I’ve finally been able to think properly about “Choosin’ Texas,” the Miranda Lambert co-penned Ella Langley hit that has broken Billboard records while simultaneously giving me grist for a theory of American “regional pop” (it remains stubbornly low on Billboard’s GXU chart, hitting an all-time high of #33 last week).

I hadn’t thought about it much beforehand because, frankly, I couldn’t remember how it goes. I think the only commentary I’ve had so far on it is as an aside in my piece about weak melodies, where I lumped it in with other melodic genre artists who don’t manage to earworm me.

But thanks to an inquiry about whether or not “Choosin’ Texas” has gotten the budots remix treatment, I decided to make the accursed remix myself. I’ve said before that mash-ups are more like music criticism than music production. Mash-ups give me a chance to think about both the overall structure of songs and about particularities and peculiarities that I sometimes miss in listening. In the case of “Choosin’ Texas,” though, I actually grew to like the song less, even though I can technically hum it now.

I was irritated by the song’s lopsided verse structure, with a rogue couplet acting as a a mini-prechorus to jumpstart the chorus early. (In that way it’s similar to the extra measure in Taylor Swift’s “Fate of Ophelia,” which sounds like a random and superficial choice.) I was also struck again by the dishwater quality of the melody. And the song has neither post-Swiftian syllabic interest nor a faintly pleasant easy listening melody like Olivia Dean specializes in. It just sort of sits there without going anywhere.

Anyway, I don’t really want to beat up on the song—it’s…fine, solid 6/10, wouldn’t turn it off but probably wouldn’t notice it, either, etc.

I was interested in the BDM take on it that frames it as a rare “family-friendly” hit:

And I would say what Ella Langley is doing is… putting out songs you can enjoy with your mom, or your aunt, or your kid cousins, or at a swim meet, or whatever.

[…]And if you’re mad about the charts, I think one question is: who else is doing that? Because to me, it seems like a handful of artists are ruling some very static charts right now simply because they don’t have a lot of competition at trying to do this thing, which is, make a song most people can play in most contexts.

It seems true that there is very little music on the charts that is aiming for pleasant and acceptable in this way, regardless of whatever else it might be doing. It’s striking how little Top 40 pop I notice getting public airplay for younger kids (one reason, though not the only one, why KPOP Demon Hunters and “Golden” were such huge hits last year, too).

For many years now what most people think of as “pop” and what I’ve been starting to call “A-pop” has been appealing to a more savvy and online audience that has certain expectations of content—confessional enough to suggest a writer in the center, but more knowing and less genteel, often with profanity as a kind of shortcut to “realness” in a way that was harder to get away with in a pre-streaming environment—a weird amalgam of confessional rock and raunch-pop. Pop-as-genre’s relationship the demands of a past conception of least objectionable popularity has become more like indie rock’s relationship to the mainstream rock that preceded it—defensive, cerebral, and highly sensitive to territorial breaches from general audiences and outsiders. It’s not designed to let everyone in, even if it doesn’t think of itself as actively keeping everyone out.

It also reminds me of the creatively exciting but structurally disastrous rise of prestige television, where an abandonment of conventions could seem thrilling during a transitional phase, after which everything takes on a leaden, overworked feeling without offering the simpler pleasures of the more conventional past—comedies without jokes, dramas without episodic cohesion, a sense that no one is really sure what they’re trying to do, but in a way that is pretentious and hesitant, like spinning an ART roulette wheel and hoping to reverse a losing streak.

One thing that was interesting about the teen confessional boom of the mid-aughts, and the alt-rock invasion of adult contemporary that preceded it, is that it really was an exciting transitional period for mainstream pop, the way it managed to do angst and anger while still sounding fundamentally pleasant in a radio airplay sense. I remember hearing “Because of You” by Kelly Clarkson come on at a restaurant once and thinking about how it seemed to both fit into that context so well and still rip me out of my surroundings when I was really hearing it. Having it both ways—provocative easy listening—seems difficult to do these days, though I think some artists (Taylor Swift most obviously, who comes directly from that former environment) still try to do it.

This is maybe related to other thoughts I’ve been having about changes in songcraft, away from easy earworms and strong melodies. But as “Choosin’ Texas” also suggests, there can still be something missing in songcraft even where the listening is easy.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. Angèle: Dis-le
Belgium

2. Camille Yembe: Rien à fêter
Belgium

Two Belgian pop songs from a great London Lee thread of recent Francophone pop. My focus has been on Francophone music coming from Caribbean and African diasporas, or informed by them, but there’s a good case that French-language pop is just more generally on fire lately. I’ve sort of wondered if we might get our first song in French in ages on the Hot 100 in the next year or two.

3. Jain, Meryl: Fam
France/Martinique

Shatta star Meryl continues to diversify her sound through collaboration, appearing on a phonk-inspired French electro pop track.

4. Sw@da, Niczos: Podlasie Bounce Karnavał
Poland

Meanwhile former Polish phonk-poppers seem far too restless to stick to one sound, on this one have some folk elements thrown in to bounce claps and Eurodance.

5. Lali: 1Amor (En Vivo)
Argentina

I tend not to include live performances from Latin American stars even though these versions are often huge. Argentine pop star Lali offers what sounds to me like an improvement on her 2024 “1Amor” that happens to be a good wedding-themed lead in to the next track.

6. flowerovlove: American Wedding
UK

Flowerovlove is yet another twentysomething pop formalist bringing melody to the forefront like ice water in the desert. My first impulse was to peg it to indirect country influence, but upon listening to it in context, it’s only as indirect as Sabrina Carpenter, which I eventually admitted this is hewing pretty closely to. The full-length also cycles through Olivia Rodrigo and few other post-Taylor singer-songwriter styles—there’s some lazy lyrical writing throughout, expletives peppered in like placeholders standing in for more interesting turns of phrase, and the whole thing feels a little underbaked. But she’s a promising talent, and she’s already collaborating with Willow, so we’ll see where that goes.

7. Masha Kondratenko: Тіп з Рейтарцької [Tip z Reitarskoi / Guy from Reitarska]
Ukraine

Spiteful-sounding disco-rock from Ukraine—would hate to be whichever guy hanging out on scenester high street Reitarska she’s talking about. “He’s got vinyl records and anxiety,” “I don’t mind, he’s a decent guy, though a scarf in July is a bit much.”

8. judith: Ay Ay Ay
Mexico-Honduras-US

Something like a median Latin pop song, from a US artist of Mexican and Honduran heritage. I strongly suspect per my musings above that one reason that western Anglophone pop is in a crisis right now is that they have no idea how to handle the dominant pop forms of the moment, whereas anyone with a passing familiarity with Latin pop can put something out that sounds great.

9. AZIEDOESNTEXIST: Strange
US

Atlanta emo-rap made in a fast cheap and out of control method but sounds slow cheap and merely frazzled.

10. xiangyu, Gimgigam: Perori!
Japan

xiangyu is back! I’m not sure that there’s anything that she’s ever put out that I haven’t immediately considered for a mix, and no two songs sound the same. This time it’s semi-ironic dorky old school hip-hop beats that put me in mind of early Cibo Matto.

11. Kinocohotel: 電子廃墟の恋 [Denshi haikyo no koi]
Japan

J-rock power-pop that’s tuneful in an almost jigsaw-puzzle way; my brain started constructing the chart for it in my head while I was listening.

12. Phương Mỹ Chi, Shiki, DTAP: Liễu Yếu Đào Tơ
Vietnam

Still don’t have a great handle on the different lanes of Vietnamese pop—for new music, I currently have a general Vietnamese pop playlist, a Vinahouse playlist, and I get more avant-garde stuff from other places. This seems to be on the more traditional end of general pop, with slightly more of a pulse than that usually suggests.

13. Nigar Muharrem: Yaram Derindir
Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan I know even less about, but do occasionally find good pop stars there. Should probably do more digging.

14. The Watergirls: The Whole of the Moon
UK/US

A charity single from the DFA label to celebrate the late JD Twitch, who loved the Waterboys original. I never managed to figure out a way in to the Waterboys, though I could imagine liking them more if I were about a decade older. (I might get a chance to try again if their 1988 album Fisherman’s Blues makes it into the upcoming Best Albums poll of 1988.) Enjoyed this electro rendition, though.

15. The Olivia Tremor Control: Advice from the Oceans
US

I have no idea why I had a burned Olivia Tremor Control CD among my earliest forays into music nerdery, back when I was mostly testing out classic rock and had barely cracked ‘80s indie—I think my friend Ana might have had their CD? Anyway, have always been fond of them and tended to set them apart as the Elephant 6 band it never stopped being cool to like. Looking forward to a long-awaited return album with remaining members.

16. Les Poissons: The Image You Choose
Norway

I can’t tell if these fish have even made a ripple in Norway; the streaming numbers are abysmal. But this is the second song I’ve included from them this year, even if it’s not as good as first featured track “Nature Boy,” which has all of 80 views on YouTube since then.

17. Kashcoming: Chaser
Nigeria

Spacier than the usual Afropiano—as holding patterns go, it at least holds interest, too.

18. Thabo Tonick: Listen to the Kids
South Africa

Three-step vanguard label Stay True Sounds has a radical philosophy: simply release all of the best songs all the time. Can’t believe it was that simple!

19. Mike Cooper, Pierre Bastien, Mark Cunningham: Archaeopteryx
UK

Jazz trio farts around in an echo chamber, leaves an impression, if not anything dinosaur-sized.

20. Yuki Watanuki: ゆめうつつ [Yume utsutsu]
Japan

Can you believe this meme anti-pop is only the second weirdest song on the mix this week?

21. Sara Bareilles: Hands Off My Body
US

The honor of weirdest goes to Sara Bereilles, who has sort of managed to do a straight version of “Dawn’s Song of Fears” from Girls5Eva. Ditches the jokes, but ups the unhinged escalation by literally representing it with an abrupt key change in every chorus. Love it.

That’s it! Until next time, throw around more key changes, why not.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from Masha Kondratenko: Тіп з Рейтарцької [Tip z Reitarskoi / Guy from Reitarska] (“вініл і тривожність”)

I asked on Bluesky what the deal is with the modern convention of using “bridge” strictly to mean a section in a song, usually after the second chorus, in which there’s a change in the melody and sometimes the chords—those sections that Taylor Swift mentions a lot when she talks about her songwriting. I grew up using “bridge” to also mean the connection (i.e., the bridge) between the verse and chorus. When I was in my 20s, I started referring to a separate section that is now usually called a bridge as a “middle 8.”

To skip to the ending of this conversation to quickly answer my own basic question: I was basically just muddling US and UK conventions based on my history of UK-heavy music chat. In the US, the connecting section between a verse and a chorus is usually referred to as a “pre-chorus” and the new, separate section usually toward the end is referred to as a “bridge,” whereas in the UK the connector between verse and chorus is the “bridge” and the new section a “middle 8.”

In the course of the conversation, Franklin Bruno, who is writing a book on bridges, gave a helpful definition and a series of examples:

(1) “Middle 8” comes from the conventional 8 measure B section in 32-bar pre-rock standards in AABA form (late ‘20s-’30s): “The Man I Love,” “Blue Skies,” “Ain't Misbehavin’,” that kind of thing. U.S. songwriters called this the bridge (or, earlier, “release”); “middle 8” seems to be a coinage by UK jazz musicians; it became widely known when the Beatles used it in interviews, but as McCartney notes, they didn't know it meant eight measures, so a lot of Beatles songs have bridges of unusual lengths.

(2) Because some UK writers still use the term “middle 8,” they reserve “bridge” for what we in the U.S. call the “pre-chorus” (or “pre” or sometimes “lift”), which can be confusing if you don’t go back and check the song being discussed.

(3) Whatever terms are used, it’s important that there be two distinct terms, because one song/record can have both a pre-chorus & a bridge (or bridge & middle 8) if you like. 2 good examples are “You've Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” and “Wrecking Ball.” In general, a pre-chorus [US] /bridge (UK) can be thought of as a subsection of the verse that precedes and sets up the chorus, while a bridge (U.S.)/middle 8 [UK] interrupts verse/chorus alternation, often after the 2nd chorus, and returns to another verse/chorus pair (e.g., [“Just Like a Woman”]), or directly to the last chorus or choruses (“Changes,” “Since U Been Gone”). There are many variations and exceptions, but these are the basic formal ideas

I think this is a good description of the conventions around pop songform going back about a century. I play a lot of American standards on the piano and am more or less comfortable with the conventions in point (1), with an A theme that repeats, followed by a B section (which historically in the US was sometimes called the “bridge”), with an occasional coda section or outro. Most pop music I’ve encountered in my life falls under the structure of (in US terminology) verse to prechorus to chorus, with a bridge sometimes happening somewhere later than those three basic parts.

But I wonder if this way of thinking about songcraft misses many ways that pop songs now function, even though the proliferation of these basic terms has made them common in chat about pop music and especially in online lyrics and analysis sites like Genius.

Frank Kogan brought up the construction of lots of post-2015 K-pop, and used MEOVV’s “Hands Up” from 2025 as an example.

Frank: My question is: What the hell is going on in Korea? I started drifting away from K-pop in 2015 and eventually lost the thread; my not-very-analyzed sense was that a song would go through the song parts and then just add several more parts.

Dave: It’s interesting that the interlocking parts help give individual members distinctive things to do. [In “Hands Up,”] the first short rapped verse is repeated again later, while there are two longer prechoruses. Genius labels that “verse” a refrain — it’s more of a chant than a rap. So you have four distinct sections given equal weight (refrain/verse/prechorus/chorus) which repeats before a bridge and then a dance break (which Genius calls an “outro”).

But it seems almost silly to break these into verse/prechorus terminology because what they really are are rap features that happen to be sung—you could just call them all verses, but in the sense of a guest verse.

One way to think about it is K-pop figuring out how to collapse rap group structure into pop song structure. “Who gets which part of the song” is in tension with “how many bars does X get on this one”

Frank goes on to say that even when K-pop is using more conventional structure, the way that it gets from point A to point B can still sound like it flouts the structure: “what’s hitting me about it is psychological, that it feels disparate.”

I think in some ways the conventions of song structure that are entrenched on sites like Genius can hold back analysis of what’s actually happening in a lot of music right now. In one direction, you have the expansive and somewhat unpredictable breakdown of conventional pop structure in global pop, where keeping up not with “sections” but with bars—measures given to vocalists or to moments, new twists and turns—makes more sense than corralling everything into clearly demarcated sections according to classic pop songcraft.

On the other hand, a lot of American pop right now has collapsed verse, chorus, and everything in between into a long drone of words. Audrey Hobert is someone who does this in a way that I find illustrative and sometimes interesting: long, flowing, neurotic passages that occasionally land on a title phrase but don’t really have much of a chorus to speak of—or at least, not a chorus that you can immediately tell apart from the verse.

In “Bowling Alley,” there’s a clear verse that leads into a long pre-chorus that’s about as long as that first verse, and then where the chorus should go, we’re in a third verse-like section. Even though you can retroactively mark these three sections as verse, pre-chorus, and chorus, they just sound like three verses. It’s not until the song over halfway finished that you even realize that she has technically repeated the pre-chorus and chorus, and even then she makes lyrical changes the way you might in successive verses.

Like in the K-pop example, the description of the structure of the song doesn’t really give you a good guide of what you’re actually hearing, which feels like verse after verse after verse. You’re following along with bars—how the song changes on a measure by measure level. (This is how I describe Taylor Swift’s delivery on Tortured Poets Department, but I think you could also apply it to a lot of non-Taylorite pop, like Charli xcx.)

In the same way that (American) funk music or experimental formats have in the past demanded new terminology—or in some cases ad hoc or no particular formal terms—I wonder if we’re approaching a similar place in pop, where things that seem at first to be beholden to conventional structure, and are discussed by fans in terms of those structures, just don’t really fit the templates.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. Lex Walton: Hipster Runoff
US

Lex Walton gives herself a Pitchfork 5.6 in a ‘10s-damaged music video, but Hannah Jocelyn gave it an 8.3 and the album also got an editorial Best New Music, in part for the impact of its many dead ends and trapdoors:

A lot of Walton’s music feels intentionally incomprehensible, whether you grew up on the internet and then moved to Brooklyn or not; it initially kept me, a New York-based trans person of Tumblr experience, at arm’s length with its hyperlexic musings. If ever a Bandcamp page needed a glossary, it would be Walton’s account.

