Katherine segues us from Thursday to the inevitable follow-up…

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Katherine St. Asaph: Rebecca Black is incredibly easy to root for, even among survivors of the gossip-blog mob. Unlike many pop stars, she’s not a nepo baby — she actually has an almost identical background to Chappell Roan, another theater kid whose parents were both veterinarians. Unlike some girls gone viral, she capitalized on her compromised fame not by, say, pump-and-dumping memecoins, but by summoning a Monkees-esque drive to make her fake pop real. So far, though, you only know that if you read about pop music on the Internet. While it took just a few years for Addison Rae to get rehabilitated from mediocre TikTok dance rehabilitator to actual pop girlie (I guess???), even after a decade Black hasn’t gotten there, despite/because of her music being more daring. Since her accidental debut, she’s released two separate sequels to “Friday” to please the crowd; now, she rips right back into them in the Regina George-styled intro to “Trust.” The song speaks the musical vernacular of the tabloids, which means the seething electropop of Britney Spears circa Circus — though who I really hear is Britney’s demo singers, like Keri Hilson and Penelope Magnet — of Luciana on “I’m Still Hot,” and of Lady Gaga’s The Fame. Black even does a “Bad Romance” style namedrop, in case you missed the influence. (I don’t think the “GUILTY!” outro is a actually a reference to the Britney song, but it would fit.) The sound is implicitly confrontational; even when these songs aren’t angry, as they usually aren’t, they sound strangely pitiless. Sex is a steely competition. Clubs are seething cauldrons of danger. No one is here to make friends. If Black must live in an eternal “Friday,” she’ll at least make it a Voorhees one. (Note: At least one point here, maybe two, is because few moments in pop have made me laugh more than the jumpscare of “I heard she had sex with Elon Musk!” Grimes: still catching strays. 
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Alfred Soto: Rebecca Black gives me hope that you or I or anyone with a little money and a lot of curiosity can record acceptable entertainment. Compare her to a star with putative talent like Gwen Stefani and she’s Madonna. 
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Kayla Beardslee: cunty cunty cunty
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Al Varela: You’d think tilting towards an aggressive, dark club anthem would call to mind other “teen star turned sex icon” transitions such as Miley Cyrus’s “Can’t Be Tamed” or JoJo Siwa’s “Karma”, but Black is far more convincing in this lane than her peers. “Trust” sounds like the sweatiest, horniest, queerest dance floor you’ve ever lost your mind in, and Black is fully tapped into the atmosphere.
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Tim de Reuse: Deliciously crisp, spiky, and artfully produced, swapping between whispers, a heady talk-sing, a dark chant. Perhaps we’ve finally crossed the Rebecca Rubicon; she’s made something so dense and immediately arresting that it’shard to get distracted by questions of “Wait, that’s that Rebecca Black?” when listening to it.
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Taylor Alatorre: At some point, in order for a reinvention to succeed, it has to be able to strong-arm its observers into dropping the word “reinvention” from their vocabulary. Rebecca Black hasn’t succeeded in that yet, and though last year’s Let Her Burn came close, “TRUST!” doesn’t move the ball any further, no matter how loudly it commands me to “eat, eat, eat” in the manner of an off-Broadway playground taunt.
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Kat Stevens: It’s fascinating, isn’t it, when someone tries so hard to recapture a moment of unexpected brilliance. I respect that Rebecca is taking matters into her own hands and giving it a proper go, after the disaster remix the other year. But truly great pop moments need at least one of the following: a) a great song b) a great star c) a level of WTF so high that we can’t believe it’s really happening. None of these apply here. “Trust” has potential as a song but is missing a chorus. For all her expensive choreography and daft outfits, Rebecca still looks, sounds and moves like a normal person (complimentary — in fact she should probably lean more into this). And unfortunately, in this era of skibidi toilets, a sequinned chainsaw barely registers on the WTF scale.
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Will Adams: I’m always up for slick electro with a bratty edge (obnoxious bangers 4ever). But “Trust” just strikes me as a Slayyyter song with fewer hooks and less concept.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I resisted listening to this for as long as I could (the mythos around Rebecca Black is so tedious; this isn’t a comeback, she’s been a middling hyperpop orbiter for years.) I shouldn’t have been worried — this is utterly effective club pop, thrilling both as catchphrase bait and as a straight-ahead banger. The spaghetti western guitars give this a certain pomp and circumstance, but everything else is brute-force pop, an overwhelm of the senses that cares not for any backstory. Sometimes skillful anonymity is all you need.
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Frank Kogan: Back when producers Danja and Bloodshy etc. were sampling and manipulating Britney’s voice into the rhythms and bones of Blackout, Dave Moore said it was as if Britney was “everywhere in the tracks, like power-stained in to them.” On “Trust,” it’s as if Britney and modern-day whisperers and stylists like Billie Eilish have been power-stained into Rebecca Black. The result is “anonymous” not in the sense of lacking in character but rather as containing all the characters, saturating the music with them.
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Leah Isobel: Rebecca Black’s music aspires to be uncomplicated; “Friday” was meant to be a simple vanity project, the subsequent teenpop singles aimed for disposable Disney fizziness. Her more recent work embraces the deadpan irony and dissolution of hyper and post-hyperpop, but only at a surface level. At the center of the sound, she remains a consistent and remarkably sincere figure, as if she’s the last normal woman standing. When Rebecca wears a wig, it only reinforces the artificiality of the pose; she is not a chameleon. This quality gives “Trust” a surprising and pleasant sense of gravity, even when its excess feels calculated. In other words, this is the only song I can think of in which its performer baits online stans (“Eat! Eat! Eat!”) without immediately falling into the garbage hole.
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Nortey Dowuona: Trust is a two-way street, but I guess I’ll make the second step since Black has made the first. I’m excited to see what she’s going to be doing next year. 
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Dave Moore: Distant rockabilly guitar sets the mood like a fog machine as Rebecca Black bursts onto the stage with a casually commandeering force I’ve never heard from her — references Gaga and Gwen, channels Britney and Kesha. Has been amazing to see her work herself, will herself, to this.
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