It’s no surprise that “PARTYGIRL” is the name Charli xcx adopted for the DJ nights she put on in support of *BRAT*. It’s kind of her brand anyway, but on her sixth studio album, the British pop star is reveling in the trashy, sugary glitz of the club. *BRAT* is a record that brings to life the pleasure of colorful, sticky dance floors and too-sweet alcopops lingering in the back of your mouth, fizzing with volatility, possibility, and strutting vanity (“I’ll always be the one,” she sneers deliciously on the A. G. Cook- and Cirkut-produced opening track “360”). Of course, Charli xcx—real name Charlotte Aitchison—has frequently taken pleasure in delivering both self-adoring bangers and poignant self-reflection. Take her 2022 pop-girl yet often personal concept album *CRASH*, which was preceded by the diaristic approach of her excellent lockdown album *how i’m feeling now*. But here, there’s something especially tantalizing in her directness over the intoxicating fumes of hedonism. Yes, she’s having a raucous time with her cool internet It-girl friends, but a night out also means the introspection that might come to you in the midst of a party, or the insurmountable dread of the morning after. On “So I,” for example, she misses her friend and fellow musician, the brilliant SOPHIE, and lyrically nods to the late artist’s 2017 track “It’s Okay to Cry.” Charli xcx has always been shaped and inspired by SOPHIE, and you can hear the influence of her pioneering sounds in many of the vocals and textures throughout *BRAT*. Elsewhere, she’s trying to figure out if she’s connecting with a new female friend through love or jealousy on the sharp, almost Uffie-esque “Girl, so confusing,” on which Aitchison boldly skewers the inanity of “girl’s girl” feminism. She worries she’s embarrassed herself at a party on “I might say something stupid,” wishes she wasn’t so concerned about image and fame on “Rewind,” and even wonders quite candidly about whether she wants kids on the sweet sparseness of “I think about it all the time.” In short, this is big, swaggering party music, but always with an undercurrent of honesty and heart. For too long, Charli xcx has been framed as some kind of fringe underground artist, in spite of being signed to a major label and delivering a consistent run of albums and singles in the years leading up to this record. In her *BRAT* era, whether she’s exuberant and self-obsessed or sad and introspective, Charli xcx reminds us that she’s in her own lane, thriving. Or, as she puts it on “Von dutch,” “Cult classic, but I still pop.”
Forget song of the summer—2024’s undisputed album of the summer (northern hemisphere version) arrived in early June with a slime-green album cover and wall-to-wall bangers that would launch Charli xcx’s career to stratospheric new heights. (Cue news anchors worldwide grappling with the sociopolitical ramifications of “being brat.”) For years, the self-directed English artist enjoyed a reputation buzzier than “cult favorite” yet not quite “main pop girl,” but with the release of her sixth studio album, she hadn’t just captured the zeitgeist—she’d become it. If you didn’t see it coming, well, neither did Charli. “I really was preparing for this album to be for my fanbase only, and not really break outside the walls of that at all,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe with typical candor. Nevertheless, she presented the concept to her label with a manifesto she’d written—things she’d wanted to say since 2016’s paradigm-shifting *Vroom Vroom* EP. “‘On this record there’s going to be no traditional radio songs, because we don’t live in that world now,’” she told them. “This fanbase I have built is so hungry for me and my peers and our slightly-left world of pop/dance music—they’re hungry for us to succeed. That doesn’t mean that we have to do any pandering to any other side of the industry. We just have to do it for them because they’ve championed us for so long, and that’s all we need to light a fire.” Not content to rest while that fire’s still burning, Charli’s also committed to single-handedly keeping the remix industry afloat. You could call the full-length remix album yet another shrewd marketing move, though the project was in the works well before *BRAT* blew up. Here, a cross-generational who’s who of cool kids mingles in the smoking section of fall’s most exclusive party, where NYC garage-rock legends rub elbows with genuine pop divas and mystical Swedish rappers. And for all *BRAT*’s messy rawness regarding the complications of being a woman in the industry, the remix album brings together a slick-talking Billie Eilish, Ariana Grande at her glitchiest, Robyn flexing her ’90s bona fides, Tinashe basking in her own long-awaited shine, and naturally, the Lorde remix that broke the internet. Brat summer is dead. Long live brat summer!
