This question was on my mind a few months ago while I was looking over the Apple Music city charts. I guessed the answer was a solid “probably”, but I wanted to know for sure. So, I did what any normal music fan would do. I spent five months coding multiple scripts to download, store, and analyze streaming chart data for 18 cities across the US and developing an assortment of graphics to illustrate that relationship. I then discovered the Billboard and Luminate already answered this exact question two years ago.

What they found was a resounding yes. When a touring musician comes to town, their local streams increase by a median of 42%. But that 42% isn’t uniform for every concert series. Billboard’s press release for the study notes that genre plays a key role in the size of the boost, with popular genres like rap and country seeing smaller gains, likely because the baseline streaming numbers for those genres are already so high. On the flipside, K-pop and EDM, genres that are more niche in the US, saw local streaming numbers increase quite dramatically.

They go a step further, connecting this to streaming trends at the national scale. Beyond the local streaming boosts, “artists also enjoy long-term above-average consumption throughout the duration of a tour”. They attribute this to short-form content, using the Mute Challenge from Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour as an example. The challenge was simple: during the song Energy, when Beyoncé sings the word “mute”, the crowd should go quiet. But at arenas with an average capacity of over 65,000 people, there was always bound to be some asshole yelling for attention from the nosebleeds. These yells (and Beyoncé’s sometimes visible reaction to them) created some viral moments on TikTok. I saw them often, even though I never actually attended the tour itself. With the Mute Challenge, the tour’s cultural impact extended beyond its venues’ walls. And, as Billboard notes, this online momentum led Energy to “nearly [triple] its consumption from before the tour”.

Anyway, here’s what I found.

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Illegally collecting Apple Music’s data

Most of the charts I follow are aggregated on a national scale – the biggest songs in X country for Y date(s). But if I want to tease out the impacts of tour dates on certain cities, I need city-level chart data. Spotify and Apple Music both publish this for a handful of cities, but there’s a problem – they don’t have good archives. Apple Music displays each city’s top 25 songs in a playlist but there’s no way to see what these playlists looked like in the past. Once they’re updated, yesterday’s chart is gone forever. Spotify is a bit better, with a historical record for each of its cities that can indexed pretty easily, but there isn’t a way to download the data. I can use their website to find, say, the 67^th most popular song in Portland on August 12, 2025 (Party 4 U by Charli xcx). But there’s no easy way to track a song’s local performance across time, or to compare a song’s popularity across multiple cities.

To get around this, I dusted off my python skills and built a web-scraper. My code reads the HTML for a given website and parses the artists’ names and song titles into a spreadsheet. In this case, I used the Apple Music city charts because I couldn’t figure out how to program a script to get past the login page needed to view Spotify’s city charts (but I haven’t given up yet!). I’ve run this code (almost) every day since last August, giving me an archive of the last five months of Apple’s city charts across 18 US cities, stored in .csv file with over 70,000 rows and counting. Is this legal? I’m not sure. But it has been a fun project and it’s basically the only way I’m able to complete this analysis at all. Please don’t sue me, Apple.

Who is YoungBoy Never Broke Again?

YoungBoy Never Broke Again (often simplified to NBA YoungBoy) is a rapper from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, known for such hit songs as Nevada and Make No Sense. I’ll admit that I knew basically nothing about him before last month. I knew who he was, but never got around to listening to him myself. I checked out a few of his songs while writing this, and they’re fine – not really my thing but that’s okay. I am amazed at the quantity of his output though; I don’t know of many artists that have released nine studio albums in under eight years – that’s a lot of music for me to have fallen behind on. Lucky for me, I’m not writing a post about his music.

This post is, instead, about his tour. The Make America Slime Again (MASA) Tour took place last fall to promote his (at the time, most recent) album of the same name. It ran from September 1 to November 12 and had 42 shows in total, plus three that were cancelled in Chicago, Detroit, and Atlanta (this will be important later). On Apple Music, this makes NBA YoungBoy the most chart-successful artist who was touring last fall, the exact period of time that I’ve been collecting data. So, what can the city chart data tell us about him and his tour?

Initial observations: A geographically-specific chart presence

Before I even checked his tour dates, I noticed that NBA YoungBoy’s chart-presence is very geographically limited. He was the most popular artist last fall without question in southern cities like Atlanta, Houston, and Dallas (the ones closest to his hometown of Baton Rouge), but had no chart impact in New York, San Diego, or Honolulu, and very little in the west, generally (this might be why I didn’t know much about him). The graph below shows how prominent his music was on the Apple Music charts for US cities between August 15 and November 30, 2025.

Let me explain what I mean by “chart prominence” on the y-axis. When Luminate and Billboard report that touring artists saw a 42% increase in consumption, that’s looking at the raw numbers of streams and sales across multiple platforms. Apple Music does not have any publicly available data with that level of specificity (at least, not that I know of). I can see which songs made the cutoff for top 25, but not how many individual streams those songs got. So instead, I created a proxy variable that I’m calling chart prominence. A song’s chart prominence is equal to 26 minus whatever rank on the chart the song occupies. So the number one song in Portland has a chart prominence of 25 that day, and that 25^th most popular song has a chart prominence of 1. For the graphic above, I added together the chart prominence of each NBA YoungBoy song across each day in the data, for all 18 cities. This isn’t quite the same as raw streaming numbers and the final values for chart prominence are a bit arbitrary. But it’s still a helpful metric for comparison.

Another way to visualize chart prominence is on a map.

The cities with higher NBA YoungBoy chart prominence are shaded in blue. The regions around them are Voronoi polygons – areas that show which city is the closest to anywhere on the map. This is another detail not to take too seriously (we can’t tell how popular NBA YoungBoy is in North Dakota based solely on his popularity in Denver). I just think they look nice and make it easier to see the overall geographic trend – he’s more popular in the south and less popular in the west.

My actual research question: Do concerts lead to local streaming boosts?

So back to the question at hand: did NBA YoungBoy’s music see gains in streaming during the MASA Tour, and were these gains apparent at the city level? If there’s one thing I’m going to do on mump’s playlist, it’s make line graphs out of chart data.

This is a pretty dense graph. It shows every charting NBA YoungBoy song in every US city throughout the fall. His his four most popular songs (Shot Callin, What You Is, Wine & Dine, and Nevada) are shown in color while the grey lines represent everything else (his other 12 songs charting songs). The vertical green bars show planned tour dates, which appear dashed if the show was ultimately cancelled (as was the case for Atlanta’s second show, as well as the sole shows in Chicago and Detroit).

This graph also highlights his regional popularity. Several of his songs charted consistently highly throughout the fall in the south, whereas his western chart appearances are brief. But these brief appearances occur exclusively following a concert. In Los Angeles, Seattle, and Denver, his songs first appear on the chart the day after their respective shows, and last only up to a week or so. There also seem to be boosts after shows in the south, especially in Dallas, Houston, and Miami, but these are bit harder to see on this graph.

In addition, there’s some evidence for the theory put forth in the Luminate report that short-form video has expanded the geographic scope of tour-based streaming boosts. I included the last half of August on this graph, but NBA YoungBoy was largely absent from the city charts during that time – even in the southern cities with charts he would later dominate. It was only after his tour began in September that his songs (re)entered the any city charts, in a sort of “September surge.” But the September surge happened all across the south and the east, including cities like Miami and Nashville, which didn’t have concerts of their own until October. In Miami and Nashville, his local streaming numbers went up alongside the tour, but not as a result of individual concerts happening in those cities. I’m not sure whether these boosts can be attributed to TikTok specifically, but the overall pattern matches what Billboard and Luminate saw with Beyoncé’s Energy.

One other observation is that the most popular NBA YoungBoy songs are not the same everywhere. In Atlanta, Houston, and Dallas, his most popular song was Shot Callin, a single from MASA, the album. In Los Angeles, Seattle, and Denver, on the other hand, his highest charting song was Nevada, a single from his 2021 album, Sincerely, Kentrell. I doubt this is coincidental. That said, I can’t put my finger on what the logic might be here. Perhaps people who are more tuned-in to NBA YoungBoy are more likely to listen to his new releases, whereas the north and west have more casual fans who are mostly there for his more established hits. I can’t say for sure. Shot Callin has already surpassed Nevada’s hot 100 peak, so Nevada might not even be the bigger hit of the two anymore. I’d need someone who knows more about his music and fanbase to explain this one.

One way we can simplify the line graphs is by returning to the chart prominence metric I calculated earlier. The bar graph below shows his chart prominence in each city for the week immediately before, and the week immediately after his first concert in each city.

The green (week-after-show) bars are much larger than the grey (week-before-show) bars, so we can conclude that in each city, NBA YoungBoy’s local chart prominence increased after the concert.

This graph also shows the original dates for Chicago and Detroit concerts even though these tour stops were ultimately cancelled. I think they are as a useful control group. In almost every other city, NBA YoungBoy had a drastically increased chart prominence for the week after a concert compared to before. His chart prominence also rose in Chicago and Detroit, but by a much smaller amount. That could be the result of random chance, or simply the fact that his popularity rose throughout the country throughout the course of the tour.

Oh yeah, the other big takeaway here is that NBA YoungBoy’s baseline chart prominence steadily increased throughout September and October. With the exception of Houston, the early stops on NBA YoungBoy’s tour itinerary were in places where he had very little chart prominence going in. But by October, the grey, week-before-show, bars get larger, indicating that his songs were now charting before the local tour effect had a chance to kick in (similar to what we saw in Miami and Nashville). This, like the September surge from on the line graphs, could just be coincidence. Or, it could be a result of the tour generating buzz around NBA YoungBoy that transcends local performances – the Energy effect.

Okay, so what if we condensed the last 2200 words into a single map? And what if we made it a gif? Let’s bust out that old geography degree.

Discussion and Conclusions Because I Somehow Wrote A Whole Academic Paper About A Rapper I Don’t Follow and A Streaming Service I Don’t Use

NBA YoungBoy is most popular in the south, and not so popular in the west. His tour increased his songs’ positions on the Apple Music city charts quite a bit, both as a result of people listening to his music after seeing him live, and because of a general increase in his cultural relevance throughout the duration of the tour. This matches the trends described in the report by Billboard and Luminate. I don’t have a catchy statistic like their 42%, but my “chart prominence” metric lets us make graphs and see that these were trends were likely a direct result of the tour.

There are also some bigger conversations that I’ve been intentionally avoiding throughout this post. Most notably, conversations about race and genre and the potential return of regionality in rap music. But all that is best left for another post in the (possibly near) future.

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Honorable Mentions:

• Amaarae - Black Star

• John Michel and Anthony James - Egotrip

• Model/Actriz - Pirouette

• PinkPantheress - Fancy That

• Turnstile - Never Enough

• Tyler, The Creator - Don’t Tap The Glass

10. Sudan Archives - The BPM

This album’s still pretty new, and my thoughts on it aren’t yet fully formed. It was certainly one of my biggest let downs of the year. Sudan Archives’s 2022 album, Natural Brown Prom Queen, introduced me to her unique blend of RnB, pop, and avant-garde violin and was one of my favorites of that year. This album, by contrast, shows her (and her violin) veering into the worlds of dance and house music, with mixed results. I enjoyed many of the singles she dropped leading up to its release, but I didn’t find them particularly memorable and didn’t return to them much.

But once I let go of my expectations and sat down with The BPM in full for what it was, I enjoyed it quite a bit. There are a couple misses, but this album’s highs are so high. She especially sticks the landing with the new sonic palette on tracks like The Nature of Power, Noire, David & Goliath, and A Bug’s Life. Like with her last album, these songs all show her to be someone incredibly daring in her music making. There’s no one else out there that sounds quite like her.

Start With: The Nature of Power

9. Sam Fender - People Watching

My music taste leans pretty loud and electronic, but I always need something in my playlist to balance out the constant thumping in my headphones. Usually, that takes the form of one token sad song and one token guitar song. Sam Fender completely monopolized my token guitar songs this year.

The thing that sets this album apart for me is Sam’s voice. He sings so much depth and emotion into each song. He’s also a great text painter. On TV Dinner, he sings a very monotonous melody brimming with rage to convey his feeling of being trapped and pushed down by the music industry. He also brilliantly conveys the cycles of binge drinking and alcoholism with a looping ostinato throughout the second half Wild Long Lie. These aren’t the most complicated songwriting techniques, but they’re executed flawlessly and when combined with Sam’s voice and lush guitar work, they make for some powerful moments.

Start With: Arm’s Length

8. Miley Cyrus - Something Beautiful

You’d think that in a year so lacking in major pop releases, someone like Miley Cyrus, coming off the massive success of Flowers and Endless Summer Vacation, would pretty easily take over the pop charts with a new album. But alas, her new era flopped hard. It was basically forgotten, comercially, before anyone even had a chance to hear it. And that sucks. Something Beautiful is beautiful.

Maybe it underperformed because it was a bit riskier in its production choices than Endless Summer Vacation, which I found endlessly boring. But the ABBA-esque sheen of End of the World and the slick and gritty disco of Easy Lover are both perfectly in-step with the 2020s pop landscape. Meanwhile, the title track and Every Girl You’ve Ever Loved are impressively daring in their instrumentation, and More to Lose is a touching ballad with a gorgeous outro. This album is a bit pretentious. I mean, the name declares itself to be Something Beautiful. But I don’t mind so much. These songs are just good enough to justify all the religious imagery and the dramatic spoken word intro. Even for the Miley-skeptical, and perhaps especially for the Miley-skeptical, I’d give this one a chance.

Start With: Something Beautiful

7. Isabella Lovestory - Vanity

This album is very silly, and it simply bangs. It opens with Isabella Lovestory asking “Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all” before diving head first into gritty, club-ready, dance pop and reggaeton bangers. Vanity can be a bit one note in its tone - vain. But it more than makes up for it with catchy hooks, changes in instrumentation (I especially like the percussion on Fresa Metal and the synths on the title track), and by keeping its runtime to a tight 35-minutes. This packs a sucker punch of glittery hedonism, without taking itself too seriously.

Start With: Putita Boutique

6. Marina Sena - Coisas Naturais

I want to listen to more Brazilian music. I don’t know how to describe this album, other than that it sounds very Brazilian. There’s a bunch of different genres on display, very few of which I can identify, but all of which I can tell are executed wonderfully. Marina Sena’s voice is at times smooth and controlled, and at times forceful and commanding. Anjo shows her range particularly well, starting as a easy bossa nova track, before kicking up to a wild pop rock outro with a good scream. Even though I barely understood a word, I had this album on repeat all summer.

Still, while I was researching things to say about this album, I saw a bunch of Reddit threads on r/MusicaBR saying they thought it was a let down. Opinion seemed mixed overall, but if this constitutes a letdown, then I really need to find the good stuff.

Start With: Numa Ilha

5. Joey Valence and Brae - Hyperyouth

Last year, my 5th place album, Porter Robinson’s Smile! :D, made the list mostly because of how much I enjoyed seeing him in concert. This year, Joey Valence and Brae do the same. I saw the punk rap duo in September, during a bit of concert binge (five shows in six weeks). I’ve never been in a room with so much energy. It was nonstop jumping, dancing, and moshing through the show. People jumped to JVB. People jumped to the opener. People even jumped to the preprogrammed DJ set that played between the two artists when the stage was empty and the lights were on.

On the surface, this album is a wild, bombastic, hyperactive burst of energy. The beats go hard, their rap flows are punchy, and their bars are witty and filled with attitude and humor.

Earth must be flat the way you fucking fell off.

Went for some Chinese food and the fortune cookie told me I was goated.

I’m half amazing and half Asian. I’m so good you could say I’m am-Asian.

But the hyperactive facade masks a suppressed worry about getting older. It’s most apparent on Live Right, with its “I’m afraid of growing up” refrain, but the theme is constant throughout the album. These more introspective moments recontextualize the album’s bombast in a touching way. It’s not just goofy and youthful, it’s defiantly goofy and youthful. It clings tightly to its bombast, at times overcorrecting its youthful spirit into a parody of itself. What would otherwise just be a loud, obnoxious, over-the-top album gets a nice touch of bittersweet.

I don’t know why these two are so afraid of growing up though. They’re dad jokes are immaculate.

Start With: Bust Down

4. Oklou - Choke Enough

Harvest Sky might be one of my favorite songs I’ve ever heard. My first exposure to Oklou was this album, so hearing it for the first time on the track list stopped me in my tracks. I knew immediately that it would be my most streamed song of the year. Everything about it sounds perfect, like it’s a song that has always existed.

The rest of this album is pretty good too. I’m not sure how to describe the genre. Ambient pop electronica? Hyperpop if it was quiet and hushed instead of loud and distorted? Whatever it is, I quite like it. It’s understated, but with a just-perceptible driving pulse. It’s a very melodically-driven album, and Oklou has a knack for great melodies. Friends and Family was the other big standout for me, in addition to Thank You For Recording, ICT, Obvious and Blade Bird. But maybe the most impressive thing about this album is that it even got me to enjoy a song with Bladee on it.

Start With: Harvest Sky

3. Ninajirachi - I Love My Computer

When I started listening to new albums a couple years ago, my goal was to broaden my music taste. The first year or two definitely expanded my horizons quite a bit. But these days, I feel like I’ve given most genres enough chances that my actual preferences aren’t changing much. A pop album with house influences? Right up my alley. A lyrically dense rap album? Challenging, but I’ll give it a try. Stadium country? Forget it.

So when an album like I Love My Computer comes along now, it’s extra special. I’ve been puzzled by my inability to really get EDM for a while now. The genre should be right up my alley. I love pop songs that sound like EDM songs (e.g. Brat), and I love electronic sounds and textures. I don’t usually pay much attention to lyrics, so a lack of vocals shouldn’t be much of an issue for me either. But it’s taken until I Love My Computer for me to really love an album that puts its EDM front and center.

There’s just enough pop influence here to get started. iPod Touch and Fuck My Computer are the poppier standouts. The former, with its driving bass and vivid imagery of a passionate novice music maker, transitions right into the latter, with its deliciously absurd chorus. And from there this album becomes a nonstop digital dance party. Music to jump up and down to.

Start With: Fuck My Computer

2. Rochelle Jordan - Through The Wall

Through The Wall unlocked house music for me in the same way I Love My Computer unlocked EDM. I’m a sucker for pop music that sounds like house music, but I’ve struggled to connect with house on its own. It’s usually too repetitive, instrumental, and hookless for my liking. Great background music, but not something I’ll seek out myself. This album made me come around, though. Unlike a pop album, where the lyrics and vocals take center stage, Rochelle’s voice is hushed and restrained, taking up no more space in the mix than the bass, keys, or percussion. If someone asked me to sing the vocal melody to any of these songs, I don’t think I could. I barely even remember which track is which. But I could groove to it for hours.

This is a tricky album to pick a starter-song. I’m putting The Boy because it’s relatively hooky, but this album is so much more than the sum of its parts. No song is long or distinct or catchy enough on its own to capture the magic of the album as a whole, unlike what you’d expect on a pop album. Really, I’d suggest just listening to the whole thing front to back while cooking or cleaning or walking or something. Really dig into the rhythms of this album. It’s almost meditative.

Start With: The Boy

1. Bad Bunny - Debí Tirar Más Fotos

I feel like Debí Tirar Más Fotos is a boringly obvious choice for album of the year. But it’s obvious for good reason. Bad Bunny was my most streamed artist of the year, and no one else came particularly close. In ten years, when I’m trying to remember 2025, this album is going to bring back the clearest memories. I’m tempted to wax poetic about this being Bad Bunny’s heartfelt love letter to Puerto Rico, and all of the local genres he employs and the politics he describes, and all of it would be very true. But also, who would I be kidding? This is my favorite album mainly because it’s filled to the brim with bangers and bops. I broke my usual “no two songs by the same artist” rule to put both Nuevayol and Baile Inolvidable on my best hit songs list, and came very close to putting DTMF on there too. Beyond that, Voy A Llevarte Pa PR and EoO are reggaeton bangers, Cafe Con Ron is a plena bop, Weltita is a jam and a half, El Clúb has a weird, fun club influence, and I could keep going. Plus, every time I was about ready to move on from Debí Tirar Más Fotos, Bad Bunny would release another music video (or underwear commercial) for yet another song I hadn’t paid much attention to on first listen, and I’d get hooked again. This was the first album I listened to in 2025, and from then on it was a challenge to see if anything else could stack up. Nothing did.