The breakout track is a good example of an unconventional song structure, too—all verses and an abrupt outro. At press time, its Genius lyrics page is refreshingly unadorned with any structural groupings at all, and the words appear clumped and unlabeled, which is how they sound, too.

Part of what I was arguing in Part 3 of the A-pop series is that indie’s convergence with pop music had a huge impact not just on indie music, but on pop, too. But it might be interesting to think more formally about the overlap. I don’t know that a main stage pop star could get away with something quite this caustic, but it’s not a world removed from what I was describing with Audrey Hobert: words, words, words, end. This one happens to get there by crawling over broken glass.

2. Jorja Smith: What’s Done Is Done
UK

I do like Jorja Smith’s album, but this was the runaway keeper and has very little to do with some of the global music experimentation happening elsewhere on it. Just a straight-ahead UK garage banger.

3. Myra: Ouff
Norway

Katherine St. Asaph featured this in her Stereogum column and it rang a bell. After checking, I see that I have featured not one but two Myras, one from France and one (this one) from Norway. Neither are the Hollywood Records nonstarter from 2001 whom they planned to launch the label’s bespoke Disney pop.

4. HUGEL f. Sexyy Red, Gatano: Bad Bitch
France/US/Canada

No idea how this middling French DJ has taken over the global charts this year. He’s eating Ella Langley’s lunch on the GXU! Anyway, this is the only song I’ve heard from him so far that interested me, mostly from a decent if somewhat phoned-in Sexyy Red feature.

5. YKNIECE: Lil Mama
US

Another day, another viral rap hit from a woman who will not be included in hand-wringing thinkpieces about the decline of rap.

6. Kinck: Bet (Queen of Clubs)
Denmark

This is easily the most annoying whistle hook I’ve heard in a song this year that I actually liked (the most annoying whistle hook I’ve heard in a song that I don’t like is from the Gorillaz song “Orange County”). I can listen to an hour of tuin in Brazilian funk even without doing whatever drugs are suggested to make this pleasurable, but two minutes of this is about all I can stand.

7. Kiismet: Give Me More
Thailand

8. QVINT: รินรดา (Rinrada)
Thailand

9. Thoại Nghi, Trung Đức, ICM: Về Nhà Em Nhé
Vietnam

Southeast Asian pop block! The first is a bold Britney-quoting debut from a girl group I liked better before I saw their uncanny valley video, the second a dependable disco-pop banger from a group I’ve featured before, and the final a dopey mid-tempo Vietnamese pop track whose melody snared me, somewhat against my will.

10. Keina Suda: Black
Japan

The vocaloid auteur behind Balloon has a pop career that features his own vocals—was surprised to learn it had any relation to this Balloon song that sent me into a bit of a vocaloid rabbit hole a few years ago but I maybe I heard something in the production.

11. ØTTA, Bibi Babydoll: 4x4
Portugal-UK/Brazil

Bibi Babydoll expands her sonic palette into EDM party rock territory, sounds a bit buttoned up.

12. Danpapa GTA, King Dr. Saheed Osupa: Dance with Me
Nigeria

Another good one from previous Lokpo recommendation Danpapa GTA, who is carving his own path in a Naija pop that still seems like it’s in a post-Afrobeats wilderness.

13. Kea Mandela: Run Jozi
South Africa

Gqom-inspired South African rapper, has an EP I should probably check out before the next monthly round-up.

14. MODELKI, Vłodarski: aż nie chce się wracać
Poland

Polish pop group MODELKI has at least one success at a vaguely Afrobeats global pop sound, though from what I sampled the rest of the album doesn’t really maintain my interest.

15. Victony f. Young Jonn: Armed & Dangerous
Nigeria

Occasionally I’ll hit unexpected vocal grain in Naija pop—Victony reminds me a little of Zinoleesky in his lightly damaged vocal fry.

16. Lune: Nur mit dir.
Germany

Wouldn’t have guessed this lilting clave pop from Germany is in the top five most popular songs this week in terms of YouTube views.

17. Marilina Bertoldi, Lula Bertoldi: Momentismo Absoluto
Argentina

Dependable return of Argentine rocker Marilina Bertoldi, whose 2025 album I really liked, this time alongside her older sister, a member of rock trio Eruca Sativa.

18. Mustangs: Ya Mar [1972]
Bahamas

A decent take on the more raucous Cyril Ferguson (Dry Bread) original, from ‘70s Bahamanian group the Mustangs—I first heard in the original in People’s Pop, but apparently it’s a huge live song for Phish.

19. Ok Cowgirl: Rhinestone Cowgirl
US

Another strong entry in an overcrowded alt-country field—curious when one of these might cross over to 1/1000th of a “Choosin’ Texas” run at the charts? Along with the mosquitoes of this week’s title, I also like the shout-out to Ethel Cain and a childhood spent in a plastic bag like a goldfish.

20. Paulina Przybysz f. Marek Pędziwatr, Wiktoria Jakubowska, Tymon Kosma, Max Mucha: Mama’s Car
Poland

Dorky Polish jazz rap charmed me, what can I say. “My kids just kidnapped my Bluetooth”—yeah! Lately they’ve been playing the Undertale soundtrack a lot.

That’s it! Until next time, if your kids kidnap your Bluetooth let me know what they’re listening to on it.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from Ok Cowgirl: Rhinestone Cowgirl

August in review! Holy cow, can’t believe it’s September already. A lot of discussion of the Great Bouyon Speed-Up of 2026 below, so in that spirit I am speeding through the intro to get to the best stuff from last month.

11 Songs I Heard in August (unranked)

• CHITAA: Kiss Ei Chuu

• Dhuruta Dora & DJ Snake: Toka

• DJ EXE & CACAU CHUU f. Luísa Sonza & Ryan Castro: Que Loucura (Remix)

• Itz Tiffany: Money

• Jnr SA, Dlala Thukzin, & Kabza De Small: Rider

• Kurena Ishikawa: Les Fleurs

• MAYLIE: Connais Pas

• Nia Barbia: Chiga Biga Barbiya

• No Na: Honk!

• Shanae: Beep Beep

• Verito Asprilla: Quiero Ser Buena

10 Albums I Heard in August (lightly ranked)

• MOLIY: Baddies <3 Moliy

  Love it when a favorite artist who makes lots of good songs puts those good songs together onto an album with several other good songs. Sometimes it’s just that simple!

• Ravyn Lenae: Blue Island

  And speaking of simple, was very attracted to this album as a formal exercise in pop songcraft that doesn’t make a big deal out of its formality. Alfred Soto: “Betraying no anxiety of influence, Lenae and her fleet of producers led by Daji don’t offer pastiches so much as glossy updates devoid of contemporary neuroses: she’s not K Michelle or Kehlani explaining themselves to a therapist, she’s Janet Jackson hiding her commands as adeptly as a glove conceals a stiletto.” Somtimes it’s just that simple (even if the simplicity is deceptively complex).

• Brennan Wedl: s/t

  I’m really on a “hey there are songs on this” kick this month, so here’s one from the alt-country singer whose debut LP I’ve been waiting for since loving “Fake Cowboy” a few years ago. “Cowboy” is still the best song in the collection, but I appreciate that every song here has a no-foolin’ melody attached to it, killer lines throughout, and some fun games of spot-the-sound (Hold Steady on “Tasmanian Devil,” Liz Phair on “Airplane Movies,” is that Soundgarden on “June Gloom”?).

• Nu Fvnk: Kick Uyu

  Interesting album that does not do much beyond the blurb I already wrote for the song I featured from it on a mix: “Really love the album on which this is the lead track, might write more about the project in my next monthly wrap-up. It’s a Kenyan producer who does sampledelica collage with traditional Kenyan music mixed with breakbeats, and is more frenetic than a lot of electronic takes on folk forms tend to be.”

• Yosuke Shimonaka: SHIMONAKA

  Ditto this one! (Except this time I’ll also re-link my 1974 Japanese music essay, which I forgot to do in the original post.) “I’m looking forward to the forthcoming fusion album from Yosuke Shimonaka, purveyor of the sort of quirky, uptight funk I enjoyed (a little) in my 1974 Japanese albums research.”

• Jorja Smith: What Are the Odds

  I complained about Tyla’s new and unfortunately(?) titled album A*POP, which I underrated (a little). But in this case I find the same shortcomings-on-paper—a sort of view-from-nowhere mix of hot-shit African and Caribbean sounds into an R&B template—charming rather than disappointing. Rather than overthink it, I’ll just say the songs are better. As I’ve been saying this year about French diasporic pop, there’s no reason why this move to reframe regional pop sounds shouldn’t work in the US or UK, it just hasn’t really.

• Joyce e Tutty Moreno & Adrian Younge: Jazz Is Dead 27

  Man, all of these are good, aren’t they.

• Amy Grant: The Me That Remains

  I have no particular familiarity with Amy Grant, but a lightly positive rating from Chuck Eddy (reviewing her since at least 1991) and this song rave from Brad Luen put it on my radar. (I thought that my other favorite music writing Brad, Brad Shoup, had reviewed Amy Grant in Pitchfork, but the only mention of her ever is in a Menomena profile from 2005!) Although that Luen song rave is the highlight, said highlight is track one, and there was enough of a halo to get me through the rest. The words seem pretty good! Maybe I’ll listen to it twice someday.

• Hayley Law: Last Summer

  A stylistically varied but mostly futurist R&B (which is now retro-futurism) recommendation from LondonLee. You should follow them if you’re over on Bluesky, someone that I often find good stuff from but probably don’t credit enough. I recognize intellectually that the new FLO album, which mines similar yesterday’s-future territory more adeptly, is probably better, but I like this one more.

• MÖRDA: Asante IV

  Pretty much everything the prolific South African producer MÖRDA puts out is gorgeous—I’d say “otherwise unspecified South African house” that is generally on the dreamy end of amapiano—and he has put out a new album like clockwork every year since 2022 (all named Asante with Roman numerals; maybe he’s the amapiano Led Zeppelin?). I’m not going to pretend I have now, or will likely ever, listened to all 2 hours of this, though.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. Shygirl: Alyse
UK

Shygirl last appeared on these mixes duetting with Björk, and she almost tricks you with that ponderous orchestral opening to think that it’s rubbed off on her. But then it explodes into a straight-ahead breakbeat banger, albeit one that’s getting itself lost in dark alleyways.

2. Dani Enli: Body Tea
China-Australia

Ah, from art-adjacency to some serendipitous meta-junk, the only song I think I’ve ever included on a mix that came from my YouTube algorithm (on the heels of listening to “Stereo” by Cannelle). I seem to have removed all of my browser extensions for YouTube and my reward for playing ball with the machine is a raunchy (NSFW, FWIW) post-Pantheress jam.

3. Fyore: Jenny
Togo-Canada

Third appearance from Montreal’s Fyore in one year puts her into CACAU CHUU territory, but unlike with the Brazilian singer I’ve actually noticed Fyore’s rise, not just in hindsight. (This “rise” might only be my personal estimation, not a reflection of her actual popularity. I’m still grabbing most of her stuff from Bandcamp.)

4. Limitlezz, General Love: Hit the Road Jack
Greece-Germany/Mauritius

A simple shatta beat with a lazy sample, but it works!

5. Famous Pluto: Fast and Furious
Nigeria

A great Naija pop track that gallops along sounding like a beneficiary of the great bouyon speed-up of 2026, where tempos seem to be on the rise and hinting at bouyon influence even if there’s likely other factors. But in contrast to the tempo, the secret weapon on this one turns out to be a plaintive violin line that reminds me of…Moon and Antarctica by Modest Mouse? Hm.

6. Julinho Ksd: Dembélé
Cape Verde-Portugal

More evidence for the Bouyon Speed-Up in Portugal.

7. Lady Lava: Happy Birthday
Trinidad and Tobago

Trinidadian dancehall star wishes you a happy birthday in a way that is maybe less NSFW than Dani Enli but also more of a hoot.

8. Lullysnake: Buta
Tunisia

While bouyon explodes across the world at breakneck speeds, contemporary baile funk’s spread to other regions’ pop scenes shas been steadier (time will tell if it’s also sturdier). Sounds great mixed with Maghreb pop. Makes me wonder who if anyone will be the first breakout star that pulls off being the Homer Simpson time traveler of baile funk in the US—the first non-Brazilian to make it work.

9. Eva B f. Anina Fida, Mudassar Qureshi: Ant Bahr
Pakistan

I have not yet done any research on the Pakistani pop I’ve been getting on a few new playlists, nor have I bothered to figure out why I’m selecting it more reliably than the much better represented Hindi and other Indian pop in other playlists. Like Chinese pop, Indian pop is a stubborn blind spot that can’t be entirely explained by lack of access, though I should probably do a more concerted scan of both countries.

10. Preta Ary: Por Nós
Brazil

An off-the-cuff Brazilian rap freestyle to remind me that there are whole other worlds of Brazilian music of which I hear very little.

11. Donna Mobile: It’s All a Lie
Turkey

Throwback house-pop from Turkey, where producer Elif Çağlar created the persona Donna Mobile to add live vocals into electro dance music.

12. The Flabbies: Yangın Yeri
Turkey

13. Islands On Tape: Dust Conspiracy
Israel

Always nice to get more representation in my mostly-instrumental soul/funk/psych category—here are two for the pile. I usually put a mix of this stuff together at the end of the year, makes for nice background music for holiday parties.

14. Lael Neale: Slip Away
US

The second insistent, droney Lael Neale song with an environmental message I’ve featured on a mix, which tells me this is her deal. I like how the song’s sameyness ends up obliquely suggesting a punk sneer.

15. Анастимоза: Чи я кохаю? [Anastimoza: Chi ya koxayu? / Do I Love You?]
Ukraine

Anastimoza’s soft voice barely registers through even a fairly austere electropop backdrop, reminds me that I want to write something more about how Ariana Grande vanishes into the tracks on her new album, which is a topic I might address (in a roundabout way) next week.

16. Fallon: Changé
France

Another lush post-dancehall pop I set aside in my blindfold listening sessions that turned out to be from Fallon. She’s in the running for mathematically favorite artist of the year (i.e. most songs featured, even if I don’t remember featuring them).

17. Duo Anggrek, Ecko Show: Senayan Tanah Abang
Indonesia

My knowledge of Indonesian pop subgenres is basically nil, and my personal breakthrough Indonesian act of the year, No Na, is taking the Katseye transnational girl group takeover approach and is probably not that representative. So I will tell you that this is filed under dancedhut, which derives from the same folk-pop etymology (dangdut) as hipdut but isn’t as connected to contemporary hip-hop/R&B and is more upbeat, closer to cheery Europop.

18. Culoe De Song: The Spiker
South Africa

I hear more gqom and Afro house in my playlists each week than I usually include on mixes (a lot of these songs end up on my South Africa holdover list), so it’s nice to hear something that catches my ear in a way that makes me want to put it on the main mix. (I do not remember what caught my ear this time out.)

19. Juçara Marçal, Thais Nicodemo: A gente se fode bem pra caramba
Brazil

20. Diogo Monzo: Uma Rosa para Pixinguinha
Brazil

Two piano-driven Brazilian songs to end things, a sprightly but spare number by singer Juçara Marçal of Metá Metá and a Liszt-ish ballad by jazz pianist and composer Diogo Monzo.

That’s it! Until next time, consider filling your next album with all of your best songs.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from Fyore: Jenny (“Je m’en vais / Je te le texte”)

I am thinking about the State of US Pop again based on some chart chatter. I should immediately qualify this with (1) being skeptical that there really is such a thing as “the” state of US (or any) pop, (2) not generally having a ton of personal interest in the charts to guide my own listening, and (3) not thinking that the charts actually give you a very good barometer of the health of a region or a scene.

So maybe I should start with what does give me a decent (but subjective) barometer. I’m in the position of not having a particular beat or hobbyhorse, so I can sort of float around the world cherry-picking good stuff that I hear. That means that any country, region, or genre can sound strong to me if I find enough good stuff there, even if that stuff is an exception, is locally unpopular, or is otherwise unrepresentative of its genre or scene.

That said, there are some areas where the glut of good music is overwhelming and undeniable. This is related to the term I use a lot to describe developing or thriving scenes: ferment—a sense of rapid development and promise. I use the term very loosely, since there is enough music being produced on a daily basis that you could theoretically find ferment anywhere at some level.1 But in a simpler sense, the scenes in ferment are the ones where there seems like a miraculous supply of good music, sometimes so much of it that I have to actively keep some of it off of my mixes each week because I could make a full mix worth of just that type of music.

