Sabrina Carpenter is funny – funny on purpose. A lot of people have suddenly realized this at the same time. This isn’t news, though, to people who saw her steal scenes as a snarky tween in Disney’s sitcom Girl Meets World. (The character-actor-to-pop-girlie pipeline is real!) Nor is it news to people who’ve attended Carpenter’s shows recently, where she’s been cranking out raunchy city-themed outros to her single “Nonsense” for almost two years. My sense of humor is juvenile enough to appreciate bars like “Only use my mouth, that’s a cappella” or “Then he made me come to Brazil,” but my favorite of the lot isn’t sexual at all: “Calgary, you do not rhyme with jack shit!”

Summer is the most pop of seasons, yet as far as pop albums in July go… there isn’t much! There are albums by pop-adjacent artists, like Porter Robinson or Clairo or Childish Gambino. There are albums that would have been big pop records a decade ago, like OneRepublic or Eminem (boy, has he tried). Culture-capturing event albums, though? Basically nil.

Is chaos really chaos if you summon it on purpose? A few years ago, former Fifth Harmony member Camila Cabello went about the business of being a pop ingenue with determined seriousness and as much trying-hard as possible. She gave interviews about how she’d rather go out to dinner with her mom than attend an awards-show afterparty and how she never swore in her songs because she wanted to be a good role model for her sisters. Her singles, even when they didn’t sound theatrical, nevertheless had Broadway-audition energy: lots of effortful belting and vocal runs and romantic-lead scenarios. She was cast as Cinderella, which made sense. Now Cabello is showing up to Fallon interviews with Donatella Versace hair and telegenically irreverent stories about weekslong debauchery. More shockingly to pop heads, she pureed her showy, X Factor-trained voice into hyperpop goo on a blown-out, Gucci Mane-interpolating lead single that many people found genuinely offputting. (It has yet to crack the Billboard top 80.)

Like the subject of its lead single, Dua Lipa’s Radical Optimism comes and it goes, a quick pop workout that immediately does a Houdini-like escape act from staying power. The record is a frustrating listen: an album that it’s hard to find anything really wrong with, that’s packed to capacity with inarguable bangers, but that feels so, so inessential.

(Yes, it’s a Taylor Swift column. The reason is simple: This is a pop column, and every artist in the industry knows better than to release a pop album the same week as Taylor Swift. What else is there to write about? Pearl Jam? UB40? Raffi?)

The first thing to know about Tyla, Johannesburg’s biggest pop ingenue, is that she has had at least one literal dream about her Spotify numbers going up. The second thing is that she’s proud of that fact. She is strikingly direct about her ambitions, and she consciously (and apparently, subconsciously!) goes about them with the focus of a guided missile.

Every few years, pop music rediscovers the acoustic guitar. Beats give way to twang, stilettos give way to suspenders, and Adult Hits radio stations rejoice in their new content.

January is traditionally a slow time for albums. Singles are another story; the beginning of the year can be a quite lucrative time for pop artists to drop their lead singles. Perhaps it’s the whole new-year-new-era thing. Perhaps it’s because a January single release sets up nicely the spring album release, then the summer album tour. But to illustrate: For over half of 2023, the #1 spot on the Hot 100 was occupied by either Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers” or Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night,” both of which were released in January.

December is always a bit of a dead zone for big pop albums, unless it’s 2013 and your name is Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. So for this month’s column…

The thing you have to understand about PinkPantheress’s Heaven Knows is that it contains a (synth) harp-filled song about an unrequited crush metaphorically murdering her, called “Ophelia.” The album has lots of songs about dying for love, actually, with the musical palette to match. Dramatic quasi-Gregorian chants introduce the romantically fatalist “Capable Of Love”; dramatic quasi-organ and melted hearts populate opener “Another Life”; dramatic quasi-panpipe and Linkin Park piano loops permeate the aptly titled “Feelings.” This variety of teenage melodrama should feel familiar to anyone whose Internet browser has ever autocompleted the URL “xanga.com” or anyone hoarding leftover makeup from a high-school emo phase. And if that’s you, PinkPantheress was like you too, as she told Alternative Press: “Emo lyrics are just so theatrical and camp and over the top. It’s never just, ‘I’m having a bad day’ — it’s, ‘I’m gonna dieeeee!’”

