PopMatters' 30 Best Pop Albums of 2024

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.”

“Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they?” Linda Martell cackles at the beginning of “SPAGHETTII.” Perhaps the name Linda Martell isn’t a household one, which only proves her point. She was the first Black woman to perform at the Grand Ole Opry, but her attempt to move from soul and R&B into the realm of country in the 1960s was met with racist resistance—everything from heckling to outright blackballing. Beyoncé knows the feeling, as she explained in an uncharacteristically vulnerable Instagram post revealing that her eighth studio album was inspired by a deep dive into the history of Black country music following an experience where she felt similarly unwelcome. *COWBOY CARTER* is a sprawling 80-minute tribute not only to those pioneering artists and their outlaw spirit, but to the very futility of reducing music to a single identifying word. Another key quote from that post: “This ain’t a country album. This is a Beyoncé album.” It’s more than a catchy slogan; anyone looking for mere honky-tonk cosplay is missing a much richer and more complex point. Listening in full to Act II of the presumed trilogy Bey began with 2022’s *RENAISSANCE*, it’s clear that the perennial overachiever hasn’t merely “gone country,” she’s interrogating what the word even means—and who merits the designation. On “AMERIICAN REQUIEM,” in a voice deep and earthy as Texas red dirt, the Houston native sings, “Used to say I spoke too country/And then the rejection came, said I wasn’t country enough.” She nods again, as she’s done before on songs like “Formation,” to her family ties to Alabama moonshiners and Louisiana Creoles. “If that ain’t country,” she wonders, “tell me what is.” With subtlety and swagger, she contextualizes country as an offshoot of the Black American musical canon, a storytelling mode springing from and evolving alongside gospel and blues. Over the wistful pedal steel and gospel organ of “16 CARRIAGES,” she tells you what it’s like to be a teenage workhorse who grows into an adult perfectionist obsessed with ideas of legacy, with a bit of family trauma buried among the riffs. On “YA YA,” Beyoncé expands the scope to rock ’n’ roll at its most red-blooded and fundamental, playing the parts of both Ike and Tina as she interpolates The Beach Boys and slips in a slick Playboi Carti reference, yowling: “My family lived and died in America/Good ol’ USA/Whole lotta red in that white and blue/History can’t be erased.” A Patsy Cline standard goes Jersey club mode on “SWEET ★ HONEY ★ BUCKIIN’,” with a verse from the similarly genre-flouting Shaboozey and a quick note regarding *RENAISSANCE*‘s Grammy fortunes: “AOTY I ain’t win/I ain’t stuntin’ ’bout them/Take that shit on the chin/Come back and fuck up the pen.” Who but Beyoncé could make a crash course in American music history feel like the party of the year? There’s the one-two punch of sorely needed summer slow-dance numbers: the Miley Cyrus duet “II MOST WANTED,” with its whispers of Fleetwood Mac, followed by “LEVII’S JEANS” with Post Malone, the “in those jeans” anthem filling the radio’s Ginuwine-shaped hole. *RENAISSANCE*’s euphorically nasty house bounce returns, albeit with more banjo, on “RIIVERDANCE,” where “II HANDS II HEAVEN” floats on clouds of ’90s electronica for an ode to alternately riding wild horses and 24-inch spinners on candy paint. (Houston, Texas, baby!) There are do-si-do ditties, murder ballads, daddy issues, whiskey kisses, hungover happy hours, cornbread and grits, Beatles covers, smoke breaks, and, on “DAUGHTER,” what may or may not be a wink in the direction of the artist who won AOTY instead. There’s also a Dolly-approved Beyoncification of “Jolene,” to whom the protagonist is neither saying please nor begging on the matter of taking her man. (“Your peace depends on how you move, Jolene,” Bey purrs, ice in her veins.) Is this a genre-bucking hoedown? A chess move? A reckoning? A requiem? If anyone can pull it off, it’s *COWBOY CARTER*, as country as it gets.

