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 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 was on to 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 2000s.
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 re.