Start With: Nuevayol

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But unfortunately, I’m not here to talk about the future of pop. I’m here to talk about present of pop, which is still mostly awful. Nevertheless, there were still a few hits worth shouting out. Spotify playlist available here.

Honorable Mentions:

• Me Jalo by Fuerza Regida and Grupo Frontera

• Folded by Kehlani

• Luther by Kendrick Lamar and SZA

• No One Noticed by The Marías

• Love Me Not by Ravyn Lenae

• Sports Car by Tate McRae

10. The Subway by Chappell Roan

Chappell teased The Subway for months before she recorded and released a studio version, and during that time, videos of her performing the song live were bountiful and wildly popular. So with all the hype, along with this being Chappell’s second new release after her incomprehensible rise to superstardom last year, The Subway should have been a massive hit. Indeed, it debuted at number 3 on the Hot 100, but it tanked pretty hard in the following weeks. Not quite as hard as her other single this year, The Giver. But unlike The Giver, The Subway is actually quite good.

Some fans were disappointed that the recorded version didn’t live up to the live version. And fair enough - I haven’t actually watched the videos her live performances. But the more common reaction I saw was that people just thought The Subway was boring. And I think that’s insane.

There shouldn’t have been any doubt that Chappell had one of the most impressive voices in pop today, but I find her performance on The Subway the most compelling of her career. It’s not as theatrical as usual, but that gives her the space to fill the song with earnest heartbreak and longing. It’s especially powerful in the bridge/outro. The whole of the song could just be Chappell singing “she’s got a way; she got away” and I could listen to it for hours on end. I love the way her voice swells with each phrase and all of the little melismas and vocal flips. It’s gorgeous.

9. Nuevayol by Bad Bunny

What a great year for Bad Bunny. Nuevayol shines in its sample flip - a salsa classic turned dembow banger. I’m stoked to hear him perform this at the super bowl next year.

8. Tears by Sabrina Carpenter

People online are so weird about Sabrina Carpenter. I’m hesitant to acknowledge her at all. There’s so much thinkpiecing about her schtick and whether it’s properly feminist or not. I could hardly open Substack or TikTok for a week after she revealed the cover art for her new album, Man’s Best Friend, because my algorithms (correctly, I’ll admit) recognized the discourse surrounding it to be prime engagement-bait for me. I’m 25 and AFRAID of Sabrina Carpenter.

Tears is Sabrina’s schtick at its schtickiest, and I’ll admit that I love it. For as much as disco throwbacks have been done to death in the 2020s, I think the key change between the chorus and verses and Sabrina’s onomatopoeia save this one from sounding stale. And while it’s schticky, it’s also clearly a joke. The chorus goes “I get wet at the thought of you being a responsible guy. Treating me like you’re supposed to, tears run down my thighs.” This is hyperbole. She’s exaggerating the situation to the point of absurdity because it’s just that absurd how incompetent these men are. If anything, this song is mocking towards men more than it’s degrading to women. For the men she dates, the bar is in hell, yet they are somehow unable to do anything but limbo beneath it. Like every other part of Sabrina schtick, it’s delivered with a wink and a nod to let you know she’s not taking any of this too seriously. Yet somehow, a lot of people, including the Internet’s Busiest Music Nerd himself, don’t seem to recognize the humor, and instead think Sabrina is literally aroused by basic decency. I’m not sure how this joke went over so many heads.

At this point, it’s dissected to the point where I don’t find it that funny anymore. But I like absurdity. I like goofy sound effects. And most of all, I like disco.

7. Denial Is A River by Doechii

A lot of my favorite hits this year were songs that I’ve already written a full post about, and my thoughts on these songs haven’t changed much in the meantime. I still think Denial Is A River is a clever little bop, and I still think Doechii is the most exciting artist to watch over the next few years. I also, correctly, called that Doechii was about to see a huge jump in popularity (although in retrospect, her rise was already well underway). There have been many updates on the Doechii story since I wrote that piece. I think her new position in pop culture is fascinating, and a bit worrying.

As of now, her biggest hit is no longer Denial Is A River, but Anxiety - a song she wrote at the very beginning of her music career in 2019, which wasn’t even available on streaming services until after it went viral on TikTok sometime in March. This song has since been widely ridiculed across the internet for its trite lyrics and obvious, gimmicky sample (Somebody That I Used To Know by Gotye and Kimbra). This not super great hit has led Doechii’s presence as an artist in the rap sphere to be met with a vitriolic backlash that I was really shocked to see, especially toward someone who has been your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper for several years now. Then I remembered that she’s queer and dark-skinned. I don’t think Anxiety is a good song, but it’s not terrible, especially for an artist in their infancy. There’s certainly nothing about it that warrants anger or backlash. That said, I am a bit nervous that she’s getting showered in praise when her two biggest hits are so corny. If her biggest hits were, instead, Alter Ego, Crazy, Nissan Altima, or Persuasive, I don’t think we’d be in quite this mess. But at least Denial Is A River is corny in a fun way.

6. Sugar On My Tongue by Tyler, The Creator

Tyler, The Creator’s new album, Don’t Tap The Glass, was one of my funnest listens of the year. It’s short, but bouncy, danceable, and weird. It sounds like Tyler and his producers just goofing around in the studio together, not putting too much thought into what comes of it. It’s loose and carefree in a way that’s quite refreshing. Sugar On My Tongue was a clear standout. Such a great beat.

5. Party 4 U by Charli xcx

This was a fun moment! Sleeper hit of the year right here. This is another one where I don’t have much to say aside from what I wrote about it in another post. So go read that instead. I’m just glad that the new fans Charli gained from Brat are digging back through her older stuff as well. And I’m glad that she’s pivoting her newfound commercial success into something somehow even weirder than she’s done yet.

4. Man I Need by Olivia Dean

The out-of-nowhere, Chappell Roan-style come up that I hoped Doechii would have this year instead went to Olivia Dean. I like Olivia Dean. Her album, The Art of Loving, is intricate and soulful. It’s not super my thing, but I can appreciate it for what it is. It feels a bit out of step with the pop landscape in a special way. We need an Olivia Dean on the scene right now. And, best of all, it includes Man I Need.

Olivia’s voice is warm, and she fits beautifully in the song’s groove. I love the way the vocal melody floats off just before the chorus, and right before the song drifts away entirely, she catches the groove again with the “Talk to me, talk to me” refrain. I don’t have a lot to say about this one either, mainly because the song is so plainly gorgeous. There’s something refreshingly simple about her music, and I’m excited to see where she goes from here.

3. Where Is My Husband? by Raye

The vocal runs here are crazy, especially in the bridge, and the horns and percussion are phenomenal. This song has so much grandeur to it. I haven’t heard a pop song that sounds quite like this before.

Until writing this post, I always heard the lyric “tell him I’m kind” in the bridge as “tell him I’m cunt”, which I thought was a strange but funny choice for a song about a woman with a noted resemblance to Nara Smith looking for a (presumably heterosexual) husband.

2. Baile Inolvidable by Bad Bunny

Bad Bunny is the master of the lopsided two-part song. The first two thirds of Tití Me Preguntó are a dembow track about all of his girlfriends, and the last third reveals his emotional disconnect over a trap beat with horror synths. Después de la Playa, inversely, starts with the slower, drum-less A section, before ramping up to a longer and livelier merengue B section. Baile Inolvidable does this too, with a slower, spacey, synthy opening with no percussion, before revealing the song’s true genre - salsa.

As much I like all of Bad Bunny’s lopsided songs, I’ve mostly liked them in spite of their extra parts rather than because of them. I usually skip the slower sections of both Tití Me Preguntó and Después de la Playa. But for Baile Inolvidable, the two-part structure works in the song’s favor. I like how Bad Bunny introduces the horn motif in the synth section, before recontextualizing it when the salsa kicks in. It keeps the beginning interesting and provides some much needed continuity during the transition. It also makes sense thematically, contrasting the initial lonely pain of a heartbreak with a bittersweet dance later on. I have a soft spot for sad songs set to upbeat music. Dance songs about missing the person you used to dance with.

I’m not familiar enough with the genre to have any critiques of the salsa itself. It just sounds flawless. I appreciate the live instrumentation and Bad Bunny’s ad libs, and the jazz piano break. And the lyrics are simple and heartbreaking. It all just comes together to sound like a great live band playing together in a bar somewhere. Great stuff.

1. 12 to 12 by Sombr

I’m tempted to write about the weird interaction that Sombr had with a fan my age who attended his show and made a TikTok about how she found his performance too oriented toward kids and teenagers for her taste, and also filled with sexual jokes that were inappropriate for a teen audience. I could mention that Sombr’s public response to this criticism was catty and unprofessional and really soured my impression of him. I could analyze the relationship between artists and critics and the public, and how social media has changed these dynamics. I could even mention the power imbalance (and often abuse) that arises when a musician with millions of fans so much as acknowledges the negative opinion of a random person on the internet. But I’m not going to write all that. Because 12 to 12 is still one of the best songs I’ve heard all year, and I’m choosing to separate the art from the artist on this one.

I should probably delete TikTok and throw my phone into the ocean at this point. But I’m worried that TikTok discourse might actually be the core today’s pop music culture rather than the actual music itself. No one listens to the radio anymore, so the biggest monocultural moments we get from pop these days are from social media. The biggest pop music is whatever commands the most attention - and drama commands a lot of attention.

I don’t have much else to add about the song itself other than what I wrote in my last post, so go read that if you want more detail about why I think this song is so great. But to summarize, Sombr has a great voice for this sort of disco pop-rock, the lyrics are the least cringe he’s ever given us, and the bridge is chilling, especially when he sings about feeling unlovable. I also feel validated that the Switched on Pop podcast also thought the intro piano chords sounded like Don’t Start Now. This was, fittingly, my 12th most streamed song of the year. I still welcome Sombr as the new main pop boy for the youths.

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All ten of these songs were among my top 100 most played of the year, according to Spotify Wrapped. But I didn’t much hype for them. They didn’t appear on any charts (that I saw), Anthony Fantano has not commented (that I saw), and if anyone I know IRL is listening to these tracks, it’s because they heard it from me first (that I know of). These are the songs from 2025 that I would want someone to be recommending to me right about now.

You can find all of these songs in a Spotify playlist here.

1. Tommy Richman - Miami

If you recognize Tommy Richman’s name, it’s probably from last year’s viral hit, Million Dollar Baby. I loved that song, but I think I was a bit alone on that take. I will admit, the lyrics to Million Dollar Baby are a bit silly, and Tommy’s falsetto is a bit grating when you’re not in the mood for it. I haven’t followed Tommy closely since Million Dollar Baby, but I happened to give Miami a listen, and it’s a slick sex jam that hits all the same funky notes as his viral hit and then some (and without the weird “don’t at me” line).

2. Astropical - Me Pasa (Piscis)

If there’s one problem in my criteria for this list, it’s that neither my online nor my IRL circles listen to very much Spanish-language music. I don’t have a good sense of what’s relevant in Latin America until a song gets so big it crosses over to the US, so it’s entirely possible this song was a big deal somewhere. But I’m assuming this list will mostly be read by other English speakers, who, like me, don’t always know where to look for good music from other parts of the world.

Astropical is a newly formed duo consisting of Bomba Estéreo and Rawayana. Bomba Estéreo are known to me for htheirer feature on Bad Bunny’s Ojitos Lindos, and Spotify has been trying to get me to listen to Rawayana for years now. Their astrologically themed album from earlier this year blends a bunch of pop, African, and Caribbean sounds into 12 easy-going bops. Music to listen to in a hammock on the beach. Me Pasa (Pisis) was the standout for me. The two have great vocal chemistry and harmony and I love the amapiano breakdown in the post-chorus.

3. Isabella Lovestory and Taichu - Putita Boutique

Great, quirky, Y2K electropop vibes. This was my favorite track on an all-around great album. Not much else to say for this one, other than stay tuned for my Best Albums of 2025 list in a week or so. This sounds like a Spanish version of what Tate McRae was trying to accomplish with Sports Car, but with grittier, fresher production and some silly CupcakKe-esque ad libs as well.

4. RaiNao - Logout De Riíto Con La Gata

RaiNao is another artist that I was introduced to via Bad Bunny, and I’m so grateful for that. She has such a nice voice and a really unique approach that weaves reggaeton and electronic music together in a refreshing way. This song was from the deluxe edition to her 2024 album, Capicú, and a remix of one of the original tracks. I listened to the remix before I ever heard the original, and it kinda ruined the original for me. I love the way this remix bounces between reggaeton and a light merengue, and I love the vocal melody. This song has a lovely, distinct vibe.

5. Maria Sena - Numa Ilha

My point about Spanish-language music being a blindspot for me - multiply it by 1,000 for Brazilian music. I don’t listen to much Brazilian music, and I basically never see anyone talk about it online. But what little bit I do come across, I really love. In Marina Sena’s case, Wikipedia describes her genre as simply “Música popular brasileira (MPB)”, whereas her Spotify bio says she blends MPB with samba, reggae, dancehall, and axé. My closest reference point for Numa Ilha is either bachata, or the song Pote de Ouro by Liniker, which I’ve gotten some amount confirmation is brega music, but neither I nor Wikipedia are entirely sure what brega is (I found a cool mashup of Numa Ilha and Pote de Ouro on Soundcloud though). Whatever genre this is, it’s a sound that I adore. The eerie flutes and the deep, echo-y guitar notes in the chorus especially add a gorgeous extra layer of texture.

I do know that Marina Sena is a big deal in Brazil. But I think the anglophones might like her too.

6. Muque - Cheers

And multiply that point by a million for Japanese music. Astute readers of mump’s playlist may recall this song from my Shazaming the Streets of Taiwan post from May. This was pretty handily my favorite song I heard that trip. #GetMuqueToPortland

7. Pabllo Vittar and Nathy Peluso - Fantasía

A fun Argentinian-Brazilian collaboration. I like how cross-cultural this sounds. There’s Brazilian funk-style chopped up background vocals, a booming reggaeton pulse in the chorus, and a bit more of the maybe brega, maybe something else percussion and guitar work that I loved on Numa Ilha. And I think Nathy’s and Pabllo’s voices work well together, especially on such a punchy beat.

8. Rema - Bout U

I was listening to Rema before Calm Down, and I’m still listening to him after. I love how willing he is to try on different sounds and styles. He strikes me as one of the most exciting artists in Afrobeats right now. This song in particular has a killer electric guitar riff and a sick minor harmonic melody. Between Bout U and Bounce, Rema is an harmonic minor savant. Listen to this song at your own risk, though. If you do, you might catch yourself humming “there’s something about you, girl” to yourself until the new year.

9. NewDad - Roobosh

I was ever so slightly let down by NewDad’s newest album. They have a very distinct sound - a sort of grungy Irish shoegazy dream pop. It’s very good, but they rarely stray far from it. Altar was a good listen, but after two albums and an EP in two years, I’m starting to feel a bit of NewDad fatigue.

But that’s all forgiven by the time NewDad’s lead singer, Julie Dawson, screams the word “God” in the chorus of Roobosh. Her voice is usually so disaffected and brooding that there’s something really visceral about the sudden change in tone. I literally sit up in my seat when I hear it. This is pretty easily NewDad’s best song yet, in my opinion.

10. John Michel and Anthony James - World’s End

This is one of the coolest hip hop instrumentals I’ve heard in a long time. Such an enthralling soundscape. But I can’t tell what exactly is so great about it. Maybe it’s the complex drum patterns that ebb and flow throughout the song. Or maybe it’s the soaring electric guitar. Or maybe it’s all of the different vocal samples in the background. I need to take a music production course just to figure out what addictive substance Anthony James put in this beat. And John Michel has the perfect voice and flow to match the instrumental. This is a duo to keep an eye on.

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That article is now six years old, and the situation for male pop stars seems somehow even more dire than ever. But that’s not because songs by men are unsuccessful. On the contrary, recent hits by Shaboozey, Benson Boone, and Teddy Swims have spent record-breaking time on the Hot 100’s top 10. There are also successful rappers like Kendrick Lamar, who’s Super bowl Halftime Show was the most watched of all time. And successful country stars like Morgan Wallen, who’s had unimaginable chart success all decade. Then there are also global hitmakers in BTS and Bad Bunny, who fill the role of male pop star abroad. But none of these men (besides maybe Benson Boone, who I’ll get back to later) fit the purest definition of a male pop star in the US. All are male, many are pop, and most are stars. But they don’t invite anything resembling early 2010s Bieber Fever.

As a part of this disconnect owes to their styles of “The Voice Audition Core,” a term coined by Larisha Paul in Rolling Stone last May. She uses the term to describe the likes of Alex Warren, Teddy Swims, and Benson Boone, arguably the three biggest male pop stars of the last two years, whose songs feature technically impressive vocal melodies alongside nondescript instrumentation and a blank canvas of personality. These songs are easily adaptable for TV singing competition shows, hence the name, and lots of plays on the radio. While Paul reports on this trend in a neutral tone, she also notes that this genre might not be as conducive for a long-lasting stardom. “Millions can root for an artist they watch perform twice a week and even vote for them to win after each episode. But what keeps their attention once the season wraps? Or when their prized contestant debuts with music that doesn’t sound like the songs they’ve been covering for these vocal showcase series?” I think she’s onto something about why the current male pop stars aren’t sticking. The songs are massive, but they don’t lend themselves to the glittery body suits and backflips that really define superstardom.

For a while the common understanding was that TikTok was filled with one hit wonders, but that a lasting career in the mainstream was mostly reserved to pop stars coming up in more “traditional” ways. But for every TikTok one hit wonder, there’s a rising star who jumps to the mainstream off of their viral moment. For every Powfu or Benee, there’s a Doja Cat or Lil Nas X or Doechii or The Marías. Or now, as Paul notes, a Sombr.

Late last spring, two songs by some artist named “sombr” showed up on the Spotify charts and Hot 100. I’d never heard of this Sombr guy before. Who was he? Why was his music suddenly so popular? And it didn’t seem like anyone else was talking about him either. At first, I assumed his two big songs (titled Back to Friends and Undressed) would go the way of Freaks by Surf Curse or Spit On My Face! By ThxSoMch – lo-fi bedroom indie TikTok-to-Spotify hits that would be forgotten about by next year despite their Spotify success. But Sombr’s songs kept growing: Back to Friends nearly topped the Spotify chart while Undressed took over US pop radio. Still, I wasn’t convinced he was someone that could stick around. Despite hearing his music on TikTok, I couldn’t find any discussion about him as an artist. And I found his breakout hits a bit underwhelming.

Back to Friends is a catchy tune of melodramatic yearning with a big sing-along chorus and satisfying bridge that makes good use of the TikTok bedroom indie sound. The production is charmingly rough, matching the song’s teenage DIY ethos (Sombr recently turned 20). I like the background vocals, that Sombr clearly recorded himself, and the guitar notes in the second verse. And the vocal jump before the second chorus (an octave leap that Paul considers a hallmark of The Voice Audition Core), as well as the whole bridge are both stellar. But for me, the musical elements I like are nearly ruined by Sombr’s songwriting. The song builds into an event of a chorus, which went viral on TikTok. But the awkward, “I’m 19 and this is deep” wording of what should be the song’s epic hook, “How can we go back to being friends when we just shared a bed?” undermines the potential payoff of the bridge and verses.

His other hit, Undressed, is also a catchy tune of melodramatic yearning with a big sing-along chorus that makes good use of the TikTok bedroom indie sound. It’s also basically a rehash of Back to Friends. Both songs’ choruses consist of two parallel sentences in call and response, with essentially the same melodic phrasing. The songs’ choruses are already repetitive enough on their own, but when played together, their similarities make one sound like a ripoff of the other. The main difference between the two is that Undressed is slightly worse than Back to Friends in almost every way. The melody is less catchy, the bridge is weaker, and the production isn’t as gritty. And the lyrics are slightly awkwarder – especially in the bridge. I’m not usually one to care about lyrics, but it’s hard to ignore when Sombr belts cringe at the emotional climax of every song. They make his teenage heartbreak come across like teenage whining. So as much as I like the instrumentals, I’ve struggled get on board with him overall.