There was a time, not so long ago, when things felt relatively simple for Beatrice Laus: She’d write and record songs in her London bedroom, she’d post them online, the world would come to her or it wouldn’t. But it did—very much so. To such an extent and at such a dizzying clip that, still 23 and just two albums into her career, the Up Next alum found herself taking a meeting with Rick Rubin—part mystic, part producer, part institution. “I think we just wanted to meet each other,” she tells Apple Music. “The entire meeting was about life and just catching up. It was almost like a therapy session. I think at the end I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve been making some songs. Do you want to hear them?’” Those songs became part of *This Is How Tomorrow Moves*, a lush and supremely confident third full-length that Laus would go on to record with Rubin at Shangri-La, his legendary studio in Malibu—a long way from said London bedroom. It’s an album about self-realization and growing up, written in the aftermath of a breakup, as Laus—fully online and in the public eye, on tour and away from home—came to terms with a life that had become unrecognizable to her. “I really needed music to help me understand what my brain was going through,” she says. “I just had so much to say. I didn’t really think about the way it sounded. You know when you really badly need to go to the toilet? That’s what it felt like: I really badly needed to write a song.” At Shangri-La, Rubin encouraged Laus to see and hear what she’d written in its simplest and clearest emotional terms. Though she still takes plenty of inspiration from a wide swath of ’90s alt-rock and pop (“Post,” the Incubus-like “Take a Bite”), she is equally at home here at the center of a spare piano ballad (“Girl Song”) as she is amid the fanfare of an incandescent indie-folk cut (“Ever Seen”). It’s the sound of an artist finding clarity and herself, an artist leveling up. “I think being in a space like Shangri-La, and knowing that you’re making this record with Rick, it definitely kind of kicks you,” she says. “Like, ‘All right, it’s time to shine.’” Read on as Laus takes us inside a few highlights from the album. **“Girl Song”** “I think you can argue that ‘Girl Song,’ out of all the songs on the record, is the most tragic. I wrote it because I’m still trying to figure that one out, just in terms of growing up and loving myself and the way I look and physical appearance and all that mumbo jumbo. But it sits at number six, just because I just felt like it was perfect. It had to be perfectly in the middle of the record because it didn’t suit the beginning or the end. It was just how I felt at that moment.” **“Beaches”** “I wrote ‘Beaches’ because of how terrified I was getting into this. I am the sort of person that values feeling comfortable and loyalty and trusting people around me, not changing a lot of things. But I would’ve been an idiot if I had said no \[to Rubin\]. I remember my boyfriend being like, ‘Are you crazy? You have to go.’ I’m so used to making music back at home, not in a massive, fancy place.” **“The Man Who Left Too Soon”** “I actually wrote it in LA, in my hotel room. I’ve never really experienced death in family. I always wondered how that felt like. My current boyfriend, unfortunately, lost his dad around his twenties; I really got to see how that would feel like and how that would affect someone. I wanted to write about it so I can understand what that would mean to other people and what that would mean to him and what that would mean to me.” **“This Is How It Went”** “It makes me so anxious: A very intense thing happened to me, and I needed to write about it. I have to say all this shit.”

The LA-by-way-of-Miami duo of Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin pick up where they left things on their debut, 2021’s *Mercurial World*, and make everything just a bit bigger. Opener “She Looked Like Me!” begins innocently enough, with hushed vocals from Tenenbaum backed by twinkling keys and a buzzing bass synth. Before long, though, massive drum hits give the song an unrelenting pulse, blending the energy of a hyperpop anthem with the rise-and-fall restraint of a classic-rock song. “Image” is a disco-inspired cut that dances around synths that speed up and slow down according to their own whimsy, as Tenenbaum’s voice floats effortlessly above the fray. “What\'s the best you’ve got?/I forgot all my common sense/I need all the common sense/Time to start the clock from the top,” she sings, letting the feel-good vibes of the club-ready instrumental imbue her abstract lyrics with visceral meaning. Even when the duo concoct songs that fear the future or suggest wariness at where the world is headed, the jams suggest that the AI apocalypse will still feature plenty of dancing.

In a short time, Claire Cottrill has become one of pop music’s most fascinating chameleons. Even as her songwriting and soft vocals often possess her singular touch, the prodigious 25-year-old has exhibited a specific creative restlessness in her sonic approach. After pivoting from the lo-fi bedroom pop of her early singles to the sounds of lush, rustic 2000s indie rock on 2019’s star-making *Immunity* and making a hard pivot towards monastic folk on 2021’s *Sling*, the baroque, ’70s soul-inflected chamber-pop that makes up her third album, *Charm*, feels like yet another revelation in an increasingly essential catalog. *Charm* is Cottrill’s third consecutive turn in the studio with a producer of distinctive aesthetic; while *Immunity*’s flashes of color were provided by Rostam Batmanglij and Jack Antonoff worked the boards on *Sling*, these 11 songs possess the undeniable warmth of studio impresario and Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings founding member Leon Michels. Along with several Daptone compatriots and NYC jazz auteur Marco Benevento, Michels provides the perfect support to Cotrill’s wistful, gorgeously tumbling songcraft; woodwinds flutter across the squishy synth pads of “Slow Dance,” while “Echo” possesses an electro-acoustic hum not unlike legendary UK duo Broadcast and the simmering soul of “Juna” spirals out into miniature psychedelic curlicues. At the center of it all is Cottrill’s unbelievably intimate vocal touch, which perfectly captures and complements *Charm*’s lyrical theme of wanting desire while staring uncertainty straight in the eye.