Right now the scenes that have earned separate folders for an overflow of good music include Brazilian funk and South African house music, along with Latin American and Spanish-language pop.2 Caribbean dancehall and related pop (mostly Francophone) is becoming another area that might soon have enough songs each week to qualify for their own list.

This is totally impressionistic, and I’m sure if I looked intently for music in other scenes I’d find more of it. But the point is that for the scenes I’m describing, I don’t have to look very carefully; the music jumps out at me constantly.

When the music isn’t jumping out, you need to dig for it. This is more or less what I’m used to doing anyway, and it’s exactly how a few pieces I’ve come across in the past week have framed listening to US chart pop right now. Here is how a recent article in Nylon describes exciting music at the “bottom of the charts”:

Recently, three of the most exciting up-and-comers of the moment earned their first-ever Billboard Hot 100 chart entries: on Aug. 4, Audrey Hobert’s “Sue Me” came in just under the wire at no. 98, over a year after its release in May 2025. The next week, Hobert climbed to no. 92, leaving room for Slayyyter to take over her position at 98 with her new hit “Brand New Chanel$.” Pop protégé Adéla also secured a spot that week at no. 85 with her latest single “Ain’t In LA,” making her the first Slovak artist to appear on the chart.

In the Atlantic, Spencer Kornhaber singles out some of the same artists (and also Kim Petras—could she make a CAPDY comeback?) to make a series of broader points about the State of Things:

After a long pop-cultural swing away from Millennial do-goodery toward a redux of 1980s “greed is good” aesthetics, burnout with chasing the bag is finally setting in. Many influencers are starting to see their reach wane; luxury brands are facing flatlining sales. At the same time, anti-institutionalist sentiment—whether directed at political parties, Big Tech, or the entertainment business—is at a high. “Party in the U.S.A.” landed at a time when people still regarded Hollywood as a land of magic, not as a playground for sex traffickers.

The most popular songs of late reflects these trends as well. Ella Langley’s record-setting charts run with “Choosin’ Texas” speaks to a demand for music that’s indifferent to the cosmopolitan hustle. The stateside appeal of non-English-language stars also represents shifting ideals of what success looks and sounds like. Just as Adéla advises that the baddest bitches ain’t in L.A., Bad Bunny scoffs at the idea that Puerto Ricans need to head to the mainland United States to make their dreams come true.

In these conditions, it’s no wonder that pop, once the sound of the center, is finding glamour in marginality. Stars who might otherwise aspire to godhood are meeting listeners where they’ve always been: partying in their own backyard, with their own friends, and on their own terms—even while dreaming of something bigger.

Some of this feels like special pleading for a struggling pop scene. I suspect there’s something bigger happening with the US charts that intersects with my writing about regional pop, though. At the top of the charts, you see the continued relevance of major 2010s stars, the ones who I describe when I trace a prehistory of today’s regionalization. And you also see more music on the US charts that is distinctively regional and doesn’t translate abroad. It seems hard for new pop-as-genre artists to gain a foothold.

I use the Billboard Global 200 Excluding US (GXU) chart as a level-setter. There will always be songs that do better in the US than elsewhere, but the question is how wide the gap is between performance in the US and performance in all charts except the US.

For instance, nearly all current Hot 100-charting country music has little to no impact on the GXU charts, and it hasn’t in the chart’s 6-year history, spanning the whole period in which artists like Morgan Wallen, Luke Combs, and Zach Bryan have done very well in the US. (Morgan Wallen has never appeared above #82 on the GXU charts as a solo artist; he once hit #3 on a Post Malone collaboration.)

I wondered what it would look like if you pared this week’s US Top 40 down to exclude all songs by major 2010s stars (Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Bruno Mars, Drake) and also exclude all songs that do not cross over to the GXU (i.e. they peak much lower on the GXU chart than the US Hot 100). The latter criteria eliminates pretty much all country music, including Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas,” which is set to break an all-time record for most weeks at #1 in the US but only cracked the Top 40 (at #38) on the GXU this past Tuesday.

Here are the 13 songs left from the Top 40 for this week—relatively new artists with songs popular in the US and abroad:

• Olivia Dean (“Man I Need” and “So Easy to Fall in Love”)

• Tame Impala & JENNIE (“Dracula”)

• Olivia Rodrigo (“Stupid Song,” “The Cure,” and “Drop Dead”)

• Zara Larsson (“Midnight Sun”)

• Malcolm Todd (“Earrings”)

• Dominic Fike (“Babydoll”)

• Shakira & Burna Boy (“Dai Dai”)

• KATSEYE (“Animal”)

• Temper City (“Self Aware”)

• Stray Kids (“This and That”)

There are US artists here, but they’re not the subjects of the above chart analysis, with the possible exception of Olivia Rodrigo. Two US artists (Dominic Fike and Temper City) are more popular abroad than in the US, while several of these songs are much more popular on the GXU than they are in the US (World Cup song “Dai Dai,” KATSEYE, and Stray Kids).3

Maybe this is all just a fluke of the last two years—lots of people think 2024 was a banner year for US chart-pop. But I also wonder if there are more structural things happening: as US pop stops signifying as something to aspire to abroad, the Hot 100 chart becomes more of a regional chart, and the US either adapts to more global music or recedes further into an insular scene with old incumbents or its own regional hits.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. MAYLIE: Connais pas
France

Another week, another French pop upstart riding Caribbean dancehall to a banging crossover. (MAYLIE is under-the-radar enough that I had to physically type out her Instagram handle from her artist bio, underscores inclusive.) Will see how she’s doing this time next year among the current crop—for those of you keeping up at home, that’s, in roughly descending heatseeker order: Theodora, LinLin, Fallon, (D)Juno, and maybe sometimes MAYLIE.

2. Naomi, SLM: Hershey Kiss
Canada

Don’t count out Montreal, though, where Fyore also caught my attention among Francophone ferment and will make her third appearance on a mix next week. This week it’s Naomi with guest rapper SLM.

3. Shanae: Beep Beep
Brazil-US

Took me a while to figure out whether this Shanae is the same one who created a wonderful light baile funk song filmed guerrilla style across different NYC locations, “Acquicemento da Xanaina,” that Isabel (via Nick) shared with me. I looked up Shanae on streaming and found this song, and was convinced it was a different artist until I finally found a social media account that included both songs. Rob Sheffield’s theory that there are no bad songs about waiting for phone calls remains undefeated. I also particularly like the hook “in one ear, in the other,” like she’s talking on two phones simultaneously.

4. XYVRL: SBAPN
Philippines

This Filipina rapper’s song is the most casually backgrounded use of budots I think I’ve heard to date? A budots beat sets the tempo but occasionally switches over to house organ. This is to my knowledge the second budots crossover I’ve had on a mix— that is, one where the style is being used in the service of something less DJ-oriented—after girl group VVINK’s single produced by DJ Love. So far these integrated songs putting the budots in the background don’t really hit as hard as the DJ stuff. The lane for pop crossover is still wide open: maybe Chappell Roan will figure out she was doing budots the whole time.

5. pikika: Hoje Tem
Portugal

Incredible how quickly the bouyon rhythm has spread globally in subtle ways, too—it sort of functions like PinkPantheress did a few years ago, as a tempo defibrillator across the entire pop landscape. Not sure if this song is directly inspired by bouyon per se, but it feels swept up in the same zeitgeist.

6. Nia Barbia: Чіґа-Біґа-Барбія! [Chiga-Biga-Barbia!]
Ukraine

The Jersey club beat is another one that has wound up spreading globally in a similar fashion in the past few years—here it is in Ukraine. It wasn’t until recently that I noticed that the Jersey club beat is a little like an inverted clave rhythm—two straight beats and then a triplet (sort of), a 2-3 pattern instead of 3-2. But the bigger idea is just that certain rhythms travel well and quickly, and this is one of them.

7. Myaap: Hunnids
US

Bounce rhythm has maybe not traveled as widely outside of the US, though I hear it now and again in odd places. Myaap has found a way to make bounce simultaneously more pop and more arty—in this one, her first single since putting out an incredible album, the production by Prodi-G practically sounds like it’s hiding DJ Shadow behind the beat.

8. Audrey Nuna, Valorant: SuperHuman
US

I did a bit of due diligence during the KPop Demon Hunters craze last year checking out the solo careers of each HUNTR/X member, and Audrey Nuna (who provides the performing voice of Mira in the film) was the most interesting. I had selected a 2024 track last year to share that I wavered on (the “Boy Is Mine”-sample-with-Jersey-club-beat “Mine”), but waited until she had a new single out to finally include something.

9. Jasmin407: Ale Maroc
Morocco-Italy

More indirect bouyon ferment with those faster tempos I mentioned in that pikika track from Portugal, this time from a Moroccan artist based in Italy.

10. DJ EXE, CACAU CHUU, Luísa Sonza, Ryan Castro: Que Loucura (Remix)
Brazil

11. Jhow, CACAU CHUU, LeoZera: Ela ké pancadão
Brazil

CACAU CHUU, a Brazilian funk singer I know nothing about, has become a serious utility player in São Paulo, rivaling Mc Gw for the most appearances on the funk tracks I set aside each week. She’s so ubiquitous that I didn’t even realize I’d put two tracks featuring her in a row—both have brega funk’s reggaeton-like rhythms, but the first employs the swooning snyths of sexy drill while the second sounds like it was cobbled together from Mortal Kombat sound effects.

12. Las Culisueltas: Murmullo Descuidado
Argentina

Argentine reggaeton has at least one “Careless Whisper” sax usage to rival the two Brazilian funk variations of that song’s sax hook that I’ve included on mixes to date.

13. Team Paiya, Gaz Mawete: Au chaud
Côte D’Ivoire

14. Bigyne wiz f. Jolina Verdigo, Le Grand Homme: Eusseu toi tu me connais
Côte D’Ivoire

Last week I promised but did not really deliver any Ivorian biama (or fast coupé decalé, still can’t tell the difference?) so here are two good ones from a few new playlist sources.

15. Sexbomb Girls: Mama Mama
Philippines

As someone who recently got very into “Sex Bomba,” the 1982 singe by Bosnian artist Alma Ekmecic featured in the Pop World Cup, I was primed to like something else Sexbomb related. But I was surprised that the reason I liked this was because it sounds like the America’s Funniest Home Videos theme song.

16. Leona: Stay or Go
Philippines

Someone named Leona doing passé R&B in a way that I like even though I recognize it’s kind of stale? What are the odds that would happen twice?

17. EMJAY: Moreno Fantasy
Mexico

EMJAY is still leaning into confessional darkness and moody snyths—the turn that I called Down on the Dancefloor back in 2007, though I’ve lost the track list for that mix (Hook Me Up era Veronicas, downer Rihanna, the weird second Katy Rose album, and a few others).

18. Murex: Flock of Swans Fly in V’s
Sweden

19. @: Punish My Mind
US

Two art-rock-y songs, one an animal song without animal noises and the other a non-animal song with animal noises.

20. Joyce Moreno, Tutty Moreno, Adrian Younge: Sorria de Novo
Brazil/US

Dog bites man: another impeccable collab from Adrian Younge for the Jazz Is Dead series.

21. Jnr SA, Dlala Thukzin, Kabza De Small: Rider
South Africa

Amapiano—still good! First Dlala Thukzin appearance of the year I think! Jnr SA’s album is good!

22. Tropical Soldiers in Paradise: 700
Poland

Thorny fusion odyssey from Poland to close things out if you have eight minutes to spare.

That’s it! Until next time, stay fermenting.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from Shanae: Beep Beep

If you spend enough of your time online with British music nerds, you start to engage with questions like “is there a US equivalent to the Manic Street Preachers?” That is: a band big in the home country with basically no crossover to a usually sympathetic market. This was the question du jour a week or so ago as one of the Manics’ biggest UK hits, “A Design for Life,” appeared in the People’s Pop Poll of 1996.

My first impulse was to compare the Manics to Tragically Hip, the Canadian band that seems to have about a hundred songs that all Canadians know by heart and I’ve never heard before. (I was glad that someone else brought up the comparison first; Canadians in the thread grumbled but a few of them reluctantly agreed.) The band I’m imagining not only stays within its home country, but in some way typifies some perceived essential [home country]ness, and doing it in a way that sparks not only local chart success, but also a meaningful debate about a whole body of work amongst its home audience that is incomprehensible abroad.

I don’t think I could hum you a single Manic Street Preachers or Tragically Hip song at all, though I could maybe name one or two from observing other people from other places talking about them. I miss not only the appeal of these groups, but the basic entry-level context in which you would even distinguish between their songs. (To both bands credit, I have never actually tried to do this, have always been turned off for shallower reasons of thinking the bands sound kind of boring.)

Andrew Unterberger suggests that it wouldn’t be possible for any US rock group of the Manics’ era to have a career like that: “May largely be a matter of chart differences between the two countries but I am very confident a reverse Manics—a U.S. rock band with multiple massive hits + major cultural presence stretched across multiple albums but zero U.K. chart impact —simply does not exist. Not in the ‘90s anyway.”

Interestingly, the thing that sparked these musings was the pairing of the Manic Street Preachers with Sublime in the People’s Pop 1996 poll, where Sublime got walloped by the Manics (and also by the winner of that round, “Return of the Mack” by Mark Morrison). UK voters responded to “What I’ve Got” with the same bemused confusion that many US voters did to Manic Street Preachers. Tom Ewing compared Sublime to Beck, which, when I ignored my entire childhood and adolescent listening history, I could sort of hear, even though socially it makes no real sense to me (my high school band covered at least three Sublime songs but no Beck).

Sublime fits the chart picture, too: an all-time UK chart peak of #71 with “What I’ve Got” with only one other entry listed, and it’s an error: the second charting Sublime song is 2003 house track “Sublime” by Keep the Change, which is listed with its title and artist switched on Official Charts.

The mention of Sublime in the conversation opened up references to other bands from the mid-90s, many of them jammy, ambiguously ironic, or slacker-adjacent, like Cake (two short-lived Top 40s in the UK in 1997) or Dave Matthews Band (barely cracked the Top 40 for “The Space Between”).

Jonathan Bogart made a connection to carnival barking as a US analogue to a music hall tradition. This in turn put me in mind of one of the few books I managed to get through in the past year, and which I immediately called the Great American Novel in a Boss Baby Tweet sort of way. That book was Nightmare Alley, William Lindsay Gresham’s jaundiced and funny noir about carnival hucksters, mysticism, alcoholism, and conning the rich with woo-woo. (Gresham is smart and/or caustic enough to rope psychoanalysis in with the rest of the snake oil.) I agree with the friend who recommended it that it may not the best American novel, but it might be the novel that contains the most America per square inch. It’s pretty lean, but it still makes room for a major plot point that hinges on enrolling a filthy bodega cat in a scheme to swindle an automobile tycoon.

I’ve always been drawn aesthetically to some of the more benign forms of American hucksterism—more infomercial than prosperity gospel—and have managed not to parlay this into inflicting or falling prey to a variety of scams or vices. I think there’s something to the music hall comparison: music hall generally sets my teeth on edge, but carnival barking gets you to corners of my taste like Mike Patton and Mr. Bungle, Primus, Ween, and any number of sellout singles from alt bands—like Butthole Surfers’ “Pepper,” which didn’t make it to the 1996 People’s Pop finals.

It’s always worth thinking a bit more about country music crossover (or lack thereof) between the US and UK, too. There’s plenty of divergence there—Garth Brooks barely made a dent on the UK singles charts, say. But some contemporary country in the current US Top 40 wave has done much better in the UK than other parts of the world.

This is all to say that I’m interested in tracking regional US music in a post-A-pop sort of way, thinking about how the US has always had distinctively regional pathways for music that haven’t translated. Maybe this is will provide of glimpse of where US music will itself go—or perhaps recede—into local niches that largely stay put.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. The Vampire Lestat: Long Face
Australia

I have been told by at least one reputable source (the same one who recommended Nightmare Alley! Thx Isabel!) that I should really be watching the sexy vampire show. I think that actually being taken in by an in-universe song from Sam Reid, who plays Lestat, should push it further to the top of my queue. (It’s a short queue and I’ve already seen Widow’s Bay.) I don’t know how the libidinality—libidosity? libinitudinousness?—is supposed to play on the show musicwise (at least one character telepathically heckles Lestat and tells him this song sucks). But the mix of sexy and goofy gets it close enough to John Cameron Mitchell, which itself was close enough to glam. Glampires! Surely someone has coined this already?

