Pop music is messier, for the better, because of Chappell Roan, Charli XCX and Sabrina Carpenter

CNN
 — 

This year brought us new albums from some of the biggest artists in the world: Ariana Grande, Dua Lipa, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift all put out music that thrilled fans.

And yet some of the most impactful pop music of 2024 came not from Tay or Bey, but from three rising pop stars whose songs took us out to the clubs (Pink Pony and otherwise) and back home to the bedroom. They embraced romantic ugliness and cutting self-reflection — and pushed pop forward.

The year arguably belonged to Charli XCX, Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter.

“People like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, who’ve dominated for so long — they have a sheen and a polish to them that’s somewhat unrelatable as a listener,” said Sam Murphy, a music curator who analyzes and dissects pop on his popular TikTok account. “What people really craved this year, the TikTok generation, was to see more mess and chaos in people’s lives. We wanted pop stars that we were able to see the flaws within and the charisma coming out.”

The year saw Charli, a boundary-pushing yet oft-overlooked pop veteran, finally escape what the New York Times once called “pop’s middle class” with her defiant, sweat-soaked, goopy-green opus, “Brat.”

This year, Carpenter went from a supporting act on the highest-grossing tour in history to a leading lady herself, with her endearingly silly, sexy songs topping the charts. (Here’s where she’d make a sex joke.)

And it was the year when everyone wanted to take things H-O-T T-O G-O, dance in the Pink Pony Club and wish their exes good luck, babe. Roan’s debut album came out over a year ago, but it rapidly grew an audience this year as she took her act on the road and won us over.

We loved this trio of stars because they weren’t impenetrable like Beyoncé or as towering as Swift. These artists were accessible to us, interacting with fans online and touring prolifically. Their music was personal and specific, with confessional lyrics about self-hatred, unrequited love and lust.

It helps, of course, that their music is exciting and compulsively listenable, said Mike Errico, a musician and visiting assistant arts professor at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, who teaches songwriting.

“The songs are great. They’re great writers and vocalists, and they’re working with great teams,” Errico said. “ But they also have something very urgent to say.”

None of these women became stars overnight — they’ve been recording music since they were teenagers, steadily building an audience who jibed with their unique sound. Their music doesn’t reinvent pop. But by adding their unique flavors to a well-trodden genre that’s been stuck in a rut of sameness, they’re forcing it into a looser, freer future.

“It’s been a while since there’s been a changing of the guards for people at the top,” Murphy said.

Fans want authenticity — and these artists delivered

There will always be room for artists like Swift, who’s “etched a place in history that can’t be erased,” Murphy said. But her titanic popularity has led to some “fatigue” among pop fans, he said.

“I think there’s a level of polish that is really reflective of a bygone era of pop that people aren’t relating to,” Murphy said.

Part of why Charli, Roan and Carpenter are so magnetic is because their music wasn’t made for everyone. They weren’t the biggest pop stars in the world when they were writing their breakthrough albums, so they weren’t beholden to an audience of millions. They’ve each cultivated a sound so specific that it can’t be mistaken for anything else.

“The ubiquitous, all-satisfying pop star has disappeared, and instead these niches are becoming bigger and bigger,” Murphy said. “I think that’s why it worked, that push that kept so much on that niche fanbase. It became so big to the point that it was able to start penetrating the mainstream conversation.”

Mainstream, indeed. Some of the biggest songs of the year were made by this pop trifecta. “Espresso,” especially, was inescapable, as Spotify’s most-streamed song globally with over 1.6 billion plays. “Good Luck, Babe!” also scored over one billion streams, and it was Roan’s only new single of the year.

The craving for authentic pop stars reminds Murphy of the “transition from Instagram to TikTok, where your Instagram feed was all about being polished and showing the incredible life that you were leading, even if things were really falling apart behind the scenes.”

On TikTok, meanwhile, users approach their content with inspiring candor, sharing their lives, warts and all, he said.

Charli, Roan and Carpenter take the same approach to their music. Their respective breakout albums, “Brat,” “The Rise and Fall of a Midwestern Princess” and “Short n’ Sweet,” are all deeply personal, vibrant and, crucially, danceable records. That their voices or hearts might break along the way only adds to their considerable charms.

Works from established artists who have a quality and reputation to uphold, like Grande’s “Eternal Sunshine” or Lipa’s “Radical Optimism” — even “Cowboy Carter” and “The Tortured Poets Department,” which are both nominated for album of the year at the Grammys — ”all just got blown out of the water by these moments that felt more exciting,” Murphy said.

TikTok virality can turn a song into a hit, but it’s the art of performance that turns an artist into a star.

“I don’t think what happened to Chappell this year (would have) happened without her live stage presence,” Murphy said.