Some people kill their nemeses with kindness; Sabrina Carpenter, the breakout pop star of summer 2024, takes the opposite tack, shooting withering one-liners at loser exes via featherlight melodies, a wink and a smile. The former Disney Channel star began her music career at age 15 with her 2014 debut single “Can’t Blame a Girl for Trying.” Now 25, the singer-songwriter is making the catchiest, funniest, and most honest music of her career at a moment when all the world’s watching. But on songs like “Please Please Please,” on which she begs her boyfriend not to embarrass her (again), she’s poking fun at herself, too. “A lot of what I really love about this album is the accountability,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I will call myself out just as much as I will call out someone else.” It’s not because Carpenter’s “vertically challenged,” as she puts it, that she named her sixth album *Short n’ Sweet*. “I thought about some of these relationships, how some of them were the shortest I’ve ever had and they affected me the most,” she tells Lowe. “And I thought about the way that I respond to situations: Sometimes it is very nice, and sometimes it’s not very nice.” Hence songs like “Dumb & Poetic,” a gentle acoustic ballad that’s also a blistering takedown of a guy who masks his sleazy tendencies with therapy buzzwords and a highbrow record collection, or the twangy, hilarious “Slim Pickins,” on which she croons: “Jesus, what’s a girl to do?/This boy doesn’t even know the difference between there, their, and they are/Yet he’s naked in my room.” With good humor and good taste (channeling Rilo Kiley here, Kacey Musgraves there, and on “Sharpest Tool,” a bit of The Postal Service), Carpenter reframes heartbreak through the lens of life’s absurdity. “When you’re at this point in your life where you’re almost at your wits’ end, everything is funny,” Carpenter tells Lowe. “So much of this album was made in the moments where there was something that I just couldn’t stop laughing about. And I was like, well, that might as well just be a whole song.” Carpenter wrote a good deal of the album on an 11-day trip to a tiny town in rural France, where the isolation unlocked her brutally honest side, resulting in unprecedentedly vulnerable music and one song she readily admits shouldn’t work on paper but hits anyway: “Espresso,” the song that catapulted her career with four delightfully strange-sounding words: “That’s that me espresso.” “There really are no rules to the things you say,” she tells Lowe on the songwriting process. “You’re just like, what sounds awesome? What feels awesome? And what gets the story across, whatever story that is?” Still, she’s painted herself in a bit of a corner when it comes to placing an order at coffee shops worldwide: “They’re just waiting for me to say it,” she laughs. “And I’m like, ‘Tea.’”

Ariana Grande is used to being in the spotlight, but over time, she’s gotten savvy at playing it. The pop star’s seventh studio album *eternal sunshine*—a lightly conceptual riff on the head-spinning 2004 film starring Jim Carrey, of whom Grande has said she’s a lifelong fan—feels like a mind game itself, blurring the lines between real-life references and theatrical bits. It arrives in the middle of a whirlwind tabloid-packed stretch—Grande married, divorced, and scored a starring role in Hollywood’s big-screen adaptation of *Wicked*—and she knows fans have questions. What’s true? What’s real? Ari gives a lot of things on this album, but answers aren’t one of them, a cunning reminder of how little transparency celebrities actually owe us. In an interview with Zane Lowe, Grande leans into the project’s thematic murkiness. “true story,” she says, is “an untrue story based on all untrue events,” and when asked about her own experience with the Saturn return, an astrology milestone referenced in the album’s only interlude, she shrugs. “It was chill. Nothing changed. Pretty uneventful.” She says she finds freedom in art because “you can really pull from anywhere,” and she describes the film as another “lovely costume” to wear. Her answers have flickers of defiance that feel like power. Whoever said albums had to be tidy, or true? “It doesn’t have to be an everlasting love story,” she tells Lowe. “Love is complicated. Showcasing both sides of it is what I tried to \[do\].” If there’s one thing these tracks make clear, it’s that she’s still Ari on the mic—she’s still hitting those high highs (“eternal sunshine”); still finding release on the dance floor (“yes, and?”); still sifting gold out of ’90s R&B (“the boy is mine”), a sequel to the leaked 2023 track “fantasize.” Her favorite? “imperfect for you,” a tribute to the friends who make up her inner circle. “We’re so lucky to have loved ones who are accepting and real with us no matter what,” she says. “We live in a time where everything is boiled down, but that song demands room for nuance, humanness, and complexity.”