2. GAYLE: Junebug!
US

A few years ago I set off a minor discourse bomb on early Bluesky claiming that GAYLE was merely a standard deviation away from the post-teenpop alt-confessional haves (Olivia Rodrigo, mostly). Any attempt to do post-pop impressionism from Kara DioGuardi (as mentor not writer) was going to get my attention, and it did, though “abcdefu,” GAYLE’s biggest hit, wasn’t really something I cared much about. But she’s come into her own as a too-many-syllables-not-enough-tunes semi-star, and I still think she sounds better than plenty of other syllable-slingers. She doesn’t sound like an actor pretending to be a pop star (no offense to The Vampire Lestat).

Editorial note: I guess this is as good a place as any to let you all know that the hierarchy of power in the CAPDY universe has changed! The “P” no longer stands for Kim Petras, who did not get the critical traction I thought she might, but rather for (duh) Phoebe Bridgers. My personal rankings do not really change, though: Charli > Ariana > Phoebe > slaYYYter > Disney.

3. piri: Both Be Happier
UK

Post-pop impressionism isn’t rocket surgery — piri shows that all you have to do is stick some lite dnb-pop in the background and you can easily rise above the labored sneers of the average post-popper, even without much tune to speak of.

4. Samara Cyn f. Ovrkast.: Bushwick
US

Have probably been underrating Samara Cyn since I inexplicably compared one of her older singles to “iPod commercial music,” which even for someone who compares a lot of music to iPod commercials in a non-derogatory way was probably a stretch.

5. Luci Gang: Easy A
South Korea

Via Kogan/Henderson, have been checking out K-rapper Luci Gang, who happened to show up in my playlists this week with a new release after being shared by a few social media mutuals for a different single that seems to be getting more heat than this one (“Headlock”). Can’t remember why I picked this one instead; both are good.

6. Allnight: Bang Bang Bang (Radio Edit)
US

Miami DJ keeps a stealth electroclash revival going in a way that doesn’t draw too much attention to itself, and maybe doesn’t draw enough attention to itself.

7. Son Rompe Pera: Reptilio
Mexico

Psych-cumbia that earned a fist pump from me at some point while listening to it.

8. Shannon: Tête
Martinique

More evidence of light-speed ferment in bouyon among various Francophone scenes, with more to come next week. This one’s from a shatta star and mix mainstay (with I think a song every year since 2023), who has combined shatta and bouyon across a solid new album I’ll probably write up in the end of month recap.

9. Bamby, Rambo Goyard: Gogowine
Guyana-France/DRC-France

Another dancehall star riding bouyon rhythm, though the timing is not as fortuitous: her full-length from 2025 (Muse, which I probably underrated) feels light years away already.

10. Paulo Chakal: Antou (Nan Guin Nan Wan)
Côte D’Ivoire

Have recommitted myself to finding a few new sources for coupé decalé and biama music after reading a recent article about the latter in the Guardian. I’ll admit that I have a hard time distinguishing between biama and coupé decalé since, as I understand it, the biama trend has sped up tempos across subgenres and there aren’t hard lines between them. (A lot of songs that I see categorized as biama I’ve covered previously using interchangeable terms.) No such confusion here, though—rap Ivoire/R&B with a breezy tempo and production more indebted to pan-regional afropiano.1

11. Zarhzä, DJ Tagada: Les Oiseaux de Tapage - Remix
France

Hard-to-categorize but easy-to-move-to Balkan-Latin-French global dance-pop melange.

12. Pedro Sampaio, Cachirula, Loojan: Tímida, Santa y Peligrosa
Brazil/Mexico

Fun Brazilian/Mexican reggaeton tag team.

13. Baba Harare: Tsa Tsa Tsa
Zimbabwe

Logdrums programmed into tricky polyrhythms like they’re trying to reinforce the song with an exoskeleton coated in a comic book super-polymer.

14. Cheyada: พันธนาการ [Phạnṭhnākār]
Thailand

Chayada has appeared twice on my mixes before, and I’ve referred to her as going soft indie rock without turning to mush (high praise) and “decaffeinated but not entirely free of caffeine” (not high praise, but not a slam since I switched to decaf myself). She upped the formula to half-caf.

15. Sangay Lhaden: Pemi Tshewang Tashi - The Legend
Bhutan

Bhutan is the second country after Laos that has never appeared on a mix. Cheating a bit with this one by reviewing the Bhutanese finalists for the new Eurovision Asian contest (they got second place in the qualifier). Could cross two more off my country list this way with Nepal and Mongolia to represent everyone competing—will at least try to find something from those countries before the end of the year.

16. Meshell Ndegeocello f. Cat Power: Don’t You Want Me
US

Another week, another smoky cover of a pop classic. I’d give the edge to Kurena Ishikawa’s “Les Fleurs” last week but this one’s pretty good, and might be the last appearance of Cat Power on a mix for a while if she really has gone full anti-vax.

17. Valerie June: Smokestack
US

Speaking of smoky, I think this lead single from Valerie June could use more soot, but it does rock.

18. Rafi Joe Wartanian: Makam Delta
Armenia-Lebanon-US

The poet laureate of Glendale with an acoustic guitar jam that reminds me of the guitar figure in “Coconut” by Harry Nilsson, but goes somewhere very different with it.

19. Play Time: Public Broadcast
US

Keyboard-sax-drum trio of Ben Vida, Will Epstein, and Booker Stardrum with a pleasing if somewhat polite jazz freakout. Some background, and an effusive comparison to Kraftwerk that I don’t really hear, at Jazz Times.

20. Jenna Davis: The Summer I Turned Pretty
US

A nasty little break-up song, revenge gotten not by keying your car but telling the internet you can’t stay…faithful. Nudges the ribs a little too, er, hard, but it does actually sound break-up music I enjoy listening to, even if I’d maybe like it better if she just keyed the car.

That’s it! Until next time, may all of the hucksters in your life be benign ones.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from piri: Both Be Happier

Have been wanting to write about some observations about global music from this year, but always freeze up a bit for fear of overgeneralizing or revealing vast tracts of my own ignorance. But I want to take a few swings anyway so I don’t lose the thread.

I think one of the shifts in my own thinking about the world’s music right now is understanding simultaneous regionalization and globalization, and the way that these phenomena work together in a cyclical way. There are two interrelated ideas — (1) regional cultures spread globally and (2) specific regions annd countries export music with a vision for reaching—or creating—a global mass culture.

Thinking (reductively) in terms of insider/outsider, the first phenomenon is reaching a larger and larger group of insiders, especially through worldwide diaspora communities. The second is deliberately framing “insider” music for outsiders, which has historically been a role for US, UK, and Anglosphere broadcasters.

Anything that begins as a regional cultural phenomenon can become a global template, but at the same time there are always sounds of the moment that hew closer to already-established templates that you can draw on to reach larger audiences. Figuring out which is which can be tricky, because both things can be happening at the same time: a regional sound quickly becomes a global template, which can then be re-packaged by someone else for new listeners.

This spread of musical ideas isn’t new, and is probably foundational to all musical development ever. But it has gotten faster, I think, and lost some intermediary steps. One change I notice recently is that there are fewer “outsider” translators of regional sounds, because stars arise from their own scenes. When translators (of a sort) do appear, they tend not to be English-language US or Anglosphere pop stars.1 Instead, the network for translation and adaptation operates more through immigrant and diaspora communities. Distinctively regional music forms are united by language, culture, and genre (especially rhythmic genre) and spread via broad diasporic inspiration and iteration, with geographically distinct diaspora artists pushing and inspiring each other until at least one becomes a much bigger star.

It seems difficult for outsiders to comfortably inhabit or incorporate these sounds—at least at first. Eventually the sounds may shift the grammar of global pop more generally, until there is some breakthrough and the sound becomes more legible and accessible to more people who make music.

The place where this is the most front-of-mind for me this year is in various strains of Francophone pop based on Afro-Caribbean rhythmic genres. Caribbean dancehall genres like Guadeloupean bouyon and Marticinian shatta have gotten a lot of traction among French pop stars of Caribbean and African heritage—Theodora, LinLin, Fallon, (D)Juno, recent find Maylie (whose latest single is on an upcoming mix). There’s a related but smaller scene in Montreal pop. (Might talk more about this specific Francophone zeitgeist next week.)

Another way that global music spreads is when specific countries or regions develop self-consciously global sounds as a competitive export-minded pop industry. (Collin Smith wrote an interesting piece about the organic or strategic global spread music using the framing of reggaeton and K-pop in Trollz World Tour.) Right now, multiple popular music centers—including K-pop, J-pop, and Latin American urbano music—have a greater claim to global template-setting than most US or Anglosphere pop. So in countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines, you get accelerated development of hyphens denoting a growing industry (V-, T-, P-, respecitively) that is indebted to but distinct from two major Asian pop industries in Japan and South Korea. (K-pop especially also taps into a diaspora to cultivate talent.) And you also get a combination of both diasporic connections and industry competition in Latin American pop, which has multiple geographic centers.

Jonathan Bogart shared and translated an interview with Don Omar about the rise of urbano music in the past 25 years that got me thinking about some of this:

Caption: Few things fill me with more pride than seeing how far urban music in Spanish has come. For years we celebrated every door that opened. Today the best reward is knowing that they remain open.

Don Omar: Music in Spanish today is the envy of the American music industry, and I believe it was very, very unlikely to think that this would happen 25 years ago. 25 years ago hip-hop was the role model for music that urbano artists listened to. Today [urbano] is the reference point for the American industry. It’s reversed: today it is hip-hop artists who are listening to and thinking about urbano music in Spanish in order to reinvent it and apply it in their industry.

Americans 25 years ago had no idea what was going on in Latin music or its industry, but today it is Latinos who are showing the American industry how it works. Because for Daddy Yankee, Don Omar, Tego Calderón, Ivy Queen and all the rest who did our work in our day, the only thing we can feel is pride. The only thing we can feel is pride for the work we did, for how it was received, and how it changed the industry, and how today the industry is totally open to urbano music. It’s an achievement that—I'm being completely honest with you—I never thought would ever happen. And today it is happening.

Omar’s interview in turn reminded me of an interesting documentary on tamborzão from an MTV Brazil producer interviewing Brazilian DJs Sany Pitbull and Mavi in 2006. They present something like an on-the-ground prediction of Omar’s observations from that time period. The DJs are describing the gradual evolution of Brazilian funk, which historically at that point had been based heavily on Miami bass—they single out the formative American record “Voltmix” by DJ Battery Brain— that set the template for the tamborzão rhythm that became globally popular in the 2000s.

Since then, Brazilian DJs continued to borrow or invent other sounds to build on tamborzão, and eventually changed or stripped out entirely the elements that had originally been imported, in many cases leaving only spare clave accents on an implied hard 4/4. And it’s now that sound, which I call “hard clave,” that is traveling more globally and shaping pop music in many different regions. Mavi predicts something like this in the documentary:

I believe very soon it will be 100% Brazilian. It’s 90% right now. DJs and producers are evolving, playing instruments like an MPC. If you look closer, Brazil funk is the only electronic scene where at each ten bailes, you’ll find at least seven DJs performing live. At the rest of the world, maybe one or two. We are always researching it to develop it one step ahead.

It used to be complicated to have a studio, and produce. Twenty years ago you couldn’t imagine recording at home a CD and playing it in your car. Now it’s very easy—access to technology has changed it all. We are making it our own way.

We had a strong international influence—now it’s more and more Brazilian. 10 years ago, all beats were 100% international. Portuguese lyrics started with 1989’s album Funk Brasil. But all the beats were gringo.

This feeling of emergence into a changed landscape really does feel like it’s happening almost everywhere in the world right now, with development so rapid that scenes that seem local and insular can become global lingua franca in the span of a few years or less, and the number of scenes this can happen to simultaneously keeps rising.

You also get representative megastars from many of these scenes and regions (what I call the “monsterverse”), who have largely replaced the need for outsider broadcasters. And there are still examples of scrappier underground scenes, and mid-level pop star strivers, and burgeoning near-megastars. It’s everywhere, all at once.

Whether global music comes from sophisticated (but historically siloed) regional music industries or ground-up street scenes or avant-garde scenes, the sense of a power reversal in the last decade-plus is the same. There’s been a radical de-centering of where globally recognized pop music is supposed to come from (that is: anywhere) or how it’s supposed to get where it’s going (that is: anyhow). Paying attention to this constant global ferment has become not just a high-minded critical goal, but an entry point to understanding pop music at a basic level.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. no na: Honk!
Philippines

That’s all to say: beep beep—get on the angkot. 88Rising’s no na seem to have found the got it flaunt it rocket last seen propelling NewJeans through their incredible 2024 (before it incinerated), and they have created an admirable Indonesian Vengabus—causing further custody headaches for who in the world gets to be the “I” in I-pop. (I don’t think that particular letter is going to stick.)

2. SB19: Lawless
Philippines

Via a nudge from Jake at Glorious Noise, I have now caught up with P-pop boyband SB19 just in time to watch them shove cake in their faces— maybe not a have it and eat it too situation, but they want you to know they’re definitely eating it.

3. Nutdao, Swagwazz: The World Is Yours
Laos

Laos was the first country with zero representation across all of my newsletters that I decided to look at more intently for a few songs. As far as I can tell (which is not very far), Laos has not yet stepped up their hyphenate-sharpening and is somewhat stuck in the shadow of bigger pop scenes from nearby countries. But there were more keepers on a quick skim than I expected judging from some of my past country-specific searches, along with a few playlist leads to keep me lightly informed.

4. Sugar N’ Spice: Paligaw-Ligaw Tingin
Philippines

More P-pop, far more sugar than spice.

5. Reet Talwar, Badshah, Hiten: Tum Yun Mile Ho
India

The first release from Reet Talwar since she put out one of my favorite singles of the decade in 2023, “Meherbaan.” This would probably get on a mix regardless of how good it is. (It’s fine.)

6. Verito Asprilla: Quiero Ser Buena
Colombia

Mr. Bongo does some nice curatorial work via DJ and 6Music presenter Jamz Supernova, who includes one from an artist you could have found in the Jonathan Bogart best of 2025 (which has already outlasted a link-rotted Remezcla feature). (Did I mention I archive all of my songs and newsletters twice a year now?)

7. 143leti, Roxxee: Hombres de Papel
Argentina

A personal breakout from this year goes “recession pop,” which annoyingly seems to encompass things from any year in the late 00s and 10s you like. (I wrote about recession pop before the recession!!) Anyway, it sounds a little like Danity Kane.

8. Ferah Zeydan: Bu defa başka
Turkey

Charming and probably wholesome summer jam from a Turkish singer who broke through on Turkish X Factor in 2014 and offers plenty of ice cream for pitselehs.

9. Gayance, Waahli, Jarreau Vandal: Podjab
Canada-Portugal, Haiti-Canada, Netherlands

There’s more Francophone diaspora pop to come next week but this one was interesting for having a bit of an old-school zouk feel.

10. Kurena Ishikawa: Les Fleurs
Japan

Really liked Kurena Ishikawa’s covers EP from 2023, which I featured in an early newsletter. She has upped the cover difficult level considerably to Minnie Riperton’s “Les Fleurs” but finds a smooth route in, even has a meta take on incorporating Riperton’s higher register.

11. João Donato, Roberta Sá: Flor de Maracujá
Brazil

An album of contemporary covers of songs by Brazilian pianist and composer João Donato, who passed away in 2023.

12. Nu Fvnk: Uyu 1
Kenya

Really love the album on which this is the lead track, might write more about the project in my next monthly wrap-up. It’s a Kenyan producer who does sampledelica collage with traditional Kenyan music mixed with breakbeats, and is more frenetic than a lot of electronic takes on folk forms tend to be.

13. Ysa C: Zuzu
Colombia

I must be keeping light tabs on Ysa C because everything she releases shows up in my playlists. I’m not complaining! Some of the lightest logdrum incorporation I think I’ve heard yet—this is what I mean in the above essay by regional sounds becoming global templates; that bass sound in something this effervescent probably wouldn’t sound as natural even two or three years ago.

14. Koyo Sur La Prod, David Campana, Maky Lavender: Adam West
Canada

Quebecoise R&B, a bit plain but something drew me to it. Maybe it was the Bat Signal.