“That is who Lady Gaga is to me,” Lady Gaga tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe of creating *MAYHEM*. “Maybe to someone else, it might be the Meat Dress or something that I did that they remember as me. But for me, I always want to be remembered for being a real artist and someone that cares so much.” In that vein, Gaga set out to make her latest album—which she calls her “favorite record in a long time”—its own thing. “*ARTPOP* was a vibe. *Joanne* was a sound. *Chromatica* had a sound. All different. *The Fame Monster* was more chaotic. *The Fame* was theatrical pop. *Born This Way*, to me, had more of a metal/electro New York vibe to it,” she says. “I actually made the effort making *MAYHEM* to not do that and not try to give my music an outfit, but instead to allow myself to be influenced by everything.” Indeed, *MAYHEM* traverses—and oftentimes melds—the various flavors of Mother Monster’s career, from the disco scene of her earliest work to her singer-songwriter era and back again. The opening tracks, singles “Disease” and “Abracadabra,” revisit dance-floor Gaga to thrilling fanfare. The spirited “Garden of Eden” follows the trend of what she calls “2000 throwbacks.” With its sparkly synths, “LoveDrug” might be seen as the brighter and shinier elder sibling of her early cut “LoveGame.” She even specifically admits the “electro-grunge influence” seeps its way in—especially apparent in “Perfect Celebrity,” “Vanish into You,” and “The Beast.” The latter even shows shades of *Joanne*, but “Blade of Grass” and her Bruno Mars duet “Die with a Smile” really put her former folk-pop-rock persona on display. It’s also all incredibly personal to her. “The album is a series of gothic dreams,” she says. “I say it’s like images of the past that haunt me, and they somehow find their way into who I am today.” Below, Gaga takes us through several tracks, in her own words. **“Abracadabra”** “I think I didn’t want to make this kind of music for a long time, even though I had it in me. And I think ‘Abracadabra’ is very much my sound—something that I honed in \[on\] after many years, and I wanted to do it again. I felt like being stagnant was just death in my artistry. And I just really wanted to constantly be a student. Not just reinvent myself, but learn something new with every record. And that wasn’t always what people wanted from me, but that’s what I wanted from me. And it’s the thing that I’m the most probably proud of, if I look back on my career, is I know how much I grew from record to record and how authentic it all was. The thing that was most important to me was being a student of music, above everything else.” **“Perfect Celebrity”** “It’s super angry: ‘I’ve become a notorious being/Find my clone, she’s asleep on the ceiling.’ It’s almost comical, this idea that any time I’m in the room with anyone, there’s me—Stefani—and Lady Gaga asleep on the ceiling, and I have to figure out which body to be in. It’s kind of intense, but that song, that was an important song on this album because it didn’t feel honest to me on *MAYHEM* to exclude something that had that kind of anger in it because then it felt like I was trying to be a good girl or whatever and be something that I’m not actually. Part of my personal mayhem is that I have joy and celebration, but I’m also sometimes angry or super sad or really celebratory or completely insecure and have no confidence.” **“Shadow of a Man”** “That song is so much a response to my career and what it always felt like to be the only girl in the room a lot of the time. And to always be standing in the shadow of a man because there were so many around me that I learned how to dance in that shadow.” **“The Beast”** “In that record, it is me or someone singing to their lover who’s a werewolf, but what I believe about this is, this record is also about \[my fiancé\] Michael \[Polansky\] and I, and that this song is also about me and being Lady Gaga. What the beast is, who I become when I’m onstage, and who I am when I make my art and the prechorus of that song is, ‘You can’t hide who you are. 11:59, your heart’s racing, you’re growling, and we both know why.’ It’s like somebody that is saying to the beast, ‘I know you’re a monster, but I can handle you, and I love you.’” **“Blade of Grass”** “Michael asked me how I would want him to propose to me one day. We were in our backyard, and I said, ‘Just take a blade of grass and wrap it around my finger,’ and then I wrote ‘Blade of Grass’ because I remembered the way his face looked, and I remembered the grass in the backyard, and I remember thinking he should use that really long grass that’s in the center of the backyard. Those moments, to me, at a certain point I was into the idea of fame and artifice and being the conductor of your own life when it came to your own inner sense of fame. I had to fight a lot harder to make music and dance a little bit later into my career because my life became so different that I didn’t have as much life around me to inspire me.”