It wasn’t until he released 12 to 12 that he started to win me over. It hits the main notes of a Sombr song, but he trades his melancholic whining for urgent pleading. He picks up the tempo, puts a rock edge in the guitars, and adds some disco-inspired piano chords reminiscent of Dua Lipa’s Don’t Start Now. It’s got a groovy bass line and lots of fun drum fills. And some decent lyrics! I can’t tell whether the lyrics are actually better, or if the chorus just doesn’t put as much weight on them. Or maybe he sings this song with enough conviction that his lyricism doesn’t phase me. Regardless, it makes for a much smoother listening experience.

After this song, Sombr quickly announced his debut album, I Barely Know Her, which came out last month. I went in a skeptic, but came out the other side very pleasantly surprised. Each track on the album follows the same general sonic and lyrical formula, but they range in tone from melancholic to desperate to bitter, which makes for an album that’s cohesive, but rarely samey. The lyrics are generally awkward and melodramatic, but they were rarely as egregious as on Back to Friends and Undressed. Crushing, Dime, and I Wish I Knew How To Quit You in particular are all standouts. And I love the post-chorus on We Never Dated (even if the rest of the song is a yet another Back to Friends ripoff).

I think this album’s main accomplishment is that it finally got more people talking about Sombr, and figuring out where he fits in the (abysmal) pop landscape of 2025. The comparison I’m seeing most often for I Barely Know Her is to Olivia Rodrigo’s debut album, Sour. Both are massive debut albums by young artists that sing melodramatically about their world-ending teenage breakups. Both albums drew some criticism for the limited breadth of their subject matter and teenage lyricism. Both artists struggled to be taken seriously from their singles, and were only given a fair shot after their albums were released. Sour is the fourth most streamed album of all time on Spotify, and Olivia is arguably the defining breakout star of the 2020s. It’s about time we get her male equivalent. If the comparisons follow, this will be a very good year for Sombr.

So, is Sombr a sign of good things to come? Has our male pop star drought finally let up?

When I listen to Sombr, and especially when I watch him perform, I don’t think of Olivia Rodrigo. I think of Benson Boone. That may sound harsh to some, but I’m a bit of a Benson Boone defender. My read on Benson is that he seems like a perfectly fine guy whose artistic ambitions are far beyond his actual skill level. He clearly wants the defining male pop star of the 2020s, but his art comes off as mostly style and little substance. He got clowned on for the glittery body suits and backflips at his Grammy performance, and while I don’t think they were particularly suited to his style of music, at least he’s interesting – most of his male contemporaries don’t even try to be interesting on stage. He also does have a great voice, as evidenced by his Adele cover. But he’s got an uphill battle ahead of him, between fleeing his American Idol beginnings, his The Voice Audition Core smash hit Beautiful Things, and an online discourse/hate trend a few months ago that reached a level of vitriol the internet generally reserves for women. I wish him the best, and I hope that one day, he writes a song I actually enjoy listening to.

Musically, I’d take Sombr over Benson any day. But does Sombr have star power? From watching his live performances, I’m not sure yet. But he’s clearly ambitious. He jumps around the stage, throws the mic stand back and forth, and puts a little extra twang in his voice. There’s even theatrics – I liked his performance of Undressed on Jimmy Kimmel, when a bunch of hands rip off his shirt during the bridge. His ambitions are especially clear during his performance at the VMAs. I love the concept here, singing 12 to 12 surrounded by female dancers he mostly ignores, and the glittery jacket suits him well. Like with Benson, it’s all still a bit awkward. But unlike Benson, whose singing career began on American Idol four years ago, Sombr only made his TV debut back in May and was quite obscure before 2025. He’s not exactly a Bieber protégée, either. His music and image are darker, and, well, a bit somber. But he’s clearly doing something to get the Gen Alpha and baby Zs on board. I’d keep an eye on him.

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I’ve seen people make the case that this year’s lack of good, big pop music is the result of America’s recent leap toward conservatism. Good pop music is almost always gay, Black, feminine, or rebelious, and those are not easy things to be right now. I certainly think our country’s politics are related to the extra Christian music on the charts this year (and the extra country music for the last three years). But I’m hesitant to mourn the death of pop music too soon. 2024 was an exceptional year for pop, with a truly absurd amount of new releases from the biggest names. Most of the big artists are still capitalizing on the success of last year’s music, or maybe barely starting to work on any new stuff. Have Americans’ political persuasions taken pop music from its best year in recent memory to completely dead in a matter of months? I don’t buy it. And I’m worried that dooming over its recess is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Just like how making concessions to fascism only makes them more powerful, acknowledging the death of pop music too soon may be what kills it.

Anyway, here’s some songs I like!

1. Every Girl You’ve Ever Loved - Miley Cyrus ft. Naomi Campbell

   In a just world, this song would’ve been as big as Flowers was a couple years ago. Miley’s latest album, Something Beautiful, came out in May and lives up to the name. What makes Every Girl You’ve Ever Loved such a standout to me is the chorus. Miley belts the chorus in her naturally gritty voice over a blaring horn section and some bold percussive sounds that I can’t identify. Then the post-chorus gives us some lines from Naomi Campbell. I don’t know much about her or fashion/runway culture in general, but her addition to the song is really special, synthesizing the restrained poise of the runway with Miley’s textured voice and the chaotic instrumentation. And the way it all comes together, it’s like the song was custom-made for the gay club.

2. I Care - Turnstile

   I don’t know much about Turnstile. Actually, I’d never heard of them until I heard to their new album. But this album, Never Enough, brought me a polished, exploratory, punk sound that I didn’t know I needed. I don’t normally gravitate toward punk, but it feels warranted these days, and Turnstile make it pretty easy for a newcomer to join the party, with each song adding something unique to the drums and guitars. I think a part of why I like I Care so much in particular from this album is that it’s basically a pop song that just so happens to have a punk chorus. Most of the song catchy and relaxed, with these 80s synthesizer drum passages and a looping chord progression that’s never too tense or too resolved. But these pop sections are punctured by the heavier, shoutier chorus. It sounds like a warm sunny day in July. One that comes after an unusually cold and rainy June, and even though you’re enjoying the nice weather you’re still frustrated that summer is already half over even though it feels like it barely started (not that I’m speaking from experience).

3. Mr. Media - Tyla

   She’s back! And she’s angry! I won’t get into the various PR controversies Tyla’s gotten into over the last couple years (from what I can tell, they’re mostly just misunderstandings, xenophobia, and misogyny). But she’s letting the frustration they’ve caused her fuel this track. I didn’t love her two last singles, Bliss and Is It, but the rest of her new EP, WWP, (which also includes Mr. Media and the WizKid collab, Dynamite) won me back over. I love her attitude on this song, especially the way she rolls her R and stresses the line “I can never get it ri-i-ight”. Few things are more cathartic than an angry song to dance to.

4. One of My Bedbugs Ate My Pussy - CupcakKe

   I’ve been a genuine fan of CupcakKe for a while now, and she has long been the queen of injecting raunchy hip hop with absurdist humor. But wow, this one still left my jaw on the floor. Even past the title, it’s filled with meme references from last year, a punchy and danceable beat, incredible flows, and an Itsy-Bitsy Spider interpolation of all things. I won’t go in too much detail because the song speaks for itself (and also because my parents read my Substack). But I’ve had this song on repeat far more than I’d like to admit.

5. The Subway - Chappell Roan

   Aaaaand just after I started working on this post I had to rewrite it because we might have a genuine song of the summer on our hands! (Very) early predictions based on streaming numbers have it in competition with Ordinary for a number 1 debut next week. We’ll see if this song proves stable enough to pull it off. But I’m feeling optimistic.

   This song only came out two days ago (at least for me since I never watched the live recordings), but I feel like I’ve been listening to it for years. Like so much of Chappell’s songwriting, it’s timeless. She tones down her theatricality here, leaning into the vulnerability of longing and heartbreak. And the bridge/outro, where she sings “She’s got a way; she got away” is one of the most powerful vocal passages I’ve heard in a pop song in a while. And the line about moving to Saskatchewan is particularly relatable right now. It might not be a typical, upbeat song of the summer. But it feels appropriate for the moment.

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Pop might be paused, but it will resume shortly.

Their new song, Gnarly, also prompts a lot of questions. For example: What the fuck is this?

When the song dropped, it elicited very strong reactions from fans – some positive, but mostly negative. I hadn’t kept up with Katseye before Gnarly, but the hubbub around it made waves across my TikTok feed. Fans were upset at what they saw as an ugly and abrasive change of sound. Oh – I quickly realized – it’s a hyperpop song.

Hyperpop is the name of the (alleged) genre of music created by A. G. Cook’s PC Music label, and the musicians inspired by it. It employs highly exaggerated, often contrasting sounds. For example, loud and heavily bass with chipmunk vocals, heavy autotune, and uncouth sound effects. It’s pop music with all the dials turned up to 1000. One of my favorite explorations into the hyperpop phenomenon is Mic The Snare’s video on the topic from 2020. He outlines what he viewed at the time as the four pivotal moments for the genre: the inception of the PC Music record label, Charli xcx’s Pop 2, Sophie’s Oil of Every Pearl’s Uninsides, and 100 gecs’ 1,000 gecs.

That year, 2020, was a sort of hyper-peak – the year ElyOtto’s Sugarcrash! dominated TikTok and 1,000 gecs made ears bleed around the globe. The genre’s abrasion and, well, hyper-ness, certainly made it a fitting soundtrack for my and many other pandemic lockdown restlessnesses. But it’s been five years since that moment. What have these artists been up to in that time? 100 gecs released another album, 10,000 gecs, which was also very boundary pushing but in very different ways, and the duo have expressed apprehension toward the “hyperpop” label. Sophie passed away in a tragic accident and left us with a posthumous album that fans mostly disliked. Charli xcx found mainstream success with Brat summer, which was commercially and critically lauded as a return to form after her failed attempt at mainstream popularity with Crash. But even Brat is a pretty straightforward electropop album compared to Pop 2. And the PC Music record label has ceased releasing new music as of 2023. With 2020 in hindsight, hyperpop looks less like a full-blown genre and more like a solar eclipse. The artists’ creative trajectories aligned in a beautiful, fleeting moment, amplified by pandemic glasses, before continuing on their separate paths.

But that doesn’t mean hyperpop is dead. The sounds have stuck around and lots of smaller artists are still going at it (I really liked the recent Food House and Underscores albums). Katseye has also, now, tried their hand at the genre, and it’s landed them their first entry on the Hot 100. And I suppose I can’t talk about Gnarly without mentioning the other hyperpop song currently charting, Charli xcx’s Party 4 U.

Party 4 U was first was released on Charli’s 2020 album, How I’m Feeling Now, and it’s great. It takes a simple refrain of Charli singing “I only threw this party for you” and recontextualizes it in ways that range from melancholic to euphoric, to paint a vivid picture of unrequited love set against a backdrop of an ecstatic celebration. It’s very well executed and after going a viral on TikTok, it’s charting on the Hot 100 for the first time, making it the first song from How I’m Feeling Now to do so. I’m glad that it’s finally having its time in the spotlight. It also sounds very of its time.

Song released in 2020, music video in 2025

When I listen to Party 4 U in 2025 having been there for the hyper-peak (though admittedly, I wasn’t tuned in to Charli until Crash), it sounds a bit dated, especially for a song that barely turned 5. I’m sure that’s partly because big names of hyperpop are doing other things now. It’s not beating the pandemic allegations. But listening to Party 4 U among 2024 and 2025 pop songs, it fits in surprisingly well. It’s hardly more experimental than 360, no more abrasive than Apple. It’s an easier listen than Sam Smith’s Unholy, and with less vocal processing than Jimin’s Who. Hyperpop may have moved on, but its influence has seeped all over the pop landscape. And now, it’s mainstream enough for K-pop (or, perhaps, global pop) to take notice.

Gnarly is very abrasive. The lyrics are bratty, the vocals are over-processed and distorted, and the beat is full of harsh sound effects and metallic synths. It was cowritten by Alice Longyu Gao, a pioneer of the hyperpop scene whose music is often more out there than even I can handle. It’s a big departure from the group’s other songs, which are more in line with the softer bubblegum side of K-pop. Going from Touch to Gnarly is certainly a risky move for a group that has fewer than 10 total songs released on Spotify. The group even teased that it wouldn’t be what listeners were expecting, and that we might not like it on first listen. And they were right! They assured us, though, that with time, we’d all acclimate to the new sound.

I acclimated pretty fast. I admire the risk. Katseye have already challenged the K-pop status quo once with the racially diverse cast; why not keep going? Just like hyperpop is (or was) pushing pop music to its logical extremes and testing its limits, why can’t Katseye do the same for K-pop? How much control can they have over their image and lives? Could one of them even be queer? When I first saw the backlash to Gnarly, I assumed the bulk of the criticism was coming from people who aren’t familiar with this side of hyperpop or just don’t like the sound. And fair enough – risks don’t always pay off. But several of the objections turned out to be lyrical, and about Katseye’s perceived lack of authenticity. So, what’s going on with the lyrics?

On face value, the lyrics are pretty awful. They describe a bunch of random, unrelated things as gnarly (except Lara, as she, herself, declares), they mention Tesla, and they say “gang gang” uncomfortably too many times. In short, they’re K-pop lyrics. But that’s just the surface level interpretation. What if there’s something else going on here? Hyperpop is a very tongue-in-cheek genre, that, as Mic The Snare puts it “toes the line between sincerity and parody” so maybe the lyrics, too, are a sort of parody. What’s if it’s not meant to be taken seriously? Maybe Katseye, a group that’s sort of K-pop, but sort of not, are singing a song that is sort of a joke. But also, sort of not.

The think-piecing over Gnarly and its lyrics has taken over my TikTok feed. For what it’s worth, Alice Longyu Gao has said the song was inspired by her experience learning English as a foreign language and realizing that the word “gnarly” can be applied to really anything, good or bad, including boba tea and fried chicken. They also apply it to Tesla, though TikTokers remain divided on if Tesla is meant to be gnarly (good) or gnarly (bad). Still, some people feel like the lyrics are too meaningless, akin to how K-Pop lyrics apparently often sound to Korean speakers (I don’t speak Korean, so I can neither confirm nor deny). And then there’s the issue of who’s performing. While some folks welcome Katseye into the hyperpop space with open arms, others think the satire gets lost when performed by an idol group – with the money, marketing, and manufactured image that gives them. As to what is actually being satirized? Some suggest consumerism, others say rich influencers. Or as the Gay Pop Substack suggests, it’s a “[celebration] of cultural homogeneity where – in our hellscape times – we’re used to seeing untold atrocities unfold on our phones, and then dutifully go on with our day.”

I’m tired. Personally, I don’t want to comb through layers upon layers of meta-irony and post-irony to find dubious depths in the lyrics of a K-hyperpop song. Party 4 U is a hyperpop song. But it went viral specifically because it’s so vulnerable, and its cinematic portrayal of unrequited love resonated with people. Other, more tongue-in-cheek hyperpop songs, like Money Machine by 100 gecs, don’t spark think pieces because we can all somewhat agree that the lyrics are just goofy ramblings. Gnarly, on the other hand – if it’s trying to be a satire, I think it’s failing. And not just for of a lack authenticity. I don’t necessarily disagree with any of the points I mentioned above. The cultural homogeneity Gay Pop describes is certainly a real phenomenon. It’s just not something that crosses my mind when I’m listening to Gnarly. Gnarly, the word, can be used to describe everything, and therefore means nothing. Likewise, Gnarly the song, doesn’t strike me as being about anything in particular. Is the song authentic? Is it genuine? I don’t care. It’s a bop.

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My partner and I went to Taiwan in April. I spent two weeks there, visiting cities across the island and eating lots of great food. But I don’t know much about Taiwanese music. The Spotify charts tell me to expect a mix of K-pop and Chinese music, with a few western hits here and there. Naturally, I had Shazam going for most of the trip.

I started this Substack as a place to ramble about music and to write travel stories. The two travel stories I have posted are both about navigating my queerness in the post-Soviet world. They’re the culmination of the four months I spent in the region and I’m quite proud of them. I think they’re more insightful than anything I could write about a two-week vacation. Look at this delicious food! The transit system is so easy to navigate! The people are so friendly! All of that is true, but I don’t think it makes for an interesting story.

Still, my friends and family keep asking me to write more travel stories, and I want to write more of them too. So, this post is something a little different: A playlist of the songs I Shazamed in Taiwan. I’m hoping that for the people in my personal life, this will provide a bit more color to my answer when you next see me and ask, “So how was your trip?” And I’m hoping there’s enough music here that I don’t alienate my three subscribers that don’t know me in real life (shoutout to y’all).

I’ve saved these songs into a Spotify playlist here:

1. APT. by Rosé and Bruno Mars

I never Shazamed this one, but I didn’t need to. I recognized it myself, and I recognized it everywhere. Not a day went by in Taiwan that Rosé and Bruno didn’t invite me to the APT from a restaurant, convenience store, or tea house. Spotify tells me it was the 9^th most popular song in Taiwan during the trip, whereas Apple Music puts it at number 3. Personally, it felt like a runaway number 1.

Honorable mention to another Bruno Mars duet, Fat, Juicy, and Wet with Sexyy Red. I didn’t hear it, but it was advertised on a very prominent Billboard in Taipei Main Station (I wish I thought to take a picture of that billboard). Also, my partner wants me to write about the TikTok trend of babies that love APT. It seems to be a very popular song in the baby community.

2. Summer Riot by The Rampage from Exile Tribe

I heard this list’s first proper Shazam while wandering the labyrinth of shopping plazas surrounding and underneath Taipei Main Station, trying desperately to find an exit. The city’s (and therefore the country’s) central node for trains and busses is adjacent to several above-ground shopping malls, to which it is connected by a dizzying network of underground tunnels that are also shopping malls in and of themselves. I think this song was coming from a bookstore. I don’t have any pictures of the complex, but a quick YouTube search will provide hours of walking tours.

This is a fun song by a Japanese boy group. I don’t have very much to say about it except that it’s a good addition to my playlist of songs in different languages that have a reggaeton beat. I’ve been listening to it a lot this week.

3. Taidada by Zutomayo

One thing I’ve noticed about the (little) J-pop I’ve listened to is that there’s a lot more key changes than in western pop music. Some of them strike me as gimmicky – abruptly shifting the whole song up in pitch to keep the energy rising – but I like how it’s done here. And Taidada does it twice. I like this song quite a bit. I need to listen to more J-pop.

I Shazamed Taidada still within the purgatory of the underground mall, fifteen minutes after Summer Riot, still looking for an exit to the surface. The song’s frenzy was a good instrumental for my quest. When I eventually did find the exit, I wound up about a mile north of where I started, somewhere along the red line. If I wanted to get from that point back to Taipei Main Station where I started, it was about three stops away on the metro.

4. 病嬌の愛 by Yawnisher3x♡ and Siick

“Is that Bladee???” I thought to myself as I heard this song from outside an open-air electronics store in Taipei. It wasn’t Bladee. Chinese Bladee maybe, idk. I don’t really like Bladee. I like this song though. It’s got a fun melody and a few English lyrics for some reason. And I like Yawnisher3x♡’s voice MUCH more than Bladee’s horrible yarl. Yarjak on Genius describes Yawnisher3x♡ as a “Hyperpop – Hip-Hop – Emocore artist from Hong Kong,” but this song doesn’t have lyrics so I can’t Google translate much of the song beyond the title: “Love of Illness”.

5. Dream by Lisa

I was in a bit of a hurry getting from my hostel near the train station in Hualien to the Dongdamen Night Market for dinner. Hualien is on Taiwan’s less populated east coast and is a center of indigenous Taiwanese culture, and I was excited (hungry, even) to try some indigenous Taiwanese food. But I heard this song coming from small bar (with four taps and even fewer seats) and thought I recognized it.