15. Dieyla Gueye: Wanéko
Senegal

Eagle-eyed Tidal and Deezer users among you might have already seen this mbalax song appear a few weeks ago. I forgot to write it up in that week’s mix and removed it from my other playlists but can’t go back and edit other playlists very easily. It’s as good now as it was then!

16. M. Rumbi, Ceke, Kamore: Baki Nami
Kenya

A sweet Kenyan duet with acoustic guitar and light percussion, almost light enough to drift away in the wind but I managed to hang on to it.

17. Raffaè: Prato
Italy

More light Latin sounds in kitchen-sink Italian pop.

18. Orquesta Akokán, Miriam Elhajli: Girassol
Cuba-US/Venezuela-Morocco-US

One from the mambo and salsa project I highlighted in the July roundup. Particularly like the slight brassiness that comes through in Miriam Elhajli’s voice, curious how they recorded her (they make it sound like a clean remaster of a 60s record).

19. Jussgigi, JayJayy f. Shoes Meister, Boips: Inxabano
South Africa

20. Djy Mow Sa, Vibekulture Sa, Jayy Scott f. Lethabile 012, Pop Diller: Busa
South Africa

Ending with two from South Africa. New fave vocalist JayJayy appears on a sprightlier- and funkier-than-average amapiano track from a producer I don’t know, then an all-new-to-me crop of producers do a remix of Mpumi Mzobe’s Afrohouse track “Busa” from 2015, paring things down to spotlight Mzobe (who isn’t credited) and then building back up.

That’s it! Until next time, feel free to share your own grand theories of global ferment.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from no na: Honk!

I am away! But it’s time for July in review, so here we go.

11 Songs I Heard in July (unranked)

• Angela Autumn: Mountain Stream

• Aspen Kartier f. K-Money: Bring It

• Bb trickz: A la mala

• Carla Clavijo, Cande Gonzalez, & Omar Varela: Fala de Mais

• Chloé Caillet: Bad Bara

• (D)Juno: BB Bringue

• Güneş: Al Ya Da Barak

• i-dle: Crow

• MOLIY, Yailin la Mas Viral, & Theodora: Jetski (Friki)

• PowerSolo: Habibi Bob

• vgtbl.pl & Clementine le Fruit: Les légumes

10 Albums I Heard in July (lightly ranked)

• Portraits of Tracy: Q: From Where Do Our Primal Instincts Originate? A: MTV! EP

  My favorite from a month of lax album listening and maybe too much attention to big hyped releases I liked well enough to mention here. So this wins the month on points, shows a ton of promise for another young pop formalist in the Debbii Dawson mold, except where Dawson studies Queen and ABBA, Tracy studies…basically all other late-70s/early-80s pop, with a dash of Hüsker Dü thrown in for good measure.

• DJ Love: Budots Republic

  Ranking budots is like ranking seashells, so I was happy to crib from Chuck Eddy’s recent crop of “YEAHs” in his semimonthly Pazz & Jop Product Report and agree that this was the best album qua album, not that that really means much in budots land (for the on-the-ground sand-sifting I’m still mostly using Frank Kogan’s playlists).

• Charli xcx, Music Fashion Film

  I liked this much more than I thought I would, and also agree with pretty much every take I’ve seen, pro or con. Think it frequently sounds “bad” but in a way that sounds good; think it’s distastefully nihilistic but that this is in itself kind of interesting, like trying to make Kesha’s Gag Order without being a hippie; think it’s frequently funny and (less frequently) exhausting. But I’m not in the market for artistic integrity and relatable lyrical philosophies for their own sake, don’t expect her to break any ground in melodic popforms, and the whole thing’s over in 30 minutes flat.

• Willow: The Thread

  I guess I have to be the biggest Willow fan in my immediate friend circle (probably not in the world; I’m sure that includes at least one of her parents) to think this album is: (1) the second-best Willow album in calendar year 2026, (2) much better than most albums, (3) probably underrated by me even now because my expectations are so high, and (4) still probably higher on my list of things to care about in pop music than most critics. Her writing is getting better at the word level and she seems to be putting herself through Berklee in public. At least she met Mei Semones there!

• Ariana Grande: Petal

  Grande’s barely a presence here, alternately bored and haunted, and melts into opaque but oddly sumptuous, if not exactly tuneful, productions—sounds like Max Martin learning how to go hypo from students-become-teachers Luka/Elvira, with Grande at least providing more vocal grain than Addison Rae, which is to say “any at all.” I’m relieved this isn’t quite good enough for me to have any further opinions on the matter. Here’s hoping we can all move on. Anyway, CAPDY is now complete: C > A > P > Y > D. So let’s talk about something—please, anything—else.

• Nia Archives: Emotional Junglist

  Honestly a little too junglist, even though it’s not particularly junglist except maybe in spirit. Let’s call it the second-best indie rock album of the year after Vince Staples’s album, but this is more of a commentary on indie rock than on either of their albums.

• Curió Curió: s/t

  Have very little to say about this crackerjack Brazilian/European dance collection, but it gets the Golden Beatology award as the one album that I suspect most newsletter readers would actually like if they listened to it.

• Orquesta Akokán: América!

  Or maybe it’s a Golden Beatology tie with this one, self-consciously throwback Cuban mambo and salsa album full of great guest vocalists and maybe a frisson of political relevance (according to the promo anyway: “themes of loss, upheaval, and the weight of the immigrant experience”).

• MIA: In the Moonlight EP

  Paper-thin disco-funk that headlines this week’s mix with its oldest track, but the newer ones are pretty good, too.

• Nomieye/Rosie Turton: Tapestry of an Echo EP

  A slow and pretty EP from a jazz trombonist that has the most textural trombone I can remember hearing in a good while, if ever. I don’t understand ASMR but I do understand this.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. MIA: Crime of Passion
Chile-US

Lead track to the fun EP listed above by a Stones Throw artist (that’s “Mia” in all caps). Originally from 2024 but I’m including it under “new to you” rules. A bit aimless as sincere pastiche goes but she’s really smothered into the track in a way that keeps me interested, like there’s an Italians Do It Better anti-pop song hiding inside.

2. Young Pulse, ELASI: Milano Formentera
France/Italy

Keeping the meta throwback party vibes going with more early ‘80s chintzy synth funk. Cadence in the “allo/adieu” section reminds me of Amina’s incredible “Sheherezade.”

3. The Womack Sisters: If I Let You
US

Three literal nieces of “Uncle Bob” with a song that I wavered on putting on the mix because it stalls completely in a way that put me in mind of my thoughts about the contemporary melody crisis—the song is structured like a classic girl group song but the chorus and verse are too close together, and give the song an oddly droning quality. Could maybe imagine this as filler on a classic soul album, but never an actual single. That said, the drone finally got me, especially in context with the other two songs leading the mix.

4. Lalla Rami: 9A7BA
Morocco

I think this is the last Jonathan Bogart megathread inclusion for a while, though I may continue to highlight songs from it in its own special feature or something. Bogart: “trans moroccan diva in paris, debut album coming later this year, with an electro-raï sound that isn't too far from reggaeton but is very conversant with french pop urbaine as well as queer vanguard pop”

5. Dhurata Dora, DJ Snake: Toka
Germany-Albania/France

Sam3K claims that the songs of the year for the past two years have been “ontologically evil”: in 2025, Katseye’s “Gnarly” (which, for the record, I hated, though I think “Internet Girl” is great, so what do I know) and in 2026, the Major Lazer collab with Tokischa. I may eventually relent to Katseye, but this year I’m using DJ Snake as my Major Lazer harm reduction.

6. Itz Tiffany: Money
Ghana

Will give partial credit to Jonathan for this one, too, except it was already on this mix before he shared it! That said, I’m still stealing his blurb for it: “the first Ghanaian pop performer I ever paid attention to, way back in the low-resolution early 2010s, is back, and I don't think it's just nostalgia that makes this big authoritative azontopiano compelling for me”

You can check the genre rolodex for azonto (I did). The “piano” is South African influence in the logdrum, which is more of a neutral bass sound here than its usual amapiano ratatat. Amapiano basically found the most roundabout way possible of ushering in a new era of DONK.

7. CHITAA: Kiss Ei Chuu
Japan

Another one that’s technically been on a mix longer than the person I go to for music like it (this newsletter’s been waiting in the wings for almost three weeks—I’m not here right now!), and whose blurb I will also steal. Here’s Patrick St. Michel on the album:

It takes just over 20 seconds for a bunch of trauma-induced anxiety to spill out of CHITAA. “2020 new virus / COVID-19 / I’m close to 18 / where the fuck is my teen dreams?” And with that we are off into the void that is Japanese adolescence in the 2020s over a fittingly nervous drum ‘n’ bass foundation, fitting for something so jittery about everything. CHITAA herself zips and pogos through it all, Skip-It-ing between English and Japanese to compare her uncertainity over the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (which end in 2030…had no idea!) and explaining what gives her the ick. This debut EP offers a showcase of her vocal loopiness, from the Hyperpop-indebted warp of “Kiss Ei Chuu” to the rap-sing emo on closer “Bluevery Pie.”

8. Yosuke Shimonaka: Private Jet
Japan

I’m looking forward to the forthcoming fusion album from Yosuke Shimonaka, purveyor of the sort of quirky, uptight funk I enjoyed (a little) in my 1974 Japanese albums research.

9. Curió Curió: Amor Doente
Brazil-Austria/Germany

[You may notice I wrote this prior to the album blurb above] I did not go back and check but I’m pretty confident this Brazilian cosmo-pop party is yet another Bongo label no-brainer, just can’t remember if it’s Mr. Bongo or Les Disques Bongo Joe. <checks> Mr. Bongo! I guess I had a fifty-fifty shot there. Whole album is a blast.

10. Baiuca, Carlos Ares: Noitada
Spain

Spanish act I think I first learned about from Dan Bright Amaya, an indispensable guide to Spanish and Catalan pop. The project blends Galician folk and electronica, but this one is a little more straightforward, with more guitar and less cut-up.

11. Mari Froes: Rio Lua
Brazil

Another one said to blend folk with modern pop, though I don’t know that I need to go much further than “pretty acoustic guitar and melancholy melody.”

12. Teodros Makonnen: Libesh Kabashen [c. 1980-1984]
Ethiopia

An early electronic pioneer in Ethio-jazz. As far as Ethio-jazz titans go, it’s closer to Hailu Mergia’s minimal approach than Mulatu Astatke, but it’s flatter, sparer, and more cyclical than Mergia.

13. Sulaf: Shogi Ana
Sudan-France

14. Bonobo f. Arooj Aftab: Fire on the Water
UK/Pakistan-US

Two songs that stretch out slowly with enough lightness to avoid feeling like a trudge. The first is from Sudanese artist Sulaf, the second a collaboration between Arooj Aftab and British producer Simon Green, part of the new Bonobo record that’s a who’s-who of trendy pop-experimentalist guests.

15. Sucola: Venus Line
Japan

Japanese pop with a Kings of Convenience-esque guitar pattern that reminds me of “Drop” by Cornelius.

16. N NAO f. Helena Deland: Fleuron
Canada

Well, if you are going to stretch things out to a trudge, you might as well do it in Montreal.

17. Sudno: Ніч [Nich]
Belarus

The downer rock suite continues with another song from a very Cure-oriented Ukrainian band that did not get a zine in Pitchfork on this basis.

18. Starcleaner Reunion: Never Odd or Even
US

Less downer, still indie rock, with a dash of Stereolab in there to keep things interesting.

19. Maddie Lenhart: Newton’s First Law
US

I like how this song does exhibit a kind of inertia—the motion of a heavy rock down a very shallow decline, perhaps—but without really having the forward momentum that I’d like from it, which is to say it keeps moving without really getting anywhere, which is admittedly The Point.

20. Maudit Vincent: Vieux chêne (version nuit au parc)
Canada

A nice lo-fi closer from Montreal, no idea how they keep getting away with it (having a thriving indie scene).

That’s it! Until next time, go listen to a Willow album or two.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from Maddie Lenhart: Newton’s First Law

Another week, another shout out to new followers who may have no idea what this is! The short pitch: it’s a weekly music newsletter where I share a bunch of mostly new songs (20) and mostly new words (many more than 20). If you don’t want the words, you can skip to the songs, and vice versa.

My post from two years ago on Taylor Swift and the ‘10s trend I call “modal rap,” a specific iteration of melodic rapping, seems to be making the rounds again. I never really expanded on that piece, which compares melodic rapping to Taylor Swift’s melodies in a way that’s deliberately provocative. I ended up making a mash-up mixtape of Taylor Swift melodies on melodic rap beats, though, for which I provided light liner notes here:

I describe her melody style as “hugging the root tone”: building songs around the rhythm of the words and (I would guess) rarely starting the process from an inspired wordless melody. Her singing, especially post-2020, tends to generate more rhythmic and verbal than melodic interest, which should in theory make it interesting to pair with rap. […]

At the end of the mix, I tie my musings together with older work. First, a live performance of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” where you can hear her get her sea legs when the fiddle comes in. I pair “You Belong With Me” with “Ride Wit Me,” the [Nelly] song that I conspiratorially believe she learned to play when she was twelve. More accurately, I believe she learned how to sing “Ride Wit Me” over the chords to “Complicated” by Avril Lavigne.

I have a more sophisticated take on the genesis of Taylor Swift’s melodic style than just “singing ‘Ride Wit Me’ over the chords to ‘Complicated’.” The early inspo pie chart has big slices for hip-hop, confessional teenpop, country, and emo. And there seems to be some evidence for this from a very early interview with her from 2004 on Good Morning America that was uploaded to YouTube about a year ago. That video confirmed a few things I’ve long suspected about her early musical favorites—for instance, she was a big enough Eminem fan to own not only Eminem albums but D12 albums. (This is also true of Ed Sheeran.)1 That plus Kelly Clarkson, Tim McGraw, Yellowcard, and Simple Plan, with a special symbolic place for Leann Rimes’s Blue, gets you a decent speculative taste roadmap.

I think my melody musings point to something outside of a lot of those maybe-inspirations, though. At the center of my writing is an idea of Taylor Swift’s voice, in a literal and figurative sense, being simultaneously conversational and incantatory. She’s singing to you in some obvious sense, but really she’s talking to you in a way that has a kind of alchemy in it, and I think she has something that basically none of the artists who seem to be working in her style really share. They frequently resort to sprechgesang but they aren’t talking to you.

Part of what distinguishes Taylor Swift is simply her scale. But I also think that among her childhood heroes, she towers less like her formalist muse LeAnn Rimes, an otherworldly singing talent, and is more like an Eminem pied piper figure. Like Eminem, Taylor Swift appears to leave traces of a massive impact everywhere, even though no other artists really get away with being soundalikes—the more you try to copy directly, the further you fall from the promise of her.2 Bob Dylan is like this, too. As other comparably scaled megastars go, I’d argue that the Beatles are not like this; they’re too generous and generative. You can borrow directly from the Beatles all you like and still sound like yourself (and sound great).

Over on Bluesky, Mark Sinker (dubdobdee) noted that one thing that both Bob Dylan and Taylor Swift do is create a kind of permission for others to do something other than merely “sound like me.” (His ideas in full are worth reading in the thread.)

Dubdobdee: “It really [is] about reshaping the entire landscape—obviously this has SOME relationship to what Bob Dylan was doing but it’s more what listeners took from it, as in ‘oh wait apparently I have permission to do THIS now!’ Where ‘this’ isn’t something Dylan was doing but NO ONE ELSE WAS DOING IT EITHER.”

You can hear a “post-Swift landscape” without ever really having to hear another Taylor Swift, per se. In fact, the closest we’ve gotten sonically to “another Taylor Swift” is the fascinating ROSÉ album that I wrote about here, which to me sounded like it was threatening Swift head on, not drawing from her power. It was an attempted industrial coup of its own odd design.

More generally, confessional-minded music in the wake of Taylor Swift’s success gives us a deluge of diaristic words pointing to the inner life of the artist, the deluge itself often coming at the expense of melody and economy. This autobiographical quality was not in and of itself something that really motivated me to like millennial confessional teenpop that preceded Taylor Swift (and which, I argue in my series, she took over completely)—it’s just that this approach happened to create lots of good, affecting music that I took to heart.3 The recessive 2020s version in the shadow of Taylor Swift is verbally denser and melodically weaker, and most of it simply doesn’t sound very good to me.4 But impact’s impact, the rest is taste.