Rebecca Black continues to rewrite her myth in real time. Since becoming famous overnight as a teenager with her 2011 viral smash “Friday,” the Los Angeles singer has spent nearly a decade proving she’s more than a novelty. If her 2023 debut album, *Let Her Burn*, was an untamed exploration of sound, *SALVATION* is where she sharpens her vision. The EP’s title came to Black on a subway ride in London, sparking a fascination with salvation—not just as a religious concept, but as a personal reckoning. “*SALVATION* is based around this idea of letting some of the less-safe, less-poised, less-sweet versions of myself into my world,” she tells Apple Music. She amplifies, and sometimes even embraces, those once-buried versions of herself with newfound fearlessness, declaring on the title track, “I love being disgusting,” before a defiant retort: “I don’t need you to save me/I already saved myself.” Leaning into Black’s self-described “unhinged” instincts also unlocked bolder production choices, from layering a perky chorus over walloping techno on “Sugar Water Cyanide” to the whip-cracking, laser-strobing rave of “TRUST!” Yet, for all its bravado, *SALVATION* also demands a deeper vulnerability. “Tears in My Pocket” finds intimacy in fragility, while “Do You Even Think About Me?” digs into unresolved heartbreak. Where the latter lingers in longing, “Twist the Knife” bites back, its sweeping orchestration fueling Black at her most vengeful and dramatic. “As I was letting these more dangerous parts of myself be shown, it almost felt like a protective mechanism,” she says. “Because if I make it larger than it is, it feels less naked.” Read on as Black breaks down *SALVATION*’s core tracks. **“Salvation”** “It felt really energizing to explore this really sexy, really unafraid, very direct version of myself that I hadn’t before. The song is all about taking ownership of the version of yourself you are, regardless of whether anybody else understands. I like juxtaposition. There’s a bit of rapping happening—that, against a super melodic, ultra-harmonized chorus that feels to-the-bones of the pop that I grew up with in the mid-2010s, was really nostalgic for me. It felt right, given it’s basically a song about being gay as fuck.” **“TRUST!”** “‘TRUST!’ felt daring. It felt like the least seriously I had ever taken myself. Genuinely, if I had known three years ago that I would have a song where the chorus is, ‘Ooh, la la, get me going like ga ga ga,’ I would’ve been so afraid that people would’ve gone, ‘Is this bitch fucking stupid? She thinks she can do “Friday” and then do this, and we’re going to treat it seriously?’ That felt like a moment of freedom where there was something really exciting and invigorating. It felt like a banger instantly.” **“Sugar Water Cyanide”** “I forget what \[co-writers Jesse Saint John, Nightfeelings\] and I were listening to or how we landed on the idea, but it was the first time in a while that I had started writing a song without a lot of prior thought around it. I wanted to make something that felt really visceral, and really sexy, and really fun. I knew that I wanted to take a big risk sonically that day. We landed on this juxtaposition of this very sugary-sweet verse with this truly deathly chorus. It felt like the most emblematic version of me I could put in a song. Lyrically, it felt so fun to create an energy that wasn’t the story of meeting someone or an experience. It was just about a feeling and trying to put words to that in the most Rebecca way possible.” **“Tears in My Pocket”** “‘Tears’ felt like such an informative first song for the rest of the project. Something else I wanted to explore was minimalism and space and silence in songs. It was the first time I felt like I had successfully done that without losing energy, because I didn’t want \[this project\] to be soft. I wanted to create something bright and in your face, and that has the same level of impact—maybe even more—as a song that has a thousand elements of production. This was probably the first time I left a session on the day with an almost-finished song. That was also a big practice for me, learning not to touch whatever we first landed on.”