Roan cut her teeth on Olivia Rodrigo’s “Guts” tour earlier this year before joining the lineups of spring and summer musical festivals. We watched as her star rose steadily with every performance: In April, a clip of Roan performing the bridge of “Good Luck, Babe!” dressed in sleazy latex and leather at Coachella won new fans who went back and discovered her debut album. Four months later, at Lollapalooza, she played to the largest crowd in the festival’s history — organizers said as many as 110,000 people may’ve been in her audience.

“We were watching that growth in real time, in tandem with incredible presentations of her music live,” Murphy said. “It’s difficult to imagine that kind of thing happening even five years ago, pre-pandemic.”

Carpenter’s trajectory was similar, supporting Swift on the Eras Tour before making some festival stops on her own and releasing the smash that introduced us all to the nonsensical phrase “that me espresso.”

These artists are meeting audiences where they’re at, which is, overwhelmingly, on TikTok. Charli and Chappell regularly connect with their fans on the platform, candidly delivering news directly to followers in a video instead of a manager-approved statement.

They also shirk the traditional promotional model of aiming for radio play to grow their fanbases, said music writer Reanna Cruz, who’s written for New York magazine, Rolling Stone and NPR. Now, radio is trying to play catch-up with the young fans it used to influence.

“We’re seeing younger artists that know how to access those hyper-online audiences more effectively have more success,” Cruz said.

We’re living the adjustment to mega-fame with the stars, too. Charli took a victory lap with the remix album “Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat,” on which she warped her original songs into meditations on sudden superstardom. Roan’s public grappling with invasions of privacy sparked conversations about how much stars owe their fans. And clips from Carpenter’s tour routinely go viral, most recently when Marcello Hernandez of “Saturday Night Live” stopped by, in character, as doctor-model-loverboy Domingo.

Over the last decade, hip-hop has reigned as the most popular genre, Cruz and Murphy said, where innovation thrived and stars were reliably discovered. Until this year, pop, with a few exceptions, had been stuck in a rut.

The genre has been suffering from sameness throughout the back-half of the 2010s and into the 2020s, when many artists tried to appeal to all kinds of listeners without carving out their own recognizable sound. There was still room for breakouts like Lipa, Rodrigo and Billie Eilish, plus artists that blended pop and hip-hop, like Doja Cat and SZA, but pop was overwhelmingly plagued by monotony.

Enter Charli, Roan and Carpenter. While their sounds are clearly influenced by earlier acts — “Good Luck, Babe!” builds to a Kate Bush-style bridge; Carpenter’s latest album borrows from Shania Twain and Grande in parts; and Charli has mentioned electronic pioneers like Sophie and titans like Lou Reed and Daft Punk in “Brat” press — it’s their approach to the genre whose rules and boundaries are well-known that make them such exciting artists.

The artists make few compromises in their music. Charli’s beats are tailor-made for the club, with lyrics vacillating between braggadocious bombast to reflections on grief and insecurity. (“Nowadays I only eat at the good restaurants, but honestly I’m always thinkin’ ‘bout my weight,” she sings in “Rewind.”)

Roan’s campy, drag-inspired musical aesthetic has drawn more than a few comparisons to Lady Gaga’s similarly theatrical sound. It lends itself well to songs about hooking up with and falling hard for other women — still a rarity in mainstream pop. (“She did it right there, out on the deck — put her canine teeth in the side of my neck,” goes the first verse of “Red Wine Supernova.”)

Carpenter stuffs a dozen double entendres and innuendos into each deliriously raunchy song on “Short n’ Sweet.” And then sometimes, she drops the artifice and just says what she means: “I’m so f**king horny!” Here’s a pop star plainly confessing and celebrating her lust, something artists like Madonna were once lambasted for. Flirting with cheeky controversy, as with Madonna, has only boosted her profile.

Their music isn’t necessarily political, though Charli, who’s British, famously waded into the conversation when she posted, “kamala IS brat” shortly after the vice president’s candidacy in the US presidential election was announced. But the candid, confident music these pop stars make is meaningful during this turbulent moment, Errico said.

Songs like Charli’s “I think about it all the time,” in which the avowed party girl weighs motherhood, Roan’s various queer love songs and even Carpenter’s lusty, lightweight “Juno,” take on a new gravity at a time when, in the US, bodily autonomy for women and LGBTQ people is fraught and uncertain, Errico said.

“I think they’re sensing the clock turning back, and coming up with hooky, clever ways to say, ‘Over my dead body,’” Errico said. “They’re building a new army for a newly perilous time, while also having a blast.”

The future of pop, Murphy says, is tipping toward honest excess. We saw it this year with Charli transforming massive arenas into sweaty clubs, Roan painting herself with the patina of the Statue of Liberty, Carpenter enraging pearl-clutchers by striking provocative poses on tour. None of the over-the-top flourishes would work, though, without confessional bangers that both transport and ring true.

“People sometimes joke that we’re living in ‘the worst timeline,’ but these artists are determined to throw the best party anyone’s ever tried to shut down,” Errico said.