Troye Sivan has good taste. Let’s start at home: In 2021, the Australian singer showcased his modest yet extremely interior-designed Melbourne abode via a meticulous Architectural Digest spread and accompanying YouTube walkthrough that has tallied nearly 9 million views. (To put those views into rough context, that’s about double RuPaul’s home and half the Barbie Dreamhouse.)

We’re somehow three-quarters of the way into this fast-moving year. Out with the summer jams, in with the fall vibes. And hey, speaking of in with the new: I’m taking over as Stereogum’s pop columnist! You may have read my writing here – most recently on Ariana Grande – or on Pitchfork, Spin, the late, great Village Voice, or the late, great Singles Jukebox. (I’m noticing a trend here, but let’s move past it.) I also, as one does, have a Substack.

If you follow K-pop – or the wider pop universe – then you may have noticed how a certain overseas quintet have dominated the conversation this summer. South Korean girl group NewJeans are barely one year old, and they’ve only released a handful of tracks. Still, Minji, Danielle, Haerin, Hanni, and Hyein, who are all between ages 15 and 19, are everywhere.

Let me begin by saying that I have not watched The Idol. Between the eviscerating reviews and an (allegedly) toxic filming environment that resulted in phrases like “sexual torture porn” being bandied about, I figured it was best to not waste my time. There’s so much good TV out there, and I don’t like hate-watching unless I’m getting some level of enjoyment out of the experience. For example, I have been hate-watching The Bachelor for approximately five wonderful years. Is it heteronormative garbage that refuses to evolve or address race with any nuance whatsoever? Yes. Do I watch it anyway? Also yes. Because I’m a *cue Bouncing Souls* hopeless romantic, and the Bachelor franchise scratches an itch.

Last summer, I dedicated this column to talking about how a now-historic TV-to-music sync — Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” via Stranger Things season four — vaulted the famously camera-shy singer back onto the Billboard charts. That column mainly focused on “bringback culture,” or the instance of an older piece of music re-entering the zeitgeist through a successful screen sync, samples and interpolations, or being meme’d on TikTok. Today, I’m here to talk about a similar phenomenon with a parallel history to “bringback culture”: the cover song, and where it’s at today.

Growing up in the United States, a country that likes to tell itself stories about it being the center of the world, I cannot say that I grew up listening to Mexican regional music. Part of this is purely circumstantial and cultural; my own background is Jewish, so, when they weren’t spinning Tom Petty and Carole King CDs, my parents filled our home with klezmer CDs and songs performed in Hebrew. My best shot at hearing popular regional Mexican music would’ve been through Selena Quintanilla. I was still a little young for Selena, being about eight when she was tragically killed. Otherwise, I might have heard a little Joan Baez — but that would be it.

As quickly as a pop song can go viral, sometimes it’s fascinating to see one do a slow burn. A prime example of this would be Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts,” which was originally released in 2017, blew up in 2019 (partially thanks to a placement in the Netflix movie Someone Great), and then spent another 17 weeks climbing the Billboard Hot 100 to #1. Nigerian performer Rema (real name Divine Ikubor) hasn’t had to wait quite as long with his swaying Afrobeats single “Calm Down,” which was released in early 2022 as the second single from his debut album Rave & Roses — but a little more than a year later, Rema’s “Calm Down” remix featuring Selena Gomez has become his first Hot 100 top-10 hit.