This is the last song (excluding remixes) on Alter Ego, Lisa’s (from Blackpink) debut solo album released earlier this year. I listened to Alter Ego when it came out, but to be honest, I’m not sure I recognized Dream from the album. I think it sounded familiar because the chorus has the same melody as F2F by SZA. Strange.

6. Bingo (ASSA) by The Turtles

I don’t remember this song at all. Maybe it was a mis-Shazam?

7. Muy Lento by Lawd Ito

I wondered if I’d hear any music in Spanish this trip. This was the only one. I heard it at a clothes store Hualien, and I wonder how it got there. Lawd Ito has close to the fewest monthly listeners of anyone on this list, and this isn’t even one of his bigger songs. Probably TikTok or something, idk.

Most people who visit Hualien are there for Taroko Gorge National Park. But after an earthquake damaged the park last year, it’s still quite difficult to visit without a car or scooter, and I’m not one to drive in a foreign country. There was plenty to do in Hualien otherwise, and my hostel suggested I rent a bicycle for the day. They showed me an ArcGIS StoryMap with different bike route suggestions and I took the blue route. I rode about twenty miles through fields, past a couple temples, and along Qixingtan Beach. It was a stony beach, but I noticed a spot where some families were stacking rock towers, and I tried my hand at rock stacking as well. The ocean was a stunning blue and the mountains towered over the city. Then I took a detour to the Taiwan Aboriginal Culture Museum and learned about the indigenous hunting rituals.

8. Love Me Not by Ravyn Lenae

I wasn’t expecting this to be the first English-language non-K-pop song I heard in Taiwan.

9. Blue by Yung Kai

I’m not a big ballad guy, but I was kinda surprised I didn’t hear this one earlier in my trip. It’s been a huge Spotify hit across Asia all year, at one point peaking in the top 25 on the global charts. One slightly unusual thing about its success is that despite charting across southeast Asia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Canada, it hasn’t cracked the US at all. On the one hand, I’m surprised by that since Yung Kai is based in Canada and sings the song entirely in English. But he seems to be doing just fine without us.

10. 你的微笑 by F.I.R.

Finally, an artist that’s actually from Taiwan! I heard this song over lunch on a very bright, very hot, very sunny, very humid day in Kaohsiung. I don’t remember that afternoon well because the weather was making me a bit delirious.

The song, whose title translates to “Your Smile,” was a single from the band’s 2004 self-titled debut album, the 3^rd bestselling album in Taiwan that year. There’s a fun mix of pop and rock here – I feel like F.I.R. is drawing on different elements of the two genres than most artists that I would think of as “pop-rock”. I really like the harmonic minor guitar solos. And, of course, there’s a key change halfway through.

11. Love to Dream by Doja Cat

“Oh, what’s this Chinese song?” I asked myself, standing on a busy street outside a mall in Tainan with the Shazam app open. Doja Cat. It was Doja Cat.

(I also heard Born Again, her collaboration with Lisa and Raye, a couple times out and about.)

12. Cheers by Muque

We left Kaohsiung and Tainan after a couple days to head to the mountains. We knew that Alishan was the place to be, but we worried that Alishan would be busier and touristier than we liked. Instead, we opted to stay in Fenqihu, the village best known as the bento box stop on the way to Alishan. Mountains are mountains, we figured. It shouldn’t make a huge difference which ones we see. But to get to Fenqihu or Alishan from Kaohsiung, we had to take the train to Chiayi and catch the bus.

Our transfer was only an hour I’m not sure if there’s much to do in Chiayi besides leave for the mountains and eat turkey rice. But the boba shop down the block from the train station had immaculate taste in music – this song went directly into my playlist. Muque don’t seem like a particularly famous band, and I can’t find any records of their songs charting anywhere. But they’ve got 25k monthly listeners in Tokyo, 11k in their native Fukuoka, 6k in Taipei, and now, one in Portland.

13. Movin’ On by Josh Ross

My partner and I were sitting by the train station in Fenqihu, admiring the mountains, watching the day-trippers, and eating some delicious oolong ice cream when we heard it: the store next to us was BLASTING American country music. On the one hand, I’m well aware that country isn’t just the soundtrack of rural Americans (or more accurately, suburbanites cosplaying as rural Americans). But I’m still always surprised to hear the genre outside North America. And I hear it everywhere I go. I didn’t mind the country playlist. It was country music for the countryside. But this song, however, has a really heavy trap beat that made it stick out from the other, acoustic guitar-focused, songs in a really jarring way. Country artists should never have been allowed to use trap beats – I’m always saying this.

Luckily, the ice cream was tasty, and the view was dazzling. It was wonderful cooling down for a bit after the oppressive heat in Kaohsiung, and the mountain detour brought some much-needed tranquility as well. The town bustled during the day, but once the afternoon’s last train departed, only a dozen or so foreign visitors spent the night, and we wandered the town as the locals closed their shops for the evening, leaving us to enjoy the countryside, the mountain air, and fireflies.

14. Cosmic by Red Velvet

After Fenqihu, we took the train back up to Taipei, where we based ourselves for the last four days of the trip. There is so much to do in the city, not to mention a plethora of potential day trips, that we could’ve spent the entire trip there without getting bored.

I don’t remember where in Taipei I was when this song came on. But it’s fun and I like it.

15. Sensational by Chris Brown, Davido, and Lojay

I wondered if I was going to hear any Afrobeats this trip, and words cannot express my disappointment that the one Afrobeats song I got was a Chris Brown song. This came on at a hot pot restaurant in Ximending. At least the food was good.

16. What is Love? by Twice

This song came on at a gift ship atop of the Maokong Gondola. I was having phone troubles for the latter half of the trip, and the battery kept dying unexpectedly. I had my partner Shazam this one for me. Luckily, he also brought a portable charger that I could monopolize. We walked a mile or so from the top of the gondola to a tea house overlooking the mountains, tea farms, and Taipei 101, which protruded starkly from the Earth and could be seen from anywhere in the surrounding hills. Built in 2004, Taipei 101 was once the tallest building in the world (though it no longer ranks among the top 10) and while it’s hard to get a sense of its scale from the luxury mall comprising its bottom half dozen floors, a trip to the viewing decks or neighboring mountains puts it into perspective. It feels strikingly unnatural and almost unearthly how it dominates the skyline from the hills, when every other connection to the city, save the 20-minute gondola ride, is imperceptibly distant. Taipei 101 stands on its own, like the valley’s thumb telling the mountains they’re doing a good job.

17. I still by Milet

We got off the mountains later than we planned and made it back to our hotel even later. By the time we were ready to head back out again for dinner not much was still open besides night markets, and we were both too tired to for the adventure. We ended up at a Japanese fast-food place which was exactly what we needed. They were playing only Japanese music, but I thought this one sounded familiar.

Apparently, this song only came out this year, alongside a movie. It’s reached the top 20 on the official Japanese charts, but I’m not sure where my déjà vu could have come from. Maybe I know a song with a similar melody in the chorus? If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.

18. New Genesis by Ado

Another song from the Japanese restaurant. I don’t remember why I picked out this song, but I felt satisfied that I recognized the artist – I listened another one of her songs in college.

19. 往后余生 by 孙莞

The Rest of my Life by Sun Wan. I can’t find anything else about this song. But it’s cute! I heard it on our last night in Taipei while eating a delicious dinner of fried chicken, fried tofu, fried squid, fried fishcake, and fried green beans tossed in garlic and chili at the Shida night market. I like the little synth countermelodies in the background.

20. Dancing Diva by Jolin Tsai

Probably my favorite song on this list. I Shazamed it on our last night in Taiwan as we wandered Yongkang Street looking to finalize our souvenir collections. We were busy during our time in Taipei. We visited the National Palace Museum, and the Chiang Kai-Shek memorial. We took a day trip to Jiufen and to Houtong cat village. We were too busy to buy souvenirs, and apparently, I was too busy to Shazam much.

I knew Taiwan had a strong Japanese influence, and that K-pop is popular across Asia, but I’m surprised just how few songs on this list are actually in Chinese. This is only the fourth one and (spoiler alert), I didn’t hear any more after this. So maybe it’s fitting that the last Chinese song I heard was by Jolin Tsai, the queen of C-pop. I won’t pretend I knew who she was before I googled her from back in the US, but just from this song I could tell she was important.

21. Easy by Le Sserafim

I’m surprised I hadn’t heard this song before. Le Sserafim are a big group, and this song seems like one of Le Sserafim’s biggest. But it also came out before I was paying any attention to K-pop. Either way, it’s a catchy bop.

22. How Sweet by NewJeans

One last song, and while I only finally Shazamed it at Raohe Night market, I’d heard it a few other times around Taiwan and listened to it on repeat when it came out last year. I love NewJeans and I’ve always felt like this song was underrated, so I was glad to hear it getting some recognition, and surprised it was the only NewJeans song I heard this trip. I know NewJeans are involved in a legal battle with their label. I’ve tried a couple times to read up on what’s going on, but every source I find leaves me even more confused than I was before. I’m just sad their musical journey might be over.

I was sad to leave Taiwan. I had a lot of fun this trip and it was a great bit of escapism for the everything that is happening right now. I’d love to go back some day and see more – Keelung, Taitung, Taichung, Alishan, Sun Moon Lake – but I know it’s impossible to ever see everything. I’m grateful for the memories.

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The answer, it turns out, is a collab album with fellow Toronto rapper PartyNextDoor titled $ome $exy $ongs 4 U.

Lately, I have not been listening to Drake’s new album, and it seems I’m not the only one who hasn’t tuned in. While a number one debut on the albums chart and a couple 10 singles on the Hot 100 would be excellent for most artists, it’s a notable drop in stature for the one with the most Hot 100 entries of all time, and whose previous albums have on multiple occasions occupied the top 3-9 songs on the chart at once. Even his last collab album (Her Loss with 21 Savage), occupied 8 of the top 10 spots for its release week. And besides one $exy $ong 4 U, Nokia, the rest of the album seems to be falling pretty quickly. Drake is still too big to fail, but these number indicate that Drake’s era of mega stardom might be waning.

Maybe the album is good; I don’t know. But that doesn’t seem to be the general reception, and I don’t care enough to find out myself. Nokia has been all over my TikTok feeds this month and I’ll admit it’s pretty catchy. But against my will, a different song from the album has taken over my TikTok feed as well. It’s a cross-cultural effort in which the two Canadians are joined by Mexican singer Chino Pacas. I not super familiar with Chino Pacas specifically, but he’s a part of the wave of Regional Mexican singers who took the Hot 100 by storm in 2023 and never really left (see also: Grupo Frontera and Peso Pluma). The song is called Meet Your Padre, and it's a mess. For most of its runtime, Drake and Chino Pacas trade the microphone to woo a girl over a stiff guitar riff, boring melodies, a beat consisting mostly of handclaps and random voices in the background shouting in Spanish to fill the dead space where the two have run out of things to say. This goes on for a while, until a beat switch steers the last minute of the song into a corrido tumbado, a subgrenre of Regional Mexican music, that is sung by PartyNextDoor.

But the most memorable aspect of the song isn’t the beat. It’s Drake’s particular style of Spanglish lyricism. I could write about it more in depth, but I think the nuance of the poetry will get lost in translation, so I’ll let Drake’s words speak for themselves:

I want to meet your madre, pay my respects to your padre mi amor.

I want your phone número por favavaor. [Drake manages to pronounce “por favor” with four syllables]

She kissed my cheek and she said “Muchas gracias.”

These mexicano girls are way too attractive.

I am appalled. I am fascinated. I am baffled. How did we get here? Why is Drake?

Drake has a long history of riding trends, but he does so in a way that comes across to many as exploitative. He has a long history of jumping on whatever genres are trending up – whether its Afrobeats (One Dance), reggaeton (Mia), or house music (Honestly, Nevermind) – with half-assed and watered down versions of these sounds. He’s done this so frequently, and the results have been so subpar, that it comes across less like he has a genuine interest in these sounds and more like he sees them as nothing more than a way to get his music in more people’s ears. He often collaborates with rising artists, too, but this can then lead to him taking the newer artist’s best ideas for himself and stifling their growth. A subplot in the Drake and Kendrick Lamar feud was Drake’s other feud with The Weeknd, who felt like this happened to him.

The way this plays out on a large scale and affects rap culture is (alongside the pedophilia accusation) the other main line of attack in Not Like Us. Drake even sometimes takes it a step further by representing himself as from whatever place or culture he’s stealing from, going so far as to change his accent to match (or attempt to match) his new sound. So it’s not even all that new or surprising for Drake to suddenly don some Spanglish - he already has a song with Bad Bunny - and especially when Regional Mexican music has been so hot on the charts recently.

Cosplay gangsters, fake-ass accents - Megan Thee Stallion, Hiss

You run to Atlanta when you need a few dollars, no you not a colleague you a fuckin’ colonizer - Kendrick Lamar, Not Like Us

I don’t think Drake expects people to think he’s suddenly Hispanic based off his two-day-Duolingo-streak Spanglish. But it is revealing that Drake is dipping his toes in Regional Mexican music now, not long after its meteoric surge on the Hot 100. He’s not the first rapper to hop in on the wave. Cardi B released a song with Peso Pluma last year, and Bad Bunny made an appearance on a Grupo Frontera track in 2023, which played a big role in the genre’s global ascent. But unlike Cardi B and Bad Bunny, who both speak Spanish and who both pay frequent homage to Latin music in their own work, Drake has spread himself so thin that it’s hard to believe he actually cares or knows anything about the genre in the first place. Especially when his lyrics are such cringy, fetishizing, and half-assed.

I wrote that Meet Your Padre has been all over my TikTok. But that’s only because everyone on MusicTok is making fun of it. At least on my corner of the app, everyone heard this song and immediately recognized it for what it is, and immediately went to dunk on it. There’s a lot of antipathy toward Drake at the moment, so I’m not surprised to see one of his new songs getting this treatment. And Meet Your Padre was an obvious target, especially after the beef, and especially when its doing the exact same thing Kendrick called him out for in Not Like Us.

I saw the same recycled jokes about this song many times during its release week. “Worst Bunny,” “Mi minor”, “Drake wrote this for his girlfriend’s quinceañera”. These are all fun jabs, and I chuckled the first time I heard them. One TikTokker says “omg bad bunny lock your doors and up the security because why is drake elbow deep rifiling through ur purse” to which someone comments “he stole his nachos right off his plate omg”. After a year of being drug through the mud for his “fake-ass accents” no one has time for a Bad Bunny knockoff. We’ll listen to the original instead.

But what Bad Bunny song sounds like this? Sure, there’s a reggaeton-ish pulse, but that’s a pretty common rhythm. I could point you to songs in English, Russian, and Hindi that use it. The musical elements of Meet Your Padre that stick out most to me are the Spanish guitar, castanets, and cheers of encouragement (jaleos). These aren’t sounds you’d usually hear in a reggaeton song, not even by someone as sonically varied as Bad Bunny. Really, they’re sounds you hear in flamenco. These aren’t Bad Bunny’s nachos we’re stealing. They’re C. Tangana’s (and maybe Rosalía’s). To me, the beat on Meet Your Padre (at least until the outro) is basically just a cheap knockoff of Tú Me Dejaste De Querer, which sounds quite unlike any Bad Bunny song I can think of. That places Meet Your Padre not in Puerto Rico or Mexico, but in Spain – technically outside the realm of Latin music altogether. Even the outro, which is of a Mexican style (corrido tumbado) is of a very different Mexican style than the Bad Bunny’s Mexican collaboration (the cumbia song Un X100to, with Group Frontera).

I’m not expecting everyone to know the differences between these genres, and I’m sure there’s some nuance I’m missing too. Besides, Drake is an easy figure to dunk on, and he deserves the dunks. So what’s the harm in taking the piss out of a multi-millionaire suspected-pedophile? But it’s surprising how many people dunking on Drake for cultural appropriation don’t seem to know what culture he’s appropriating from. It makes me wonder how much people care about these issues at all, or if they just want someone to laugh at.

Drake is a lolcow. Every time his popularity or relevance are beginning to wane, and he wants to return to the limelight, he does something that we, as an audience, can milk for lols. So, I guess skeptical of the motives of the people still dunking on him after everything. We know who he is and what he does. He can always do something shocking to get our attention, but at this point it can’t really be surprising anymore. It’s just a big entertainment spectacle. I guess I’m guilty of perpetuating this spectacle myself, seeing how I just wrote 1800 words about it. It is fun to dunk on lolcows, but lolcow cults can lead to anti-fandoms, which can be just as effective publicity and revenue as regular fandoms. Everyone dunking on Meet Your Padre is making the song more viral and getting this piece of junk into more people’s ears. That has the potential to lead to bigger streaming numbers and turning this pathetic attempt at ragebait into an actual hit. Ragebait music has already produced number 1 hits by artists as varied as Jason Aldean and Lil Nas X1. There’s no reason it couldn’t work for Drake.

Luckily that’s not what’s happening with Meet Your Padre. The song charted for its release week at number 63, then promptly left the Hot 100 entirely. And its moment of TikTok virality was brief – only really lasting a couple days and never escaping beyond my musical corner of the app. It’s too pathetic to laugh at or care about any longer than that (unless you’re me and unemployed and have nothing better to do with your time). So, there’s not much left to say, except gracias for reading and adiós.

Bad Bunny’s latest album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos (I should have taken more photos), has been described as his love letter to Puerto Rico. It’s filled with references, both sonically and lyrically, to the island’s culture and music. The Switched On Pop podcast has a great episode on the album which helped me understand the different sounds a bit better, but I’m sure there’s still a lot going over my head. My Spanish is nowhere near good enough for me to understand all the lyrics, and for the most part I don’t really try. I just want to dance.

And I’m in luck – Bad Bunny brought bangers. Within just the first three songs we get an electrifying array of Caribbean sounds to dance to. The opening track, Nuevayol, starts with a classic salsa sample, but Bad Bunny reworks it into a dembow beat that’s so well done, it inspired many a TikTokker (or their parents) to react to the remix (but more on TikTok later). This is followed by Voy a Llevarte Pa PR, which (as well as EoO and Veldá later in the album) is a lively piece of reggaeton. And the third song, Baile Involvidable, is six minutes of salsa bliss.

But more than any of these, the song that has taken off the most is the album’s title track, DtMF. DtMF debuted at number 2 on the Hot 100, making it Bad Bunny’s highest charting song as a lead artist, and it topped the global Spotify chart for three weeks. DtMF isn’t an obvious hit, at least to my US-American ears. It’s much slower than the opening tracks and it drags on towards the end. It’s also devastating. The main line of the chorus translates to “I should have taken more photos of when I had you. I should have given you more kisses and hugs whenever I could,” which Bad Bunny sings to his people who’ve moved away from Puerto Rico, leaving him behind. But it’s far from a dirge. Towards the end, the synths cut out and Bad Bunny is joined by a chorus of people riffing off each other over some acoustic percussion, giving the song the intimacy of a live recording. The song, and the people singing it, turn the pain of loss into a communal healing exercise.

There’s a lot of politics in Debí Tirar Más Fotos. It’s present as subtext in DtMF with the group vocals, the lines about Puerto Rico, and the use of plena, a Puerto Rican folk genre. But the record’s politics are even more explicit on songs like Lo Que Le Pasó A Hawaii and Turista. The former (which translates to “What Happened To Hawaii”) is a güiro that addresses the processes of gentrification and colonization that are causing an erosion of Puerto Rico’s culture, similar to what happened in Hawaii. And the latter compares a lost lover to a tourist who entered his life briefly for a good time without regard for him or his well-being. These songs haven’t matched the streaming numbers of their upbeat counterparts, probably partly because of their politics, and partly because of gringos like me who just want to dance. Even still, there’s a lot to be learned even just from each song’s YouTube visualizer, which contain information about Puerto Rican history. Thematically, DtMF fits in with this political side of the album more than with the upbeat salsa, dembow, and reggaeton songs from earlier, and when the album first came out, I expected its streaming numbers to be similarly (relatively) low. But I was quite wrong.

