Becky Hill has spoken about the global ambitions for her new album, Believe Me Now?, as well as establishing herself as a career artist.
The dance music star, who features on the cover of the latest edition of Music Week, is now well into the campaign for her second album, released May 31 via Polydor/Eko.
“It feels like I’ve achieved breaking the UK, which is what I always wanted to do. It took me probably 12 years and now I feel like I’m onto the rest of the world,” she said. “That feels really good. I’m just hoping the rest of the world gets with the Becky Hill programme.”
The singer has 17 million monthly listeners on Spotify and has racked up over 10 billion streams. She has multiple million-selling UK singles, six Top 10 hits, a No.1, won Best Dance Act at the BRITs twice and her 2021 full-length debut Only Honest On The Weekend hit No.7. That record has 277,287 sales to date, according to the Official Charts Company, while Get To Know, the 2019 compilation album that preceded it, has 429,602.
Hill has two concurrent Top 75 entries with Right Here and Outside Of Love. It follows multiple charting singles for the artist, who this year performed at the BRITs with Chase & Status.
For her second studio album, Hill is delving deeper into dance music following more commercial radio hits such as Remember with David Guetta, which has 1,708,540 sales to date.
“When we did Remember, the idea was to be as overly saturated on radio as possible, to get people to link the dots on who I was and what music I did. We definitely did that and it was a great move commercially,” she said. “But I felt like I’d become a bit of a radio commodity.”
For this phase of her career, Hill said she wanted to try and get “some cool points back”, an idea that prompted the drum & bass banger and No.3 hit Disconnect (722,272 sales to date), a team-up with Chase & Status.
“It’s not that I don’t like my own music,” she told Music Week. “But I’m very immersed in dance culture and I wanted to have a new body of work that didn’t isolate the commercial by any means but fitted a little better into the dance world. The new album is still great pop songs – I can’t write anything other than pop music – but it’s teamed up with a weightier, purer production and I can’t wait to see what people think of it.”
I’m just hoping the rest of the world gets with the Becky Hill programme
Becky Hill
Hill recalled speaking to Polydor president Ben Mortimer and telling him that she wanted to go more dancey on the production with this record.
“I said to him, ‘I’m always gonna make commercial music but I just want it to be a little bit cooler and less try-hard and a lot more heads-y,’” she said. “I want to be an artist. This is my artist era and I hope it’s as successful as my chart era.”
Hill has a great relationship with her label, where she signed in 2017, following a short stint as an independent act after parting ways with Parlophone in 2014.
“They’re amazing because they see how scared I am and they try to reassure me that they’re not gonna leave me, at least not any time soon anyway,” she said. “The whole relationship has really been lovely because they just see that I want to sell loads of records for them and for me. It’s been a bit of a journey with this album and it’s been lovely that I’ve had the label behind me.”
Chase & Status are amongst a collective of new names, including Parisi, Toddla T, Maur, Mark Ralph and Jax Jones, joining Hill’s tried and trusted collaborators.
Hill would love a No.1 album with Believe Me Now? but, more than that, she’d love it to be the record that made people take dance music more seriously.
“I think it’s quite notorious that dance albums don’t do much in terms of sales and people not really giving a shit,” she reasoned. “I’d like to buck that trend, I’d like it to be the dance album that brings it back home for dance music.”
Hill also learned things about herself making this album, emerging as more determined, driven and ambitious than she has ever been.
“I’m a hard motherfucker, I am such a bad bitch,” she declared. “I have worked my fucking arse off and I’m still here 12 years later to make a second record when a lot of people thought I was going to fall by the wayside. I’m completely unstoppable and I’m completely unbreakable and this is just the beginning.”
Subscribers can read the full Becky Hill interview with her label and management team here.