At the risk of sounding condescending to someone with whom I only have a parasocial relationship, I’m proud of Miley Cyrus. Any time someone in my vicinity has dismissed her as, I don’t know, day-old Disney channel bread with a chronically bouncy butt, I’d hold up my hand, like, STOP! I will not hear blasphemy.

I’ve written about TikTok’s lottery-like rags-to-riches fantasy in this column before — it’s what YouTube’s head of catalog Ryan Thornton once described to Billboard as the “potential of any song to go viral.” About five years into TikTok’s mainstream reign, countless unknown artists have benefited from that literal overnight virality and parlayed that success into also-viral dance challenges, lucrative brand partnerships, major-label deals, commercial radio play, chart dominance, enough Spotify streams to actually get paid, and then some.

The Sam Smith of 2023 has come a long way from the Sam Smith who sang on Disclosure’s 2012 hit “Latch,” then parlayed that success into 2014’s Grammy-winning neo-soul triumph In The Lonely Hour. The Sam Smith of yesteryear was a balladeer, a brokenhearted sentimentalist praying for salvation by way of romantic love. Three albums later, that Smith is still here, but they’ve shed a few layers and come bursting out on the other side, liberated and dancing, relishing in their freedom, sexuality, personhood, and maximalist artistry. The Smith who made Gloria, out today, is confident, inspired, and excited for the future.

As a music writer, I don’t actually sit around much comparing current years to previous years — I don’t even do that very much in life. I’m more interested in looking ahead to whatever is coming next. So when I do look back, it’s mostly just to savor standout songs and/or albums that came out X number of years ago, and there are always plenty of those, regardless of whether they came out last year or 30 years ago. This is just my long-winded way of saying that I love every year’s music output equally. That said: 2022 unleashed some damn good pop albums.

Is it weird that a Jewish person who wasn’t allowed to listen to Christmas music growing up is now getting paid to write about Christmas music? As the Cure say, I don’t care if you don’t — life is full of delicious ironies. Just don’t tell my parents.

In 2011, when Charlie Puth was a sophomore at Berklee College Of Music, he was flown out to Los Angeles and plopped down on the Ellen Show. Up until then, Puth had been actively trying to replicate Justin Bieber’s path to stardom by uploading songs to YouTube, which eventually led to his winning a Perez Hilton-sponsored contest called Can You Sing? After seeing his cover of Adele’s “Someone Like You” (which he performed with Emily Luther), DeGeneres decided to sign both of them to her (now-defunct) label, eleveneleven, and, in subsequent years, bombard her audience with reminders that she discovered him.

“It feels like one big practical joke.” This is LF System’s extremely understandable, extremely self-aware take on the astronomical success of their hit song “Afraid To Feel,” which just ended the UK’s longest unbroken run at #1 this year. “Afraid To Feel” — a Pure Disco™ bop that features a prominent sample of Silk’s 1979 track “I Can’t Stop (Turning You On)” — has beat out Encanto’s “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” on the Official UK Singles Chart, and it’s apparently the longest-running dance #1 of the decade at eight straight weeks. “Afraid To Feel” repeatedly held off Beyoncé’s “Break My Soul,” which peaked at #2 on the same chart and currently sits at #4. It also managed to topple maybe the year’s best-known bringback, Kate Bush.

Maybe you’ve heard, but this longtime weekly column is about to go monthly. While I’m excited to mix up my contributions to this site, I definitely couldn’t let a pop-column pivot take place without a long-overdue tribute to Bad Bunny, who has no doubt enjoyed the most successful year in pop so far. In fact, last week Billboard declared that the Latin trap / reggaeton innovator’s 2022 album, Un Verano Sin Ti, has overtaken the once-unassailable Encanto soundtrack as the year’s most popular album in the US. Also this past week, former President Obama added Bad Bunny and Bomba Estereo‘s “Ojitos Lindos” to his 2022 summer playlist. Not bad for a start, and the rabbit hole goes much deeper than that.

