The Masked Singer 2026 is officially back, and Series 7 kicked off in headline-grabbing style tonight (January 3) with Goldfish being revealed as none other than pop star Anne-Marie.
The ITV favourite is shaking things up this year, introducing bands to the competition for the very first time. Saturday night saw Goldfish take to the stage alongside No Trout, while Sunday’s episode (January 4) will spotlight Emperor Penguin and the Antarctic Funkeys.
Goldfish performed with the band No Trout during tonight’s episode (Credit: ITV)
Goldfish on The Masked Singer
Goldfish had the honour of opening the new series, launching into a performance of Rosé and Bruno Mars’ hit APT.
Clues quickly started to stack up. When host Joel Dommett drew attention to one of No Trout’s band members wearing black belts, judge Maya Jama was straight in with her guess, pointing out that Anne-Marie famously holds a black belt in Karate.
As the judges locked in their final thoughts, Mo Gilligan went with Liberty X star Michelle Heaton. Davina McCall suggested Paloma Faith, while Jonathan Ross threw Ray Winstone into the mix.
Maya, however, stuck to her guns and named Anne-Marie, a call that proved spot on when Goldfish was unmasked.
And it wasn’t just the panel who were confident. Plenty of viewers watching at home were already convinced they knew exactly who was behind the costume.
Anne-Marie was unveiled as Goldfish (Credit: ITV)
‘I knew it was Anne–Marie’
“Anne-Marie was possibly the most obvious unmasking ever. I knew Goldfish was Anne-Marie,” one user wrote on X.
“Turns out it was that obvious! Anne-Marie is Goldfish!” another person shared.
“I knew it was Anne–Marie, she was so easy to guess. First one of the season, I know she’s not a contestant,” a third remarked.
“That was the easiest guess ever,” a fourth said.
Following the initial clues released earlier this week, many fans had already predicted Anne-Marie well before the series even began.
After her reveal, Anne-Marie treated the audience to a performance of her hit 2002, before taking a seat on the panel for the remainder of the episode.
While some women like to at least slightly pretend they would “emancipate themselves” if they “could” from a toxic relationship, some simply like to own up to loving the pain. Especially in song form. For the past decade or so, both Rihanna and Lana Del Rey have been largely responsible for filling that role. And yet, as both women “mature” (theoretically), each one has “calmed down” and explored more spiritual, “good-natured” themes in their songs of late. For Del Rey, this includes falling prey to the middle-age trap of expressing the desire to just settle down and have kids with someone (hopefully not Jack Donoghue or Evan Winiker or some other out-of-left-field rando). This revealed on such Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd tracks as “The Grants” and “Sweet.” Nonetheless, she still struggles with letting go of her younger self’s input on more usual emotional pain-worshipping fare, namely “Candy Necklace.”
As for Rihanna maybe part of the reason she’s taken a hiatus from music (save for her two singles, “Lift Me Up” and “Born Again” for the Black Panther:Wakanda Forever Soundtrack) is a result of not necessarily wanting to keep talking about how good toxic relationships feel (hear: “Rehab,” “Russian Roulette,” “Love the Way You Lie” and “Love on the Brain,” to name a few). After all, she’s presently in a “healthy” one with A$AP Rocky, spurred by having two children with him. Even so, considering both LDR and RiRi are like a sonic version of the Safdie Brothers’ Heaven Knows What, it’s difficult to branch out from the trope they established for themselves. That’s why Del Rey mostly hasn’t and why Rihanna has opted to become a business mogul—to avoid singing about topics that are perhaps not what people want to hear (i.e., being in love with someone stable and supportive). Because, for as much as she was ridiculed for her relationship with Chris Brown (and going back to him a second time after he physically assaulted her), listeners couldn’t deny their love of lyrics such as, “It’s like I checked into rehab, and baby, you’re my disease.” To be sure, the idea of being unable to kick a toxic addiction in the form of a love interest has been romanticized for centuries (just look at Catherine and Heathcliff). Rihanna has been able to capitalize on that repeatedly, especially after she stopped denying rumors of her romance with Brown, initially saying things like, “We are best friends, honestly, like brother and sister.” Sure, like brother and sister if they were Finneas and Billie. Or Angelina and James. Anyway, this pattern of starting out as “besties” with a guy before finally letting him into her boudoir continued with Drake and A$AP, the former being jettisoned perhaps because he was just too wholesome for Rihanna’s taste.
Focusing on her new family and her various Fenty-related business endeavors has thus made Rihanna lose touch with her songstress “baddie” side, while Del Rey, too, shuffles in the limbo of her early persona and the one in which she tries to become this generation’s Joni (Mitchell) meets Joan (Baez). So, possibly sensing a void once wholly occupied by these two queens of championing “it hurts so bad but feels so good” relationships, Anne-Marie has entered the fray with her latest single, “Unhealthy.” Already coming in hot this year with singles like “Sad Bitch,” “Expectations” and “Baby Don’t Hurt Me,” “Unhealthy” marks the fourth single that will appear on her third album of the same name this summer. Not only that, but it somewhat ironically features Miss “Man! I Feel Like A Woman” herself, Shania Twain. And yet, Twain’s notedness for being an “independent woman” took a while to cultivate after releasing “You’re Still the One,” also from her 1997 album, Come On Over.
