A new month is upon us, and in pop in 2025 that means one thing: New sensitive dude just dropped. His name, unfortunately, is sombr. His aesthetic is part indie sleaze, part Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest. Despite his stage name, his music is not really somber; it’s jaunty radio bait that, if not fully rock, is certainly rock-coded. His lyrics aren’t quite somber either, but they’re definitely pained: His album, I Barely Know Her, presents 10 angles on the girl who broke his heart. Unsurprisingly, he gets mobbed by girls both on stage — see last weekend’s VMA PDA — and in person; one imagines that at least some of his fast-growing fanbase was drawn by the seductive pull of “I can fix him.”

Is anybody media trained anymore? Do a YouTube search for your favorite pop star of the decade, and there’s a decent chance you’ll get an exhaustive 30-minute video of every chaotic, unfiltered thing they’ve said or done on camera — at least, unfiltered in the eyes of the person painstakingly compiling the clips. The idea that an artist might engage in a little recreational reputation-torching and blurt out whatever shit at whatever time is becoming less of a professional liability than a status symbol, an aspirational messiness: As media trainer Bill McGowan told The New York Times, “unhinged has become the new authentic.” And just like “authenticity,” it’s a performance and a fantasy; one wonders how it is that, if so many artists are unafraid to ruin their reputations, so few of their reputations seem noticeably ruined.

Few people in pop music have earned a comeback more than Kesha Sebert. For over a decade, her career has been defined by producer and ex-collaborator Lukasz Gottwald, a man she openly despises with good reason. Kesha sued the producer, better known as Dr. Luke, in 2014, accusing him of rape and psychological abuse. (The case was settled in 2023.) Yet her music was still bound to him both literally — she didn’t get out of her contract with Luke’s Kemosabe Records until 2023 — and figuratively. Sometimes that subtext was intentional, as on diss track “Praying,” or the title of her final Kemosabe album, Gag Order (since renamed Eat The Acid).

TikTok influencer turned pop star Addison Rae’s Addison might be the most surprisingly good pop album of the year. Really! This is one of those situations you get into as a pop music fan that, objectively, is not even close to being a hardship, but still feels hard. Sometimes you must speak your inner truth, like “the new Addison Rae album is good,” and then try to figure out how big an asterisk your inner truth wants to put on that.

Before this month’s column, some news: My book The Rise And Rise Of Chappell Roan: The Stories Behind The Songs, Tours, And Birth Of An Icon, co-written with London culture writer Hamza Jahanzeb, comes out this September via Hachette. I do deep dives into all the Chappell singles I’ve covered here, and the many more she’s released throughout her career, up to the Grammys and “The Giver.” The book also has plenty of supergraphic ultramodern red wine supernova femininomenal stuff like photos and tour anecdotes and fashion moments. Learn more here!

The #3 single in America, slowly climbing out of the looming shadows of “Die With A Smile” and the still-charting “Pink Pony Club,” is a pop-rock song called “Ordinary.” The track sounds instantly familiar: a towering edifice of sound with multitracked, devotional-coded vocals in a perpetual rousing chorus, lyrics that equate the wife-guy lifestyle to breathless religious surrender, and a voice that projects more gravitas than the fratty-looking zoomer that’s intoning it. It pointedly aspires to couples dances and wedding tributes — there’s a separate “Wedding Version,” for the besotted among you.

Selena Gomez might not be your favorite pop star’s favorite pop star, but she’s probably got a track or two on their favorite playlist. She began her career as an actress on Disney’s Wizards Of Waverly Place, but despite sustaining a decades-long musical career with many Top 10 hits, she’s never quite escaped her former-Disney-kid image. She is quietly a billionaire, largely because of non-musical ventures such as her Rare Beauty makeup line and various luxury endorsements. She continues to be an actress, on notably outre projects, like the Oscar-nominated (albeit rapidly self-discrediting) film Emilia Pérez, and the Emmy-nominated true-crime series Only Murders In The Building with Steve Martin and Martin Short. This goes back to 2013, where Gomez damned her Disney past by starring in A24 and Harmony Korine’s sleazefest Spring Breakers (though she hedged her rep a little by having her character dip out before the real debauchery begins). But there, too, her past precedes her; last year Gomez told The Hollywood Reporter that she frequently sends casting directors anonymous tapes or has her agents withhold her name until she showed up to the audition, so they wouldn’t automatically reject her as Disney fluff.

The summer/fall 2025 issue of Gen V, an offshoot of high-fashion V Magazine, commissioned a glossy, splashy, Nicola Formichetti-styled cover story celebrating the “inauguration into pop royalty” of Canadian artist Tate McRae. Here is the lead of that story: “In the beginning, God created heaven, earth, and Britney Spears.”

As we know, pop albums usually don’t come out in January. (Some worthwhile exceptions: FKA Twigs’ Eusexua and Bad Bunny’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos – more on that later.) What do come out in January, though, are lists: lists of rising artists, emerging artists, artists to watch.

For at least a decade now – since Billboard started counting music streams in its chart calculations in 2013, and probably before – the sound of pop music has been sharply bifurcated between the extremely online and extremely offline. The starlets you meme about on social media aren’t necessarily making the songs you hear 20 times on the radio on your commute, or in the coffee shop picking up breakfast, or out at the pool’s pumped-in speakers. 2024 had an especially sharp divide; compare the charts to the conversation, and you’ll see what I mean.

Welcome back, pop fans! While the American music industry is waking up from holiday hibernation, the rest of the music industry is doing no such thing. This month, we’re going to take a look at the state of K-Pop — the good, bad, and the prolific — and its increasing enmeshment with the US pop world.

If Halsey’s The Great Impersonator project comes off as defensive, it’s because they’ve earned it. Their debut album, Badlands, came out almost 10 years ago, but Halsey has yet to be fully received with the kind of gravitas one might reasonably expect after a decade-long career. This goes back to the start. Early single “New Americana,” an earnest (for better or worse) song about a particular kind of millennial experience, was received as Girls-esque parody. A claim went around that Halsey identified their sexuality and neurodivergence with the flippant label “tri-bi,” a rumor Halsey called “the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard.” And scads of early press profiles likened them to “a millennial grown in a lab” and “a superstar you can own” – dismissive, boomeresque takes that have nevertheless stuck to Halsey ever since. Even their creative breakthrough, the 2021 Trent Reznor collaboration If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, had a nagging undercurrent of reality: coincidentally or not, their music was never fully taken seriously until a male auteur got involved.

Every posthumous album carries the burden of being a career retrospective, a summation of a body of work that can no longer develop. Sometimes these records are like that on purpose, as an artist’s estate curates their unreleased work into a eulogy. Other times, it’s unintentional: The artist left a fully-formed concept behind, and collaborators must somehow make the most of an unhappy accident. Sophie, the first and likely only posthumous album by the late Scottish producer (though future individual singles or even longer EPs are basically guaranteed), is very much the latter sort of record. That probably explains why it’s been so divisive among critics and fans – understandably so, but also undeservingly.

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.