In the years since Lizzo released her major-label debut album, Cuz I Love You, she has achieved a level of household-name status most artists can only dream about. Singles like “Truth Hurts” and “Juice” exploded on every listening platform and soundtracked movies and commercials. Lizzo herself hit the big screen, appearing in Hustlers alongside Cardi B and JLo. She’s won Grammys, hosted a reality show (Amazon Prime Video’s Watch Out For The Big Grrrls), launched a size-inclusive shapewear line (Yitty), and been hailed as a symbol for body positivity. Though she’s been hustling in the music biz for at least a decade, Lizzo’s ubiquity is relatively new, and now she’s making the most of it. These days music feels secondary to her empire, like Rihanna with Fenty.

The double (or even triple) album might be thriving, but for a non-household name to release a 34-track album as their major-label debut? That’s pretty audacious. To do something like that, you need a compelling reason. What possible force could be pushing you? For rising country singer Zach Bryan, who released his 34-track American Heartbreak in May, the “why” justifies that level of output. And Bryan hasn’t stopped at 34 songs. On Friday he shared even more new music: a nine-song EP called Summertime Blues.

Conventional wisdom says that anything you put on the internet lives forever, whether it’s a long-buried YouTube video or unearthed LiveJournal entries from 2004. It’s true, the internet has a long memory. And yet artists like sad boi balladeer Joji have been using the medium to reinvent themselves every few years. For Joji, it’s definitely working.

When you’re young — say, under 18 — you have this idea that you’ll eventually cross a threshold and every family-related issue will fade into the background, like the soft hum of white noise. And you won’t have to pay much attention to it, because you’ll be busy doing your own grown-up thing. You’ll be out of the house, all occupied and moved away. But, as Conan Gray lays out on his sophomore album Superache, the arduous stuff you grew up with never goes away; it just shape-shifts as your perspective evolves.

It’s easy to forget that MUNA have been a band for nearly a decade. Three albums in, they’re finally getting their mainstream due, and it couldn’t come at a better time. But before I launch into a whole screed about why MUNA – aka indie-pop trio Katie Gavin, Josette Maskin, and Naomi McPherson — are on their way to becoming full-blown pop and fashion icons via their new, self-titled album, it’s important to look at all of the elements that had to come together in order to make this happen.

In January of this year, music and pop culture writer Ted Gioia wrote an article in The Atlantic titled “Is Old Music Killing New Music?” I think about this piece every time a big TV show nabs a particularly effective needle drop — like Stranger Things did with Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),” which then re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 at #8, becoming Bush’s first top-10 single in the US. (As of today it’s up to a new peak of #4.) Or when TikTok turned Matthew Wilder’s seminal “Break My Stride” into a meme-prank. Or when the platform’s users found and subsequently exploded any number of older songs: Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 classic “Dreams,” Aly & AJ’s 2007 hit “Potential Breakup Song,” Britney Spears’ 2011 cut “Criminal.” It even crosses my mind when artists like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Neil Young sell their catalogs for hundreds of millions.

Once a pop artist becomes successful — like, Grammy-nominated, Hot 100-dominating big — it’s reasonable to assume that they’ll hit a wall. That crash could look like anything: burnout, writer’s block, depression. Think of it this way: If you’re a high-achieving artist with towering dreams, you’re basically on the roller coaster’s lift hill before the kinetic-energy drop. Lots of creators never make it to the downhill part. But for those that do make it to the free fall, there comes an onslaught of new obligations. You have to do press, perform for all the label heads and fans, tourtourtour, become a fashion icon on the side, firm up a social-media presence if you don’t already have one, talk to random radio DJs in towns you’ve never heard of. It’s a lot! No wonder after three albums, Post Malone had nothing left to give.

The entertainment industry loves a good story of survival. The more compelling, the better. Well, if emerging country singer-songwriter Nate Smith has anything going for him, it’s a really moving backstory — a phoenix-y one about endurance and optimism in the face of tragedy. I’m not even being hyperbolic: Across the last 15-ish years, Smith’s tried to make it in Nashville multiple times, experienced a divorce, and lost everything he owned in the 2018 Paradise, California Camp Fire, including his guitar. The bio practically writes itself.