You might say that it, too, turned out to be a song about toxic love—once Mutt Lange eventually ended up cheating on her with her best friend, Marie-Anne (not Anne-Marie) Thiébaud (truly, the stuff of country song clichés, and also a large part of the plot driving Hope Floats starring Sandra Bullock). Weirder still, though, was Twain ending up with the now ex-husband of Marie-Anne, Frédéric Thiébaud. Meanwhile, Marie-Anne is still with Mutt. So, in the end, it was a happy little “wife swap” story, wasn’t it? The sort of story Del Rey (or Taylor Swift during folklore/evermore period) might talk about on one of her songs. The point is, the fact that Twain makes a cameo on “Unhealthy” just goes to show that, no matter how far a woman comes or how much “growth” she might have experienced, there’s always room to ruminate on the “beauty” of l’amour toxique.
But before Twain’s verse enters the picture, Anne-Marie opens with, “Well, your love is worse, worse than cigarettes/Even if I had twenty in my hands/Oh, babe, your touch, it hurts more than hangovers/No, that bottle don’t hold the same regret.” Yet, despite knowing all these things vis-à-vis how bad this man is for her, she still can’t—nay, doesn’t want to—let go. In other words, “good dick will imprison you.” Or even slightly adequate dick, these days. With an accompanying visualizer for the song that shows Anne-Marie delighting in some junk food before proceeding to treat her ketchup bottle like an unwieldy splooging penis, we can feel her lack of concern for other people’s opinions as she blithely recounts, “And my mother says that you’re bad for me/Guess she never felt the high we’re on right now/And my father says I should run away/But he don’t know that I just don’t know how.”
In certain respects, it channels the simultaneously parallel and antithetical anthem that is Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” during which she chirps, “My mother says, ‘When you gonna live your life right?’ Oh momma dear, we’re not the fortunate ones/And girls, they wanna have fun” and then adds, “The phone rings, in the middle of the night/My father yells, ‘What you gonna do with your life?’/Oh daddy dear, you know you’re still number one/But girls, they wanna have fun.” And the “fun” Anne-Marie wants to have is with this “bad for her” man (cue the Bridget Jones’ Diary line, “Anne-Marie, wanton sex goddess, with a very bad man between her thighs”). Much like Bonnie Parker, who one could easily imagine singing, while bullets rained down on her and Clyde, “‘Cause even if it kills me, I’ll always take your hand/It’s unhealthy, they just don’t understand/And when thеy try to stop me, just know nobody can/You’re still gon’ be my man.”
Anne-Marie dares to release such a single at a time when it’s not exactly chic to continue such LDR and RiRi stylings in music. Which begs the question of how much a sudden aversion toward #MeToo-oriented notions have gradually started to fall back into favor, even by women themselves (Anne-Marie could very well be talking about her own relationship with Slowthai, for all we know). As for Twain, she confirms the delights of toxicity by chiming in, “Oh, this body high gives me sleepless nights/It’s a million times what any drug could give/And my red eyes, they are twice as wide/It might look like pain, but to me, it’s bliss.”
Perhaps not since Britney Spears singing, “With a taste of your lips, I’m on a ride/You’re toxic, I’m slippin’ under” on her 2004 hit called, what else, “Toxic,” has there been so much pleasure expressed over pain. And, considering some of the other song titles on Unhealthy, including “Psycho,” “Obsessed,” “Kills Me to Love You” and “Cuckoo,” this particular single only adds to the “on-brand” motif. One that someone apparently had to pick up the slack for as Del Rey and Rihanna have started to soften.
As the latest in an increasingly long line (no nightclub pun intended) of songs that have seen fit to extract 90s dance hits for a twenty-first century “update” (though not necessarily improvement), “Baby Don’t Hurt Me” alludes to its origin source in the title. That is to say, Haddaway’s chorus in “What Is Love” that finishes such a weighty question with, “Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me/No more.” But, clearly, Haddaway was hurting enough financially to allow David Guetta, Anne-Marie and Coi Leray to sample his song. Just as Alice Deejay likely was in order to allow Kim Petras and Nicki Minaj to decimate “Better Off Alone.” Unlike the latter duo, however, the trio of “Baby Don’t Hurt Me” saw fit to pay more direct and correlative homage to a song that soundtracked most of the 90s (apart from the Mentos jingle).
