The pandemic made a lot of big pop music sound hushed and melancholic. Duncan Greive assesses three women bringing the beat back – and the shock return of Lorde.

New Zealand is seasonally cross-matched for pop culture. The big budget movies all come out in the northern hemisphere summer, when we’re drenched and shivering and would rather stay at home. The same goes for pop music – everyone competing for the unofficial but you-know-it-when-you-hear-it “song of the summer” drops their singles in April-June, hoping for maximal zeitgeist for the US and UK holiday seasons, with no consideration at all for just how hard it is to get out of the house down here.

Early signs are that a very particular kind of pop music is staging a roaring comeback, just in time for what New York Substacker Emily Sundberg, who focuses on the business of culture, has variously described as a “druggy”, “trashy”, “party” summer, featuring the unexpected revival of… smoking?! Maybe the coalition were onto something? New singles or albums from Charli xcx, Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan have surged up charts and through Spotify’s algorithm to promise a season of hypermelodic and often horny pop music, the likes of which we haven’t heard all at once since the ‘00s.

I’ll get to that. Before then, consider what we’ve dealt with since the pandemic. The last truly great maximalist pop album was probably Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia, which demanded you dance to it, tragically released just as dancing became literally illegal in March of 2020. Since then, despite a bunch of cool music released – country’s resurgence, the Fred Again.. phenomenon, the globalising of once-regional genres like grime, reggaeton and afrobeats –  pop has been a bit subdued.

This was in part driven by the tone of the biggest stars. Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour was extraordinary – but her new music is mostly hushed and introspective. Billie Eilish is amazing, but designed for headphones over clubs. Even Olivia Rodrigo, a born pop star, makes music more in thrall to ‘90s indie than anything else. 

There have been glimpses. Raye’s career steadily arcing up to the incandescent Escapism. and Kylie Minogue proving she still unequivocally has it with Padam Padam. But if you’re a believer in the power of women (they’re just better at this, sorry) singing pure exultant pop music – that unmistakable thing that ran through Madonna to Whitney to Britney to Sugababes to Beyoncé (who is making fascinating records, but which function more as art than pop) to Robyn to Lady Gaga to Lorde to Carly Rae Jepsen… If you love that, it’s undeniably been a little slow lately.

Going to the Chappell

No longer. About the time Kylie released Padam last year, a little known artist named Chappell Roan dropped maybe the best pop album since Lorde’s Melodrama in The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. She’d been putting out interesting but unexceptional songs for years, so hardly anyone noticed the new record. Maybe it was the timing – she released it in late September, just as the leaves were falling up north, before the sun was out here.

In April, she followed up with a new single Good Luck, Babe, which capitalised on the growing cult fandom around her. It launches with squelchy, minor key synths and Roan restrained and weary, before a sugar rush chorus wishing (not really) an ex good luck with her new dude. It culminates in a snarling, savage crescendo:

“When you wake up next to him in the middle of the night /
With your head in your hands, you’re nothing more than his wife”

That final line is shot through with bracing contempt. Roan is a lesbian, and there is a frank sexuality in her best songs, one which feels electric and free and new to big hit singles. The success of Good Luck, Babe forced a reappraisal of Rise and Fall, which reveals itself as a stunning, near-perfect pop album (seldom sighted in a rightly singles-obsessed genre). She is a true creation, self-manufactured, cut from the cloth of drag and with a rich knowledge of pop’s history –  lighting up corners which have been dark too long. 

Some highlights. Red Wine Supernova is this chugging, new wave-evoking call-and-response beauty, with Roan bragging and cracking dirty jokes about “a wand and a rabbit”, singing “you just told me, want me to fuck you / Baby, I will ’cause I really want to”. Femininomenon and the ballad Casual (“Knee deep in the passenger seat, and you’re eating me out / Is it casual now?”) are almost as good.

Different paths to stardom

Around the same time as Roan was starting her ascent, another artist who’d been plugging away in what the New York Times aptly called “pop’s middle class” released a single which might be as good as Good Luck, Babe – and is certainly bigger.

Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso is deliciously weird (“I’m working late / ‘Cuz I’m a singer”), but one of those irresistible melodies that blasted past the slightly tentative music she’d made prior. It’s a fixture in the New Zealand singles chart, hit #1 in Australia and the UK, and Carpenter’s now near 75m monthly listeners on Spotify, putting her just below the top tier of pop (only three artists crack 100m).

She just followed it up with Please Please Please, a lesser song which nonetheless proved that she has already reached rare air – Variety noted that Carpenter is “the first solo act in the history of the 66-year-old Billboard chart to land two simultaneous top-three hits.” This is particularly notable as in the post-TikTok/Spotify era, in which records are hard to match with prior decades, it’s notoriously hard to mint new stars – nine of the top 10 artists on Spotify broke out before the algorithm took over.

Alongside Roan and Carpenter is another artist having a pop breakout – one whose music is maybe too prickly to hit the mainstream to the same extent, but who nonetheless feels tightly connected to this electric moment for pop music. Charli xcx has been at it for over a decade, but has never quite had a crossover hit to surpass I Love It, her collaboration with Icona Pop, released in 2012. 

Earlier this month she released Brat, an album of charged, dry ice synth-pop with juddering percussion you feel in your belly, and piercing siren-like vocals which recall The Knife. It had a brilliantly executed rollout, one which has been described as closer to a sneaker drop than an album release. It means nothing if the music isn’t great though – and songs like Von Dutch, Sympathy is a Knife and Girl, So Confusing more than deliver.

The latter was part of that genius release strategy – not quite a diss track, but certainly an expression of very complicated feelings, and absolutely about somebody. Sleuths immediately clocked that somebody (“You’re all about writing poems… people say we have the same hair”) as being Lorde, who clearly loved the challenge it represented. The song has two brilliantly composed verses and practically begged for a collaborative answer record.

It arrived on Friday afternoon, an inverted version of the Kendrick-Drake beef, whereby a prickly relationship resolves into an astounding collaboration rather than a bitter war. After Charli’s verse, Lorde responds, her voice harshly filtered but still unmistakable.

Part of what made Girl, So Confusing so compelling was the way it dropped the artifice and revealed deep insecurity. Lorde responds in kind, dropping that untouchable poise which has radiated out of her in recent years in favour of a wildly human admission. “’Cause for the last couple years / I’ve been at war in my body / I tried to starve myself thinner / And then I gained all the weight back.” It’s a startling window into what a forthcoming more raw Lorde album might portend, a return to the deeply human revelations of Pure Heroine. 

All this means that in the space of a couple of months, the moribund state of pop feels shot full of energy. Carpenter is going to make it. Charli has crafted the best music of her career. Lorde is back in pop. Chappell Roan is on another planet – tellingly the collaborator is Dan Nigro, who has credits on iconic songs from more couture artists like Sky Ferreira and Caroline Polachek, as well as chart destroyers like Rodrigo and Conan Grey. After years of the Jack Antonoff flattening machine, Nigro’s sound is a technicolour dream, and feels made for the artist, rather than the artist following him.

What this group have done here feels extremely significant. This is absolutely not a fleeting flash – this music has teeth and depth, feels fresh in significant ways. It feels like the vanguard of a return to a hedonistic, cathartic pop music we’ve been missing too long. In a bleak New Zealand winter, it sounds like hope.