When she emerged from obscurity as a 19-year-old vagabond turned overnight SoundCloud star, Halsey was something of a cipher: You knew her voice (one of the 2010s’ prime examples of “cursive singing”), but very little else. “I think there is a little bit of a grand narrative about me that’s like, ‘I don’t know what she looks like. I couldn’t recognize her on the street because she looks different every time I see her,’” the singer tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Some people get into a creative medium and have a very specific style: ‘This is what works for me, this is who I am and what I’m comfortable with.’ And for me, I just don’t know that it’s fun unless I’m reinventing. I think a lot of people see that and get the sense that I don’t have a very secure sense of self.” In one sense, the lead single from her fifth studio album shows she’s as hard to pin down as ever: For one, she was beginning with “The End.” An unplugged folk ballad co-produced by Alex G and Michael Uzowuru, the song shed light on recent health scares she’d been keeping under wraps. But *The Great Impersonator* is vulnerable in a new way, using the concept of homage as a lens through which to write—hence the series of photos Halsey released leading up to the album’s release in which she posed as David Bowie, Aaliyah, Kate Bush, and more. “As I get older, I love to write about myself, but I find it boring to talk about myself,” she says. “So these reinventions give me these little means of escapism—not in the sense of running away, but just telling the story in a different way.” Themes of identity, mortality, and legacy snake through the album’s 18 tracks, which channel ’70s folk, ’80s power ballads, ’90s alt-rock, and 2000s pop before arriving at the decade in which Halsey herself emerged. At times she reels at her own temporary nature; elsewhere, she craves depersonalization: “I think that I should try to kill my ego/’Cause if I don’t, my ego might kill me,” she yelps on the PJ Harvey-inspired “Ego.” “Hometown” is an ode to Dolly Parton, though it’s Springsteen-esque (“Glory Days” in particular) in its depiction of faded American dreams. And on “Lucky,” she riffs on the Britney Spears hit of the same name, one of the great pop ballads on fame’s diminishing returns. “I turned 20 as *BADLANDS* came out, and I’m turning 30 as this record comes out,” Halsey says, tracing the arc of her career. “I had this 10-year plan, but I didn’t really have anything beyond that. I hadn’t really thought about what was going to happen.” And though she may not know where life will take her in the next 10 years, she’s focused on appreciating the journey rather than racing towards the finish line. “I used to look at the way that SZA or Frank \[Ocean\] make records like, ‘Gosh, I could never spend two or three years on an album. I’m so impulsive and impatient and I just want to get it done,’” she says. “Then I spent a long time writing this record and I understood for the first time—oh, the making is the best part.”

