The 2020s File Feature
Demons
Demons: Doja Cat's Dark Turn on ScarletThere are moments in a pop career when an artist decides to stop being comfortable. For Doja Cat, the summer of 2023 w…
01 The Story
Demons: Doja Cat's Dark Turn on Scarlet
There are moments in a pop career when an artist decides to stop being comfortable. For Doja Cat, the summer of 2023 was one of those moments. After years of building a fanbase through viral wit, playful choreography, and radio-friendly hooks, she walked into the release of her album Scarlet with something harder to define: a willingness to alienate, to confound, to shed the persona that made her famous. The pop press noticed. The stans debated. And the music landed somewhere genuinely strange and compelling.
The Artist at a Crossroads
By 2023, Doja Cat's commercial trajectory had been extraordinary. Planet Her produced multiple top-ten hits including "Kiss Me More" and "Need to Know", and her live performances had become spectacles of glamour and controlled chaos. Yet the lead-up to Scarlet was marked by public statements that signaled a rupture with her own fanbase. She was open about wanting to distance herself from earlier work, and the music she was crafting reflected that restlessness. "Demons" arrived as one of the most pointed expressions of that shift: a track that replaced bubbly hooks with something coarser, more confrontational, less interested in pleasing.
Sound and Production
The production on "Demons" leans into dark, hypnotic textures. The beat feels excavated rather than constructed, heavy with low-end pressure and an atmosphere that suits the lyrical territory. Doja's delivery here is not the melodic acrobatics of her earlier hits; she adopts a cadence that is blunter, more measured, letting the words hit with weight. The sonic palette mirrors the album's broader aesthetic: less shimmer, more shadow. For longtime fans expecting a sequel to Planet Her, this was a deliberate redirection. The rap-forward approach pointed back to her earlier SoundCloud years, before the pop machine had fully claimed her.
The Billboard Run
On the commercial side, "Demons" charted modestly, which was entirely in keeping with its character as a provocation rather than a pitch. It debuted on the Hot 100 at number 46 on September 16, 2023, reflecting the considerable reach of Doja Cat's audience, who showed up even for her most left-field material. The song spent two weeks on the chart, peaking at that same debut position before slipping away. The chart run was never going to rival those of Planet Her's radio staples, and no one at the label or in the artist's camp seemed to be pretending otherwise. The accompanying music video accumulated over 38 million YouTube views, a number that speaks to the genuine curiosity surrounding this chapter of her career.
The Meaning Behind the Shift
Lyrically, "Demons" finds Doja grappling with the darker impulses she sees in herself: the reckless appetites, the antisocial edges, the parts of a personality that don't play well in public. It is less a confessional than an acknowledgment, a way of saying that the polished surface the music industry rewards is only one layer of a more complicated human being. In the context of Scarlet as a whole, the song functions as a thesis statement for an artist who had grown tired of performing ease. Pop music is full of carefully managed revelations; this one had the texture of something unmanaged.
Legacy and Context
Whether "Demons" is remembered as a turning point or a detour in Doja Cat's catalogue depends on what comes next. What is already clear is that it demonstrated her willingness to spend commercial capital on creative integrity, to put out something uncompromising even when safer choices were available. In a pop landscape that constantly rewards familiarity and punishes deviation, that kind of defiance earns its own kind of respect from the people who value it. Press play, let the dark textures wash over you, and decide for yourself which version of this artist you want to follow.
The cultural and critical conversation that surrounded Scarlet helped ensure that even its less commercially successful tracks found substantial audiences over time. "Demons" benefited from that sustained attention, accumulating streams and views well beyond its brief chart window.
“Demons” — Doja Cat's singular moment on the 2020s charts.
02 Song Meaning
The Meaning of "Demons" by Doja Cat
An artist who built her name on wit and accessibility choosing to write about her own darkness is a provocative act. "Demons" is Doja Cat in candid conversation with the parts of herself that don't get invited to the pop radio party, and the conversation is more uncomfortable than most pop confessionals allow themselves to be.
Naming the Unglamorous Self
The song's central subject is the impulse toward self-destruction, or at least self-disruption. Doja uses the word "demons" not in a supernatural sense but as shorthand for the difficult, appetitive, boundary-testing aspects of her personality. The framing is neither apologetic nor celebratory; she observes these qualities with an almost clinical detachment, as though cataloguing rather than confessing. That distance is part of what makes the song interesting: it doesn't perform vulnerability in the way that most chart-friendly introspection does.
Authenticity Over Image
A significant thread running through the song is the tension between public persona and private reality. Pop fame constructs a character that must be maintained: a version of you that exists for the cameras and the streaming algorithms. "Demons" refuses that transaction. The lyrics insist that she is something messier and more contradictory than her radio-friendly catalog had suggested, and that this messiness deserves acknowledgment rather than concealment. In 2023, that was an act of genuine risk-taking.
The Cultural Moment of 2023
The song arrived in a year when the conversation around celebrity mental health and authenticity was particularly loud. Artists across genres were publicly discussing burnout, the cost of maintaining a public self, and the ways the industry extracted creative labor while polishing off the rough edges that make people real. Doja Cat's declaration of inner conflict landed in that context with a specificity that made it feel personal rather than performative. Listeners who had followed her through the more playful years of her career found here a different kind of intimacy.
Lyrical Texture and Tone
The imagery in the song draws on appetite, excess, and the seductive pull of bad decisions. There is no redemption arc on offer; the track doesn't arrive at a resolution where the demons are defeated or integrated into a healthier whole. That irresolution is precisely the point. Life as Doja Cat describes it here is ongoing negotiation, not resolved narrative. The refusal of easy comfort is what separates "Demons" from the kind of confessional pop that tidies itself up for mass consumption.
Why It Resonated
For a segment of her audience, this was the Doja Cat they had suspected existed behind the memes and the viral moments. The song gave permission to engage with the harder material without requiring a personal crisis to justify it. In the broader landscape of 2020s pop, where vulnerability is fashionable but rarely unguarded, "Demons" managed to feel genuinely unmediated.
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