treatment and two with named directors, is a release pattern built for sustained attention rather than a single launch spike. Buffalo 66 in particular used a feature spot to widen the audience without diluting the record, and putting it out on the same day as the EP meant the collaboration drove attention to the full release rather than sitting apart from it. The same logic is visible in the Tough Love rollout, where the singles are spaced five weeks apart and the second arrived on the opening night of a tour.

A Support Slot That Works as a Trial Run

Since 24 August, Barrett has been opening for The Neighbourhood on the European and UK leg of their World Tour, a run that began at Stockholm’s Avicii Arena on the same day Bad Girls Never Die was released. The timing is not accidental. A support slot in arenas puts new material in front of a large, adjacent audience during exactly the weeks a label wants pre-release streams accumulating.

It is also a practical test of the arrangements. Songs built on string parts and dynamic drum performances behave differently in a 10,000-capacity room than programmed pop does, and a support set is a cheap place to find out what needs reinforcing before a headline run. Barrett is 23 and has been working in Los Angeles since she was 17, which by pop-career arithmetic makes Tough Love a mid-career record rather than an early one.

Where the September Date Leaves Her

The gap between the EP in March and the album in September is short for a major label, and it reads as a deliberate compression: two related releases inside one year, sharing a sonic direction, with the second one carrying the weight. Whether the record lands depends on whether the trip-hop and rock references survive contact with a pop mix across a full runtime, or thin out into texture. The two singles suggest they survive.

Barrett is not alone in this. The current dark-pop field is full of artists building albums as extended pieces rather than single-plus-filler collections, and the same instinct runs through Melanie Martinez’s HADES, released this year as one half of a larger structure. What separates Barrett’s approach is the specificity of the reference points. Naming Portishead and Alice in Chains in the same breath is a claim about method, not just taste, and on 25 September there will be a full album to test it against.