Billie Eilish has always delighted in subverting expectations, but *HIT ME HARD AND SOFT* still, somehow, lands like a meteor. “This is the most ‘me’ thing I’ve ever made,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “And purely me—not a character.” An especially wide-ranging and transportive project, even for her, it’s brimming with the guts and theatricality of an artist who has the world at her feet—and knows it. In a tight 45 minutes, Eilish does as she promises and hits listeners with a mix of scorching send-ups, trance excursions, and a stomping tribute to queer pleasure, alongside more soft-edged cuts like teary breakup ballads and jaunts into lounge-y jazz. But the project never feels zigzaggy thanks to, well, the Billie Eilish of it all: her glassy vocals, her knowing lyrics, her unique ability to make softness sound so huge. *HIT ME* is Eilish’s third album and, like the two previous ones, was recorded with her brother and longtime creative partner FINNEAS. In conceptualizing it, the award-winning songwriting duo were intent on creating the sort of album that makes listeners feel like they’ve been dropped into an alternate universe. As it happens, this universe has several of the same hallmarks as the one she famously drew up on her history-making debut, 2019’s *WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?*. In many ways, this project feels more like that album’s sequel than 2021’s jazzy *Happier Than Ever*, which Eilish has said was recorded during a confusing, depressive pandemic haze. In the three years since, she has tried to return to herself—to go outside, hang out with friends, and talk more openly about sex and identity, all things that make her feel authentic and, for lack of a better word, normal. “As much as *Happier Than Ever* was coming from this place of, like, \'We\'re so good. This sounds so good,\' it was also not knowing at all who I was,’” she tells Apple Music. FINNEAS agrees, calling it their “identity crisis album.” But *HIT ME HARD AND SOFT* is, she says, the reverse. “The whole time we were making it, we were like, \'I don\'t know if I\'m making anything good, this might be terrible…’ But now I\'m like, \'Yeah, but I\'m comfortable in who I am now.\' I feel like I know who I am now.” As a songwriter, Eilish is still in touch with her vulnerabilities, but at 22, with a garage full of Grammys and Oscars, they aren’t as heavy. These days it’s heartache, not her own insecurities, that keeps her up at night, and the songs are juicier for it. “LUNCH,” a racy, bass-heavy banger that can’t help but hog the spotlight, finds Eilish crushing so hard on a woman that she compares the hook-up to a meal. “I’ve said it all before, but I’ll say it again/I’m interested in more than just being your friend,” she sings. The lyrics are so much more than lewd flirtations. They’re also a way of stepping back into the spotlight—older, wiser, more fully herself. Read below as Eilish and FINNEAS share the inside story behind a few standout songs. **“LUNCH”** BILLIE: “One of the verses was written after a conversation I had with a friend and they were telling me about this complete animal magnetism they were feeling. And I was like, ‘Ooh, I\'m going to pretend to be them for a second and just write...and I’m gonna throw some jokes in there.’ We took ourselves a little too seriously on *Happier Than Ever*. When you start to embrace cringe, you\'re so much happier. You have so much more fun.” **“BIRDS OF A FEATHER”** BILLIE: “This song has that ending where I just keep going—it’s the highest I\'ve ever belted in my life. I was alone in the dark, thinking, ‘You know what? I\'m going to try something.’ And I literally just kept going higher and higher. This is a girl who could not belt until I was literally 18. I couldn\'t physically do it. So I\'m so proud of that. I remember coming home and being like, ‘Mom! Listen!’” **“WILDFLOWER”** BILLIE: “To me, \[the message here is\] I\'m not asking for reassurance. I am 100% confident that you love me. That\'s not the problem. The problem is this thing that I can\'t shake. It’s a girl code song. It\'s about breaking girl code, which is one of the most challenging places. And it isn’t about cheating. It isn’t about anything even bad. It was just something I couldn’t get out of my head. And in some ways, this song helped me understand what I was feeling, like, ‘Oh, maybe this is actually affecting me more than I thought.’ I love this song for so many reasons. It\'s so tortured and overthinky.” **“THE GREATEST”** BILLIE: “To us, this is the heart of the album. It completes the whole thing. Making it was sort of a turning point. Everything went pretty well after that. It kind of woke us back up.” FINNEAS: “When you realize you\'re willing to go somewhere that someone else isn\'t, it\'s so devastating. And everybody has been in some dynamic in their life or their relationship like that. When you realize that you\'d sacrifice and wear yourself out and compromise all these things, but the person you\'re in love with won’t make those sacrifices, or isn’t in that area? To me, that\'s what that song is about. It\'s like, you don\'t even want to know how lonely this is.” **“L’AMOUR DE MA VIE”** FINNEAS: “The album is all about Billie. It\'s not a narrative album about a fictional character. But we have always loved songs within songs within songs. Here, you\'ve just listened to Billie sound so heartbroken in ‘THE GREATEST,’ and then she sings this song that\'s like the antibody to that. It’s like, ‘You know what? Fuck you anyway.’ And then she goes to the club.” **“BLUE”** “The first quarter of ‘BLUE’ is a song Finneas and I made when I was 14 called ‘True Blue.’ We played it at little clubs before I had anything out, and never \[released it\] because we aged out of it. Years went by. Then, for a time, the second album was going to include one additional song called ‘Born Blue.’ It was totally different, and it didn’t make the cut. We never thought about it again. Then, in 2022, I was doing my laundry and found out ‘True Blue’ had been leaked. At first I was like ‘Oh god, they fucking stole my shit again,’ but then I couldn\'t stop listening. I went on YouTube and typed ‘Billie Eilish True Blue’ to find all the rips of it, because I didn\'t even have the original. Then it hit us, like, ‘Ooh, you know what\'d be cool? What if we took both of these old songs, resurrected them, and made them into one?’ The string motif is the melody from the bridge of ‘THE GREATEST,’ which is also in ‘SKINNY,’ which starts the album. So it also ends the album.”

