LISA, Doja Cat, and RAYE Join Forces on 'Born Again': What to Know Before the Feb. 6 Release
By Jang Hojin
On February 6, 2025, LISA will release "Born Again," a collaboration with Doja Cat and RAYE that has been generating anticipation since its January 24 announcement. The single arrives through LLOUD and RCA Records — LISA's own label partnership, the infrastructure through which she has been rebuilding her solo career outside YG Entertainment — and it represents the clearest encapsulation yet of the artistic direction she has been mapping since leaving the label system that shaped her career with BLACKPINK. Here is everything you need to know before the release.
What 'Born Again' Is and Where It Comes From
The announcement came the way many of the most anticipated collaborations do: a photograph shared simultaneously across three Instagram accounts. On January 24, LISA, Doja Cat, and RAYE appeared together in coordinated black cocktail dresses, the image spare enough to let the names carry the weight. The single's title and release date followed, and the reaction from fans across all three artist communities was immediate.
"Born Again" is a post-breakup empowerment track — the kind of song that frames romantic dissolution as a starting point rather than an ending. Written by RAYE and producer Andrew Wells alongside Doja Cat and Anthony Rossomando, the song incorporates disco and electropop production into a pop framework, which places it in the lineage of recent tracks RAYE has produced or co-written rather than in the harder-edged hip-hop register of LISA's "ROCKSTAR." The tonal shift is deliberate: this is a collaboration that asks all three voices to operate in shared sonic territory rather than grafting one artist's style onto another's.
The release is the fourth single from LISA's debut full-length studio album Alter Ego, which is set for February 28. Each preceding single has previewed a different facet of the album's five-character conceptual framework — the album explores distinct alter egos, each mapped to a point on a star emblem that has become central to the campaign's visual language. "Born Again" slots into that framework as a specific emotional register: the moment of reclamation after loss.
The Three Artists and Why This Combination Works
LISA's positioning heading into this release reflects the deliberate reconfiguration of her career over the past year. In late 2023, she departed YG Entertainment for her solo activities, establishing LLOUD — her own management company — in February 2024, and signing with RCA Records for global distribution shortly after. "ROCKSTAR," the lead single from Alter Ego, arrived in June 2024 and won Best K-Pop at the MTV Video Music Awards, making LISA the first solo K-pop artist to win that category twice. Each of those moves — the label independence, the Western distribution deal, the awards recognition — has built toward an artist who can approach collaborations from a position of structural parity rather than as a feature on someone else's project.
Doja Cat's participation is significant for reasons that go beyond her commercial weight. She is currently one of the most versatile performers in mainstream pop: a Grammy winner, an MTV VMA headliner, and a figure who has demonstrated that she can adapt her vocal and lyrical approach to almost any production context without losing her specific identity. Her presence on "Born Again" signals that this is not a label-arranged promotional vehicle but a creative alignment — Doja Cat's team does not attach her name to projects that don't serve a genuine artistic purpose.
RAYE represents a third kind of credibility entirely. The British singer-songwriter had one of the more dramatic career inflection points in recent UK music history: after parting with a major label that had held her back, she self-released "Escapism" (2022), which eventually became a global phenomenon, and followed it with her debut album My 21st Century Blues (2023), which earned her six BRIT Awards in a single night. The path from industry constraint to self-directed success mirrors, with different specifics, the trajectory LISA is now pursuing. Both artists understand what it means to rebuild on their own terms, and that shared context gives "Born Again" a subtext that its post-breakup lyrical theme can carry naturally.
The Larger LISA Solo Project: What 'Alter Ego' Signals
The album title Alter Ego is precise in ways that repay attention. It acknowledges that the artist performing on this record exists in relationship to a prior identity — LISA as a member of BLACKPINK, one of the most globally recognized K-pop groups of the past decade — while asserting that this identity is distinct and self-authored. BLACKPINK remains one of the most commercially significant acts in K-pop history, and LISA's individual profile within the group — as the group's main dancer and one of its most globally followed members — means she carries both the benefit and the weight of that association into her solo work.
Alter Ego's fifteen-track runtime and its guest roster — which includes Rosalía, Tyla, Future, and Megan Thee Stallion alongside Doja Cat and RAYE — describe an artist who is actively positioning herself at the intersection of multiple global music markets rather than targeting a single demographic. The hip-hop and trap elements on the album speak to listeners who followed her through "ROCKSTAR"; the disco-inflected pop of "Born Again" speaks to the Doja Cat and RAYE fanbases; the cross-genre structure as a whole describes a debut album that is trying to establish range rather than consolidate a single identity.
The commercial infrastructure is in place to support that range. LLOUD's RECA Records partnership gives "Born Again" the distribution reach that a self-released track from a newly independent artist would lack, and LISA's existing social media footprint — hundreds of millions of combined followers across platforms — ensures that the release will register immediately in streaming data regardless of radio airplay or traditional media coverage.
What to Expect When 'Born Again' Drops
"Born Again" releases on February 6 at 7 PM ET. For listeners coming to the track from LISA's BLACKPINK-era output or from her "ROCKSTAR" single, the disco-pop production framework will be the most immediate point of difference. For listeners who follow RAYE, the song will arrive as a familiar tonal space — RAYE has consistently worked in the emotional register of self-assertion and recovery, and her co-writing credit here suggests that the song's lyrical architecture reflects her instincts as much as LISA's or Doja Cat's.
The critical question is whether the song functions as a cohesive three-way collaboration rather than a marketed co-sign. Each of the three artists brings a genuinely distinct aesthetic to the project, and the post-breakup empowerment theme is flexible enough to accommodate all three voices if the production lets each artist's section breathe independently. The disco-electropop framework supports that structural approach better than hip-hop or pure R&B would, which is presumably why it was chosen. In the months following this release, "Born Again" would go on to establish itself as the most commercially successful single from Alter Ego in several key markets — a result that, on February 6, remains to be earned but is not difficult to anticipate given the combination of names on the track.
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저작권자 © KEnterHub 무단전재 및 재배포, AI학습 및 활용 금지
Entertainment Journalist · KEnterHub
Entertainment journalist specializing in K-Pop, K-Drama, and Korean celebrity news. Covers artist comebacks, drama premieres, award shows, and fan culture with in-depth reporting and analysis.
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