Ray Leach and Sienna Bentley
Women in pop are killing the music game in 2024, and we absolutely love to see it.
A brief glance at the music calendar so far this year:
March
- Tyla | Tyla
- Ariana Grande | Eternal Sunshine
- Beyonce | Cowboy Carter
- Nicki Minaj | ‘Let Me Calm Down’
- Olivia Rodrigo | Guts, Spilled
April
- Lizzie McAlpine | Older
- Dua Lipa | ‘Illusion’
- Sabrina Carpenter | ‘Espresso’
- Doja Cat | Scarlet 2
- Taylor Swift | Tortured Poets Department (unreleased)
May
- Dua Lipa | Radical Optimism (Unreleased Album)
- Billie Eilish | Hit Me Hard And Soft (Unreleased Album)
RL: In an age where Beyonce and Dolly Parton are collaborating, Grimes is riding into Coachella on a mechanical spider and Sunak is wearing Sambas… it feels like anything is possible. Capturing the attention – and the excitement – of a 21st-century audience is becoming increasingly challenging, particularly when trends expire after two weeks, celebrity feuds are soon forgotten and comment sections are littered with TLDR: “too long; didn’t read”.
That being said, my attention has been continuously drawn towards female artists this year. It feels like we have had back-to-back albums and, as a consumer, it feels like we’ve been spoiled rotten. Billie Eilish’s anticipated album Hit Me Hard and Soft will be released on 17 May, and I’m sure this will be something to rave about. We can only hope this theme continues into the summer, as I’m sure the girls won’t be willing to give up their reign any time soon (nor should they).
We’re quick to judge women. So it is refreshing to hear people raving about their new favourite music as opposed to detailing celebrities’ private lives, of which we only see a fraction. It’s high time that we appreciated their creative and intellectual abilities above all else. It’s no shock that these women are incredibly talented, so I’m happy and excited to support them. Here are some top picks…
My top picks:
- ‘Espresso’ by Sabrina Carpenter
- ‘Jolene’ by Beyonce
- ‘we can’t be friends’ by Ariana Grande
- ‘Ok Loser’ by Doja Cat
- ‘So American’ by Olivia Rodrigo
SB: It does really feel like the girls are reclaiming pop. With Canadian singer and dancer Tate McRae being likened to early 2000s Britney Spears, whom she claims inspired the music video for her track ‘Exes’, we are seeing female artists making a return to quintessential pop. Seeing Reneé Rapp bring out Kesha at Coachella, I felt that pop is healing.
However, naturally, this doesn’t come without dissent – Courtney Love has weighed in on female artists on BBC Radio 6. She states that “it’s great that there are so many successful women in the music industry, but lots of them are becoming a cliché”. She continues, “every successful woman is cloned, so there is just too much music”. “They’re all the same,” Love claims. “If you play something on Spotify, you get bombarded with a lot of stuff that’s exactly the same.”
Without going into the fact that the Spotify algorithm is designed to understand what you like to listen to and play similar music that it thinks you might enjoy, I would argue that she’s focusing on the wrong thing here. Pop, by its very nature, is repetitive and catchy; it’s designed to be enjoyed by the masses and to be ‘easy listening’. Regardless of whether the industry is oversaturated (which is not a new phenomenon) it’s important to celebrate the fact that there is a space for female artists to flourish – particularly pop artists, for whom it is arguably the most difficult to make your mark due to this kind of uniformity. Ultimately, if music is successful it’s because people like it.
My top picks:
- ‘Espresso’ by Sabrina Carpenter
- ‘true story’ by Ariana Grande
- ‘Jump’ by Tyla (featuring Gunna and Skillibeng)
- ‘Illusion’ by Dua Lipa