At 28, Harry Styles has now been doing this long enough that he’s starting to compare himself to the younger set of pop stars. In a deep-diving interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, the former One Directioner spoke about observing Billie Eilish when she first came up and thinking, “I’m not that young anymore.” (And he must have only been in his mid-20s when he thought that!) “For a while it was, how do you play that game of remaining exciting?”

Sometimes I feel like I’m missing a pop cultural chip because I never had the Disney Channel growing up. One time, many years ago, I was interviewing for a pretty high-profile job at a major pop-music website. I wanted that job so badly that for the edit test I 100% researched and faked a lifetime’s worth of knowledge about Demi Lovato, who I had never seen on Camp Rock or Sonny With A Chance, just like I had never seen Miley Cyrus on Hannah Montana or Selena Gomez on Wizards Of Waverly Place. (I ended up getting the job, so my 24-hour crash course paid off in the end.) This is all to say that I still have a note of being out of my depth any time I go to discuss a Disney or former Disney star crossing over into the mainstream conversation, simply due to the contextual history I grew up not having.

When a 20-year-old Sigrid first showed up in 2017 with the glass-ceiling-breakout anthem “Don’t Kill My Vibe,” penned in response to a patronizing writing session with some older male writers, the Norwegian pop singer correctly concluded that those men were so quick to dismiss her abilities because they probably, on some level, felt threatened by her. That depth of you’re-projecting-on-me insight was so on-point, so specific and relatable to anyone NOT a straight, white man, it’s no wonder Sigrid shot to fame as quickly as she did.

Whether we like it or not, popular music has a long, well-documented history of copycatting. I’m not referring to plagiarism or copyright lawsuits, but rather one-begets-the-other artistic inspiration. These patterns exist everywhere, from Elvis (however problematically) drawing influence from Black rock/blues greats B. B. King, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, Ivory Joe Hunter, and Fats Domino to the Beatles looking to Buddy Holly and Little Richard. When I was growing up, during the Y2K pop music explosion, superstars like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson, and Mandy Moore sprang up one after the other like the cover of an Animorphs book, with each new act bringing something sliiiightly different to the mix while being marketed to audiences in one endless “RIYL” loop.

Who can really say for sure exactly how it happened, but WILLOW is everywhere. It’s a phenomenon occurring both slowly over time and seemingly all at once. Nearly a year out from her pop-punk pièce de résistance lately I feel EVERYTHING, the youngest Smith (as if you need reminding, WILLOW is the progeny of Jada Pinkett-Smith and ex-Academy member Will Smith and the sister of Jaden) has maintained a level of ubiquity that far exceeds a typical album cycle, and it no doubt sets the stage for a high-profile career, whether it’s in pop music or elsewhere.

If you pay attention to pop music on a global scale, you almost certainly already know about Brazilian pop star Anitta, who just released her fifth studio album, Versions Of Me, and whose ultra-catchy single “Envolver” recently made her the first artist from Brazil to hit #1 on Billboard’s Global Excluding US chart. Friday, she became the first Brazilian solo artist to perform at Coachella. But, as any recent profile will tell you, it’s taken Anitta (born Larissa de Macedo Machado) a full decade to achieve global recognition.

In 2019, I attended a listening session and press junket around Camila Cabello’s sophomore album Romance. It was late fall, just a few months after the former Fifth Harmony singer had publicly entered into a relationship with fellow pop singer Shawn Mendes. As I and a group of other writers squeezed into a small studio booth with Cabello, she bookended each track with passionate commentary around what the song meant to her, and who it was about. Most of those songs were about her relationship with Mendes, and the album’s amorous tone was reflected on its cover art, with Cabello in a flowing red gown.