Holy F---‘Death to Pop Music’: Demi Lovato Is Back With Her 8th Album ‘HOLY FVCK’: Album, Lyric Breakdown

‘FREAK’

The opening track to the album is one of Demi’s angrier ones, as “FREAK” addresses the hate she’s been receiving since coming out as nonbinary. “I started seeing, in my Instagram comments, people being really hateful,” Demi told Morning Edition‘s Leila Fadel in August 2022. With the opening track, she hoped to be “taking the power back” from the trolls, among others.

In an eerie, carnival-esque tune, Demi sing, “Get your tickets to the freak show, baby / Stеp right up to watch the freaks go crazy.”

‘Skin of My Teeth’

“Skin of My Teeth,” which was originally released in June 2022, speaks on Demi’s experience with addiction and her near-death experience overdosing back in 2018.

“I left treatment with incredible friends, each time that I’ve gone, and I’ve gone several times. That’s not a secret. But each time I’ve left with incredible friends, incredible insight, and into who they are and how we all struggled were one and the same,” she explains of the song. “And I wanted to make an anthem for everyone that I knew, everyone I don’t know, and for myself about this is what addiction is.”

‘SUBSTANCE’

“SUBSTANCE” is Demi’s second single off HOLY FVCK and explains their thoughts on how “we live in a world where nothing is real anymore,” she commented on Genius. “There’s so much that’s lacking substance, from the content that we intake to the activities we do in our normal lives.”

‘EAT ME (feat. Royal & the Serpent)

“I know the part I’ve played before, I know the shit that I’ve ignored,” she sings in the chorus. “I know the girl that you adored, she’s dead, it’s time to f–king mourn.”

The song talks about taking the power back over what people think of you. “I wanted to write a song basically about how I’m tired of spoon-feeding myself to the public,” Demi explained via HOLY FVCK’s website. “This is who I am, take it or leave it.”

‘HOLY FVCK’

The title track has religious undertones like much of the album, as “HOLY FVCK”  describes a handful of oxymorons regarding religion and vulgarity at the same time. “I’m a serpent in the garden, I am truth and I am darkness,” she sings. “I’m an angel, I’m a demon. Just depends on what you’re feeling.”

“The writing process for this song was really fun because there’s some (I don’t want to get in trouble for saying this) religious undertones to it,” Demi wrote via HOLY FVCK’s website. “Because ‘holy’ is religious and ‘fuck’ is not clearly, it was very tongue and cheek and I had a lot of fun writing this song with my co-writers. It was very ‘Oh my god I can’t believe I’m sayin this.'”

’29’

Demi explained the meaning behind her newest song ’29’  on Zane Lowe at Apple 1, which seemingly targets ex Wilmer Valderrama, who was 29 years old when he first started dating 17-year-old Demi in 2010.

“When I turned 29, I remember I was on vacation and I just realized I’m 29 now, and it put things into perspective. It put everything into perspective. And I’m very careful with the way that I answer these questions because I feel like the song says it all. I don’t have to say too much, to be honest, but turning 29 was a huge eye opener for me.”

Demi added, “And then, going into treatment and having realizations led to my transformation, my release of the emotion that was put into this song. I would be lying if I said I didn’t have a ton of anxiety about putting out this song. I just said, ‘I have to go for this. I have to own my truth.’ Yeah. And I do still walk that line very finely. I’ve learned that sometimes saying less is more. And it’s taken me to 30 years old to maybe learn that, but here I am approaching the way that I express myself differently in front of the media because it’s okay to have boundaries.”

‘HAPPY ENDING’

The track is about feeling hopeless in life, worrying that you might die before receiving your happy ending.

‘HEAVEN’

“HEAVEN” is another religiously undertoned track in HOLY FVCK.

“My faith is … My spirituality is based in energy,” Demi explained to Zane Lowe. “I was raised Christian and I went to this big, fancy megachurch and saw a lot of things that I didn’t like, felt outcasted. When I moved to California, [I] kept going to church, but then kept hearing things that were not okay because I was figuring myself out and I’m like, ‘How are you going to tell me who I should and should not love and be attracted to?'”

She continued, “I was thinking of all the things that have suppressed me in my life. Whether it be relationships, whether it be people of my past team, or whether it be the church. I wanted to take my power back. And I was like, I have my own sex toy. I’m not ashamed of this anymore. So I was like, it. I’m going to write this song about this Bible verse. And it’s going to be called heaven because I’m going to hell because it feels like heaven.”

‘CITY OF ANGELS’

“It’s basically about being in L.A., being bored but wanting to have new experiences and once again, it’s a very sexually charged song,” Demi explained via HOLY FVCK’s website. “It’s like ‘I want you to make me scream at The Roxy,’ I basically want to experience L.A. like it’s new… from different angles.”

‘BONES’

“BONES” is literally just a play on the saying, “Wanting to jump your bones” — which is basically just a lustful way of saying you want someone as a lover.

Demi sings in the chorus, “Let me jump your bones, start to lose control. Taking off your clothes, no one has to know.”

‘WASTED’

“It’s no secret to people that I’ve struggled with addiction and hard drugs,” Demi told Apple Music. “I wanted to write a song that’s about saying there’s no high that compares to being high off of you which is this song that you think is about getting wasted but it’s actually about falling in love and having the best high of your life from someone else, not from drugs.”

‘COME TOGETHER’

Demi explained on Apple 1, “If you listen closely to the lyrics of this song, you will realize this is actually not a song just about unifying and joining together as one. Much like many other songs on this album, this is a very sexually focused track.”

The singer explained her favorite line is “Got me closer to the edge than ever/We both want it, but we don’t surrender/And we can make this last forever/But paradise is even better when we come…together.”

She added, “The hook of this song flows very well together, and I think it is open-ended in the way that you can perceive it however you want to.”

‘DEAD FRIENDS’

Demi explained the meaning behind their song “Dead Friends” in an interview with Zane Lowe.

“I’ve made friends of all ages. I’ve lost friends that were around my age, and those hurt so deeply because we’ve been in the trenches together,” she explained. “I had a lot of survivor’s guilt after my overdose because there was right after that Mac Miller died and it just put everything into perspective for me of that could have been you, that almost was you, and how are you going to live your life now? And it affected me a lot. People that shaped your childhood, or people that have been influential to your work, or even people that I didn’t know their music, but knew who they were, it puts things into perspective.”

‘HELP ME (feat. Dead Sara)’

“I wanted to write a song that was empowering and kind of like a clap-back to anybody on the internet that thinks they know what’s best for me,” Demi explained on Apple 1. “There are so many people that have opinions and tell me what I should do and how to be and how to act and this song was basically like, “’No…I’m not gonna listen to what you have to say, I’m gonna do me.'”

‘FEED’

“It’s just like a reminder that we all have good and bad inside of us – positivity, negativity – and it’s what you choose,” Demi wrote via the HOLY FVCK website. “Do you choose to be a pessimist or do you choose to be an optimist? And we choose on a daily basis. It’s a reminder that like, I’m in the driver seat and every day, I get to decide what direction my life goes in.”

‘4 EVER 4 ME’

“Well obviously the song is about falling in love with someone,” Demi explained simply to Zane Lowe. “I actually haven’t written love songs and a long time. I don’t think that … If I go through my catalog, there’s maybe like three or four love songs in the past few albums … but actually writing a song about, ‘Hey, I’m in love with you. I found it.’ That has not existed in a lot of my music. And I started feeling these feelings and I was like, ‘I have to get them out of my chest.’ And I wanted to write a song that was inspired by Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls … and I wrote it and my whole heart is in that song.”