The music rundown - the pop girls are on a roll : on Perrie, Sabrina Carpenter and Dua Lipa
My thoughts on the week in music from the 8th-14th April 2024
Friday was a gargantuan occasion for my personal Spotify streams, with 3 of the most exciting pop stars on my release radar coming out with new music.
Ex-Little Mix star Perrie Edwards (now just Perrie) released her debut single as a solo artist, ‘Forget About Us’ after a torturous extended period of record label-enforced teasing of the song on TikTok . Surprisingly, this was one of the few occasions where hearing 30 seconds of the chorus for weeks on end didn’t dampen the experience of the final product too greatly. It’s a tribute, then, to the enduringly catchy nature of the hook, the strength of the rest of the verses and Perrie’s vocals that this song still holds up. It feels like a genuine all-out pop hit. Sure, this song isn’t reinventing the wheel in any way, but it’s not trying to. If anything, its familiarity is its’ strength. This song recaptures the early 2010’s Kelly Clarkson and Katy Perry era of joyous pop without feeling overly derivative or resorting to blatantly sampling from this time period. It feels like a classic singing-along in the car with the windows down on a summers day type of radio hit. The lyrical content, which discusses having fully moved on from an ex but not wanting them to completely forget about your shared time together, while certainly traversing well-trodden cliche’s, has just enough interesting details enough to keep the song feeling fresh. As the 3rd of the 4 members of Little Mix to release their solo work, this song seems to be the most successful so far and certainly seems to have greater crossover with the groups existing audience (my money is still on the final member yet to release music, Jade, to be the biggest solo success and the Harry Styles of the band if they’re going to have one).
Sabrina Carpenter also released her new single ‘Espresso’. As the first single following her career-redefining Emails I Can’t Send album cycle and ‘Eras Tour’ opening stint (which skyrocketed her into the mainstream) this single had a lot to prove. Upon first listen I thought it might not have risen to the occasion , feeling fun but derivative of her previous work. The fact that I’ve been absolutely unable to stop listening to it since, however, proves that this first impression couldn’t have been more wrong. In the current era of instant streaming, it can be easy to forget that songs used to be given the time and the airplay to grow on you, and grow on me it has. What I initially thought of as repetitiveness from Carpenter is actually just the singer taking everything about the most commercially successful songs on her last album (Feather and Nonsense) and doing it even better. Carpenter is completely in her zone on this song. All of the features that make her distinctive are on full display here : mellow yet irresistibly catchy pop hooks, cheeky and idiosyncratic lyrics and a smooth and distinctive vocal delivery. This song is just so addictive.
Going 3 for 3 on successful pop singles, Dua Lipa continues to delight both middle-aged mothers and their gay sons alike with ‘Illusion’ the 3rd single of her Radical Optimism album rollout. Whatever drug Dua Lipa is putting into her songs to make them so intensely catchy in a way that only increases with more listens needs to be studied in a lab. The singer seems to have an unrivalled talent for making irresistibly addicting pop songs with an unwavering ability to grow on you over time as you find yourself unintentionally singing it in your head all day after listening. After hearing a snippet of the song as a TikTok promotion I initially dismissed it as somewhat more of the same but after a few listens I’m already becoming obsessed. Dua Lipa seems to be an artist out of time in this way. She’s perhaps the only mainstream singer consistently perusing all-out pop hits - the type that feel like they belong on the radio with time to grow on you - in an era where even pop stars seem to be focussing on restrained, indie or hip hop-leaning variations on pop. I think this makes her only the more endearing to a select fanbase who miss this era of pop are glad to see someone fully committing to this unashamedly joyous, danceable music. She’s faced some criticism at the minute for her songs ‘sounding the same’ but I genuinely don’t think this is the case : she’s just content making dance pop within a similar sonic aesthetic for this album, not forcing herself to mix it up with a vulnerable ballad just for the sake of being respected by music critics who aren’t the target market of her music anyway. For the fans that are into what Dua is doing, she’s on a roll.
This week has really been the week for the pop girls finding the sound that works for them and their audience and sticking with it to great effect.