Like most unexpected hits, the spark that lit its fire was TikTok. This time, the associated trend involves collages of all the people, places, and things that people miss – typically their pets, but also their loved ones, their homelands (whether affected by colonization or genocide), or their ability to get a US passport as a trans person. The song is a grief-stricken celebration of what’s been lost, and the response to it brought Bad Bunny himself to tears. DtMF went viral in the days leading up to the TikTok ban, and there couldn’t have been a better soundtrack for the app’s departure from our phones. For a few days, my FYP was a dizzying combo of Americans saying their goodbyes to the app and preparing for the ban, and videos with this song. It baffles me a bit that no one (at least that I saw) combined the two, making TikTok itself the subject of their DtMF videos, or using DtMF in their farewells. When I decided I wanted my next Substack post to be about Bad Bunny, the original plan was to explore this connection. The grief we (TikTokkers) felt in losing our app, if any other apps could stand in place of TikTok, and what the ban meant for music going forward.

But then the TikTok servers came back up.

And then my cat died.

We got Ally Cat quite literally from an alley in 2007 soon after my family moved to Colorado. I don’t remember much from that time (I was 7) but my parents tell me that she helped me settle into the new home. I do remember chasing her around the house all through my childhood trying to cuddle or play (she particularly loved a colorful string on a stick). She lived in my childhood home longer than I did and survived the invasions of two other cats into her house. She could often be found in suitcases, on radiators, or eating whatever human food she could get her hands on (chicken wings, popcorn, cheesecake, eggs, and green chile were some of her favorites). I’m lucky that I got to spend some time with her over the winter holidays. A part of me wonders if she was waiting to see me one last time before she passed. But either way, my parents’ house won’t feel the same without a grumpy calico curled up on its sofa.

After my mom called to break the news, I spent a day or so barely leaving my couch in Oregon, scrolling endlessly through my newly restored TikTok app. The FYP was still filled with discourse about the stunt of a ban, but I skipped the DtMF posts – even a single note of that song would have had me bawling. And despite my best efforts, time kept moving forward. My TikTok now feels just the same as it did two months ago. In a way, it’s like nothing changed at all. But that’s not true. TikTok’s future is still uncertain, and likewise, I’m no longer the kid chasing Ally Cat around the house. I’ve been mostly gone from Ally’s life for the last several years. Now, she’s gone for good. She lives on only in my memories and camera roll.

Debí tirar más fotos de cuando te tuve. Debí darte más besos y abrazos las veces que pude.

I have a confession. I had the opportunity to see Doechii live and for free, and I didn’t go. She performed at my college in 2022 as the opener for Aminé. I didn’t know who she was aside her then-viral TikTok sound (“Hi, my name’s Doechii with two Is. I get anxious when I’m high” from her song Yucky Blucky Fruitcake). But I was warned. One of my friends told me that Doechii was a star in the making, and that I needed to see her before she blew up. Instead, I arrived late and only got to see one song, Yucky Blucky Fruitcake, at the end of her set. Fast-forward just a couple months, and I listened to her new song Bitch I’m Nice out of curiosity. Fast-forward a week from then, and I’ve found my new favorite rapper. Crazy was my third most streamed song of 2023, and Persuasive was not far behind. But no worries, I thought to myself, I’m sure I’ll get another chance to see her live.

Though it wasn’t a proper hit, Yucky Blucky Fruitcake was the first of many viral moments Doechii’s had in her career thus far. The viral part of that song was its intro, in which she’s asked by her teacher (a character she distinguishes with her voice) to introduce herself to the class, which she raps in entirely too much detail. Now, Doechii is making her third-ever Hot 100 appearance (after What It Is, a different TikTok song, and a feature on Balloon by Tyler, The Creator) with a new viral song, Denial Is A River. Denial Is A River sees her once again conversing with the voice of reason we met on Yucky Blucky Fruitcake. But this time, the voice is less a teacher and more a therapist, guiding her through the whirlwind few years she’s had since she wrote Yucky Blucky Fruitcake. The song is structured as a conversation between these two characters, as she (Doechii) raps about her cheating ex, her emergence as a TikTok artist, her complicated relationship with substances, and her apartment, which was vandalized by her ex. As she narrates, the therapist character occasionally interjects to pry for more details or add a little snark. There isn’t a chorus or refrain, but the intermittent bits of dialogue with the therapist function as the song’s anchors and inject it with a good dose of humor. It’s a fun songwriting trick that culminates with comedic, hyperventilating breathing exercise that sounds anything but relaxing.

But Denial Is A River’s success didn’t come out of nowhere. In just the last couple months, she’s had the aforementioned Tyler, The Creator collab, performed on Tiny Desk, Steven Colbert, and Genius Open Mic, and released a star-studded music video for the song which was promoted with an equally star-studded series of telenovela-parodying sketch comedy snippets. There’s even some speculation that she’ll open for SZA’s and Kenrick Lamar’s Grand National Tour this spring. It’s probably not a coincidence that she’s getting this exposure ahead of the Grammy’s, where she’s nominated for Best New Artist. But regardless, it has led to industry plant accusations and sparked a one-sided feud with Azealia Banks – the most telling indicators of a 2020s viral sensation.

Denial Is A River hasn’t quite reached the commercial highs of her other big hit, What It Is (which reached the Hot 100’s top 30 in 2023 during a strong run on the radio), but I anticipate it will get there soon. But Denial Is A River is her first song to reach the top 50 on US Spotify, having so far peaked at number 35. It is also currently at number 13 on the Shazam charts, and recently climbed to number 65 on the Hot 100. And, in a Chappell Roan-esque moment, Denial Is A River’s success is propelling the other singles from her album as well, as Nissan Altima (my personal favorite song of hers) has been lingering on the US Spotify Top 200 and Billboard Bubbling Under charts for the last couple weeks as well. If there was sports betting for musicians and their pop careers, I would’ve lost a lot of money betting against Chappell Roan last year. This year, I’m all in on Doechii.

This is, at least, the narrative about Doechii that I’ve seen culminating online for the last couple months, and I basically agree with it. But there is one part of the story that I still don’t quite understand – why is Denial Is A River the breakout hit rather than What It Is? Her 2023 hit is a slick, easily accessible RnB song that performed well on radio and that most people seem to like. It also has peaked higher on the Hot 100 than Denial Is A River has (at least so far). But it’s only with Denial Is A River that I’ve seen people declare her moment to be happening. Reddit threads speculating on the upcoming breakout stars of 2025 point almost unanimously to Doechii, and TikTok has fully declared it to be Doechii season. Even after What It Is took off, I still would’ve described Doechii as somewhat obscure. That is clearly no longer the case.

The extra exposure and looming Grammy’s are certainly a part of it, as well as the fact that Doechii’s debut album, Alligator Bites Never Heal, came out last year with good reviews. But more than anything, I think the difference is in the songs themselves. What It Is is solid, but it’s also a bit generic. It’s a trap/RnB interpolation of TLC’s No Scrubs that contains a lot of attitude, but not much personality. It sounds very of the moment, which made it easy for radio stations to play and for TikToks to adopt as background music. Denial Is A River, on the other hand, is an meandering dialogue that explains Doechii’s personal life in detail. It's unusual, but it’s incredibly personable. By the end of the song, the listener is acquainted not just with Doechii’s music, but also her story and her humor. It's not as radio friendly (there’s no chorus!) But that’s what makes it stand out in the current pop landscape.

The modern age of popstardom requires not just good music, but good personal branding. Lore is everything. That’s essentially the mission statement of Taylor Swift’s most recent album, The Tortured Poets Department. The music on Tortured Poets is entirely unremarkable, especially compared to Taylor’s other albums. But the lore is inescapable. After the album was released, the internet was flooded with questions primarily about Taylor as a person. Who are the songs about? Why did she write so much about Matty Healy and not so much about Joe Alwyn? Are there easter eggs about the release of Reputation (Taylor’s Version)? And it was this lore, more than the music itself, that propelled the album to break record after record (much to the dismay of online music personalities).

A newer artist like Doechii doesn’t have much lore yet, at least not that’s known publicly. But Denial Is A River seems to be the introduction to Doechii as a person (rather than just Doechii as a rapper) that was needed for her to bridge the gap from niche rap darling to pop star on the rise. We’re no longer just hearing her music on the radio or in TikToks; we’re tuned in to Doechii herself. The only quest left is where she goes from here.

And if my suspicions are correct, and she’s going on tour with Kendrick Lamar and SZA, at least I got to see Yucky Blucky Fruitcake live that one time for a decent price.

Doechii performing Yucky Blucky Fruitcake at Middlebury College, 7 May 2022

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• Standing Next To You by Jung Kook

• APT. by Rosé and Bruno Mars

• Espresso by Sabrina Carpenter

• Saturn by SZA

• Water by Tyla

• La Diabla by Xavi

10. 360 by Charli xcx

For as much of a cultural moment Brat was, it’s chart success was actually somewhat limited. The highest charting songs were the remixes (Guess, Sympathy is a knife, Girl so confusing), but these only charted for a week or two off of the star-power of their featured artists (Billie Eilish, Ariana Grande, and Lorde respectively), before promptly vanishing. The only songs that lasted on the charts were 360 and Apple. Neither of these come close to my favorite songs from Brat, but between them I prefer 360.

So is 360 only on this list because it was the biggest hit off of Brat? Yes.

9. Million Dollar Baby by Tommy Richman

This song is another win for TikTok. I don’t know who Tommy Richman is, other than that he’s “not no fu**in TikTok artist,” but Million Dollar Baby was all over my TikTok feed all summer, and I was not complaining.

This song is very disjointed, and to be honest, I’m not even sure why I like it. None of the instruments fit together. The deep vocal sample muddies out the bass line, the keyboard is a little out of tune and too loud, as are the cowbells. Meanwhile the drums are lifeless and sterile, Tommy’s falsetto is a bit obnoxious, and the lyrics are quite bad, too. But somehow, all of these elements come together to make a song that scratches my brain in all the right spots. I’ve listened to Tommy’s followups to his big hit, including his album Coyote, which came out last fall. I wasn’t a fan. It all has the same bizarre sound palette but none of it comes together the way Million Dollar Baby does. I certainly understand why this song is so polarizing, especially after being all over TikTok for so long. But for me, it walks the line perfectly between tacky and original.

8. Squabble Up by Kendrick Lamar

Not Like Us was definitely the more impactful and important Kendrick song this year, but it was also a bit too ugly for my taste (I don’t feel good bopping to a song that accuses someone of pedophilia). I’m a pop fan - I just want something to bop to.

Squabble Up is a certified bop. I love how Kendrick plays with his voice in the chorus and during some of the verses (I’ve heard it likened to vocal stimming), and the sample and beat are really fun too. Compared to Not Like Us, I find this song much more replayable, and there are still some subtle Drake disses mixed in.

7. The Boy Is Mine by Ariana Grande

I just love the way the song slows down a little before the chorus. More songs should have tempo changes like that.

6. Chihiro by Billie Eilish

Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas are just too good at this. I love the bass line and the way it continues throughout the entire song despite the swelling arpeggiated synths that take over. I heard somewhere that Finneas has been working on film scores lately and that really comes through on Chihiro - the whole song feels cinematic. At times I feel like Billie’s voice gets a bit overwhelmed by the production and it’s hard to hear her. But that also makes the song feel so much more raw.

5. On My Mama by Victoria Monét

I feel a little odd about including this song on the list since it came out in summer 2023 and I had already mostly moved on by the new year. But On My Mama didn’t actually peak on the charts until February of this year, after she won best new artist at the Grammys.

It’s still a great song though. I love the horns and the bass and the way she uses the sample. I hope Victoria Monét has a long and successful career from here.

4. Hiss by Megan Thee Stallion

If anyone in music has a right to be this angry, it’s Megan Thee Stallion. Still, it’s clearly cathartic for her to spell all of this out, and by extension it’s cathartic as a listener. This isn’t a song I can put on whenever, but when I need to hear it, I need it.

And the way this song caused Nicki Minaj to have a meltdown, even though it wasn’t even really about her at all, was quite a feat.

3. Sticky by Tyler, The Creator, GloRilla, Sexyy Red, and Lil Wayne

Sticky is a song that sounds like it’s always existed, which is impressive because it also sounds unlike any other song I know. I like how the beat is mostly percussion and shouting, and the how each rapper gets a brief moment to let their personality shine through. It makes the song feel like a live event, almost like it was completely improvised by a group of friends sitting around a table. And then the horns that come in towards the end tie the whole thing together perfectly. It sounds like such a good time.

2. End of Beginning by Djo

This is the other big TikTok song on this list, and earlier this year, when I couldn’t spend 15 seconds on TikTok without hearing this song’s chorus, I was pretty tired of it. I imagine a lot of people who know End of Beginning just know it as “that Chicago song” and have never actually listened to the whole song - I certainly wasn’t in any rush.

Against my will, I finally listened to it in full this summer. I was in Alaska visiting a friend, and it came on the radio at a museum gift shop. Listening to the song there, after it had left my feeds and I could appreciate it on its own, it finally clicked for me. It’s an emotional juggernaut with a catchy melody and climactic bridge. It perfectly captures the nostalgia of a distant home and past lives we’ve lived.

There aren’t many pop songs about the connection we have to places, but there should be. It was also the perfect soundtrack for my trip to Alaska, which has a lot of a sense of place. And it fit easily in the current chapter of my life. I moved from Colorado to Portland, Oregon a year and a half ago. And while I’ve been enjoying it and finding my people, I haven’t been in Oregon quite long enough to feel truly at home. I’m writing this post back in Colorado for the holidays, remembering the version of myself from when I lived here, and noticing how much of this place I’ve taken with me everywhere else I’ve gone. My hometown is a far cry from Chicago, but being here makes that bridge feel so much more powerful.

1. Good Luck, Babe! by Chappell Roan

Gay.

This song is so gay. It’s not just that Chappell is gay, nor that the song is about a gay relationship. It’s also about a topic (seeing someone else live in denial of there gayness) that has no equivalent straight experience. I can empathize with the lyrics of many a straight love song, and so I imagine straight people can empathize with the equivalent gay ones. But the added subtext of denying oneself isn’t a dynamic that, at least to my knowledge, straight people tend to find themselves in. It’s a uniquely queer perspective.

Aside from Good Luck, Babe, I haven’t been the biggest fan of Chappell Roan’s music. But I sure am glad she’s here. I love the theatricality of this song and of Chappell’s vocal style. I love the bridge. I love Chappell’s artistry and that she’s always in drag. And I love that such a gay song by such a gay artist is such a big hit, especially today.

Happy new year everyone!

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I listened to 126 new albums this year. These were my favorites:

Honorable mentions:

• 1999 Write The Future - Hella

• Asake - Lungu Boy

• Beyoncé - Cowboy Carter

• Billie Eilish - Hit Me Hard And Soft (honorary No. 11)

• Pa Salieu - Afrikan Alien

• Vampire Weekend - Only God Was Above Us

10. Tyla - Tyla

Tyla is one of the artists I’m the most excited to watch over the next couple years. I think a lot of people have written her off already as a one hit wonder after her song Water went viral last year. And I don’t necessarily expect her to have another Water-shed moment in the US. But I wouldn’t count her out either. Since Water, she’s released a series of singles, all of which have been just as good if not better than her hit, all of which have had decent success in her home country of South Africa, and all of which make crystal her vision of herself as a pop star – the popiano princess – and her ability to execute on that concept.

I’ve seen this leveraged as criticism against her self-titled debut album, as the consensus seems to be that Tyla’s songs all sounds the same. But I’d use a different word - cohesive. Nobody criticizes country albums for only having country songs. Sure, Tyla stays true to popiano throughout, but within the genre she’s able to highlight different sounds and approaches to keep each song fresh and distinct. Butterflies is a ballad with a gorgeous fluttering guitar part, Jump has a uniquely rhythmic groove and spoken-word chorus, No.1 has an Afrobeats beat and a Tems feature, and To Last closes the album with a climactic instrumental outro. And on the deluxe edition, Tyla+, she goes even further with Shake Ah, a return to the album’s amapiano inspiration, and Push 2 Start, which is pretty unlike anything I’ve heard before. Tyla carves out a clear niche for herself on this album, and she fills it perfectly. The only question left is where she goes from here.

Start With: Safer

9. Tems - Born In The Wild

I feel like this album really flew under my radar this year. It wasn’t until I was finalizing this list that I realized “I sure listened to a lot of Tems this year, huh!” I think that was in part because it wasn’t much of a departure from her previous EPs, and in part because it was overshadowed by a different album that came out the same weekend. But Born In The Wild is such a nice vibe. Tems’s voice is smooth and warm and she’s able to come up with catchy hooks effortlessly. But this album isn’t so much a party as it is shimmering sunset. The mood begins uplifting but understated, with a cool drive on songs like Wickedest and Love Me JeJe, but as it progresses it becomes even more tranquil and melancholic, dimming toward the amapiano-infused Me & U, and the gorgeous ballad, You In My Face. It’s a great album to play on a night drive, or around a dwindling campfire.

Start With: Love Me JeJe

8. Tyler, The Creator - Chromakopia

This was the most recently released album to make my top 10, so I’m still working through it a bit (it takes me a long time to figure out what I like about an album). But I’ll start by saying that this album could have made this list off of Sticky and Balloon alone. There’s something so satisfying to me about Tyler, The Creator’s deep, growling voice, especially contrasted with his expressive rap tone and clever one-liners (including the only good pronoun joke I’ve ever heard). And who else could write Darling, I, a slow jam about polyamory and a song about kink-shaming called Judge Judy (although I do find that double entendre a bit cheesy). I don’t have much else to say about Chromakopia yet. But I like it, so it’s on this list.

Start With: Sticky

7. The Marías - Submarine

As I alluded to in my post about the song No One Noticed (which has since cracked the top 20 on US Spotify and is still huge in Saudi Arabia), I thought Submarine was going to be my favorite album of the year when I first heard it. But a few listens it started to feel a bit samey. But the sound it repeats is a damn good one. Submarine shimmers from front to back, and the few moments that puncture the sameness (the dance chorus on Hamptons, the Spanish on Lejos de Ti and Ay No Puedo, the big outro on Blur), are truly dazzling. Even after my rave review of No One Noticed, it’s still not one of my favorites. But I’m just glad to see any songs from this album going viral. Great music to marvel at the world to.

Start With: Run Your Mouth

6. NewDad - Madra

Most of the albums I listen to each year are by artists I already know, or at least sorta know. But occasionally, when I’ve run out of ideas or I’m feeling a bit more adventurous than usual, I take a suggestion from a music critic online and dive into an album completely blind. That’s how I started listening to NewDad (thanks, @willtalksmusic). But despite the new artist, I felt a bit nostalgic listening to this album. Mainly, it reminded me of my 9^th grade bowl-cut and pent-up-angst-wielding 90s punk and grunge phase. I don’t listen to much rock these days and NewDad is pretty far from grunge – they’re still more of a dreampop band than a rock band, and that suits my musical palette better these days – but accompanying the pop hooks and wispy vocals are shoegazy and oftentimes quite heavy guitars and drums. It helps that Madra came out in the spring, a season I always find particularly angsty. Even the fun songs like Sickly Sweet have dark and brooding guitars, and the lighter songs like Nosebleed are very wistful and melancholic. I might have lost the bowl-cut with age, but I was still pretty angsty this year. And as I sulked over Portland’s refusal to stop raining before mid-June, I found this album was a perfect outlet.

Start With: Sickly Sweet

5. Porter Robinson - Smile! :D

This album is so good. I loved Porter’s last album, Nurture, for its poppy electronic, shoegazy nostalgia, and Smile! :D is a natural evolution of this sound. The main difference is that Smile! :D is much more pop, especially in its song structures. But the nostalgia is still ever-present. That’s obvious on a song like Easier To Love Me, a touching ode to loving the version of oneself that one has grown into, but also on the more smiley tracks like Cheerleader, which subsumes the listener with childlike romcom storytelling over a goofily blaring synth line, or Knock Yourself Out XD, with its instantly iconic “bitch I’m Taylor Swift” line. One of many goofy lyrics and niche references to be found here.