Ela Minus’ second album, *DÍA*, takes a massive leap when it comes to the sheer size of the Colombian producer and songwriter’s music. Her 2020 breakout debut, *acts of rebellion*, felt like someone communicating electronic pop to you in secret, with warm analog synth squiggles and a delightfully brittle feel, not unlike coldwave’s minimalist steeliness or the punkish, romantic sound of ’80s synth-pop. On *DÍA*, Minus cranks up her stylistic tics to max volume: The synths crash like monsoons, and her voice soars above the music instead of lying in wait in the shadows. The saucer-eyed wobbles of opener “ABRIR MONTE” immediately recall the lush rave waves of Jamie xx’s “Gosh,” while “ONWARDS” conjures peak-era electroclash, right down to Minus’ excellently disaffected and cool-to-the-touch vocal take. At times, *DÍA* also feels like a modern update of the icy, gothic synth-pop that Swedish duo The Knife first perfected on their 2006 album *Silent Shout*. The swooning tones and static bursts of “IDK” tackle feelings of anxiety head-on, while “I WANT TO BE BETTER” is riddled with self-doubt and regret, a hand reaching across the void toward past acquaintances. The feelings feel real; the imagery is corporeal and thoroughly sanguine—the latter quite literally over the serpentine synths of “IDOLS”: “All it took/Was a little blood/To see what I’m really made of.”
It’s no surprise that “PARTYGIRL” is the name Charli xcx adopted for the DJ nights she put on in support of *BRAT*. It’s kind of her brand anyway, but on her sixth studio album, the British pop star is reveling in the trashy, sugary glitz of the club. *BRAT* is a record that brings to life the pleasure of colorful, sticky dance floors and too-sweet alcopops lingering in the back of your mouth, fizzing with volatility, possibility, and strutting vanity (“I’ll always be the one,” she sneers deliciously on the A. G. Cook- and Cirkut-produced opening track “360”). Of course, Charli xcx—real name Charlotte Aitchison—has frequently taken pleasure in delivering both self-adoring bangers and poignant self-reflection. Take her 2022 pop-girl yet often personal concept album *CRASH*, which was preceded by the diaristic approach of her excellent lockdown album *how i’m feeling now*. But here, there’s something especially tantalizing in her directness over the intoxicating fumes of hedonism. Yes, she’s having a raucous time with her cool internet It-girl friends, but a night out also means the introspection that might come to you in the midst of a party, or the insurmountable dread of the morning after. On “So I,” for example, she misses her friend and fellow musician, the brilliant SOPHIE, and lyrically nods to the late artist’s 2017 track “It’s Okay to Cry.” Charli xcx has always been shaped and inspired by SOPHIE, and you can hear the influence of her pioneering sounds in many of the vocals and textures throughout *BRAT*. Elsewhere, she’s trying to figure out if she’s connecting with a new female friend through love or jealousy on the sharp, almost Uffie-esque “Girl, so confusing,” on which Aitchison boldly skewers the inanity of “girl’s girl” feminism. She worries she’s embarrassed herself at a party on “I might say something stupid,” wishes she wasn’t so concerned about image and fame on “Rewind,” and even wonders quite candidly about whether she wants kids on the sweet sparseness of “I think about it all the time.” In short, this is big, swaggering party music, but always with an undercurrent of honesty and heart. For too long, Charli xcx has been framed as some kind of fringe underground artist, in spite of being signed to a major label and delivering a consistent run of albums and singles in the years leading up to this record. In her *BRAT* era, whether she’s exuberant and self-obsessed or sad and introspective, Charli xcx reminds us that she’s in her own lane, thriving. Or, as she puts it on “Von dutch,” “Cult classic, but I still pop.”