When it comes to manifesting, Dua Lipa is, well, radically optimistic about its power. And with good reason. “I know this is going to sound mad, but when I was writing my first album, I was having thoughts about my third album,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I thought by the third album, I would maybe be deserving of working with Tame Impala. *Currents* \[Tame Impala’s career-defining 2015 album\] was the record that completely shook me.” With *Radical Optimism*—the follow-up to 2020’s impeccable, superstar-confirming *Future Nostalgia*, and the next note after her 2023 *Barbie* smash “Dance the Night”—Lipa got her wish. The 11 tracks here were made with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, as well as Tobias Jesso Jr. (the singer-songwriter Adele has labeled her “secret weapon”), OG PC Music artist Danny L Harle (PinkPantheress, Caroline Polachek), and Lipa’s long-term collaborator Caroline Ailin, co-writer of “New Rules.” It’s not the *most* obvious team for a chart-dominating name like Lipa to recruit, but maybe there was radical optimism in that, too. Plus, the proof came in the first song they wrote together: A moodier sister to *Future Nostalgia* standout “Hallucinate,” “Illusion” is an indisputable banger that feels tailor-made for Lipa’s 2024 Glastonbury headline set (something else she manifested for her third album). “It was like, ‘OK, how are we all going to connect together in the room? How is it all going to work?’” says Lipa. “\[‘Illusion’\] really kicked us off. When we wrote that song, it just gave us confidence as a group.” Like *Future Nostalgia*, *Radical Optimism* pulls from the past, so you can expect shimmering synths, groove-laden basslines, nods to psychedelia, and plenty of ’80s production (Lipa has also cited the adventurousness of both Britpop and Massive Attack among the album’s spiritual influences). But the singer-songwriter wanted to “experiment and do something different” as well, and in place of *Future Nostalgia*’s polished nu-disco, *Radical Optimism* often embraces an organic, golden-pop feeling with bright acoustic guitars, pianos, roomy drums, handclaps, and the occasional panpipe, plus some skyscraping vocals that should stop anyone describing Lipa’s vocal style as “nonchalant” again (see: “Falling Forever”). All of which is set against Lipa’s most personal writing to date, fueled by reflections on heartbreak, singledom, the arresting experience of meeting someone you might just give your heart to, and realizing the person you once loved has moved on. “With this album, I feel like I’ve managed to put so much more honesty out there and be really open in a way that I don’t think I’ve ever had the chance to,” she says. “It was a beautiful experience to not be afraid.” That was helped, again, by the team around her. “You come into the room, you’re hanging out with your friends, and you’re just having a tell-all,” she says. “There was absolutely no holds barred. They knew everything that was happening. There was no judgment. The fact that everyone felt free to just be themselves is what, I think, created such a beautiful energy in the room.” The singer-songwriter *gets* heartbreak pop; after all, she’s made a whole career out of crafting sharp, post-breakup empowerment anthems (and you’ll hear her trademark up-front lyricism here, such as on “Training Season,” in which she declares, “Are you somebody who can go there?/’Cause I don’t wanna have to show ya”). But here, Lipa also favors acceptance and a heartening sense of hope. Perhaps the album’s most powerful moment comes at its end, when Lipa realizes her ex has moved on and experiences an unfamiliar feeling: just happiness that they’re happy. “It feels like a full 180,” she says of closing track “Happy for You,” a song she admits she couldn’t have written until this point in her career. “Maturing, seeing almost my ghost on the other side and being like, ‘Wow, you’ve grown so much from an experience to be able to see things from that perspective. You have to be in the act of forgiveness and growing and learning and being OK with the past in order to move on. For me, ‘Happy for You’ is a beautiful, happy song because it’s so reflective of my journey.” You might say the same about “Maria,” in which Lipa salutes a new partner’s ex for making them who they are today. “I’m better, too, from the ones that I’ve lost/Now he is everything I’d ever want,” she sings. “I wanna thank you for all that you’ve done.” Working through these stories has been “a form of therapy” for Lipa, but she always kept two things in mind: what her songs mean to other people and how they might land at Glastonbury, which the singer-songwriter calls “the pinnacle.” “I think about emotions and feelings and thoughts. How does this make me feel? How will this make someone else feel when they hear it? What is the energy and the emotion and the thing that I’m trying to convey at this point in my life?” For Lipa, the answer seems to be in this album’s title. “What \[this album\] was really about was the theme, which was ‘radical optimism,’” she says. “It’s this idea of rolling with the punches, of not letting anything get you down for too long. I’ve always seen the positive side of things, of being able to grow and move forward and change your perspective regardless of what’s happening in your life—whether it’s heartbreak, whether it’s a friendship, whether it’s a relationship, whether it’s just growing and seeing things differently. I think it’s a big part of maturing.” When *Future Nostalgia* came out in 2020, just as the global pandemic set in, the album met the moment in a way Lipa could never have foreseen. It became a vehicle for escapism—another kind of radical optimism in a locked-down world. It seems that, for Lipa, *Radical Optimism* was about meeting *her* moment—the point she began working with the collaborators she’d always dreamed of, on songs made to perform on the most important stage she can think of. And now, she can draw a line under everything she needed this album to help heal. “Now, I’m done. This chapter is done,” she says. “I did so much growing. I feel like that is my exorcism.”

“My Saturn has returned,” the cosmic country singer-songwriter proclaimed to announce her fifth album (apologies to *A Very Kacey Christmas*), *Deeper Well*. If you’re reading this, odds are you know what that means: About every 30 years, the sixth planet from the sun comes back to the place in the sky where it was when you were born, and with it, ostensibly, comes growth. At 35, the chill princess of rule-breaking country/pop/what-have-you has caught up with Saturn and taken its lessons to heart. OUT: energy vampires, self-sabotaging habits, surface-level conversations. IN: jade stones, moon baths, long dinners with friends, listening closely to the whispered messages of the cosmos. (As for the wake-and-bake sessions she mentions on the title track—out, but wistfully so.) Musgraves followed her 2018 breakthrough album, the gently trippy *Golden Hour*, with 2021’s *star-crossed*, a divorce album billed as a “tragedy in three parts,” where electronic flourishes added to the drama. On *Deeper Well*, the songwriter’s feet are firmly planted on the ground, reflected in its warm, wooden, organic instrumentation—fingerpicked acoustic guitar, banjo, pedal steel. Here, Musgraves turns to nature for the answers to her ever-probing questions. “Heart of the Woods,” a campfire sing-along inspired by mycologist Paul Stamets and his *Fantastic Fungi* documentary, looks to mushroom networks beneath the forest floor for lessons on connectivity. And on “Cardinal,” a gorgeous ode to her late friend and mentor John Prine in the paisley mode of The Mamas & The Papas, potential dispatches from the beyond arrive as a bird outside her window in the morning. As Musgraves’ trust in herself and the universe deepens, so do her songwriting chops. On “Dinner With Friends,” a gratitude journal entry given the cosmic country treatment, she honors her roots in perfectly sly Musgravian fashion: “My home state of Texas, the sky there, the horses and dogs, but none of their laws.” And on the simple, searching “The Architect,” she condenses the big mysteries of human nature into one elegant, good-natured question: “Can I pray it away, am I shapeable clay/Or is this as good as it gets?”

