JoJo Would Like to Offer a Demonstration

At moments, JoJo’s newest single “Demonstrate” echoes her persona in the early 2000s, when she became a pop novelty with “(Leave) Get Out”—her assertive voice and her passionate delivery, which so charmed us when she was 13, have both matured nicely. But with its R&B and techno influences, “Demonstrate” stresses just how far she’s come since her 2004 hit. JoJo is no longer the teenage starlet who rode early fame to sell millions of albums (she broke the record for the youngest solo artist to have a number-one single in America). If there was any doubt left that now she’s a bona fide grown-up, every lyric in what is undeniably a straight-up sex anthem—”I can let my body explain… You just need to come over,” she purrs—should clear it right up.

JoJo’s been back on the pop radar since last year, when, seemingly out of the blue, she offered up a surprisingly affecting reimagined cover of Drake’s hit “Marvin’s Room,” which offered a female perspective on his original lyrics. It’s all enough to make us optimistic that JoJo might follow in the footsteps of our other favorite teenybopper-turned-legitimate-pop-artist: Robyn.

“Demonstrate” is the second single to be officially released from JoJo’s third album, Jumping Trains (the first, “Disaster,” broke last fall), which was announced in 2007 and originally slated for release in 2008. Obviously, that didn’t happen: long-lasting issues between her and her record companies put off the album for several years, during which dozens of her songs were leaked online. But with this release, word of the full album hitting stores this year suddenly doesn’t seem so far-fetched.