Most people celebrate their eighteenth birthday with cake, bad photos, and maybe one of those “haha, I’m legal now” jokes that’s only funny if you’re drunk. Alessiah, on the other hand, decided to release Obscentra, her debut album. Because why settle for a party when you can drop a meticulously crafted, emotionally destructive pop record that doubles as a manifesto?
This is not a vanity project or a victory lap for the “former child star” era. It’s a hard pivot into something darker, stranger, and more serious. Essentially, Alessiah is now holding up a mirror to all of it and smashing it in our faces. Obscentra isn’t just an album. It’s an experience that says: “I’m an adult now, and I’m going to make you sit in emotional chaos whether you like it or not.”
Right from the intro, Obscentra establishes itself as more than a collection of tracks. It’s a deliberately constructed spiral with 14 songs that bleed into one another like scenes in a single film. The protagonist is Alessiah, but it’s not as simple as “autobiographical confessions.” It’s part character study, part theatre. She plays the role with just enough distance that you can put yourself in her place, and just enough intimacy that you’re never comfortable doing so.
The world she builds here is claustrophobic, cinematic, and hypnotic. Distorted synths drone like background radiation, trap beats stutter, vocals are chopped and stretched into ghostly fragments. The entire production feels like it’s daring you to keep listening, daring you to stop treating music as wallpaper and instead get swallowed whole. It’s less an album you “play” and more an album you endure; and that’s the point.
The thematic core of Obscentra isn’t subtle. Alessiah is playing with toxic relationships, cycles of obsession, the loss of innocence, and the delightful realization that sometimes the villain is you. There’s no tidy empowerment narrative tied up with glittery bows here. Instead, she gives us desire that corrodes, femininity that seduces and wounds at the same time, and heartbreak that is both tragedy and performance art.
What makes this interesting isn’t just the lyrical content, but the way Alessiah refuses to make femininity palatable. Sometimes she’s fragile and whispery, sometimes she’s commanding and cruel, sometimes she’s both in the same line. Pop has no shortage of artists selling girlboss slogans; Obscentra simply laughs at that and sets the slogans on fire for mood lighting.
The first single, Made You Cry, was our early warning. Imagine Billie Eilish’s pop experiments of stuff like xanny crossbreeding with the playful menace of all the good girls go to heaven. It’s messy, woozy, a song that sounds like it’s been left out in the rain and is now slightly moldy in the best way. Alessiah confesses and accuses in the same breath, and the result is less “sad ballad” and more “emotional whiplash.”
f**k all the is her “lowkey bop.” Think Janet Jackson if Janet Jackson was raised on Discord and had zero patience for radio programmers. It’s minimal, hypnotic, and deliberately underplayed, to the point where you’re leaning forward just to catch the loops in her vocal melodies. It’s sexy, but in the way staring at static is sexy when you’ve been awake for 36 hours.
Call Me By Your Name dives deeper into the basement. A cross between Tate McRae moodiness and Hayley Kiyoko’s velvet tones, it anchors itself on one of the cleanest bass mixes I’ve heard all year. Alessiah’s vocal here is at her most sultry, but it’s the kind of sultry that makes you nervous. You don’t trust her, and she doesn’t want you to.
Deep End featuring Tobi Ibitoye is where the album stops flirting and just goes full toxic. His Trey Songz–esque runs are slick, soulful, and dangerously charming. Alessiah, by contrast, sounds like she’s already halfway out the door. The tension between them makes the track pulse, the kind of duet where you know this is ending badly but you can’t look away.
Hot Like This is the pivot point; the empowerment banger. A track that sounds like the Pussycat Dolls at their most dangerous, but with production so futuristic it makes Timbaland sound retro. It’s crisp, relentless, and dripping with late-night energy. After all the obsession and spiraling, this track is Alessiah planting a flag: heartbreak doesn’t destroy her, it fuels her.
Then there’s Strawberry Ice Cream, which is against all odds; a pop gem disguised as a joke. Ava Max could release this tomorrow and it’d be on every summer playlist. The bassline slaps, the chopped vocals are borderline ridiculous, and yet it works. This is what happens when someone too clever for bubblegum pop decides to play with it anyway.
Red Lights and Boy Toy return us to the darker corners of the club. Both tracks borrow DNA from the Pussycat Dolls, but Alessiah adds a sharper edge. Boy Toy, especially, is less a song and more a power play. Exotic instrumentation swirls around her as she coolly informs you that whatever you think you are, she’s already playing you like a game. It’s hypnotic and cruel in equal measure.
Finally, Girls featuring Ryaa and Luana Genevieve explodes like a Molotov cocktail of fury and camaraderie. After an album spent wandering through cycles of seduction and destruction, Alessiah ends not alone, but surrounded by allies. It’s messy, shouty, and the perfect catharsis. Think Charli XCX with actual knives.
Obscentra isn’t casual listening. It’s not meant to be shuffled in between Dua Lipa and Olivia Rodrigo on your gym playlist. It’s an album that actively resents the idea of being reduced to background noise. Alessiah wants you to feel uncomfortable, to confront the contradictions of desire and regret, to sit in the tension until it eats at you. Obscentra is not a debut album. It’s a challenge. A dare. A trap you willingly walk into. Alessiah has turned eighteen and instead of saying “here I am,” she’s saying “you’re not ready for this.” And the thing is, she’s right.
This record is obsessed with contradictions; seductive but hostile, intimate but theatrical, fragile but domineering. Obscentra is a storm in neon lighting, and Alessiah controls it with unnerving precision. She’s not just joining the pop conversation. Rather, she’s rewriting it in her own strange handwriting and if this is the start of her adulthood, then buckle up. The rest of us are going to be playing catch-up for a long time.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for publications in the US and former lead writer of Atop The Treehouse. Reviews music, film and TV shows for media aggregators.
