July 12. 2025

by Ann Powers

This week, our critic’s attention is drawn to a handful of songs that are breaking through the wearying consistency of the pop charts by leaning toward recklessness.

Alice Backham

Hello my feelingful friends,

Recently I’ve noticed a welcome bit of chaos running through my pop songs playlist. Actually, “chaos” may be too strong a word (and certainly an over-used one in this time of Dungeons and Dragons memes); maybe I should say “disequilibrium,” or at least the invocation of that state, its welcome giddiness just skirting the edge of nausea.

New albums from Haim and Lorde take fans inside highly volatile phases in those millennial standard-bearers’ lives, while the breakthrough single from underrated R&B artiste Ravyn Lenae immortalizes the pitch and sway of a breakup with the honeybee-sting phrase I miss you, come here. (It reminds me a lot of this classic by the Four Tops.) Lenae’s song, “Love Me Not,” is a typical “overnight sensation” of the viral age; it was first released in May 2024, when the world was ensnared in the managed mayhem of Taylor Swift’s biggest-ever breakup album, The Tortured Poets Department. TikTok gave it a new life at a time when pop is desperate for anything unexpected.

As my colleague Stephen Thompson’s charts column diligently chronicles each week, in the past year the mainstream has become ever more contained and boring, with Morgan Wallen’s return clogging up the Top 10 with three drowsy singles and almost everything else hanging over from last year. “Love Me Not” adds a little fizz to this summer’s cultural doldrums, as does Lorde’s re-emergence with a genuine hit album, if not a single; her Virgin even briefly unseated Wallen on Billboard’s albums chart. Haim hasn’t made a huge commercial splash with I Quit, but the sisters’ willingness to dive deep into anger, lust and bawling-your-eyes-out discomfort makes it one of the most intriguing albums of the year so far.

The contrast between these recent, refreshing offerings and what’s been dominating pop for months before this isn’t just about the new (or, for Lorde, renewed) versus the familiar. The dizzy feeling a song like “Love Me Not” rouses is fundamental to a certain strain of pop, and has been since at least the 1920s, when songs like it led American music out of the realm of the sentimental or the broadly comic and more toward the province of bodily sensation: the feeling of dancing, of being young or reclaiming youthfulness, of sex. I’ll argue until my last breath that music is the best medium for creating a sense of being inside an emotional experience, rather than art staged across a proscenium, as in even the most involving film or conventional theater piece. Yet there’s also a divide between songs that immerse a listener within emotion’s disorder and ones that cultivate a bit of distance. Think of it this way: some songs spin, enveloping us within their momentum, and others strike a pose.

One thing making the mainstream dull right now, I’d say, is that posing has at least temporarily triumphed over spinning. Even songs about good times at the bar, like Shaboozey’s “Tipsy,” reveal themselves upon the thousandth listen to be about pointing toward party signifiers (the vintage hip-hop track it invokes, the honky-tonk twang it requisitions) more than actual looseness. Another example is the Bruno/Gaga chestnut “Die With a Smile” — its grandiosity is fun, but fully constructed from James Bond themes and Whitney Houston choruses. Nobody’s actually expiring from love in that scenario.

Blame the most obvious reason for the epidemic of self-consciousness — social media — but I also wonder if the static mood of so much mainstream music has arisen in response to the upheaval of everyday life within a time of rapid change and increasingly contradictory shared narratives. More predictable forms of artistic expression feel safer. It’s also not surprising that ingenues from Sabrina Carpenter to Addison Rae have revived the arch, endlessly referential feminine affects that have served so many blondes in entertainment before them. Given recent developments regarding women’s bodily autonomy as regulated by the state, a return to carefully guarded glamor makes sense among pop’s young role models.

Call me a risk-taker; I still want songs that take me apart for a few minutes, and that’s why I’ve welcomed the return of those women artists opening their arms to the whirl. It’s such an important gift, and people still need it. Just look at the most enduring song on that maddeningly unchanging singles list, which points to the impulse Lorde, Haim and a few other artists are celebrating with their current jams: Teddy Swim’s “Lose Control.” The Georgia shouter’s irresistible ballad of romantic dependency may simply be Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” dosed with a CBD/CBN gummy, but there’s something about its reaching, melismatic riff that scratches an itch people are otherwise mostly avoiding right now. I think it’s all about the desperate need to experience some kind of inner freedom: to let that private anarchy take over for just the length of a thirteen-note glissando, and dwell in the illusion that it’s safe and beneficial to be in such an unsettled state.

