REVIEW: Lexie Liu - Teenage Ramble

“Matcha latte killed me with a panic attack”

22:38 // October 16th, 2025 // Nixie

Back in 2022, Lexie’s Liu’s masterful full-length The Happy Star felt like the future of international pop: her bilingual vision blended Gaga-fied kitsch and electropop muscle with R&B majesty and the unapologetic cheese of her native Mandopop, forging a distinctive new voice for established thrills. Rightfully heralded for its breadth and towering highlights, The Happy Star remains a clear peak within this decade’s pop landscape and unquestionable evidence of Liu’s own her stamp as an artist (with solo writing credits on all but one of its twelve tracks and co-production on all of them, you’d better hope so). Her achievement here was in many ways the fruit of various incremental successes – the in-roads she made in the Chinese market with hits like 2019’s “Manta” and 2020’s “佳人” (Kappa Girl), and the way she caught the ear of a ‘00s-nostalgic Western audience on 2021’s Gone Gold – but it marked a distinctive step up for her craft and established her as one of the figures to trust within contemporary dance-pop.

The following years were comparatively quiet for Liu – a standalone single here, a biographical hype piece there – and so it is that Teenage Ramble is the first major outing we’ve heard from her since the release of The Happy Star. Across its seven tracks (and one demo), this EP perhaps shrewdly opts to eschew the majestic scope of its predecessor and focus almost entirely on dopamine-friendly electropop.

Laying her artsier trappings aside for now and doubling down on what has previously been one of her strongest suits, the result should by rights be a timely rush to clear the air and advance her profile, and so it goes on opener “Adrenaline”. Playing as a leaner throwback to her Gone Gold camp bangers, this track rides a slick progression to deliver a slew of good hooks and an entertainingly aggro ode to letting off steam on the internet. If the moodiness behind the upbeat chord progression and sly irony (I could be your girlfriend when I’m feeling dumb) are both old hat for Lexie Liu, it’s no less satisfying to hear them revived here.

By comparison, the following tracks see Liu go some distance to expanding her palette, in part as a consequence of the sheer number of collaborators she brings into the fray. In a recent AMA, she explained her habit of cold calling producers if she enjoyed their work with other artists, and so it is that the average number of co-prod (and co-writer) credits on Teenage Ramble is a jump from The Happy Star, to the point that Liu surrenders her co-production credit entirely in two instances, handing the reins to Nicopop (Slayyyter) and AObeats (Le Sserafim, f5ve, Slayyyter) on “FFFFF”, and PC Music veteran Danny L. Harle on “Deeper & Deeper”.

The edgy bubblegum of the former is one of the most natural fits for her style and lands as a clear highlight, but Harle’s bass churn on “Deeper & Deeper” is too airless to complement Liu’s vocal performance (one of her most ethereal to date). This track is at once the most stylistically distinct on the EP and one of the most frustrating instances of near-realised potential, considering the strength of Liu’s harmonies and vocal layerings, and that Harle has previously proved very capable of supporting eerie art-dance with a murky undertone in his work with Yeule.

The EP’s must galling fumble, however, is entirely on Liu’s end, as heard on the closer “Like U”. With its zippy synth glimmer and slick drum and bass beat, this track packs one of the strongest instrumentals on the album, but finds itself wasted on a string of overly repetitious hooks and lyricism so bland as to border on trite (Can I tell you a secret? / Promise you gon’ keep it / I think I like you / I think I like you). The same can be said for the title-track and “Pop Girl” (with the concession that the latter will at least sound monstrous in a club setting), but “Like U” is perhaps the clearest case where Liu taps into a sound that should by rights be setting the agenda (see its success in recent-ish K-pop vogue) only to come away with little to show for it. If “Like U”’s mode of vanilla-’n’-vapid with caption-style delivery sounds entirely too Western for comfort, then there’s some solace to be taken in that Teenage Ramble‘s crowning highlight “X” is arguably Lexie Liu’s most brazenly Gaga-adjacent banger to date, but it underscores the album’s entire lack of Mandarin lyrics.

These found themselves evenly distributed alongside English on her previous material, such that each track’s narrative and intention came across clearly without either side compromising the other, allowing Liu to channel the de facto language of international pop while preserving exotic flair through Mandarin’s endlessly mystifying phonetics and inflections. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with foregoing one or the other, but the album’s English lyricism fails to do consistent justice to Liu’s individual stamp. Take the following, from “Pop Girl”:

Skin clear, hair shiny
Girls and gays like me
Tap, I’m on your screen
I serve my Pop Girl Chic
Skin clear, hair shiny
Girls and gays like me
Tap, I’m on your screen
I serve my Pop Girl Chic

P-G-C, I serve Pop Girl Chic
I cover magazines after nine hours of sleep
P-G-C, my skirt matching my tee
See the way that I’m walking, it’s my accessory

It’s a sad day when one has to dig deep enough for personality that the closest thing to a flourish comes in the halfway house of self-care and tongue-in-cheek slackerism she packs with nine hours of sleep. If “Pop Girl” is the slay it clearly pitches for, then it is as perfunctory as such things come; the more time I’ve spent with it, the more convinced I am that any pop artist in 2025 could have made it — and if that’s the ‘point’, it’s rather a moot one. Lexie Liu’s talents remain formidable and Teenage Ramble is a reliable, if often unextraordinary dose of electropop gratification, but these tracks raise a new set of questions about her future direction and ongoing globalisation. Girl better hold onto her edge.

6.5/10

Further listening:

the One -> Lexie Liu - The Happy Star
the landscape -> Lady Gaga - The Fame Monster
the other landscape -> Charli XCX - how i'm feeling now
de-Occidentalise and give me Mandopop cheese -> Yu Zhen - 造梦日记