So what does sound good? Well!

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. MOLIY, Yailin la Mas Viral, Theodora: Jetski (Friki)
Ghana-US, Dominican Republic, DRC-France

If you needed a quick guide to the globe’s current ferment you could do worse than getting these three on a track. MOLIY, along with collaborator and spiritual cousin Amaarae, has translated interesting elements of West African music—an ease with Afrobeats, a pinched but sweet soprano—to bigger global audiences. Yailin la Mas Viral is a good representative of various Latin American pop forms in their psych era: blending together, getting weird, pushing boundaries. And bringing up the rear in this particular version of the song (the official music video doesn’t feature her) is France’s current great hope for Afro-Caribbean crossover, Theodora, who is at the center of a whirlwind of amazing pop coming out of France right now.

2. (D)Juno: BB Bringue
Côte D’Ivoire-France

Newer to that whirlwind is (D)Juno, an aspiring French star of Ivorian heritage finding ways to take the emerging template of Caribbean-inflected generalist pop in France and adding in yet another regional element—the trickier rhythms of Ivorian coupé decalé.

I’ve been wondering why France has had so much success with the adaptation and translation of regional rhythmic forms within more mainstream-minded pop music recently, while artists attempting to do this in the US have generally faltered.

I was disappointed, for instance, with the new album from South African pop star Tyla, who named her album A*POP with the hopes of speaking to the genres and heritage of her own regional scene in South Africa, but I think accidentally tipped her hand to the limitations of her own adaptations in evoking the thing that I’ve been calling A-pop. Her songs on the new album sound to me like weak hybrids of US R&B with elements from South African pop and dance music, and mostly remind me that I’d rather be listening to South African music without US distribution.

But what’s happening in France reminds me that this isn’t some principled stance; I just don’t think Tyla specifically has been very successful at doing it. Artists in Japan, Kazakhstan, Poland, Colombia, and the UK have all had some success adapting their own style to amapiano, and I think it’s because you can hear their admiration and excitement in amapiano; they’re aspiring to make something as good as what they’re hearing. Tyla is giving flowers to the music scene she came from, but you can tell she wants to be something else—the next Rihanna, maybe. But there probably isn’t going to be a next Rihanna, or at least not one centered in the US market. Maybe (D)Juno has a shot from France.

3. Dj Quick, Fallon: Jamais
Guadeloupe-France/France

The other artists whose work I’ve featured a lot this year that I count as part of the French whirlwind are LinLin, whose album at least got a politely favorable review in Pitchfork, and Fallon. Fallon is probably the least assuming of the stars in terms of chatter in English-language publications, but she put out an album this year (Winter Princess) that I’ve returned to more than most other albums.

4. Savinnah, Genes1s: On Me
Kenya

I have already used up pretty much all of my email space for the post, as I’m wont to do! So brief descriptions from here on out. Here’s some Kenyan dancehall that seems influenced by Martinician shatta but with more low end in the drums.

5. Theomaa, 1T1: Wouloo
Guadeloupe

Bread ‘n’ butter bouyon! It’s good!

6. INNA: Morenito
Romania

Oh man, no words left for a paragraph or two on the cyclical return of INNA? She put out my second-favorite album of 2019 and one of my favorite songs of the last decade (“Tu Manera”) and here she is re-introducing herself yet again. (“Hi, how are you? What are you doing tonight?”)

7. Mahmut Orhan, Neşe Karaböcek: Yali
Turkey

Turkish electrothrob!

8. Sandy: Yalla Ya Layaly
Egypt

Lovely ballad from an Egyptian singer with a big enough profile for an English-language Wikipedia page that informs me she had a “fake retirement announcement” ten years ago.

9. Idra Kayne: San Star Tou Cinema
Greece

What would probably be a decent midtempo diva number is given a Frankenstein makeover and accompanying lightning bolt jolt with a somewhat incongruous freestyle beat.

10. Sarah Sampp: Me Deixou Leve
Brazil

Will once again give props to my favorite music thread of the year—Jonathan Bogart’s thread of outside-his-comfort-zone [EDIT: and also inside comfort zone!] songs: “brazilian r&b singer throwing back to 90s baile funk, when it was still airy miami bass pulses instead of blaring hard clave; adding her recent EP/mixtape to my listening queue now”

I’m glad that “hard clave” has taken off as a term with its intended demographic (Jonathan Bogart). May feature his thread in its own essay in the future and share a playlist of it rather than keep swiping from it (at least two more from it coming up next week, though). There’s a lot of good music out there!

11. Emma Rose: Schön sein (ist fun)
Germany

Lite German synthpop that did not graduate very far from the “singing into hairbrush” stage of development (complimentary).

12. Kapeke: London
Uganda

More charming Ugandan rap from a new playlist I’ve been following. I’ve started searching for playlists of specific underrepresented countries after my mapping adventures last week, more on that later. Uganda usually gets a leg up from being the Nyege Nyege Tapes home base, but I still don’t hear enough other stuff outside that label’s orbit.

13. LeoZera, Kaue Mc, CACAU CHUU: Na Rlk do MJ
Brazil

Two funk tracks for the week. The first is a “Smooth Criminal” joyride that sounds like it opted for the soundtrack to the SEGA Genesis game Moonwalker. From a decent album that (spoiler alert) just missed my best of the month rundown next week.

14. DJ Cigano SP, MC Pessoa: Noite Passada
Brazil

Second funk track, pretty melody, prettier fiddle. About as un-psychotic a violin as you can get, really.

15. Honda Remix: مسافة الامان [Safe distance]
Egypt

Is that brega funk from Egypt? From an artist named Honda Remix whose remix of a Honda is apparently an Audi?

16. renie cares, на її оцнові [Na Jiji Otsnovy] f. vrochinskiy: Неcповідимі шляхи [Nespovidymi shlyaxi]
Ukraine

Weirdo rock-slash-rap-slash-noise-slash-wait-what? from Ukraine!

17. mui zyu: パラレリズム (Parallelisme) [Pararerizumu]
Japan-UK

This one’s gorgeous, lightly orchestral dream-pop. Website says an album is forthcoming, at which point maybe I’ll have room to write more.

18. Damaris Bojor: All the Things She Said
Mexico

A cover of the t.A.T.u. classic in a regional Mexican pop style. Would love to hear a version in Spanish.

19. Hakushi Hasegawa, HaHa and the Hairpins: The Owner of Sweetness
Japan

Jelcore spotted! Cute ‘n’ scruffy, with suitably cute ‘n’ scruffy video protagonists. Jel weighs in: “I like it! Elephant 6 J-Pop!” (That’s a rave.)

20. Ichiko Aoba: Sayonara Penguin
Japan

Turns out you can be a critically lauded experimentalist and still do your best work writing a cute 2-minute song about a fuzzy stop-motion penguin.

That’s it! Until next time, choose your words more carefully than I do if you’re worried about email cutoffs.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from INNA: Morenito (“¡Hola! ¿Qué tal?”)

After updating my big spreadsheet of songs again, I started wondering what the easiest way might be to create a world map that tracks every song I’ve featured according to its country of origin. There are a few programs that do this pretty easily and incorporate spreadsheets without a lot of hassle. You get something that looks like this for my 2026 songs so far:1

Ideally, you’d be able to click any country and see a list of songs, maybe with
YouTube links for them. But so far the execution is a little wonky.

This is related to an idea I’ve had for a while of something like a dilettante’s guide to global pop—not really a primer, just a simple and impressionistic sense of the world’s musical ferment with links to songs and when possible reliable people and publications that tend to cover those scenes, regions, and genres. It would be a static page updated occasionally.

A regional approach is a logical way to approach it—in my own categorization I use: US, Anglosphere, Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, MENAT (Middle East/North Africa/Turkey), Caribbean (+ some Francophone diaspora pop), and the nebulous “Cosmopolitan” for cross-country collaborations and other ambiguously transnational work. (I think any useful guide would have to break these large regions down further by specific countries and subregions.)

But I don’t think that a regional approach necessarily does justice to the ways in which music operates beyond or outside of regional orientation—it’s more of a starting point to get your bearings. (The more important point is that good music can come from anywhere, or maybe everywhere all at once.)

A glossary of genres and connections can be useful to a point, but such lists start to balloon and then become counter-productive. I’ve written about my qualms with too-fine genre-splicing before, in this post. Rate Your Music has an extensive list of over 1,500 regional genres (by far the most subgenres for any of their major categories), which are handy as a raw list but pretty hopeless in meaningfully organizing contemporary music.2

I think something that at least puts global publications for different types of music in one aggregated place would be helpful. Maybe someone has done something like it? It should also probably include blogs and newsletters and social media accounts. Beehype admirably tracks different regions with lots of contributors, though the collective taste there tends toward arty and the updates can be pretty sporadic. The closest I’ve found within my immediate network keeping regular tabs on few of the major international publications (Remezcla, OkayAfrica, Bandcamp Daily, international Billboard or Rolling Stone coverage or variants, etc.) is the rundown that Collin Smith regularly does at No Chambers.3

I know that the scattered and piecemeal way that I throw around various genre terms and regional scenes—often as I’m learning about something for the first time myself, and often with only a surface level understanding—can be hard to follow. (I usually encourage people I know in real life to just pick a few songs at random and see what they think.) I’d like to be able to at least present the information in different or more accessible ways.

So who or what else is out there? What kind of organization or information would be helpful for you?

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. Angela Autumn: Mountain Stream
US

Think global, act local—this week’s mix nudged overall US representation across my mixes this year up a bit because I have to do my due diligence on alt & indie. Here’s Nashville artist Angela Autumn with some alt-country that actually rips, sounds like what I wanted to hear from Waxahatchee’s countryish turn.

2. Sad13: I Am Now Completely Invisible
US

A sketchbook EP/album from Speedy Ortiz’s Sadie Dupuis, 13 ideas in 15 minutes, lots of good starting points that probably sound better without trying to fill out a full song. The end result is a bit cerebral and the project wavers between unfinished (good) and underbaked (less good).

3. Buffalo Daughter: Harm No More
Japan

Longtime Japanese proggish-indieish outfit that was a golden beat a few years ago in a Peoples Pop Charity Poll, with the sublime “Cyclic” from 2003. This, too, is a little cyclic, but it gains steam, and a few minutes in you realize you’ve already been rocking out for a while.

4. Portraits of Tracy: Caught in a Jam
US

LA indie wunderkind who put out a decent solo album at 18 and now at 21 has already gotten bored with regular structure and has pastiched together some early ‘80s MTV weirdo-pop for her upcoming EP (Q: From Where Do Our Primal Instincts Originate? A: MTV! out tomorrow), part Buggles, part Supertramp, part…Billy Joel? Get her and Debbii Dawson in the studio together pronto.

5. The Fleeting Light of Love and Grief: Une excellente aventure
Canada

Montreal indie from CREEM’s playlist, often good for surfacing Real Rock torch-bearers who actually rock a little.

6. Dinamarca, emmi: Espacios.cl
Sweden/Spain

The vocals are airy, the accompaniment turgid, the combination provocatively lopsided enough to make up for the inevitable drag, though doesn’t exactly put the drag to great use, either. A drag that doesn’t race?

7. Snõõper: Recess
US

Snõõper sound bored and have decided to goof around at recess. It suits them.

8. Emei: Bloom
US

Ah, need to put together my unified theory of post-Taylor A-pop song construction, and explain why I think it’s a mistake to give Taylor all the credit for it. As usual, this doesn’t really sound like Taylor, only sounds of Taylor’s world, much of which she got from (let’s say) absorbing other singer-songwriter trends into her whole deal.

9. VINII: Cold
Japan

The fact that I found this song mildly pleasant and didn’t think twice about the fact that its hypertrap backing would have sounded completely alien and abrasive to me little more than 10 years ago tells you how much the sound and/or the world and/or I have changed. But then again if you’d ask me pre-hypertrap “could literally anything eventually become background music?” I’d probably have guessed yes.

10. Zae: Bomba
Philippines

Also interesting to me how quickly rap tropes from the 2010s melted into various hyphenate-pop styles across Asia, to the point that they now sound less like their original reference points and more like K-pop.

11. Kinck: Bang Bing
Denmark

I kind of like the clave with training wheels sound here, sounds like what would happen if I messed around with a DAW trying to make a Brazilian funk song, terminally dorky but not without its charms.

12. ASTAR: Dou Baayi (Hymne Sky Girls)
Senegal

Lite pop mbalax that I suppose one should expect from an empowerment anthem bankrolled by <checks notes> the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? Huh, I was not expecting that.

13. Young Roddo: No Bad Grades
US

Here’s one where the artist is so young (nine) that I start to think about its relationship to youth media. I haven’t written seriously about youth media for a long time. My biggest interest in it as a form many years ago was the question of legibility, i.e., how much does youth media need to approximate professional media to become “watchable” to adult audiences? I noticed an uncanny valley in youth media where you can be so amateurish that you approach the charming but insular speaking-in-tongues feel of home movies or even experimental cinema, or on the other hand so professional that you can compete with other media without coding as “youth media” at all. But most falls in an awkward middle: corny sketches, phony attempts at newsroom tropes, clumsy short films.

But both of these sides of the valley have sort of collapsed in the intervening years. On the one side, amateurish media has become its own grammar through YouTube and TikTok, so that the terrible high school skits I used to nudge students away from are now the form most likely to get them real eyeballs. Meanwhile it has never been easier to compete with “professional media” when it has either largely de-professionalized (“man on the street” style YouTube content, say) or can be approximated with accessible effects software.

This song falls firmly on the side of accessible professionalism, so you really are face to face with performance and the content—he can’t believe he’s going to marry his crush in the sixth grade (three years older!) while he sings in a studio that’s the same as anyone else’s studio, and has afforded him the same virality as anyone else.

14. Karen y Los Remedios: Creación del Universo
Mexico

One of those songs that I’d peg as cosmo-pop even though it wouldn’t get marked as “cosmo” in my regional spreadsheet, from a longstanding Mexican alt-rock outfit led by a social scientist.

15. Alfonso Soliano: Masth Chantani [c 1972]
Malaysia

Tabla-led jam from a new collection of Malaysian jazz pianist and bandleader Alfonso Soliano on Habibi Funk sister label Audible Beauty. More info at Bandcamp, and a short video on YouTube.

16. Ndiolé Tall, Matadi: Allez Les Lions!
Senegal

I experienced most of the World Cup by scrolling through social media posts, though I did catch a game or two. The official music left quite a bit to be desired, and seemed reflective of the unsavory cloud of corruption around the World Cup industry, and how that industry only got more odious in contact with the current US government.

Most of the good music wound up happening on the periphery, and this track from Senegal (knocked out in the Group of 32 to Belgium) is no exception, the sweeter sound of a world event with less of a pall hanging over it. It all felt like a nadir of something with a few glimmers of hope for the (distant?) future, and there’s no telling when or how you’ll bounce back from something like that. I try not to count out the possibility of better things being possible in a few years.

17. Ramiz: Haram
Turkey

18. Ziynet Sali: Yeniden
Turkey

Two from Turkey! I did not do any research on them and have very little space left to write about them in this email, which is very convenient! The first video has the camels from today’s screenshot. I think they’re both good!

19. Tufic, Luis Guinea: “El beso”
Mexico

A languorous, somewhat indulgent ballad, apparently matched my mood while compiling this mix. Who am I to question my past self’s judgment?

20. Andr: 安
Taiwan

Bringing the indie full circle in a pretty coda from Taiwan.

That’s it! Until next time, let me know if a literal or figurative map of all of this music would be helpful.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from Sad13: I Am Now Completely Invisible

It is time to go back to my childhood—the People’s Pop polls are tackling 1996, an important year in my own music listening because it was the first year that I felt genuinely plugged in to pop culture. 1996 was the year I clicked with Alanis Morissette, whose 1995 album disqualifies her from the poll, but also with Bone Thugs-n-Harmony and Blackstreet and Busta Rhymes and Rage Against the Machine and the Fugees and Sublime and “C’mon N’Ride It (The Train)” and “Return of the Mack” and “My Boo” and “Pony.” (It was not, however, the year that the Spice Girls conquered my middle school—I didn’t hear them until 1997.)