“There\'s something about this record that feels like I\'m coming home,” Maggie Rogers tells Apple Music\'s Zane Lowe about her third full-length *Don\'t Forget Me*, which is the Maryland-born singer-songwriter\'s first project since completing her master\'s degree in religion and public life at Harvard Divinity School. Being away from the music business, she says, allowed her time to think about her life as an artist while also diversifying her mind. “I was trying to put so much in music,” she says. “Now my life is a lot more balanced and a lot more full—and I\'m not saying by any means I have it figured out.” *Don\'t Forget Me* finds Rogers still on a path toward “figuring it out,” marrying the kineticism that made her breakthrough single “Alaska” such a sensation eight years prior with bigger sonic structures and wiser lyrics. Opener “It Was Coming All Along” thrums with plush synths and strings, as well as a sampled phone call that brings Rogers\' lyrics about “trying to be brave these days” to life. “The Kill” possesses a grandness that recalls a sunny drive on an open road, which makes its story of a doomed relationship hit even harder. That energy, together with a wiser perspective, enabled her to her explore stories from beyond her personal realm. Take “So Sick of Dreaming,” a sauntering, Nashville-tinged cut about the travails of twentysomething life punctuated by a frustrated monologue about being stood up for Knicks tickets. (“And by the way, the Knicks lost,” she dryly notes.) It\'s based on “a story that a friend had told to me the night before about another friend of hers that was going through this thing,” she says. “I never would\'ve thought it was material; I had only written songs about things that were so personal to me.” Broadening her songwriting is another way Rogers lets loose on *Don\'t Forget Me*—and it\'s apparent across the album\'s 10 songs, which are confident even when they\'re grappling with regret and frustration. “I\'m so focused and clear about the things that I want, and I\'ve had different goals for every record or things that I really want to accomplish,” Rogers says. “The goal on this album cycle is, I\'m trying to have fun. And if I don\'t think it\'s going to be fun, you probably won\'t find me there.”

Whether singing in Spanish or in English, Kali Uchis continually proves herself to be a versatile performer. Following 2020’s *Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios)* and its hit single “telepatía,” the Colombian American singer eventually boasted that she had two more albums, one in each language, more or less at the ready, the first being 2023’s soulful *Red Moon in Venus* and the next being *ORQUÍDEAS*. With lyrics primarily (though not exclusively) in Spanish, she delivers an exquisite pop-wise R&B set here, one replete with clubby highs and balladic depth. The dance floor is well served with cuts like “Me Pongo Loca” and “Pensamientos Intrusivos,” her ethereal vocals elevating them further. The collaborations reflect her journey as well as her status, as she links with superstar KAROL G on the polished perreo throwback “Labios Mordidos” and música mexicana sensation Peso Pluma for the romantic duet “Igual Que Un Ángel.” On “Muñekita,” she bridges her two worlds with the aid of Dominican dynamo El Alfa and City Girls rapper JT, who combine to produce an irresistible dembow moment.

On her milestone 10th project, Nigeria’s queen of Afropop, Yemi Alade, produces a spellbinding sonic tour of the African continent while absorbing global influences. Placing homegrown sounds at the heart of *Rebel Queen*, the Grammy award-winner advocates for the embrace of individuality, femininity, and heritage. Alade’s motivational, multilingual lyrics combine with uplifting melodies and liberating rhythms for expressions of style, joy, nonconformity, and elevated consciousness. This celebration of life, movement, and sound sees Afrobeat, rumba, and highlife rub shoulders with dance, hip-hop, and ragga/dancehall as the nostalgia of yesteryear anchors Alade’s imaginative explorations. As Alade’s multicultural impulse comes to the fore, Angélique Kidjo, Ziggy Marley, KiDi, Innoss’B, Femi One, and Konshens accompany her voyage across sonic worlds. The resultant confluence of influences sees the logdrums of “Ki Lo Wa Wa” meet the polyrhythmic strums of “Chairman,” cadenced percussion of “Carry Me,” and tropical bounce of “Baddie (Remix).” The music is imbued with this diversity and deft messaging that aligns the personal and communal. Accordingly, the anthemic crowd vocals of “Tomorrow” express hope in the future—one with the unity of purpose espoused by “Peace & Love.” The emancipatory “I’m Sorry” addresses gender dynamics, meanwhile, and shares its tone of empowerment with “African Woman,” By proudly coloring outside the lines in these meaningful hues, Alade attains a sense of self-assurance palpable on *Rebel Queen*. “I’m humble,” she proclaims on “Bop.” “But I’m not down to earth.”