Also, I saw him live! I was still back and forth on including this album on my list, but the concert was so good that I really had no choice. Porter was an outstanding stage presence. I nearly shed a tear when he performed Is There Really No Happiness? (a fitting title for an album called Smile! :D). On one song he asked the crowd to put their phones away to be present in the current moment (a rule which was followed unanimously). And he added Blossom to the setlist on a whim after a couple in the audience revealed they walked down the aisle to that song. I only started going to concerts this year, so I’m still pretty easily enchanted by a live show. Still, this one knocked it out of the park. When I returned to Porter’s music the next day, the concert experience made everything fall into place just a bit better, and I couldn’t stop playing this album for the next week. It makes me smile.

Start With: Cheerleader

4. Charli xcx - Brat

No explanation needed.

Start With: Von Dutch

3. Kali Uchis - Orquídeas

I’ve been a casual fan of Kali Uchis for a little while now, but this is the album that truly sold me on her. I love an album that seamlessly explores different genres, and Orquídeas does that marvelously. Between Te Mata (bolero), Muñekita (dembow), Labios Mordidos (reggaetón), Dame Beso (salsa), Muévete (merengue), and the rest of the album’s dance/RnB fusion, this album should sound disjointed and sporadic (like Bad Bunny’s Un Verano Sin Ti). But something about Kali’s vocal style and production choices keep the whole thing flowing steadily from cover to cover. And, of course, each individual song on here is wonderful.

It’s not completely seamless – the transitions in the first half are so smooth that the switch from dance/RnB to dembow and reggaeton that happens two-thirds of the way through is a little jarring. But it is cohesive, with each song imbued with lush instrumentals, Kali’s sultry voice, and (for at least for most of it) transitions from song to song that keep the energy going from start to finish.

This album came out in early January, so it’s already been out of my rotation for quite some time. Still, each time I return to it I hear something new – a groovy bass line, a masterfully placed drum fill, or a nice synth countermelody. This is the type of album that is great to listen to in the background, or up close with headphones. I also think it’s a great winter album, with the synths, vocals, and percussion as glittery as snowfall. Or I might have just listened to it during a snowstorm that iced the roads and made it impossible to leave me apartment for a couple days. Either way, tis the season for Orquídeas once again.

Start With: ¿Cómo Así?

2. Magdalena Bay - Imaginal Disk

Wowza! Another album I thought would take my AOTY spot (and certainly the AOTY I’m going to name-drop when I’m trying to impress music nerds). This was everything I was hoping Magdalena Bay’s new album would be. Synthpop on steroids and space dust, jaw-dropping moment after jaw-dropping moment, but also some opportunities for the listener to breathe so the overall experience never gets too overwhelming. I saw them live with my partner and a good friend a couple weeks after Imaginal Disk came out and the show was spectacular. The three of us left buzzing with energy and unable to shut up about how great Magdalena Bay are. And I barely listened to Imaginal Disk at all after that.

Despite Imaginal Disk being one of my favorite albums of the year, my first instinct is actually to criticize it a bit. When it first dropped, I saw this album receive such a whirlwind of glowing and intense praise online that I think was a bit overstated. Yes, it sounds heavenly. But as music YouTuber Paper Boyfriend notes in his video on the album, the song structures and pacing are a bit wonky. Most of the songs, rather than having a nice sequence of verses and choruses, are instead building to a blowout climax toward the end. These are the jaw-dropping moments that the album is packed with, but their frequency and quick succession make it so that the buildups leading to these moments can feel extraneous – why listen to the first half of Watching TV when we’re really just waiting for that final chorus? And it’s a shame that the slower moments of the album feel subsidiary when some of them (particularly the first half of Killing Time) would be great as songs in and of themselves. As attention-grabbing as they are, the blowout climaxes are distracting as much as they are gratifying.

But don’t get me wrong: Imaginal Disk is great and everyone should listen to it. Death and Romance, Image, and Cry For Me in particular are three of the best songs I heard this year. It’s all so funky and unique with its instrumentation while still being endlessly catchy, tender, and weird-but-not-too-weird. It’s the type of album where you’re never quite sure where it’s going to go, but the answer to that question is always better than you could’ve ever guessed. Bop to bop to banger to banger, it’s my second favorite album of the year.

Start With: Image

1. Liniker - Caju

One of my goals for the year was to learn some Portuguese. I already mostly speak Spanish, so I had a bit of a headstart going in. But self-guided study is hard, and I mostly made progress in a couple short sprints rather than slowly developing the skill throughout the year. I did learn some, though. I can mostly read the Wikipedia page for this album, which only exists in Portuguese, for example. And above all, I listened to some great Brazilian music.

I started the year with Pocpoc by Pedro Sampaio, a bisexual Brazilian funk blowout (which was apparently my top song on Spotify Wrapped). But I kept track of the Brazilian Spotify charts throughout the year, and listened to new albums by Anitta, Pabllo Vittar, Lua de Santana, and Pedro Sampaio. But none resonated with me quite like Caju by Liniker. Part of that is Caju’s diversity. I’m a sucker for an album that seamlessly flows between genres (see Kali Uchis), and Caju meanders between the opening song’s RnB, the Afrobeats-inspired Tudo, disco on Deixe Estar, calypso on Pote de Ouro, jazz, pop, samba, and probably other Brazilian genres I don’t have the ears to pick out yet. It also has great transitions between songs (see Kali Uchis again), and, even more surprising for me, ballads that actually hold my attention. Ao Teu Lado is a sprawling, seven-minute power ballad with sections that sound like they were lifted from a Romantic Era piano concerto that build into a blowout climax à la Happier Than Ever by Billie Eilish. The whole thing is so captivating, and when I hear it, I’m frustrated I can only somewhat understand the words she’s singing.

So, is this album on the list because it helped me learn Portuguese? Not really. I rarely pay attention to lyrics on songs in English and almost never in Spanish, let alone Portuguese. But I did have a sudden spike in motivation to learn around September and I don’t think it’s a coincidence I listened to Caju in the same month. But that’s not the only reason why it’s on here. It’s also Liniker’s emotive voice, the catchy tunes, the transitions, the genre fusions, the pacing, the way Caju oozes coolness at every corner. It’s an album with no skips and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Start With: Caju

Anyway, thank you all for reading my work. It’s been a good year in Portland and I’m glad I’ve found an outlet to write about music. Hopefully more travel stories will be on the docket for 2025 as well. I’ve got one more post lined up for before the new year though, so expect my 10 favorite hit songs of 2024 sometime next week.

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I can’t stand Blackpink. The four-member K-pop girl group is the only musical act this side of the mainstream that I truly dislike. They have an uncanny ability to produce music that gives me a headache, and I’m not normally prone to musical headaches. I’ll admit that I don’t know many of their songs, really just their hits (Shut Down, Pink Venom, How You Like That, DDU-DU DDU-DU), but these have not inspired me to dig farther into their discography.

My qualm with Blackpink is partly just aesthetic. I have a hard time describing their aesthetic, but to try, I’d say it’s epiccore empowerment anthems sung by Regina George wannabes. It doesn’t work for me. But more than that, I just don’t like their music. They borrow lots of hip-hop sounds, particularly samples, trap beats, and onomatopoeia (the ra-ta-tas and du-du-dus). They even rap. There’s nothing wrong with this – these are probably the most common sounds in the world at this point, and the production is always masterfully done, punchy and ear-catching. But this sound palette (particularly onomatopoeia that’s meant to mimic gun shots), is drawn from a genre that has a substantive history of violence. In contrast, Blackpink’s lyrical content (at least in English - the group is bilingual) consists only of taunts with vague allusions of violence, and is oftentimes downright nonsensical. I don’t speak Korean, so I could absolutely be missing something, but even the translated Korean lyrics don’t leave me optimistic. So the vapid lyrics, combined with their intentionally abrasive and “savage” public personae (and abrasive production that’s meant to compliment their abrasive personae), make it seem like Blackpink wants the allure of gangster rappers, but can’t distinguish the real violence of a gangster from the cartoon violence of a superhero movie. They claim to be savage but what is actually savage about them? The disconnect makes their whole schtick come across phony. And in that way, even their masterful production works against them. Their production is abrasive, yes, but just like their lyrics and aesthetic, it’s too clean, too crisp, all style, and no substance, with only vague references to anything truly risqué.

Blackpink

It might sound like I’m taking pleasure in bringing them down. And yeah, it is actually more cathartic than I’d like to admit. But I’m also frustrated by my inability to enjoy Blackpink. It’s more fun to enjoy things than to not enjoy things. and Blackpink are so beloved by their millions of fans (they’re handily the biggest girl group in the world) that there has to be more to enjoy than what I’ve picked up on. Besides, there’s plenty of abrasive music that I love, and plenty of corporatized and nonsensical music too, for that matter. Contradictions, like black and pink, or savage and sweet, are an integral part of their branding. That’s why their fans (the Blinks) love them. And I’ll admit there is a lot to like about their music. Like I mentioned, the production is technically great even if it’s used for evil, and the song Shut Down in particular would be a certified bop if it weren’t for the tacky “whip it” line in the chorus. But ultimately I just haven’t found a window into fully getting the appeal myself.

At least, not until now.

In the last couple months, three of the four members of Blackpink have released solo music, and without realizing it, I’ve become a fan of all of them. It started when Jennie released her song, Mantra, back in October. I listened to it out of curiosity when it came out and loved it immediately. The titular line sums up the song as succinctly as I ever could: “this that pretty girl mantra” (a nice contrast to Megan Thee Stallion, who’s taken over the hot girl market). It’s everything I want a pop rap song to be: witty, catchy, and pleasant to the ear. It’s also just silly, with Jennie rapping about cold plunges and stating that “Pretty girls don’t do drama, unless we wanna. It’ll be depending on the day”. I know that it’s not meant to be taken too seriously because Jennie says so herself that “it’s not that deep”. Mantra is bubblegum pop rap, and like the best bubblegum, it’s not trying to be anything else. And the instrumental matches the fun perfectly. Crisp as ever but in a way that fits the song, and not so flashy so as to overshadow Jennie’s lyrics. And what can I say, I’m a sucker for a song with a good bass line and horn riff.

Then I noticed Moonlit Floor (Kiss Me) by Lisa climbing the global Spotify charts. Lisa’s the only member whose solo work I’d heard before, but up until now it hadn’t clicked for me. But Moonlit Floor is something special. Of course, that’s largely due to its interpolation of Sixpence None The Richer’s Kiss Me, but Lisa injects it with a shot of Espresso (the Sabrina Carpenter kind) to keep it trendy and suited for today’s pop landscape. This sort of dreamy nu-disco love song has become a genre in and of itself in the last couple years, but I still eat it up every time, and Lisa keeps it from feeling stale. That’s thanks to how smoothly her voice glides through the song, particularly on the ooh-la-la-las, and the little details Lisa gives about her French boy that paint a clear picture of who this boy is. It’s all so captivating.

But none have taken me (or the world) by storm as much as APT by Rosé and Bruno Mars. APT is perhaps the most basic and generic pop song of the year, complete with one of the most common melodies in pop music (personally, I think it sounds like Don’t Phunk With My Heart by the Black Eyed Peas), and a beat that sounds like it was lifted straight from Mickey by Toni Basil (a song which has also been trending again lately). And I love it so much. It’s fun, it has a nice pop rock touch to give it a boost of energy, and Rosé and Bruno have way more vocal chemistry than I’d have expected. I also like that there’s a big pop song about staying in and hanging out at someones apartment, and that it taught me a Korean word and drinking game. It’s formulaic, but it’s a winning formula. And the public seems to agree, as this has become one of the biggest songs of the Blackpink extended universe, at least in the US, having topped the US Spotify chart for a week and debuting in the top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100.

(Also, to continue my chart tangent, you might notice that Moonlit Floor is underperforming in Korea compared to the global chart. That’s because the song is a bigger hit, relatively speaking, in Southeast Asia. It’s doing especially well in Thailand, where Lisa is from.)

So, what gives? If it’s not Jennie, not Lisa, and not Rosé, are my problems with Blackpink solely the fault of the odd member out, Jisoo? Well, no. She’s released solo work, just not as recently, and it’s perfectly fine as well. Maybe they’re all good individually and it’s just together that they’re a match made in hell (for Jackson’s ears). This is the point in the post where I should return to Blackpink. Maybe I could relisten with a new understanding of its members to better appreciate the group. Or I could give their back catalog a try and learn that while I might not be fond of their hits, they have other songs that I’m more fond of. I’d like to write something like that, but I’m not going to. If anything, putting words to why I dislike Blackpink’s music has solidified my opinion, and seeing how great their solo work has been just makes me upset that the group is so much less than the sum of its parts. I’m glad Blackpink works for some people. Just not for me.

But then, just yesterday, I stumbled across a YouTube video by whenfinish titled The PROBLEM with Le Sserafim and kpop vocals: a video essay. Le Sserafim is another K-pop girl group, one that I don’t know much about but are popular enough that I recognize their name as one of the ‘big ones’ in K-pop. They also, apparently, are quite bad at singing live. The video made me realize that the K-pop world functions much differently than the music industry here, not just in terms of its record labels, but also the way K-pop listeners engage with music in the first place. She mentions that Le Sserafim is a “performance based group”, which sounds ridiculous to some commenters. “What even is a performance based group?” one of them asks, “Dancers pretending to sing?”. From what I gathered in the replies, it’s essentially when idols have a greater focus on choreography and energy than pure vocal skill - orchestrating concerts that are perhaps like music videos that happen to be live. And fans attend shows mainly to see dancing and theatrics and the idols themselves. While this isn’t the way I personally engage with music, I think it’s fine and valid. But I also agree with whenfinish’s thesis that even for a performance based group, we as an audience should demand at least competency in live vocals (or they should at least have the decency to lip sync for us).

So I got curious and started watching some videos from the other K-pop groups that I know to get a sense of where my faves stacked up. I watched NewJeans, and they seemed thoroughly decent. I also watched Illit and they made Le Sserafim sound like Mariah Carey. But then I watched Blackpink perform Shut Down as the opener to their Born Pink World Tour, and I was blown away. For whatever my issue is with their songs, these girls can sing. And I realized that I do, actually, love Shut Down. The sample is phenomenal and their performance made me interpret that ‘whip it’ line as nothing more than a throwaway. I don’t think a throwaway line works in the middle of the chorus, but I can make peace with it as a slight blemish on what is otherwise a banger. Maybe I will get into Blackpink one day. For now, I can at least respect that while I don’t entirely understand it, they are all (individually and as a group) damn good at what they do.

I didn’t really know about African popular music until I went there. I spent two months in rural Uganda for an internship in 2021, and one of the internship coordinators put together a playlist of African music to soundtrack our (there were 24 of us) experience. The playlist, titled Mukwano (the Luganda word for “friend”), featured music from mainly Uganda, Tanzania, South Africa, and Nigeria. Any time our internship cohort was together, whether at the office headquarters, on an excursion to Sipi Falls or the Nile, or around a campfire in one of the villages, there was a Bluetooth speaker somewhere in the background playing songs that now conjure within me vivid memories of village life and feeling very out of my element. A part of why I’ve written so little about Uganda is because of how, even after two months in the country, I was still very in the thick of it with culture shock when I left. I learned a lot, and I loved the novelty of the experience. But I also felt like, no matter how much I learned, I could never truly adapt enough to let my guard down. So my memories are mostly bittersweet, which makes them all the more intense to navigate. Anyway, wasn’t this post supposed to be about music?

One of my favorite songs from Mukwano was Bounce by Rema. I love the dark, harmonic minor melody and the orchestral strings in the background of the second chorus. During my last year of college, post-Uganda, I developed a reputation for playing Bounce at every party where I could get my hands on the aux. I followed Rema on Spotify, and listened to his album Rave and Roses when it came out the following spring. The album’s lead single, Calm Down, wasn’t my cup of tea at first, but to my surprise, I began to hear it around campus every now and then – even at parties I wasn’t invited to. And during my last couple weeks on campus, a group of students filmed a music video cover for the song, which they debuted with a projector on an outside wall of the campus chapel.

All this happened in the immediate aftermath of covid, so epidemiology was on everyone’s mind, and I wondered how it applied to culture. This Nigerian song made its way to New York, where my classmates had heard it on the subway, and those classmates brought it to Middlebury, Vermont. And after another year of steady growth and spread, aided by a (tasteful) Selena Gomez remix, it peaked at number 3 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and became the 6th biggest hit in the country last year (and my inability to shut up about the song was one of the reasons I started this Substack).

But Calm Down’s path to success was already fairly well trodden. During my internship, Essence by Wizkid and Tems became the first Nigerian song ever to chart on the Billboard Hot 100, and after a (distasteful) Justin Bieber remix, it also peaked in the top 10. And a song that was in the original Mukwano playlist, Peru by Fireboy DML, was later remixed with Ed Sheeran to become a number 2 hit in the UK.

In the three years since I visited Uganda, African music - and Nigerian music in particular - has boomed, and the emergence of Lagos as a global music city is one of my favorite things that’s happened since I began watching the charts. It’s also been fascinating how Afrobeats (an umbrella term to describe the contemporary West African genres that artists like Rema draw from) has changed as well, generally pivoting from a more natural, dancehall-oriented sound toward amapiano, a South African deep house subgenre. In the States, amapiano is most associated with Water by Tyla, but even before Water crossed the Atlantic, amapiano’s log drums and shaker beats were integral parts of Nigerian Afrobeats hits by artists like Davido, CKay, and Omah Lay.

But perhaps none are as known for the Afrobeats-amapiano crossover as Asake, whose 2023 album Work of Art featured a song named for the genre. I listened to Work of Art when it came out last year, and while I enjoyed it overall (especially 2:30 and the aforementioned Amapiano), I found it a little samey. Nearly every song had the same formula of amapiano shakers and log drums, Afrobeats rhythms, pentatonic choral vocals, fiddle backings, and medium tempos. Pleasant, but nothing to knock my socks off.

But when Asake released Wave, the lead single to his then-upcoming, now-released album Lungu Boy, earlier this year, my socks were thoroughly knocked off and I still haven’t found them. The tempo on Wave is picked up a bit from where this style of music usually sits, and the backbeat synths and quick, syncopated, leaping log drum hits keep the energy at a ten from start to finish. It captures the same fiery energy that attracted me to Bounce from my Mukwano days. But unlike Bounce, the choral vocal echoes keep the song more fun and less dark. It is still very distinctly Asake, but expands quite a bit on that formula. It also has a Central Cee feature. I don’t typically care for Central Cee, but he keeps up the pace for his verse, and his punctuated delivery contrasts nicely with Asake’s more melodic approach.

The next single to come out, Active, was by contrast, much more laid-back, but still very fun. Whereas Wave is bold and energetic, Active is funky and cool. To riff on how Tyla has described her sound as “popiano”, Active could maybe be described as “pop-rapiano”. We have, of course, the log drum and shaker beat we’ve come to expect from Asake, but also some chopped-up vocal samples and cowbell, as well as a Travis Scott feature. It’s a mix I hadn’t really heard before, but it works nicely. And Travis Scott is a great addition too, taking a similar approach here as he does on a song like Modern Jam. After Wave and now this, I was eager for the album.

The album is decent. Good even. But few songs stood out to me quite like the singles, and a couple of the more daring choices Asake makes don’t quite pan out for me (particularly Skating, which despite the interesting production has some of the worst songwriting I’ve ever heard). But one such standout on the album is Whine, with its Mary J Blige sample and feature from Brazilian singer Ludmilla. If a Brazilian feature on a Nigerian album surprises you, well, it surprised me too. But cross-cultural collaboration has been the driving force getting Afrobeats into ears abroad this whole time. It was Selena Gomez that got Calm Down on American radio, Ed Sheeran that got Peru to chart in the US at all, and Justin Bieber that got Essence into the top 10 here. Two of the biggest African albums this year were The Year I Turned 21 by Ayra Starr and Tyla’s self-titled, which contain between them collaborators from Nigeria of course, but also Travis Scott, Coco Jones, and Giveon (American), Becky G (Mexican American but appeals to Spanish-speaking audience), Rauw Alejandro and Rvssian (Puerto Rican), Skillibeng (Jamaican), and Anitta (Brazilian). Ayra Starr recently even featured on an Afrobeats-inspired track by AP Dhillon, a Punjabi-Canadian artist whose song With You reached the top 5 on Spotify in Pakistan, India, and the UAE, and reached the top 50 globally (which is fairly rare for Desi artists).