What has interested me most in the tournament so far, though, is that it has revealed some notable gaps between US and UK experiences of “songs of the year.” Many UK voters have commented that they never heard “One Headlight” by the Wallflowers or “My Boo” by Ghost Town DJs, and that the highest charting “Tha Crossroads” in the UK is not Bone Thugs (UK peak #8) but Blazin’ Crew (UK peak #1). Meanwhile, I had never even heard of Olive (the song itself doesn’t ring a bell either, was just outside the Top 40 in the US), who beat Bone Thugs in a headline match.

This got me wondering a bit about historical US/UK chart divergence. Andrew Hickey commented in this conversation that “1996 was probably the peak of the mid/late-nineties UK/US divide, which was as stark as the early-seventies or pre-1964 ones.” Centuries of Sound expanded the thought: “1996 we were starting to get some US rap & hip-hop again, after those couple of years where it was just the Outhere Brothers, but grunge and post-grunge was absent until the start of the 2000s.”

I noticed the pre-1964 chart divergence when I did some listening for a 1962 playlist—the Beatles really do seem like a meteor from outer space, albeit one that had received transmissions from the Everly Brothers’ “Cathy’s Clown,” #1 for seven weeks in the UK in 1960.

I’m aware of lots of songs that didn’t cross the pond in one direction or the other through many years of participation in Tom’s polls going back 20 years this year; in fact I think the last time we polled 1996 was in 2006 (me in 2006 re: 1996: “it’s the year where I knew EVERYTHING on this chart, and have very specific recollections of the music in the actual context of my life at the time”). But I wondered if there was a quick way to compare UK/US divergence. The simplest one I could think of was to use simultaneous shared #1s as a proxy. That is to say, songs that were #1 in the US and UK during the same weeks.1

This gives you the following list:

That’s every year for each decade from 1950-2026. I recorded the number of songs that shared a #1 simultaneously in the US and the UK (in the “#” column) and also the number of weeks collectively that those songs were #1 on both charts at the same time (the “w” column).2

The mid-90s are indeed a bit of a dead zone, with no overlapping #1s between 1994-1996. The high total number of shared weeks for #1s in the US and UK in the 1990s is inflated a bit by Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You,” which was #1 in both countries simultaneously for a then-record 10 weeks, a feat that would only be repeated or broken (so far) by Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” (11 weeks) and Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito” (10 weeks) in 2017.

The #1s convergence grows through the 2000s and explodes in the 2010s—most of this can probably be attributed to streaming, where release dates are more coordinated globally and first-week global sales make a big difference. Sometimes songs will hang on for several weeks after a huge week 1, but other times will just hit big at #1 before dropping off the global charts.

We may be looking at a “new normal” of this kind of chart convergence in the #1 spot—I don’t see how you get around the ruthless global streaming launches of existing megacelebrities. I wonder if there’s any way for US and UK charts meaningfully diverge again.

I’d be interested to explore this a bit more beyond the #1 overlap stat and see if the historical “dead zones” on this list correspond to greater divergence in songs on the charts. But in the meantime, if you happen to meet (or to be) a British person interested in the music of 1996, please know from someone who lived through it in the US that you can probably skip “One Headlight” if you haven’t heard it by now, but by all means drop everything and listen to “My Boo” as soon as possible. Olive was pretty good!

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. Chloé Caillet: Bad Bara
France

It’s mostly a Golden Beatology week this week, lots of party tunes for weather too hot to party in. Kicking things off with a Ninja Tune summer jam that reminded me a little of the DJ Yam Who rework of Parallel Dance Ensemble’s “Turtle Pizza Cadillac,” a chant-along staple in my household and a song I last mentioned here in my very first newsletter. At that time, I figured I would publish something whenever I got a CD-length mix together, which historically had been about once a month. I’ve now published one every single week for nearly four years.

2. Ubunto: O Vento Part, As Ganhadeiras de Itapuã [2022]
Brazil

A fantastic track on a strong Bongo Joe compilation that includes plenty of, you guessed it, bongos. (Bandcamp lists the album this is from as 2022, but most other info I found points to a physical release in 2024.)

3. PowerSolo: Habibi Bob
Denmark

Was not surprised to learn that these new-to-me (I think?) but established Danish garage rockers have been longtime collaborators with Jon Spencer.

4. Gabriele Poso: 01 AM
Italy

Yeah, yeah, more bongos. What, you don’t want more bongos?

5. Acid Arab f. Cheba Ibtissem: Ktafi Bardine
Algeria-France, Tunisia

Haven’t yet checked out the new Acid Arab album, which at a glance doesn’t have as forceful a banger as “Döne Döne” from 2023, but it still grooves just fine with a bunch of MENA pop guests, like Tunisian singer Cheba Ibtissem on this track.

6. Vanita Leo, Sophie Castillo: Putiwepa
Mexico-US, Colombia-UK

Day-glo diasporic reggaeton-pop, with one artist based in the US and the other based in the UK.

7. Carla Clavijo, Cande Gonzalez, Omar Varela: Fala de Mais
Argentina

Argentine brega funk, would have guessed it was Brazilian before I clicked through. Don’t know anything about the crossover in Argentina, but should maybe look into it.

8. Lera Fatforest: Girls Vibe
Ukraine

One of the better Ukrainian dance tracks I’ve heard recently. I bet the spoken breakdown in the middle is funny, but I do not speak Ukrainian.

9. Maria Daniela Y Su Sonido Lasser: Hoja al Viento
Mexico

Have to keep up my Maria Daniela representation—haven’t featured her since 2023!

10. vgtbl.pl, Clementine le Fruit: Les légumes
Poland

Polish goofballs mix Polish and French to remind you to eat your veggies, likely with lots of wordplay and double entendres I’m missing.

11. Aspen Kartier f. K-Money: Bring It
US

No wordplay missed on this one, though, and the entendres are mostly single.

12. DJ ML ORIGINAL, Mc Gw, Mc Magrinho: Ela Fez 18 Anos
Brazil

Phonk remix of a song from 2013. One of my kids was interested in the clave rhythm and we talked about the finer points of phonk versus funk. (He doesn’t really like either, though.)

13. Sskyron, DjDanWayo: Hin Hin Hin [2025]
Réunion

A 2025 song got through my dancehall playlists this week, but it was too good to leave off.

14. Kaaris: Huracan
France

15. Dynaso Wegoso: Atasa
Uganda

Two macho poses that seem more playful than they let on, from a French rapper and a new playlist of Ugandan hip-hop I found this week, respectively.

16. Neyna: Lebam
Cape Verde

This is one from my favorite music thread of the year so far, Jonathan Bogart’s list of “some of the more interesting (not nec. complimentary) music i find over the course of the year,” which so far apparently means it aligns much more closely with my own taste than his.

Of this one, Bogart sez: “despite a solid decade of posting i don't believe i've ever successfully converted anyone else into caring about kizomba, the signature creamily romantic rhythm of Portuguese Africa, but that's fine, more for me.”

This is only true to the extent that every time I think I’ve found a kizomba artist I like it turns out not really to be kizomba, just an errant genre tag. So I hereby resolve to listen to more actual kizomba.

17. Asayel: Smo Alay
Saudi Arabia

Was so blown away with Asayel upon finding her single “Asliyah” for the World Cup of Pop that I have an alert on her for new releases. This is the most recent one, a brief but pleasant Afrobeats-ish number.

18. Sandra Kolstad: Fiat
Norway

No idea where this single-digit-view arty sequencer pop came from (aside from Norway), like The Knife if it happened to be a butter knife. I enjoyed it.

19. Yushh: Mos Def
UK

The sort of bloops and clacks and thoughtful head nodding stuff that now gets called “intricate” and used to get called IDM. She’s great, and based in Bristol.

20. Vĩ: Sóng Thần
Vietnam

The return of Vĩ, whose name changes and discography reshufflings have made her a bit hard to follow, not to mention functionally un-googleable (but then what is functionally googleable these days). This iteration seems to have stabilized and she’s collected most of her material here after some of it had disappeared for a while. The Bandcamp page does not include this week’s ambient closer, but it does include a separate experimental 9-minute track/EP(?) from April if you’re so inclined.

That’s it! Until next time, listen to “My Boo” again.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from vgtbl.pl, Clementine le Fruit: Les légumes (“Je vis ma vis je suis vitaminée”)

I came back from vacation to an overstuffed playlist brimming with good songs. We’re in an age of musical abundance — in about three hours I was able to put together the next three mixes, with 5,500 songs still to try out.

My longstanding argument through this newsletter is that you can only really understand today’s abundance by understanding the ways in which the world has opened up multilaterally—I go into it more in this essay, about the “celestial jukebox” and its delayed reality.

One way to experience this is just to throw yourself into an ocean of great art and horrible noise and cloying junk, with blurry lines between all three categories, and figure out a lot of what’s going on after the fact, in a piecemeal way often lacking key context. I don’t think it’s impossible for someone to develop some kind of expertise somewhere in this landscape, I just think it’s basically impossible for me to do that, given what I’m actually doing (which, for the record, I think is worth doing). I’m monolingual, physically unadventurous, and have a hopelessly frayed attention span.

Still, upon reflection, my entry point into “omnivorous global music” at the dawn of mass internet access 20 years ago was probably much worse than what I have now, regardless of how chaotic things can seem. The framings I most frequently encountered were far too pessimistic and patronizing even when they claimed a nominally progressive view of the situation.

I’m thinking especially about the concept of “shanty house,” which Simon Reynolds described this way in 2005:

Brit blogger Woebot coined the witty term “shanty house” as a catchall for all these world-is-a-ghetto musics: impurist genres (see also: kwaito, desi) that typically suture bastardized vestiges of indigenous folk forms to pirated elements of rap, rave, and bass ‘n’ booty. Locally rooted but plugged into the global media sphere, these scenes don’t bother overmuch with sample clearances, and vibe-wise they typically project ruffneck raucousness leavened with party-up calls to shake dat ass. They also speak, vividly if obliquely, of a new world disorder where Tupac Shakur vies with Bin Laden as a T-shirt icon and terrorists keep in touch via text messaging.

Seeing relative global poverty as a vast network of ghettos ripe for political or artistic activation was a framing that I also received from professors in college. The excitement in these conversations—about music, film, and culture—usually came from imagining “indigenous folk forms” in some dramatic collision with millennial futurism.

The actual “folk” imagined in these conversations were said to be engaged in contemporary culture enough to create visionary art or spark political revolution, but also most valuable (and most cool) in having some meaningful orientation outside of Western contemporary culture that didn’t afford them plain aspirations of fame or comfort. Guerilla films and no-budget microcinemas were more exciting than burgeoning regional entertainment industries or international blockbuster collaborations. Recording favela funk vocalists and plugging them into hip mash-ups with futurist-minded rap and electronic beats was more exciting than just putting out the albums of the extant popular Brazilian funk music in a well-curated way.

I think today’s reality of musical abundance comes not from a foundational clash between haves and have-nots, but from the gradual decline of global attentional power of assumed “haves” and the simultaneous formation—or maybe more accurately amplification—of aspirational artists in regions, diasporas, and immigrant populations across the world who have more potential audiences and more routes to success.

How to describe this landscape instead is difficult—it’s so diffuse, and there’s so much of it. I think a stronger regional understanding of the world’s music does important basic educative work: it probably doesn’t hurt to at least tap maps, musically speaking. The core argument of the A-pop series is that when American pop itself is conceived as regional, the people using it as their lodestar need to start getting used to their own version of a comparative existence: feeling the need to keep up with something unfamiliar to you, and not always having important cultural tools to help like language, convention, context, while also understanding that this just puts you at a disadvantage you can’t ignore but also can’t easily change.

But I also think regionality only gets you so far. Artists don’t respect regional boundaries with any more rigidity than they might respect genre boundaries (that is to say, they might or might not respect them as boundaries, and don’t have to). Understanding how culture moves globally inside and outside of regions, especially in ways that seem to bypass English-lanugage pop music from the US almost entirely, seems like an important part of accessing today’s abundance. And there’s always abundance locally, too, I guess. There’s music all over the damn place.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. i-dle: Crow
South Korea

I’ve long been meaning to focus more on producers when I write about music here—I know some people have shifted to a convention of listing artist and primary producer in every song credit. The detective work on this is much easier than it once might have been. But I still see some value in listing the lead artist as synecdoche for the team.

Sometimes you miss something important this way, like crediting lead singer Soyeon as a producer responsible for the sound of lots of i-dle/(G)ID-LE’s singles. This was the first one that made me sit up and take notice of the production: from its arresting use of a First Nations vocal chant sample to its glorious schaffel-stomp.

2. ALMAS, NXNNI: Dumb Boy
Mexico

Exhibit A in K-pop replacing US and Anglosphere pop as a template for variation if you want to be a Pop Star in capital letters: a Mexican girl group that leans heavily on K-pop, including being totally fine with using the “nanny nanny boo boo” nursery rhyme melody for their chorus. Also maybe some evidence that I was on to something in thinking that “Say So” was Dr. Luke’s attempt to write a K-pop song. (Apparently he’s actually started producing K-pop songs, too. It’s a good song, but c’mon, call someone else!)

3. Yseult: Freak
France

French star goes new jack swing in a way that nods to Bruno Mars’s “Finesse,” with JT playing the Cardi B role on the remix.

4. Fagata, MODELKI: Facecard
Poland

5. Young Leosia, CUZCO$: Aftery Pod Blokiem
Poland

Two from Poland—the first is light hyperpop with a dash of K-pop that maybe doesn’t really come through any stronger than the resemblance between the titles “Facecard” and “Queencard” (so not “Exhibit B,” then). Then Young Leosia does her neo-hip-house thing well; she’s earned enough goodwill to appear on a mix once a year for basically any reason.

6. Muki: Girls Will Be Girls (Lucky Iris Remix)
UK

More hyperish stuff from the UK. Hm, maybe I should start theorizing B-pop (no relation to Britpop) as a twin engine for pop templates, to include Charli XCX and PinkPantheress? Can hyperpop really be claimed just for the UK? (Probably not.) There might be an interesting divergence in US/UK charts happening, though—maybe more on that later.

7. Manya: Bez słów
Poland

Ah, right, knew I had a more K-poppy Polish song in here somewhere. It’s this one! Exhibit B.

8. AVYSS, osoroshia kakumei: モテたいっ
Japan

9. TV Tairiku Ondo: 超常現象を信んじてみる。[Chōjō genshō o shin njite miru.]
Japan

Two indie rock freakouts from Japan, first osoroshia kakumei on one of two AVYSS label J-pop collections released a week apart, one seems more rock (Inner Sync) and the other seems more pop (Hollow Hype), but I only skimmed. The other song is by TV Tairiku Ondo, whom Patrick St. Michel wrote about for The Japan Times. My brain keeps defaulting to Vampire Weekend for some reason?

10. INDAKHUS, dia: Bentar lagi sayang
Indonesia

Would have guessed this was from a hipdut playlist, but can’t seem to find it there, so maybe it’s just from a general Indonesian new music list. A good sign that the light pop/R&B Indonesian underground is getting more aboveground, or that I’m noticing its abovegroundness more.

11. Vice Ganda: Talak
Philippines

Last featured Vice Ganda way back in 2020, opening a mix I made of early pandemic songs that is now so excruciating to listen to that I thought about deleting it, but decided I couldn’t for posterity’s sake. “Corona Ba-Bye Na!” is still a banger, though.

12. Safary: Senorita
Senegal

My youngest said this reminded them of Eurovision, which surprised me a little—would kill for some smooth mbalax in Eurovision.

13. OCS, Burleson, Bailey KBC, JANE, TJWAVE: Coupe
Netherlands

Dutch rap with a beat I couldn’t quite place, except that it definitely is not the “sexy drill” that its genre tag is claiming.

14. Bass Thioung: Baol
Senegal

Couldn’t place the beat in this one, either, but by that I just mean I couldn’t keep up with it (complimentary).

15. Audio Addicts: Stjwetla Revisit
South Africa

16. 015 MusiQ & Van City MusiQ f. Babes Wodumo, Jelly Babie: Thatha
South Africa

17. Vigro Deep, Ch’cco f. Zee Nxumalo, DJ Tira: Bhampa (Woza Bakzin Gqom Remix)
South Africa

Three from South Africa, all of which interested me for finding a balance between gqom sounds and amapiano structure/groove.

The first track is from a compilation from TraTraTrax, a Colombian label. I’ve been a little ambivalent about the good-natured critical hype I’ve seen about this collection, Mzansi Bass, which I’ll admit is a good one. Lord knows I don’t know how you should pick South African dance songs to introduce to someone who knows nothing about the music already—I’d have trouble narrowing it down to 80 let alone 8.

