Artists To Watch Watch: What Will Be The Sound Of 2025, And Who’ll Be Making It?
Lillie Eiger
As we know, pop albums usually don’t come out in January. (Some worthwhile exceptions: FKA Twigs’ Eusexua and Bad Bunny’s Debà 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.
There’s a bit of a paradox to these. The sort of people who follow music — say, by reading pop music columns — have probably known about many featured artists for a while. The sort of people who don’t follow music probably aren’t following early awards-show announcements or internet music roundups.
Nor are these lists all the same. A quick taxonomy:
Rookie Of The Year Awards
These are the lists that get a lot of shit for calling their artists “new”: the Grammys’ Best New Artist category, the BBC’s annual Sound Of ____ list; XXL’s Freshman Class roundup. Dunking on them is too easy: Heard of the rising artist Chappell Roan? Or rapper Doechii (again, more on her later)? Or maybe RAYE, who was originally discovered on – millennials, please make sure you’re somewhere you can confront your mortality — the Hype Machine? Best to think of these as Rookie Of The Year awards — plaudits for performers who’ve already gotten good for years in the public eye — or the applause after Act 1 of a several-act play.
The Editorial Gift-Guide Awards
Most music publications (hi!) do these too: Billboard and Consequence are just a few. Even the Grammys have such a list. The pitch for these is that they’re curated by people who have paid attention to music in the past few years. Admirably, they include non-Western artists – although generally those who have a heavy Western PR apparatus. But this is still aspirational content. Think of these not as “rising pop artists” lists, but “pop artists who are rising and we’re OK with it.” Dozens of artists who do mondo numbers on YouTube and TikTok (for now at least), but are perhaps a bit embarrassing, simply are not spoken of.
The “Is The Data In The Room With Us Right Now” Awards
Lists much like the above, except with the authoritative assist of Data(™). Shazam put together a list of artists whose rise, they say, was corroborated by listener data. So did Spotify. Tidal also has a list, although it’s registration-walled. (One track title does peek out from the overlay: Katseye’s “Touch.” Familiar!)
This data is carefully crunched and analyzed, leveraging the methodology of “trust me, bro.” Which makes sense; streaming platforms are, in part, editorial at war with the algorithm, an ongoing battle of tastemaking vs. taste. So lists like these usually come with a disclaimer that the metrics have been massaged.
Despite its issues, this annual ritual does showcase a lot of promising artists, if a limited sample thereof. And even from that limited sample, a couple trends do emerge. So, in 2025, expect a lot of:
Diss Tracks By Pop Girls
This is actually three trends at once. The first: 2024 was the year of the diss track, and the public’s appetite for meanness (however justified) is not decreasing in 2025.
The second: Almost 20 years(!) after Taylor Swift’s debut, almost everyone in folk-pop still wants to be her – and there are a lot of rising folk-pop artists nowadays. Swift famously loves grievances against exes and haters, and her last album, The Tortured Poets Department, was diss-heavy even for her.
And finally, A&R types are eternally fascinated by the novelty of women who talk shit. Think of the praise for Laura Marling, whose teenage debut Alas I Cannot Swim combined genial folk music with brutal psychoanalysis, or Lily Allen, who launched a career by criticizing a guy’s sexual prowess, or each of Olivia Rodrigo’s breakout hits.
The proudest ambassador of pop messiness is Lola Young, who shows up on almost all of these lists. (Yet again, more on her later.) There’s also Saya Gray, whose “Shell (Of A Man)” is musically subdued but full of great lines; “This will be the last song about you and your voodoo doll fetish” zings a certain kind of New Agey dude as well as Sarah McLachlan’s “Building A Mystery.”
Also on multiple lists is Chloe Qisha, from Malaysia via London. “Sexy Goodbye” is a breakup track his other girls – “like Chelsea from uni, like Isabelle from that bar” – over a gently chugging chorus; it’s kind of like Olivia Rodrigo if Dan Nigro gave the “Good Luck, Babe!” instrumental to her instead. That’s not an accident. In an interview earlier this month, Qisha talked about how much she admires Chappell’s writing team, which basically means Dan Nigro: “I want to soak up every bit of it like a sponge and inject that into my own music as well.”
Immaculate Genre-Fusion Vibes
Here the endless fantasies of amapiano, the candied drum-and-bass tracks popularized by NewJeans and NewJeans enjoyers, the forever-here-to-stay moodiness of alt-R&B – commingle into crystalline, languidly paced music that somehow seems to sound more exquisite with every new track.
The Shazam list is especially vibes-heavy; on the nocturnal “Ella Brilla,” Filipino artist Riza and Mexico’s Humbe harmonize on sinuous, perfectly synchronized vocal runs, as a wistful acoustic loop and a light-touch reggaeton beat slip in out of the mix. (There’s also, toward the end, a Clapton-esque guitar solo.) And “Machuca,” by Suzete of São Tomé and PrÃncipe, is a brasser, bassier, higher-energy take that still has plenty of room to sink into.
Maximalism: Still Kinda Back
One genuinely surprising trend, or rather anti-trend: Very little on these lists sounds anything like Brat. (Guess no one wants to think about Brat Summer nowadays — understandable.) But hyperpop and big-coke-energy electroclash aren’t the only kinds of maximalist music. Across all genres, artists are finding ways to go big, lest they go home.