Originally released in 1993, the single became an archetype of the Eurodance genre that soon managed to warm the hearts of even the most tasteless and/or grunge-happy (an oxymoron, to be sure) Americans. Three years later, Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan would revive the track with their Saturday Night Live sketch, “The Roxbury Guys.” Playing Doug (Kattan) and Steve Butabi (Ferrell), the brothers’ signature was club-hopping from one L.A. hotspot to another as they struck out with women at every venue (via methods that would be decidedly non-#MeToo kosher today). Often joined by the host of the show, including Jim Carrey, Martin Short and Tom Hanks, the sketch proved popular enough to become fodder for the eighth movie based on an SNL sketch, A Night at the Roxbury (released in 1998). Regardless, the premise wasn’t really “meaty” enough to extend past the one-hour, twenty-two-minute mark. Even so, it left an indelible enough impression on the collaborators of “Baby Don’t Hurt Me,” who open their video, directed by Hannah Lux Davis, in much the same way as A Night at the Roxbury: with splashy club scenes shot in a manner that comes across in a way Cher Horowitz would dub “Noxema commercial”-esque. And, on a side note, Clueless’ director, Amy Heckerling, did co-produce the movie (maybe that’s why both Dan Hedaya, Elisa Donovan and even Twink Kaplan are in it).
As for Doug and Steve, they don’t ever limit their evening to just one club (as Guetta, Anne-Marie and Leray do). This being something we see established when they commence at Billboard Live (before it became The Key Club) at 11:32 p.m., then head to the Mudd Club by 12:16 a.m. Striking out with the women there as well after a botched attempt to impress them with their story of encountering “Breakfast Clubber” Emilio Estevez, they head to the Roxbury, arriving by 1:24 a.m. (but first, they’re pulled over [by Jennifer Coolidge] for speeding while doing their head bobs to “What Is Love,” of course). As Ace of Base’s “Beautiful Life” plays during this scene, A Night at the Roxbury continues to immortalize what club culture in 90s L.A. consisted of. Mainly, waiting in line outside if you weren’t on the guest list. Hence, Doug’s insistence that once he and Steve open their own club, not only will they finally get in, but, “We’re also gonna treat all the outside wannabes just as well as any legendary television star.” Of course, such an egalitarian approach to clubbing wouldn’t take hold until now (when “elitism” in such a milieu has become all but impossible thanks to smartphones)—which is perhaps why Guetta, Anne-Marie and Leray have decided to use this moment to bring Haddaway and its place in A Night at the Roxbury back to the forefront.
Thus, the presence of Doug and Steve-emulative dance moves amid a boxing ring inexplicably appearing on the center of the dance floor as two women stand in their corners waiting to fight…or have a dance-off. But no, turns out, it’s to fight (after all, it speaks to the title of “Baby Don’t Hurt Me”). Meanwhile, Anne-Marie sings, “I want you for the dirty and clean/When you’re wakin’ in your dreams.” A lyric that harkens back to Doug saying, “You can take away our phones, you can take away our keys, but you cannot take away our dreams.” To which Steve adds, “That’s right, ‘cause we’re, like, sleeping when we have them.” Their dream, as mentioned, is to open a nightclub. Something as ostensibly “inclusive” as what appears in the “Baby Don’t Hurt Me” video. And probably something as pain/pleasure-oriented, to boot. After all, the original “What Is Love” is drenched in the tone of a masochist who can’t quit a love that’s obviously emotionally damaging. So when Anne-Marie says, “When you bite my tongue and make me scream…/We are burnin’ at a high degree/And you make me feel like it burns/And it hurts/Maybe that’s part of the rush/This is us.”
The “This is us” of that hurt in A Night at the Roxbury is the growing pains that occur between Doug and Steve, as the latter starts to be more and more seduced by the normie life his overbearing father, Kamehl (Hedaya), wants for him. Complete with marrying Emily Sanderson (Molly Shannon), the daughter of the lighting store owner next door to Kamehl’s fake plant store. Because obviously their marriage would mean a lucrative business merger. But what does that matter to Steve, who really just wants to club all night like Doug?
With “Baby Don’t Hurt Me,” the glory days that furnished being able to have such dreams are briefly glimpsed as, by the end of the video, everyone in the club is doing the signature Butabi brothers head bob to the beat that punctuated dance floors everywhere (without irony) in the mid-90s. In this sense, it’s hard to say if Haddaway owes a greater debt to A Night at the Roxbury or vice versa. Either way, the trio reviving the song here still sees the movie as being inextricably linked to it. One can’t exist without the other, apparently. That might be bad news for Haddaway, but it certainly helps revitalize the ever-dwindling collective memory of the John Fortenberry-directed film so often considered to be the perfect “hokey” pairing with Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (after all, it’s about two “daffy” dames whose lives are also built around clubbing in L.A.).
In the final scenes of “Baby Don’t Hurt Me,” the fighters in the boxing ring have seemingly made peace while Guetta, Anne-Marie and Leray continue their head bobbing elsewhere: in the car. A vehicle that we’re made certain to clock as being a Lyft (thanks to strategic brand name placement). And if, somehow, they all happen to be Lyft drivers (or it’s just Leray, which somehow feels racist), it would be in keeping with the Butabi brothers’ way of life: “projecting” style only right before entering the club…while actually living at home with their parents and barely able to function in the daylight hours that solely condone “rational” behavior.