It’s not hard to see why Kylie Minogue wanted to keep the *Tension* era going. The Princess of Pop’s 2023 record—her 16th—met the moment and set the mood, captured best by “Padam Padam,” the unexpectedly viral hit that ruled over summer ’23 in what will always be known as the “Padamic.” Released just over a year on from that record, this sequel is a celebration of that career high—and a collection that feels primed to get the party started again ahead of 2025’s global *Tension* tour. *Tension II* lives in the same world as its predecessor, but here, things feel darker, clubbier, later-night. And as for all the original’s sexual tension? It *still* hasn’t been broken. Across these tracks, Kylie’s overpowered by “electric energy” (on the disco-laced, ABBA-recalling “Taboo”) and “raw emotion” (“Kiss Bang Bang”); by 4am, she’s even standing outside someone’s door on the rushing “Hello,” unable to stay away. If on *Tension* Kylie felt ultra-confident, here she feels liberated, throwing off an ex on the dance floor (“Who would think that losing you would be so much fun?” she muses on “Good as Gone”) and declaring her desires outright. “Do you have someone for me?/To be the one/To turn me on/That’s what I need,” she demands on “Someone for Me,” a moment so evocative you can almost see her hiding in a dark club corner, waiting for that wish to be fulfilled. At last, nine tracks in, she finally dials things down, with the end-of-the-night almost-ballad “Shoulda Left Ya,” on which she realizes things have become a little less no-strings-attached with someone she’s met on the dance floor. Still, she’s not hanging around. Next, she brings new partners into the *Tension* world: the artists—including The Blessed Madonna, Orville Peck, and Sia—who she worked with on a series of genre-hopping collabs in 2024. Their inclusion serves as a reminder of Kylie’s continuing pop power in an era that confirms that, 37 years into her music career, there’s still nothing this pop princess can’t do.

Alec Benjamin famously began his career by promoting his music in parking lots outside of his favorite music venues. The Arizona songwriter quickly began playing those same venues, then graduated to even bigger spaces after the success of his 2018 breakthrough single “Let Me Down Slowly.” Though the circumstances have changed, Benjamin treats life the same as he did pre-fame on *12 Notes*: He’s a pop star, but Benjamin still gets butterflies in his stomach when he sees a beautiful girl, like on “Different Kind of Beautiful,” a cinematic pop ballad built around electronic drums and plucked strings. He sings: “You\'re a different kind of beautiful, the kind that makes me scared/The kind that makes me turn around and act like I\'m not there.” On second single “I Sent My Therapist to Therapy,” he flips the traditional tale of analysis on its head and showcases his dexterous rap skills. After Benjamin encounters a therapist unable to help him cope with his issues, the shrink turns around and solicits the young songwriter for any advice. It’s a playful yet powerful moment, a reminder that we all need some help, whether we’re globe-trotting stars or accredited professional counselors.

“How long is too long to be stuck in a memory?” That eternally unquantifiable question defines Sophie Allison’s fourth album as Soccer Mommy, a record marked by loss and grief. *Evergreen* marks a perspective shift from Allison’s 2022 album *Sometimes, Forever*. “When I started writing songs for this album, I was very clearly in a completely different headspace and wanted to write something that felt more intimate and up front, and not kind of shrouded by having all this fun making it,” Allison tells Apple Music. “The feelings that I was expressing on this album were a lot about loss and grief, because that’s what I was going through at the time—a lot of changes. It was scary and different, and everything felt kind of sudden. So I was just grappling with all of that.” The result is a richly melodic work that, with the production touch of Ben H. Allen (Animal Collective, Belle and Sebastian), feels cavernous in its scope while retaining intimacy. There are moments when Allison cranks up the volume and rips into the riffage—witness the chunky chords on “Driver,” or the shape-shifting guitar lines that stretch across “Salt in Wound”—but elsewhere Allison achieves a magic trick of making nuanced, close-to-the-vest songwriting sound one million miles wide. The closing title track is draped in stretches of strings not unlike generational counterpart beabadoobee’s work, while on “M” she laments, “I hear your voice in all my favorite songs.” It’s a raw admission on an album full of them.