When artists say they’re taking their time to make a new album, they usually give it a year or two. For Zedd, whose last full-length was released in 2015, things took a bit longer. “It can definitely be a disadvantage to take too much time,” the producer tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe of the nine-year gap between *True Colors* and *Telos*, his third LP. “But it really depends on what you’re trying to do. At some point I had to decide what this album was about. In 2020 or so, I started working on an album, but I had no idea of what I was actually doing. It was like, ‘Well, there’s a pandemic. When am I going to get another chance to sit down and make music?’ But I didn’t have real genuine inspiration, and I was aimlessly trying to make music without any context or real reason.” Only one track remained from those sessions, but it was enough to give shape to what would eventually become *Telos* (that’s Aristotelian for the end or the completion of a goal). “Dream Brother,” which centers around late singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley’s vocal stems from his 1994 track of the same name, “was the one song that to me was giving me that emotion that I wanted,” Zedd says. “\[Buckley’s\] ‘Dream Brother’ has always been inspirational to me. I’ve always thought that there’s a side of it that could live in a different context. I just thought I could make this into an incredible respectful dance-ish song.” “Dance-ish” is pretty key to understanding *Telos*, and Zedd’s entire approach to music after nearly a decade between albums. “There was this moment where I had to decide that this is an album for me,” he says. “That put everything in place. All the songs that I had started, where I was like, ‘How am I going to make \[a\] 7/8 \[time signature\] work in dance music?’ Well, it doesn’t matter. It’s no longer dance music. I’m making this for myself—not for the fans, not for the label, not for anybody. It’s just for me.” Unlike the beat-driven *True Colors*, here the drums are used for color, tone, and dynamics, flickering in for a few bars and fading out, trading places with synth, piano riffs, and Bea Miller’s vocals on the opening “Out of Time” and adding a punchy rhythmic component to the vaguely South Asian “Shanti.” Tracks such as “Sona,” his 7/8-time collaboration with Irish American trio the olllam, showcase an even greater commitment to writing songs, and make *Telos* a cohesive whole that asks its listeners to take their time, just like he did making it. “I can make a good song,” Zedd admits, “but 10 of them aren’t going to make a good album. I grew up with these albums that were more than just 10 good songs. They still inspire me, and they made me the musician I am today. I wanted to create something that was meaningful. I wanted to make an album that in 30 years, I will meet a kid who’s like, ‘I heard this album and I wanted to get into music.’”
At the start of 2023, Quevedo unveiled his debut album, *DONDE QUIERO ESTAR*, to considerable acclaim and chart success in his home country of Spain. For his follow-up, *BUENAS NOCHES*, he makes a more pronounced pivot toward pop, albeit in a multifaceted manner. Opener “KASSANDRA” glistens with nostalgic synthesizer flourishes as he admires a powerful woman from afar. “DURO” maintains that maximalist bent, an aesthetic that suits the breakup ruminations of “NOEMÚ” and the playboy apologies of “IGUALES” well. He plays well with others regardless of genre, as demonstrated on the electro-rock duet “GRAN VÍA” with Aitana and the slo-mo reggaetón team-up “TE FALLÉ” with Sech. Perreo drives choice collaborations with De La Ghetto (“AMANECIÓ”) and La Pantera (“HALO”), yet his Pitbull-backed “MR. MOONDIAL” goes full EDM in execution. That unbridled dance-floor thump is countered by the sleek hip-hop fusions of “LA 125” with Yung Beef and “14 FEBREROS” with Sin Nombre.