This is also the message of Virgin and I Quit. “I’ve been up on the pedestal, but tonight I just wanna fall,” Lorde sings in one of the most-quoted lyrics on Virgin. As a former teen star now feeling her way into adulthood, Lorde is trying to escape the poses others have persuaded her to inhabit, which, her songs say, have gone rigid. That’s a personal journey, like the one the Haim sisters take on I Quit, each writing about slipping beyond the influence of particular men, and of the culture’s insistent ideals, into the unmapped field of self-determination. What matters about these stories emerging now is that they reclaim personhood as a dynamic state that’s mostly internal, open to others’ touch but not their preconceived definitions.

Consider it a matter of perspective. There’s a way of making music that radiates outward from an internal source. Much more common in mainstream pop these days are distanced stances showing discipline even when the stars taking them pretend to be relaxing. Sabrina Carpenter, for one, increasingly resists stepping out of her persona as a human raised eyebrow — a comic role she inhabits masterfully, but which could soon limit her range of expression to the narrow space of the expert kiss-off. Musically and image-wise, Carpenter seems to owe less to hip-hop than any other woman pop star since the pre-Reputation Swift, yet her distanced wittiness is an extension of what women rappers have been doing since the days of Roxanne Shanté. Calling out men for their foibles is fundamental to women’s rap game; in the 21st century, doing so while presenting the most enticing self possible has led artists from Nicki Minaj to Megan Thee Stallion to stardom. Carpenter’s closest predecessor, Cardi B, is back right now with “Outside,” her first single since a high-profile divorce; the track is all about showing off the pleasures of her freedom, with line after line directed at her ex, whom she’s now replacing with bigger, richer men, and though her delivery remains delightfully lascivious, there’s no evidence that she’ll risk one stumble.

Songs like Carpenter’s and Cardi’s maintain their distance from the desires they express — not so much for sensual pleasure, though both are clearly getting some, but for dominance and self-possession. Pop’s current women luminaries tend to line up on one side of this divide or the others. Wet Leg, whose much-anticipated second album arrived this week, goes even farther into happy disequilibrium than the other spinners of this summer. Grounded in lead singer Rhian Teasdale’s joy at falling in love with a new partner, moisturizer offers a joyful armful of new ways to say “I’m in love,” literally and musically.

In early single “CPR,” Teasdale elasticizes her voice to express the terror and delight at the desire that has disassembled her, demanding that her new amour immediately “put your mouth to mine and give me CPR.” Like the singer-songwriter Gigi Perez, whose debut album also arrives this week, Teasdale clearly feels less bound by the rules of feminine posing than, say, Carpenter. That may be because both Perez and Teasdale are queer, and they aren’t very interested in critiquing men’s destructive or simply stupid behavior. (This is a big shift for Teasdale; much of the charm of earlier Wet Leg songs like “Loving You” or “Ur Mum” is in their hilariously furious calling out of bad boyfriend behavior.) Even as the mainstream continues to telegraph, if not necessarily support, the culture’s rapid return to traditional gender roles, it feels good to get a little dizzy within these artists’ wider fields of possibility, where striking a pose doesn’t feel like it matters anywhere near as much as making a connection.

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Here are a few other things knocking me off my feet this week

Want a song that critiques the endless pressure to pose? The Irish charmer CMAT has one for you.
Everyone needs to read this harrowing, clear-eyed, deeply moving first-hand account of a family caught in the Guadalupe River floods by Texas Monthly journalist Aaron Parsley. To write in the face of such loss is an incredible achievement.
This video for the song “Hilwa” by the Palestinian-Jordanian artist Zeyne, honoring the spirit of her women forebears, is impossibly gorgeous.
You may not feel the need, but if you want to listen to just one song from Justin Bieber’s just-dropped album SWAG, make it “Daisies.”
Social media can be useful sometimes — my Facebook pal John Darnielle turned me on to this excellent debut EP from Los Angeles shoegaze band Lysithea. Joelina Garcia: What a voice.
I spent a weekend in the Chicago area in a rare Lustron home — a little vacation in the days of future past. Made me wonder what housing solutions might suit this century. Here’s a little glimpse inside one such prefab home.

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