These collaborations are exciting, in part because of what happens when you bring together artists from different styles and backgrounds. Bora Bora, the AP Dhillon and Ayra Starr collab, sounds pretty unlike anything I’ve heard before and it’s wonderful. But I’m also slowing growing uneasy about them. As a fan of both Afrobeats and the American pop charts, it frustrates me that the only time the two overlap is when there’s an American or Brit opening the door, regardless of whether that American or Brit is adding anything to the song.  With few exceptions (mainly TikTok hits like Water or Love Nwantiti (Ah Ah Ah) by CKay), African songs haven’t gained much traction in the US without such a remix gambit, and among the big hits, more often than not the western featured Artist has been tacked on at the end, resulting in features that sound unnecessary at best and downright offensive at worst. It’s gotten slightly better over time – I personally wouldn’t have given Travis Scott a second chance after what he did to Water – but still, the things that allow Afrobeats hits to chart in the US aren’t what draw me to the genre in the first place.

Maybe that’s why Fuji Vibe is such a highlight for me. Lungu Boy’s closer has no features and holds nothing back from the listener. It begins sounding just like many other songs on the album – syncopated percussion, intermittent horns and keys, a melodic pop-rap vocal cadence. But a beat switch halfway through removes all but the drums, which kick off into a frenzy. The percussion speeds up, and even as the other instruments return, they now function primarily to augment the dashing and wildly syncopated drum line. The only vocals at all in the album’s last three minutes are cheers and chants from a crowd that sound like they’re coming from a stadium rather than a studio. It’s fast, frenetic, and forceful, and easily among top 5 musical moments of the year.

It reminds me of To Last by Tyla, her album’s closing song which ends with an amapiano instrumental. I originally thought the Fuji Vibe beat switch was a similar tactic, but as I did more research, I realized that this isn’t amapiano at all, but a different genre, fuji – an indigenous genre known for its quick percussion that dates back to the 60s. This maybe should have been obvious in retrospect. Fuji is right there in the name, and the live chanting and cheering in Fuji Vibe wouldn’t make much sense on a house track. But now that I know, I’m eager to listen to more fuji, and listen for it in other songs.

If it’s not clear, I’m far from an expert on any of this. A respectable Afrobeats critic would have already known what fuji was (and would probably use more specific terms than “Afrobeats”). My music writing is usually just repeating terms I’ve heard from Anthony Fantano, Pitchfork, and Wikipedia, and trying my best to understand and articulate what I hear. But I like music, and I like this music in particular. I like how it sounds, I like the underdog story it presents on the US charts, and I like how it reminds me of a particular moment in my life.

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I first heard The Marías with their feature on Otro Atardecer by Bad Bunny, which was one of my and my friends’ favorites from his 2022 album, Un Verano Sin Ti. Like the rest of Un Verano Sin Ti, it’s delightfully summery, but there’s a contemplative nostalgia to it that also made it the perfect soundtrack for casual springtime get-togethers during the final weeks before our college graduation. I was enchanted by the band’s lead singer, María Zardoya, whose wispy vocals fit perfectly on a track about reminiscing. I followed The Marías on Spotify but never actually listened to their music. That is, until their new album, Submarine.

The singles The Marías released leading up to Submarine got me paying attention. No One Noticed was one of them, and while I liked it, it was probably my least favorite on first listen. I found it boring, especially compared to the cool bounce of Run Your Mouth, distant pleading of Lejos De Ti, and haunting mystery of If Only. And I didn’t care for the vocal melody, which I found too sparse and simplistic, almost childlike. For most of the song, Zardoya sings these simple melodies over a beat that shimmers in its stillness, but the gaps in her singing, especially in the first half of the song, lead to a listening experience that feels stagnant at times. But as the song progresses, she introduces a few more countermelodies to fill this space, some of which stand on their own at various points, and a slow guitar riff to punctuate them. The song is very a slow burn, but what it lacks in punch it makes up for in subtlety. As Zardoya introduces more melodic ideas, all of which are quite simple on their own, they begin to overlap, gradually picking up the song’s rhythmic intensity. And at the climax, about three minutes in, No One Noticed becomes a piece of counterpoint that would give Bach a run for his money, but this development is so seamless and subtle that it’s easy, well, not to notice. Right at the climax of this counterpoint, as Zardoya sings “then I’ll leave without a trace”, the vocals cut out, allowing the guitar riff to return in a gut-punch of a final bridge. When I’m not paying attention, this all goes in one ear and out the other. But when I remember to notice it, this moment is downright dazzling.   

I listened to Submarine in early June the day after it dropped, and immediately texted everyone I know that the best album of the year had already been released and I need not listen to anything else (my opinion has mellowed a bit since, though I still adore it). I saved every single track to my playlist and listened to them on repeat for the next several months. And as I always do, I excitedly got on Twitter and TikTok and YouTube and Reddit to look for other people to validate my opinions. But to my dismay, no one noticed it. The only person I saw mention Submarine at all was TikToker @willtalksmusic, whose reaction was positive, but not ecstatic. I try not to let public perception influence my music opinions too much, but I was still disappointed that this album wasn’t getting the recognition I felt it deserved. And for an indie band that’s relatively obscure, I figured that might be all I heard about the album.

Then, earlier this week, I saw this tweet.

The Bubbling Under chart is a secondary chart to the Billboard Hot 100 that ranks the biggest songs in the country that have not yet reached on the main Hot 100. I don’t follow the Bubbling Under chart super closely, even though I maybe should. But if I understand correctly, then if the regular Hot 100 were actually a Billboard Hot 101, No One Noticed would currently occupy that extra 101st spot.

I was surprised to see this for a four-month-old song that’s gotten so little buzz (at least that I’ve noticed). So, I went to check some other sources. If it’s Bubbling Under than surely it must be in the top 200 on US Spotify, right? It’s time to make a graph!

By this point, I’ve made enough of these posts and enough of these graphs that I’ve got the process down to basically a copy-pasting data from Kworb. And unbeknownst to me, No One Noticed has been in and out of the top 100 on US Spotify for the last month, so the tides might be turning for this album.

But also – Saudi Arabia? The UAE? The Marías hail from Puerto Rico and Los Angeles, why on Earth do they have a top 10 hit in the Middle East? And this isn’t just a Spotify anomaly. As I write, No One Noticed currently sits at number 9 on the Saudi Arabia Apple Music chart, number 9 on the Apple Music Riyadh city chart, and number 4 on the Saudi Arabia Shazam chart. The Shazam chart is particularly noteworthy since Shazam is often a predictor of success to come - if a lot of people are Shazaming a song, it means they’re hearing it in public and want to hear it more.

But for the life of me I can’t figure out how this happened. This is the Marías’s only song to chart in the Middle East (and only their third song to chart anywhere, after the Bad Bunny collab and their feature on Mañana with Tainy and Young Miko, both of which only charted in the Americas and Spain). I checked the No One Noticed YouTube video, but only a couple comments were in Arabic and they only wrote glowing praise for the music. There also don’t seem to be many TikToks in Arabic using the song as a sound. And my Google searches are all coming up blank. Is this just a fluke word-of-mouth Saudi sleeper hit? Do the demographics of Saudi Spotify and Apple Music skew from the general population? Do Saudis just have immaculate taste? Perhaps I’ll never know.

Regardless, despite being such a summer song, this might be one to keep an eye on as a potential late fall/early winter hit in the US. In addition to nearly cracking the Hot 100, The Marías are slated to open for Billie Eilish on her Hit Me Hard And Soft: The Tour, and the recent ascents to stardom of Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan have shown that putting on a good opening act can help an artist skip the line to stardom. Maybe the buzz for The Marías is just getting started.

(PS, if anyone reading has an extra ticket for Billie Eilish/The Marías in Portland, I will pay a reckless amount of money for it – jackson.mumper@gmail.com).

While I was doing research for my post about Селфхарм by Monetochka a few months ago, I made a monumental discovery – the Apple Music City Charts. So far, I’ve used mostly Spotify’s numbers to analyze streaming data, partly because those numbers are easily accessible on Kworb, and partly because I use Spotify myself. But as it turns out, Apple Music has daily top 25 charts for a few dozen cities around the world, spanning from Austin to Accra, and from Sendai to São Paulo. They don’t have any Russian cities, so this discovery wasn’t actually helpful for Селфхарм, but I still spent a few hours checking out the lists. I was surprised at how different the city charts were, even within just the US. A lot of that variation was genre related. Nashville listens to lots of country, Atlanta listens to lots of rap, and Los Angeles listens to lots of Regional Mexican. But even beyond the genre differences, I was surprised how many cities had local hits that I’d never heard of. One of these that caught my eye was Kehlani by Jordan Adetunji, which at the time was in the top 3 in New York. This was the first time I’d heard of this song, but when I checked Twitter that afternoon, I saw it was expected to debut on the upcoming Hot 100 somewhere in the 90s. I wondered if this song was going to have legs at the national level. After all, New York strikes me as a city that might be ahead of the curve on new hits. Maybe this one would take off.

Not to toot my own horn, but I totally called it. Two months after it caught my attention, Kehlani is now a top 30 hit on the Billboard Hot 100. Of course, the only reason it caught my attention in the first place is because of its name. Kehlani is an artist in her own right, and I listened to her then-most-recent album Crash back in June. I went into it blind, knowing essentially nothing about her music, but thought it was good. I especially enjoyed the two singles Tears and After Hours, the former being a luscious house track with an amapiano flair and an Omah Lay feature, and the latter being an anthemic pop song that’s been in and out of the lower Hot 100 for the last couple months. She’s not unknown by any means, but neither has she seen great commercial success. Kehlani (the song) is actually already a bigger hit than any song by Kehlani (the artist). So, I was surprised to see her get name-dropped.

Kehlani (the song) is not the first song in recent memory named after another artist. The first I noticed was Billie Eilish by Armani White back in 2022, but this decade has also seen Dua Lipa by Jack Harlow, Lady Gaga by Peso Pluma, Gabito Ballesteros and Junior H, and Madonna by Natanael Cano and Oscar Maydon. Doja Cat has had the (dis?)pleasure of having had two songs named after her, one by Central Cee and the other by $not and A$ap Rocky. I’ve also seen some discourse about the gender bend of these songs. All of them are named after women and all performed by men. That dynamic is a bit uncomfy, especially given the tone that some of these songs take toward their namesakes. To quote Central Cee, “Somebody tell Doja Cat that I’m tryna indulge in that”. On a first pass, it certainly feels like this is a trend and nothing more than a cheap bid at search-engine optimization to name your song after an artist with more clout and fame. In fairness, artists have been naming their songs after each other for quite some time, and there are examples in both directions of gender. Still, I’m probably not the best person to discuss the feminism of song names.

But I will discuss remixes. Jordan Adetunji was basically unheard of before this viral hit, and one trend that has been integral to the 2020s has been the chart-baiting remix, where a breakthrough star gets an established star to remix their new hit in a bid to merge audiences. So, for a viral hit named Kehlani, who’s a better fit than Kehlani?

So now we’re met with Kehlani (Remix) [feat. Kehlani]. And despite the gimmick, this is actually one of my favorites of this type of remix. I think Kehlani’s voice fits very nicely on this light drill beat and I like that it extends the song to nearly 3 whole minutes. But mainly, I love the extra layer of meaning she adds to the song. The original is a love song not to Kehlani, but to someone else entirely, that Jordan compares favorably to Kehlani. The titular line in the chorus is “you’re bad just like Kehlani is,” and it’s nice when he says it. But in the remix, Kehlani also sings the chorus, including name-dropping herself in the third person to her (female) romantic interest. The lyrics stay the same, but this time they’re captivatingly vain (And that vanity is so real – there’s a common joke among gay people how many of us could be identical twins with our partners, and what kind of narcissism that may stem from).

There’s an interesting comparison to be made here between Kehlani featuring Kehlani, and the other major summer remix gambit, Guess by Charli xcx and Billie Eilish. They’re both sapphic remixes of straight songs, but I think that Guess is brought down by this narrative change, whereas Kehlani (the song) benefits from the added complexity. But I seem to be in the minority on this opinion, seeing as how Guess featuring Billie Eilish has all but eclipsed the original, while Kehlani without Kehlani is the version of Kehlani that’s stuck around. Despite the remix boost, Billboard deemed Kehlani featuring Kehlani to have contributed too small a part of its performance for the added Kehlani feature to be recognized on the Hot 100. Similarly, while Kehlani without Kehlani is still charting in the top 100 on US Spotify, Kehlani featuring Kehlani is nowhere to be found.

I would end this post by returning to the city charts, either to see how Kehlani has done in other cities or to predict the next big hit from New York. Unfortunately, Apple Music doesn’t seem to archive their city charts anywhere. But the current New York chart is mostly Sabrina Carpenter and Cash Cobain, and while Sabrina Carpenter is already a national A-lister, Cash Cobain is new. Maybe he’ll take off next. Either way, I’m excited to pay more attention to what’s happening locally. Maybe one day a song named Jordan Adetunji will take off.  

Brat is a good album. I like it a lot and I’ve been listening to it on repeat since it came out. I’ve got a lot to say about it. But halfway into writing this post, I realized that A) I’m sick of writing it, and B) what I had written was not brat. This album has already been talked to death so it’s hard not to just repeat what everyone else has said about it already. But here’s my attempt at an original thought.

1. I think about it (politics) all the time

After Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and Kamala Harris took over his campaign, the Biden-Harris HQ social media accounts were rebranded as Kamala HQ. In the rebrand, they adopted the out-of-focus-black-Arial-text-on-a-lime-green-background aesthetic used in the Brat album cover. I remember when this cover art was announced, Charli’s fans derided it for being “ugly” and “lazy”. That’s not a criticism you see much these days.

Using this styling had two main effects for politics. First, it prompted a viral moment on social media that led to the Harris campaign raising $81 million in a single day. And second, it sent political pundits into a frenzy trying to understand why the green backdrop was such a big deal. At some point in this ordeal, Charli xcx gave her two cents on the American political system by tweeting “kamala IS brat,” which also sent the pundit class into a frenzy. It was fun to watch news anchors give their interpretation of Brat despite their clear distance from and lack of fluency in zoomer culture. A few tripped over their words and referred to the presidential nominee as “a brat” instead of simply “brat”. Some of them even cited their Gen Z children as sources.

By now, this series of events is ancient history. I’m sure everyone reading this watched it all unfold and has (or had) their own hot takes. I could give my thoughts on the state of this country’s politics, but I’m tired. The aggressive optimism I felt when the news first broke has sublimated into obsessively checking polling data every hour to see if Kamala’s lead has extended by an extra tenth of a point in any swing states. Gleescrolling is better than doomscrolling, but a Twitter addiction is still a Twitter addiction. I know that by the time I finally post this, my current thoughts will already be outdated and I refuse to write anything that could age poorly. So instead of discussing how Brat has helped the Harris campaign, let’s discuss how the Harris campaign has helped Brat.

2. So I (made a graph)

I want to know if the extra publicity from the Harris campaign affected the chart placement of songs from Brat. So let’s do what I do best and analyze some chart data.

This graph shows the positions on the US daily Spotify streaming charts since Brat came out. 360 was the most popular song at first, and it’s been relatively stable all summer. Girl, so confusing made a big splash when Charli and Lorde first worked it out on the remix, but that was pretty quickly forgotten. Then Apple catapulted into the top 50 as the TikTok favorite. This brings us to the dashed line, showing the day Charli made her now infamous tweet. To me, the most striking part of this graph is that 365 and Von Dutch both make their first sustained appearances on the chart on the same day – and immediately after Kamala HQ adopted the Brat aesthetic. This timing might be a coincidence, but it aligns with new peaks for 360 and Apple as well.

But this graph has one major flaw – it’s hard to distinguish what’s going on at the top. As songs move up the chart, the gaps in streams between them get much bigger. So songs in the top 50 (like Apple and 360) can have large gains in streams while only rising a few positions on the chart. To get a better sense of how these songs are doing, let’s look at the raw number of US streams for these two songs.

The trends in this graph aren’t as clear as in the previous one. Apple and 360 both rose after the announcement, but they were rising anyway, which makes it hard to tell if their peaks actually the result of Charli’s tweet or the trajectory they were already on. Plus, there’s a lot of variation in daily streams. In general, most songs post higher numbers on Fridays and Saturdays, and lower numbers on Sundays, and that effect can be seen in the random spikes in raw streams (this is why I generally look at chart placement rather than daily streams). Kamala’s campaign announcement came on a Sunday, so the songs were almost certainly going to rise the next day anyway.

But if we smooth out this variation by using a 7-day rolling average, the Kamala effect becomes much clearer.

Taking a rolling average allows us to see the overall trend in the data without getting bogged down by day-of-the-week differences. It’s still hard to say for Apple since it wasn’t charting very long when these events took place (and was already poised to skyrocket up the charts), but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that 360 gets such a boost after the Harris campaign announcement. We all know that Kamala is brat. But it seems true too that brat is Kamala.

3. Guess (what I’m thinking about this song)

One thing I left out in these graphs was Guess. Guess is one of the extra songs on Brat and it’s the same but there’s three more songs so it’s not, and became a hit after it was remixed to include a guest verse from Billie Eilish. It wasn’t relevant to the political discussion since the remix didn’t exist until a couple weeks after the Harris campaign began. But it is the biggest hit from the album by far, and I want to talk about it.

Guess is, basically, a sex scene. Musically, it’s a short song with three distinct sections – two verses and a EDM drop. In the original version, Charli delivers both verses and they are lyrically identical. In them, she teases the listener to “guess the colour of [her] underwear,” and the song only gets hornier from there. After the two verses, the instrumental drops out suddenly, and in a raspy, seductive whisper, she says “guess,” and the listener is immediately hit with a heavy and gritty acid bass drop. This is the focal point of the song and would have been my favorite moment on the album if 365 didn’t do the exact same trick but even better. After a steady and focused build in production throughout the two verses, this intense drop is, musically, very much earned. And lyrically, after spending so much time imagining Charli’s underwear then being told to “guess”, the most musically intense part of the song becomes even hornier in its lack of words. After all, if she’s already told the listener to “try it, bite it, lick it, spit it,” there isn’t much left to say, is there?

After this moment of euphoric intensity, Charli repeats “guess guess guess guess” for a few bars and ends with a couple sillier lyrics to ease the tension, allowing Guess to finish like it never even happened: “You wanna guess if I’m serious about this song”. While this structure is simple, it’s effective. The combination of Charli’s intimate yet confident vocals and the booming instrumental made me blush on first listen (which doesn’t happen often these days).

The remix has nearly the same song structure as the original, just swapping Charli’s repeated second verse for a new verse from Billie and having them alternate ad libs in the dance break. Theoretically, this should work perfectly. Instead of being a sex scene between Charli and the listener, it becomes a sex scene between Charlie and Billie. And that change softens the blush-factor in a way that could *maybe* make it suitable for pop radio. But there’s one major problem, and it’s apparent in the lyrics without even hearing the song. As Billie herself says, “Charli likes boys.” Billie is horny for Charli. And Charli knows that Billie is horny for her. But Charli liking boys leads this sex scene to a bit of a dead end. I think they identified this inconsistency when they wrote the remix, because the iconic “guess” that leads us into the drop is replaced by Billie whispering “Charli call me if you’re with it”, changing the implication of the drop from “Charli is having sex” to “Charli and Billie might be having sex”. I don’t buy it. Billie’s line here, at the climax of the song, is a clunky mouthful, and this invitation for consent is never really answered – the rest of the lyrics are completely off topic. As a result, the bass drop doesn’t carry the same weight that it did in the original, and it all just feels so underwhelming.