My personal pick of the picks is “En La Cara” by Argentinian pop artist Olivia Wald. Bafflingly, Shazam calls this a “minimalist pop song,” despite highlighting the part with huge synth buzzes, almost-belting, and a crowd singalong. Less flashy is London artist Sienna Spiro, whose music is big in a different way: Her singles suggest that she lives her life at Adele Mach 10. And from Spotify’s list, Debbii Dawson’s “Happy World” sounds like something from ABBA’s “The Girl With The Golden Hair” musical (complimentary).
POP TEN
A lot of big singles to catch up on this month, starting with…
Lola Young - "Messy"
As promised. Lola Young has two big things going for her. She’s the latest graduate of the BRIT School, which is still producing stars well after Adele. And she’s the latest big beneficiary of viral TikTok fame – maybe one of the last.
Because Lola is a (no pun intended) young British singer with a pouty songwriting voice and a vocabulary containing the word “fuck,” “Messy” is unsurprisingly getting a lot of comparisons to Lily Allen. What I hear is kinda like Julia Michaels or Maria Mena, steering their motormouth lyrics in a determined, haphazard, off-road desire path through a track that stops just short of sampling “Every Breath You Take.”
Bad Bunny - "DtMF"
(That’s “Debà Tirar más Fotos,” not any other acronym you might assume it is.)
The title track from the Latin megastar’s album is pumped-up percussion loops and drum fills, and a cheery high synth theme that kinda sounds like the music for the first town you reach in a JRPG. (I assumed only I would hear that, but nope – it’s not just me.) It’s also an unabashed, deeply earnest love letter to Puerto Rico, his family, and his crew, and the importance of preserving the good times in photos – including, as he nonchalantly throws in at the end, nudes.
SZA - "BMF"
Speaking of acronyms, SZA continues her recent pop run — making, not blowing, money fast. All her music is kind of converging to “The Weekend (Pop Remix),” but there are much worse things.
Tate McRae - "Sports Car"
Sure, OK, I’m on the Tate hype train now. She’s jumped ahead a couple of years in Britney eras, and “Sports Car” doesn’t sound like Max Martin stuff so much as “Outrageous” or “Showdown,” driven less by melodic math or choreography but breathy, sexually aggressive whispers. (The lyrics sheet claims the chorus goes “I think you wanna uh,” which is the least convincing thing since Lady Gaga supposedly didn’t say “fuck” in “Poker Face.”) The beat is merciless, and the sex is mercenary; as Tate sings, you know what this is.
Rosé - "Toxic Till The End"
If you only have an hour or so to figure out the median of pop music in 2025, just listen to Blackpink singer Rosé’s album Rosie: a good, honest .500 pop album. It’s got half the songwriting industry on it — producers the Monsters & Strangerz (Selena Gomez, Camila Cabello) and writers including Sarah Aarons (Gracie Abrams, Noah Kahan), Amy Allen (too many people to list), and Emily Warren (the Chainsmokers, Katy Perry).
That’s not an insult, though. “Toxic Till The End” is a bit of a power move – after proving herself as a solo hitmaker with “APT.”, Rosé reveals that all this time she was holding back an even bigger hit. Warren co-wrote this one, and it’s a tale of light toxicity over a midtempo track that sounds like a hundred pop classics at once – many of which are either by Taylor Swift or sound like her. Get ready to hear a lot of it.
Rose Gray - "Party People"
And speaking of Roses, pop singer Rose Gray has blown up seemingly out of nowhere in the past month or so – though it probably helped that her longtime partner, actor Harris Dickinson, suddenly became the new hotness after Babygirl.
Gray has said she’s heavily inspired by Kylie Minogue, which for “Party People” makes total sense. Like many of Kylie’s best dancefloor tunes, it’s unapologetically, gloriously blank–befitting a song that’s all about anonymous strangers. As the party-people saying goes, no one is more supportive of you than a drunk girl in a club bathroom; finally someone has written a song about that. (I originally thought the chorus went “party people give a party-people fuck,” which is maybe a layer of wordplay too deep for this song.)
Shaboozey - "Good News"
Can Shaboozey get a hit without the cheat-code of a nostalgic interpolation? He can! No one else owns the intersection of country and Khalid, after all. Like “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” “Good News” is a drinking song, except its big crowd of backing vocalists isn’t singing J-Kwon but a melody with the steady arch of a hymn. A packed bar is a kind of congregation, right?
JADE - "IT Girl"
There are probably people out there who hate Simon Cowell more than Jade Thirlwall. He’s just kinda lived his life that way. But they’re not making huge pop songs about it. The one thing that can be said against “IT Girl” is that it’s almost exactly the same song as “Angel Of My Dreams,” down to the reference to Sandie Shaw’s “Puppet On A String.” (The only difference is that “IT Girl” isn’t doing vintage Xenomania but vintage Obnoxious Banger; this is not something that can be said against it.) I’m fine with the repetition, though, both because “Angel Of My Dreams” was one of the best songs of 2024, and because there’s a purpose to it. Debuting with one single like this is sending a message. Debuting with two is sending a nuke.
Alex Warren - "Burning Down" (Feat. Joe Jonas)
“I Had Some Help” for people who would rather not support Morgan Wallen. (OK, yes, going by the charts “I Had Some Help” was “I Had Some Help” for people who would rather not support Morgan Wallen; just go with the analogy.)
Doechii - "Denial Is A River"
Doechii has a force of personality that cannot be contained by genre. On “Denial Is A River,” she does old-school boom-bap rap complete with record scratches, storytelling, and skits, and some of the funniest stream-of-consciousness bars and therapyspeak in a while. The “breathing exercise” in the outro almost killed me. (Probably works as well these days as real breathing exercises.)
CLOSING TIME