I know this isn’t a serious song, and I am severely overanalyzing it. But the original was clear and poignant, and this remix muddies it. Why ruin a good thing? Well, I can answer that question - it’s a ploy for the charts. Billie is one of the biggest pop stars in the world right now and has recently silenced years of “queerbaiting” speculation by singing explicitly about her attraction to women in her music. A Billie cosign can launch an underground cult favorite back into the mainstream. And Billie is a good fit for Charli, who has always maintained a very queer fanbase. But I don’t know. I’m glad that Charli is getting the commercial success she deserves. But when I hear this remix, all I hear is a straight woman teasing a lesbian who’s fresh out of the closet. I don’t think that’s how it was intended, but it still rubs me the wrong way.

4. I might say something stupid

I probably already did. I’ve seen nothing but praise for this remix in the discourse (except for a couple bad takes that it’s somehow predatory for a gay woman to express desire for a straight one). And that’s impressive, given how discourse-riddled this album has been. Girl, so confusing is the obvious example, as the uncomfortably specific lyrics made it very clear that the song was about one specific person, which prompted speculation as to who that person was. When it was revealed to be about Lorde, the two took their misunderstandings and worked them out on the remix. But beyond that, I’ve seen speculation that Sympathy is a knife is about Taylor Swift, which prompted some fans to chant “Taylor Swift is dead” at her concert, and Mean girls has been confirmed to be about Dasha Nekrasova, who has her own set of controversies. There was discourse about whether or not the cover art was good. And, of course, there’s endless discourse about its use in the Harris campaign. Is Kamala Harris really brat? Is brat an effective strategy to appeal to young voters? What does it say about society that a British pop star can be so influential in American politics?

These questions are great, but they are not brat. Brat is a messy album. The lyrics often resemble diary entries more than they do poetry. They cover topics that rarely come up in music, let alone club music, and she’s not concerned about painting herself in a negative light. She sings about her lack of commercial success, indecision about having a baby, intergenerational trauma, and mourning the death a mentor she had pushed away. In that way, Brat presents us with an unfiltered honesty that is really hard to find these days. It’s hard not to be paranoid about one’s image today, both online and offline. Simply having an online presence as a marginalized person can put someone at risk of getting doxxed. And even though the term has been run into the ground by misuse, I still think there’s truth to the notion that we live in a cancel culture. Given all this, I understand why people choose to acquiesce to the public pressure. Everything that is said or done in public, especially online, should be something you’d be comfortable sharing with not just your family and your employer, but also hate groups, predators, and cops. So if you do share yourself online, it must be done with the utmost care and thought. Every interaction with the discourse must be perfect, lest it create more discourse.

But Charli doesn’t care. She isn’t afraid to be unabashedly human in her persona. She doesn’t have everything figured out, and that’s okay. She lets out her thoughts anyway, raw and meandering, without regard for how it comes across, including her uncertainty, anxiety, and regret. It’s brave in a way that I find admirable. And I find it telling that this messy and off-kilter album has been so culturally and commercially significant. It is not demure. It is not mindful. It is brat.

One of the first things I did when I started learning Russian as my pandemic hobby was listen to Russian music. I went to Google, searched “best Russian pop songs,” and the top result was an article from Russia Beyond, “The 20 Best Russian Songs of 2018,” by Tommy O’Callaghan. I listened through all of them, and while most of them weren’t my cup of chai, O’Callaghan’s top pick - Каждый Раз (kazhdyy raz – every time) by Monetochka, very much was. I loved the lightness of her vocals, even when speeding through the chorus, and how they fit with the house piano chords and shimmering percussion and piano countermelodies. The way her voice floats above the already light instrumental is bubblegum perfection. I never got very far in understanding the lyrics myself (at least not without a lot of help from Google Translate), but the song still brings back strong memories of the early covid lockdowns and my willingness to do anything to pass the time, even learn a new language. If 2024 is Brat summer, 2020 might’ve been my Monetochka summer (or at least my Каждый Раз summer – I never bothered to listen to her other songs).

But when I heard Monetochka was back with a new album last May, I got curious.

Каждый Раз was from her 2018 debut album, and I first heard it in 2020, but Monetochka’s newest album, Молитвы. Анекдоты. Тосты. (molitvy anekdoty tosty – prayers jokes toasts) comes out under very different circumstances than her debut. The most obvious difference is that Monetochka no longer lives in Russia. After making a series of anti-war statements at the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she was branded a foreign agent by Putin’s regime, and fled to Lithuania to escape persecution. A 2023 New York Times article about her by Paule Sonne and Alex Marshall discusses the circumstances leading to her (and several other prominent musicians’) exit from Russia during this time, and the challenges she faces as a Russian artist making a living from outside Russia. She’s continued touring to keep her career moving, now performing for the rapidly growing Russian diaspora in Europe and the US. But a tour can’t last forever, and sustaining a career is more complicated than just leaning into Russians’ nostalgia for their homeland. So sooner or later, she was going to have to move forward with new music. Which brings us to today.

Monetochka does tackle the elephant in the room on the album’s opening track, Это Было в России (eto bylo v rosiy – it was in Russia), where she reminisces on the people and objects she misses from home (billboards, sunsets, a funny saleswoman, a boy named Vitya who kissed her) until she gets to the chorus: “It was in Russia, which means it was long ago.” But the album’s most popular song, Селфхарм (selfharm), doesn’t address the war at all. Instead, it’s addressed to a lover, where she contrasts her own anxieties, awkwardness, and self-destructive tendencies with the peace and calmness she feels around someone else (at least, that’s what I gather based on the Genius translation of her song. My Russian has deteriorated quite a bit in recent years). This contrast manifests not only in the lyrics but in the music as well. On the verses, when singing about her struggles (the song opens with the line “I smell like self-harm”) her voice is processed and muted, and she sings hurriedly, rigidly, and frustratedly. But when the chorus starts, and she starts describing the person the song is addressed to, a guitar chord shines through in a moment of clarity, which she uses as a chance to finally project her voice. She also sings more freely, speeding up and slowing down just enough to show she’s no longer confined to the beat, and therefore no longer confined to her selfharm. These vocal differences are subtle. She still sings softly and lightly, but she sounds a bit more assured on the chorus. And that assurance is amplified when she’s joined by a chorus of background voices, boosting her newly projected voice even more. This drives the escapism of the song. Escapism from both the tension of the verses and from Monetochka’s inner turmoil.

Escapism was a powerful force during the pandemic. Despite feeling trapped at home, I could listen to music and explore Google Street View and read articles about places I wanted to go (mainly Central Asia) to help me feel connected to the outside world again. But at the end of the day, I still had a home to hold on to. For exiled Russians like Monetochka (not to mention over 12 million Ukrainian refugees), a more urgent longing might be to escape back to home. While some higher-profile activists and artists fled Russia earlier at the start of the war, most of the every-day people who fled (especially young and middle-aged men) left after the September 2022 mobilization order, which announced Russia’s plans to enlist civilians to Ukraine. Thousands of people who didn’t want to fight ended up buying the first flight out of Russia to wherever they could afford to go with no plan other than to figure it out once they were safe outside Russia. I was travelling in Osh, Kyrgyzstan when this happened, which has direct flights to some Russian cities, and the vibe shift was palpable. For about a week every hotel and hostel in the city was fully booked with confused, despondent Russian men trying to make sense of how their world had been flipped upside down once again. I ended up sleeping on the floor at my guesthouse because they were overbooked, and I was the only non-Russian staying there. I had plenty of conversations with these folks, both in Osh and in every over city I visited thereafter. Some of them were hoping to return home as quickly as possible, others were planning to settle farther away in places like Argentina or Thailand, but most were just confused and uncertain. I haven’t kept in touch with any of them, so I don’t know how many have stayed in Central Asia or gone elsewhere, but it’s not like the situation in Russia has changed much since September 2022.

Monetochka’s 2023 tour didn’t stop in Central Asia, but I imagine the communities she played for in Europe and the US were made up of Russians who’d left during the war as well as ethnic Russians whose families have lived in Europe or the US for at least generations. I’m curious about the demographics of her shows, and of her audience. And whether that’s changed for her new album cycle.

Normally I quantify a song’s success with charts the Billboard Hot 100 or the Spotify daily charts, but these have some limitations, and a big one is that they conflate the music tastes of incredibly diverse populations. A music YouTuber I’m subscribed to, Sean Faye Wolf, recently released a video where he said, in reference to the boom in popularity of regional Mexican music in the US last year, “For a couple months there, this blend of rancheras, corridos, and cumbias mexicanas was pretty much all that English-speaking America was listening to” (quote at 7:15). But that’s not exactly what happened. While these sounds did dominate the American Hot 100, the US is not an exclusively English-speaking country, and these genres weren’t popular within English-speaking circles. Instead, their popularity can be attributed to new wave of artists like Peso Pluma and Group Frontera that brought these genres to an unprecedent level of success among American Latinos, especially Mexican Americans. But the charts hide this distinction. Sure, Ella Baila Sola by Eslabon Armado and Peso Pluma might’ve been the fourth most popular song in the US at one point in 2023, but that doesn’t mean it was every, or even most, American’s fourth favorite song.

Just as the US is made of many different musical subcultures, so too is the post-Soviet world. So given Monetochka’s exile from Russia and the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Russians who’ve fled with her, I’m curious about more than just Селфхарм's success in countries like Kazakhstan and Belarus. I want to know who, specifically, is resonating with this song. Is everyone in Kazakhstan listening to Monetochka as a hold-over of Russian hegemony? Or is it only a hit among those who are ethnically and/or culturally Russian? Or, have Russians emigrants arrived in significant enough numbers to impact local music streaming numbers, leaving Russia but taking Russia’s music with them?

Despite already being 1400 words into this post, it turns out that question is a bit too tricky to tackle. I was hoping I’d be able to contrast Селфхарм’s chart performance with that of one of Monetochka’s older songs. Or use an older song as an example to see if Russian music in general saw streaming gains in the post-Soviet realm in the aftermath of the war. But I just can’t find data that will do the trick. To start, I haven’t even found exact numbers of how many Russians have emigrated since the war began. Nor could I find any information when they’ve left, where they’ve gone, or how long they’ve stayed. But even more frustrating was how difficult it can be to get relevant chart data for any former Soviet country. Spotify charts in Kazakhstan and Belarus only date back to February 2022, a couple weeks before the invasion. And Spotify withdrew from Russia soon thereafter, ending their Russian chart with it. 

For what it’s worth, Селфхарм has been successful across the former USSR. The song has topped the daily Spotify charts in Belarus and Kazakhstan and peaked at number top 2 in Ukraine – all of which have sizable Russian populations today still. The table below shows all the countries where Селфхарм has charted on Spotify and their Russian populations as of 2023 according to the CIA World Factbook.

Country            Russian Population       Russian Speaking     Spotify Peak
Kazakhstan         17.8%                              99.4%                           1
Belarus                 8.3%                               71.4%                           1
Ukraine               17.3%                              29.6%                           2
Latvia                  24.5%                              33.8%                           25
Estonia                24.8%                              29.6%                           46
Lithuania            5%                                   6.8%                             158

Maybe I was approaching this from the wrong angle, as based on this (small) sample, language seems to have predicted Селфхарм’s success more than ethnicity. In retrospect, this was maybe an obvious find. The song has nothing to do with the war, at least not directly, and music has words that people want to understand. To draw a comparison to the US charts, British, Australian, and Canadian artists are hugely successful on American charts all the time (Dua Lipa, The Kid Laroi, Justin Bieber), but Spanish-speaking acts from the United States that are ultrafamous abroad (Grupo Frontera, Fuerza Regida) are comparatively less successful at home. That doesn’t mean they’re absent from the American charts, just that they aren’t as ubiquitous here as they are in Mexico or Bolivia.

But regardless, most Russians and Russian speakers are still in Russia, and we can assume that most of Monetochka’s core audience is as well. Other streaming services don’t keep charts that are as accessible and robust as Spotify’s, so Spotify’s withdrawal from Russia makes it difficult to gauge how popular a song is there. But looking at what data I can find, mainly from YouTube and Apple Music, it does seem to be big there as well. On Russian YouTube, it spent a few weeks in the top 20, which is impressive for a song with no official music video. For comparison, the song is in the top 2 on Spotify in Ukraine but hasn’t reached the top 40 on the YouTube charts there. It’s also peaked at number 15 on Apple Music Ukraine, and at least number 8 on Apple Music Russia (I can’t find archived versions of this chart anywhere, but I know I saw it at number 8 in mid-July). Whether or not Monetochka is able to capitalize off this success while she’s in Lithuania is another question, but it seems she has kept her Russian audience, and her song might be an even bigger hit in Russia than abroad.

Charts are not a good barometer of artistic value. But I do think it’s encouraging that Monetochka has been able to connect with all of her audiences. Both her Russian and non-Russian audiences, and both her audience in Russia and outside Russia. And while I might possibly be overstating the case for Селфхарм a little bit, I do think it has both the intrinsic value of good music, and the value of speaking to the wider cultural context in which it exists. It’s a win for music and a win for Monetochka’s career. And it shows that even under persecution, good art can prevail.

I’ve also been listening to Tshwala Bam by TitoM, Yuppe, EeQue, and S.N.E, and Можно Я С Тобой by Ap$ent.

In one of my last Listening To posts I wrote about Bécane – A Colors Show by Yamê. In the last few years, dozens of songs by obscure artists have had a viral moment on TikTok that launched them up the US charts, and I noted that Bécane – A Colors Show’s success was a French example of this same phenomenon. Since that post I’ve been curious to find more examples of TikTok hits in music markets I’m not immediately a part of. So I’ve been paying close attention to the charts and gathering very important data (watching a lot of TikTok) and I’ve got a few more that I think are worth mentioning.

The first is Tshwala Bam. This track is amapiano, a South African subgenre of deep house music that features a steady shaker, synthesizer backbeats, and a pitched log drum that often functions both as a form of both percussion and bass. For most American listeners, the most recognizable amapiano track is probably Water by Tyla, which also had a big moment on TikTok last year and subsequently reached the top 10 on the US Billboard Hot 100. Tyla has described her sound as ‘popiano,’ merging the sonic palette of amapiano with the structure of a more standard pop song (as a subgenre of house music, amapiano tracks often have run times of 8 minutes or longer and focus more on a slow build of looping and layering instrumentals than on a typical verse/chorus pop-song structure). Several West African artists like Davido, Asake, and Amaarae have also been incorporating log drums and shakers into their music recently, but Water was the “watershed” moment for the genre in the US. And Water’s success has brought amapiano to a global audience, and the genre’s influence can be heard from K-Pop to Kali Uchis (it has also taken over my own Spotify – I can’t get enough log drum these days).

But unlike Water, there is nothing pop about Tshwala Bam. The original version track runs for 6 minutes and 30 seconds and is sung in Zulu and Sepedi. This is pretty standard for the songs that top the South African charts, but an unlikely candidate to cross-over outside South Africa. Still, it reached the top 3 in Nigeria before a shorter remix with a Burna Boy feature came out. As far as I can tell, this is the first time a non-Tyla track from South Africa has charted on Nigerian Spotify (I didn’t fact check that, but it’s certainly unusual). Tshwala Bam owes its TikTok success to a dance challenge that is actually quite challenging, which has been done well by the likes of Jason Derulo, South African private school kids, and even Tyla herself, and poorly by many, many others.

The next song I’ve been listening to, Можно Я С Тобой (pronounced Mozhno Ya Stoboy) does not have a specific dance to accompany it. Instead, it’s mostly videos of Russian speakers’ pets asking to accompany their owners for various tasks (“Можно Я С Тобой” translates to “Can I Come With You”). It’s a very sweet trend, with Russian that is usually simple enough for me to understand (this one says “we didn’t choose her, but she chose us“). It's also a very distinctly Russian-sounding song. It mirrors the danceable post-punk of songs like Небо by SadSvit And Танцы by Ssshhhiiittt!. Though I should note Ap$ent is Belarusian and his song is actually censored in Russia. I imagine many English speaking TikTok users haven’t ever heard this one on their For You pages at all, since most of its videos are in Russian. But that just shows how vast the TikTok media landscape is. During its peak last March, it was the 7th top song on the platform globally, outpeaking both Tshwala Bam (17), and the inescapable Karma by Jojo Siwa (11). And like Tshwala Bam (though unlike Karma), this TikTok success translated directly to streaming success, as the song topped the Spotify charts in Ukraine, Bulgaria, and Kazakhstan.

But the main TikTok song I can’t get out of my head right now is not from South Africa or Belarus, but the great country of Texas.

Last year was a commercial high for country music. Four country songs reached No 1 on the Hot 100, the most of any year in its history, and one of these, Last Night by Morgan Wallen, was the biggest song of 2023. There are three main theories I’ve seen for why this happened. The first is that country listeners, who tend to skew older, are finally joining streaming services, which has allowed Billboard to track their listening more accurately. The second is that it’s stayed relevant by poking controversy – which there has been a lot of. The third, and the one I hear discussed least often, is that country music is finally starting to expand to new audiences.

Over the last decade, country has adopted sounds from all sorts of other genres. Trap beats, pop chords, rock guitars, and even the occasional EDM drop can be found in today’s country. Because of this, newer hits like Last Night or Luke Combs’ cover of Fast Car can be played on pop radio without sounding out of place. Artists are also taking to TikTok to market their music. And non-country artists, like Lil Durk, Post Malone, and Beyonce, have dabbled in the genre as well, bringing it to listeners who might be apprehensive to touch it otherwise.

This brings us to Dasha, whose song Austin went viral on TikTok late last February and has since reached the top 30 on the Hot 100. This story is just like any other viral TikTok hit. An independent artist promotes her song with a dance that people emulate, getting the song to more ears until it becomes a hit beyond the original dance challenge.

But despite being a country song where Dasha slams an ex who is destined to an eternity of being “drunk, washed-up in Austin,” the song has been most successful not in Texas or California (where Dasha is actually from), but northern Europe.

We tend to think of country as a uniquely American genre. But while it has its roots in the US, the globalizing world of music has led to a globalization of country. This isn’t limited to Dasha, either. In some ways, it makes sense that Dasha, who was a Nashville outsider with a TikTok presence before her viral moment, could have an audience outside the confines of US country radio. But country music was already the fastest growing genre in Britain in 2022, and I imagine that hasn’t slowed down. Last Night and Fast Car hit the top 10 on the Spotify charts in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Another recent country hit, I Remember Everything by Zach Bryan and Kacey Musgraves, reached the top 20 in seven countries (the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Norway, and Sweden). And in the time it took me to write this, another country song, A Bar Song (Tipsy) by Shaboozey, is number 1 on the Spotify charts in Norway and Sweden, and top 10 in nine others (it has so far peaked at only number 3 in the US). Even Rich Men North of Richmond by Oliver Anthony Music, a song that owes its US success entirely to conservative media praise and its allusions to Republican politics, spent two baffling months in the top 50 on Spotify in Ireland.

I’m initially surprised to see that country music is producing hits outside the US. But why should I be? American pop, rap, rock, and house music can be heard all around the world, and have influenced countless musicians around the world. So why would country be any different? If anything, it was strange that it took so long for country to follow suit.

One of my favorite things about the streaming era is how interconnected the global music community is now. From my perspective as a listener, I can play music South Africa, Belarus, or Ireland whenever I want. And that music, in turn, is evolving in countless directions as doors open for cross-genre collaboration. But with the sheer volume of music on Spotify, it can sometimes be daunting to search for anything outside my comfort zone. This is why I appreciate TikTok, both for its new role in the meme-to-hit-song pipeline, and for the occasional oddball videos I get, where I’m clearly not the target audience. Videos like the Можно Я С Тобой cats, where I can find a slice of culture that is both recognizable (TikTok song with pet videos), but also originating well outside what I’d consider my “home community.”

I’m worried about what the pending American TikTok ban means for all of this. It obviously won’t stop TikTok from making hits Africa or Eastern Europe. TikTok has over a billion active users, most of whom won’t be directly affected by the US ban. Most of Tshwala Bam and Можно Я С Тобой (and Austin)’s listeners will move on, maybe without even noticing the US ban, to the next trends to take over (pieces of) the platform. And music will continue to innovate as it always has. Maybe Ap$ent’s next song will feature a log drum. Or maybe TitoM will become a country singer to fill the void once the Americans are gone. Whatever culture emerges from TikTok in 2025, I’m certainly going to miss being there for it.