I get between twenty and fifty tracks from South African artists and producers at varying levels of fame every single week in my “to review” pile just by following playlists and not going too far out of my way to track anything. It rubs me the wrong way to see claims like this from the promotional materials for this compilation: “We hand over the curatorial keys of the label to very specific artists in whom we have absolute trust and who have an almost academic knowledge of a specific rhythm or a specific region where our eyes and sensitivity cannot reach.” Academic knowledge where eyes and sensitivity can’t reach? Gqom, amapiano, and 3-step are globally popular sounds with world-famous DJs and producers associated with them, many of whom have international profiles. This is not obscure music!

This speaks to the tension I’m getting at in the essay this week about the anxieties that outsiders have had about approaching global music that seems patronizing. I think there is important work in creating primers and tour guides for “outsiders,” so long as there is some acknowledgement (which there may be here, I’m only going from a blurb on the Bandcamp) that this is a selection of eight tracks out of about eight thousand possibilities all easily available when you have even a tiny bit of information to go on. I’ve featured half of the artists on the compilation in mixes before.

18. TYTO, C’mon Tigre: Ceiling Drip Gospel
Italy

19. Pause: Doza
Morocco

20. Mitchum Yacoub, Lourdes Iri: Deseo Celestial
Egypt-US/Panama

OK, cosmo-pop to cool down from my various sources of light agita. Ending things with some silly dance music you can’t dance to from Italy, Moroccan rap, and kitchen sink cumbia that drew my attention because of its featured Panamanian singer, whom I could find almost no information about but enough to deactivate my perhaps oversensitive A.I. alarm.

That’s it! Until next time, go dive into some corner of the world and tell someone about it.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from i-dle: Crow (“God blessed me, yeah, with a 감옥”)

Welcome! I got another influx of new readers thanks to Chuck Eddy’s generous shout out in a music writing survey over at Nick Catucci’s site.

To folks new to the newsletter: I post a sequenced mix every week of new songs from around the world, with commentary for each track. I also usually have an essay up front. I encourage you to hunt, peck, and skip. It is futile and probably hazardous to your health to try to keep up with everything. All posts are free.

My biggest ideas around any “project” of this newsletter (beyond proving that one must indeed imagine Sisyphus happy, provided he’s allowed to listen to music while he works) are in my A-pop series from last year. I posit that US pop is experiencing growing pains around its emerging regional status in competition with the rest of the world’s popular music.

Can’t go into that too much this week, though, because I’m still on vacation! June wrap-up and midyear albums ahoy!

11 Songs I Heard in June (unranked)

• Alewya: Maktoub

• Dear Tommie: The Rough

• Debbii Dawson: Where Have All the Good Men Gone?

• Fyore: Fyore

• KUOKO: Miss You

• Kuzco: Ha Ha Ha

• Leyla Ebrahimi: I’m a Little Flower

• Maya Jane Coles & Rye Rye: Rise Up

• Nia Archives: Boys in Blue

• SHINee: Atmos

• Sosyete ‘25: Yan

10 Albums I Heard in June (lightly ranked)

• Six Sex: ULTRA

  I’ve written about and evangelized for this one, easily my album of the year, pretty insistently. Did I mention it’s really funny? Two genuine laughs out loud at least. Go listen to it!

• Ditonellapiaga: Miss Italian

  I didn’t have super high hopes for this one when I heard one of the follow-ups to her Eurovision qualifier entry “Che fastidio!” but it turns out that the album works really well qua album, scenes from an Italian pop scene in light ferment. Ditonellapiaga doesn’t lean on global trend-hopping (in fact sniffs at going reggaeton in a joke in the “Che fastidio!” video) but also skirts the usual Eurocheese despite being a good candidate for a better Eurovision that lets Canada in and kicks Israel out.

• Tierra Whack: Whack’s Museum

  A strong and straight-ahead rap album from Tierra Whack, whose success with a meme format out of the gate maybe hampered her follow-ups a little despite consistent glimpses of brilliance. This aims lower and hits harder, virtuosic in its own way.

• Vince Staples: Cry Baby

  Maybe my favorite Vince Staples album, which isn’t to say I’d vouch for it as his best. He assembles the best band that Gorillaz can’t seem to buy and puts some words worth listening to on top. Let’s just call it the rock album of the year.

• Baauer: U

  Big dumb dance songs without any of the deceptive erudition of recent Skrillex (whose new one is probably about as good as his last few but I haven’t listened to it intently enough to rate yet).

• La Sécurité: Bingo!

  The formerly Francophone Montreal indie group has an all-English collection of songs and has flattened out a little, I think, but if you like one of ‘em you’ll probably like the rest.

• Alizade: Rahat Music

  Looked forward to this one on the heels of the snotty snarl of “Immigrant,” and I think Alizade has perhaps wisely varied the tone across a full-length that still only clocks in at 27 minutes. But I don’t think you really need to do this, and I wonder what 13 snarls might have sounded like instead.

• Cannelle: Cinna

  This wound up being much harsher and weirder than I expected, which seems like an oddly safe approach. “Stereo” is a massive single that manages to avoid the somewhat nervous-sounding post-Charli meta-pop across the rest of the album. The dissonance gets wearying and you sense that it’s been coated over the club thump like vaseline on a lens, to cover for the thinness of some of the writing.

• Merveille: Wondersummer EP

  A recommendation from Job De Wit, who thought that this Caribbean- and Afrobeats-inflected French R&B would be right up my street and was correct. It suggests that the future that Rihanna promised will only be realized in France, though Tayna gave it a good effort from Kosovo/Albania.

• Salimata: The Happening

  I put out a call for midyear albums that no one else has written about over on Bluesky and was charmed by Tara Hillegeist’s recommendation of this very New York album that suggests what Doechii would sound like if she put out…a very New York album.

• Bonus “album”: The Hypothetical Debbii Dawson Happy World LP

  Debbii Dawson’s Where Have All the Good Men Gone? EP came out last Friday, and as expected it’s another strong collection of songs. But it’s pretty scattershot—it feels like her RCA rollout has been frustratingly stop and start. By this point, her material from 2024 to present makes for a great full album, so I’ve put one together, sequenced as a Side 1/Side 2 LP.
  
  The Happy World LP
  YouTube | Spotify | Tidal | Deezer
  

Here’s my midyear album list. (Debbii Dawson’s hypothetical Happy World LP would easily make #3.)

Midyear albums:

1. Six Sex: Ultra

2. Myaap: Pixie Dust

3. JayJayy: Detour

4. Fallon: Winter Princess

5. Ditonellapiaga: Miss Italian

6. Tierra Whack: Whack’s Museum

7. Robounoishi (路傍の石): Album 13

8. HANA: s/t

9. Fif: The Lower Forty-Eight

10. LinLin: Disco Inferno

11. Vince Staples: Cry Baby

12. Baauer: U

13. La Sécurité: Bingo!

14. LØLØ: God Forbid a Girl Spits Out Her Feelings!

15. Juky San: ĐẪM TÌNH

16. Djy Biza: Art of War

17. DJ M13 DA ZOL: No Ritmo Do Caos

18. DJ Erik JP: No Clima da Sul

19. La Joaqui: Electra

20. Whodamanny: Onda Biloba

Under Consideration

• Cannelle: CINNA

• Liz Cooper: New Day

• Julia Cumming: Julia

• Djy Ora: The SGIDONOLOGIST2

• Jack Harlow: Monica

• RAYE: This Music May Contain Hope

• Tayna: Genesis

• Willow: Petal Rock Black

• Yumi Zouma: No Love Lost to Kindness

Midyear EPs

1. North West: N0rth4ever

2. Vayda: Don’t Lose the Groove

3. EMJAY: Confesiones de las que me voy a arrepentir

4. Hannah Jane Lewis: Consolation Prize

5. Merveille: Wondersummer

6. Zee Nxumalo & Dlala Thukzin: Izinja Zam Vol. 1

7. Natoxie: Cout Scrub Riddim

8. YUNA: Ice Cream

9. Artigo016: Ritual Da Carne

10. Uncle Waffles & Royal MusiQ: 4 DA STREETS!

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. babyMINT: I’m Not Perfect
Taiwan

2. Bb trickz: A la mala
Spain

Starting with two very different uses of the Cardigans—one from Taiwanese girl group babyMINT, who do a goofy little dance around “Lovefool” in a way that misses some of the cool buried in the center of its own goofiness.

Bb trickz, who I am hoping is recovering from her right-wing-curious edgelording, has not yet followed in the footsteps of other internet-poisoned celebs and lost her music mojo, if her carjacking joyride of the convertible in the “My Favorite Game” video is any indication (though the EP as a whole doesn’t really crackle).

3. Liza: ゆびのうた [Yu bino uta]
Japan

4. Aiobahn, 9Lana: Letter
Japan

Two J-pop tracks with very different approaches — Liza hews toward a K-pop single as event while Aiobahn goes for low-flying sleek electro.

5. AleXa: Umami
Korea-US

I continue to be more conceptually than viscerally interested in the winner of the American Song Contest (the “US Eurovision”), AleXa, though the more interesting “A-pop theory artist” associated with a global song contest is probably Monroe, the Utahn who represented France in Eurovision this past year. What I find interesting about this song is that it sounds like someone who has only ever thought about rap as something that K-pop stars do. Hard to explain what I mean, except that at some point since the second-gen K-pop boom, rap as a style uprooted completely from hip-hop in K-pop and formed its own distinctive patter.

6. Mighty, Klassik Frescobar, Motto, Shanika: Kolay (Stick)
Jamaica/Saint Lucia/Guadeloupe

A fun dancehall track in a hodgepodge of Caribbean styles, all of which are overshadowed by bed squeaks mixed high enough in the mix that I had to skip this while I was driving.

7. Facta: T66
UK

UK DJ on Wisdom Teeth showed up on Job De Wit’s radio show. This is one of many dance songs I listen to with my kids and get lots of annoyed questions about why it doesn’t go anywhere or do anything. Very interesting to see young minds molded by the uncompromising logic of the drop.

8. Julia Sandstorm: Baby It’s OK
Sweden

I seem to stumble across a lot of good freestyle and Italodisco from Europe — Whodamanny’s whole album was a keeper. Is this a resurgence, or is it just a style that has been kicking around forever?

9. Faith Leazae: Gimme a Gas Station?
US

The line between novelty and merely low-rent can be thin, and I would say that usually the deciding factor is humor, but so much rap is so low-rent and so funny right now that it really doesn’t support a strict dichotomy. This one does seem to dip deeper into surreal stream-of-consciousness, though.

10. twopiecemadeit: Calm Down Hoodtrap
Kenya

Kenyan producer does something interesting here, or I find it interesting despite it being based on uninteresting things, namely chopping up and distorting some late-EDM-pop sounds from the ‘10s that I associate with a nostalgia dead zone. But done in a way that doesn’t really make it out of the zone, like you’re listening to some D-list DJ from 2016 on broken speakers.

11. Chzter, angely2k: Eu si te pego
Mexico

Hard clave continues its gradual absorption into the pop mainstreams of lots of different places. It’s fascinating to see how the sound needs to soften to accommodate different MC styles.

12. Mc Pogba, Triz, Dj Henrique de São Mateus: Berimbau Tava Macetando Você
Brazil

Or you could just go for the real deal, or as close to real deals as I get without surfing Soundcloud and YouTube for Brazilian funk (i.e., probably not that close). Not earth-shaking as funk goes but the lead vocal hooked me well enough.

13. Güneş: Al Ya Da Bırak
Turkey

Didn’t think much of this Turkish electro-pop but the view count and video budget make it seem like a bigger deal than I expected. I am only noticing now that the video probably needs a content warning for…needle stuff. Like if the video for Björk’s “Pagan Poetry” was adapted for BLACKPINK.

14. VuVuVu f. Mervealice: Keyif
Israel/Turkey-Germany

15. Juzu: Y Solo Tú
Ecuador-US

16. Adrian Younge: Feel the High Life
US

OK, you can relax now — there are to my knowledge no videos for these three congenial psych/funk/soul tracks perfect for the middle stretch of your weekend barbecues. If there are, I highly doubt any will include face needles.

17. hanbee: Call Me Yours
Korea-New Zealand

City pop wafts out of the boombox from a haunted cassette tape but it isn’t hauntology (that just means it never got a degree).

18. Lodú: Moróuntódùn
Nigeria

Warm Naija pop doesn’t pin itself to any particular contemporary style, feels a bit out of time.

19. ゆうらん船, Ålborg: Skagen
Japan

I did not find a strong connection between this Japanese group and the city in Denmark they are named after, or the city in Denmark the song is named for. A brief bio says they hope to someday play Denmark. Sounds attainable!

20. Makam: Good Bye Mai
Netherlands

Dutch DJ dishes dreamy dub, doesn’t dazzle, denies dancing—despite demerits, decent denouement.

That’s it! Until next time, reach for the attainable.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from babyMINT: I’m Not Perfect

It’s vacation time, so this week and next will be recaps. We are at the halfway point of the year, so I thought I’d highlight a bunch of songs and writing of the year so far. Next week will be the monthly June roundup along with my albums list.

Best Songs

Here’s my ongoing best songs of the year playlist, ranked for the first 20 and then just added on as they come.

Best Words

I’ve written a bunch of things I’ve liked so far this year, but have stalled on my planned series on Disney-pop. I think I’m a little too close to it—I’ll probably sit on it for a while, or maybe move on to something else.

—A.I. and fakery: “A lot of things that feel like values in music-listening turn out to be relative assessments that are at best only true in a plurality of cases. In some instances these may be like value phantoms—that is, things you think you might believe until something forces an exception or reveals a contradiction that causes the whole house of cards to tumble down. For my part I try to steer clear of saying anything too definitive when I genuinely don’t know how I feel about something, or if I have never had reason to think about it.”

—Slapdash canon-making: “My sense is that some version of ‘pop music’—most of which really falls under the umbrella that I’ve been calling A-pop—is going through something like its indie phase. What’s important about that distinction is that it’s an audience distinction more than an artist distinction, per se. The rock canon of indie sites in the early aughts didn’t only comprise ‘indie acts,’ but conversations about every act was ‘indie’ because of the weird way that they distorted history to make a selective crop of minor contemporary artists feel worthy of sharing that same canon.”

—Regional US music: “When I talk about A-pop, I am not really referring to a regional form of music that is mostly popular within the US. I’m instead thinking about still-globally-minded US pop music seeming trapped in a battle against many other regional competitors for everyone’s attention. But I wonder if this sort of US regionalization is a related phenomenon. There are many forms of US music that haven’t always traveled well, but what seems different is that these types of more localized music are showing up in measures of listener accounting that tend to be more globalized. That is to say, the Hot 100 is perhaps taking on the characteristics of a more regional chart, one that may get more local and idiosyncratic as time goes on.”

—Afrobeats and the perils of “regional” pop: “A regionalization perspective suggests that regions will cyclically come in and out of fashion in unpredictable ways. The main thrust of the A-pop series was that the US itself has to be thought of now as one of many regional competitors, and that US pop music specifically doesn’t have a history of being framed in this way. But the flip side is that different regional styles will also rise and fall, and that it’s hard to know when and why precisely, because the global landscape has changed so much so quickly.”

—Modern melodic pop or lack thereof, a piece where I describe common melodic strategies for weak melodies that help songs get more words across with less effortful melodic construction. The strategies I name are intuitive coinages but I do think there is a bigger story I’m getting at with this one that might bear some more thought and writing.

—CAPDY, GAPDY, and “critical convergence” as critical erosion. CAPDY stands for Charli XCX, Ariana Grande, Disney expats (Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter), and SlaYYYter. It’s a play on GAPDY, a group of 2009 critically lauded albums: Grizzly Bear, Animal Collective, Phoenix, Dirty Projectors, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. “In 2026, it’s the US and Anglosphere capital-P pop albums that seem weak and safe to me, clustering in conversations while being far less interesting than those conversations would lead you to believe—though it’s too early to say if any of this will correspond to year-end lists. It’s not that there’s nothing to recommend any of the albums. Just like with GAPDY, I like some of them just fine, and dislike others. It’s more that the focus on these albums seems to ignore all of the other places where the action really is.”

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. Debbii Dawson: Where Have All the Good Men Gone?
US

I singled out Debbii Dawson as an exceptional melodic writer. What this song reminds me of most is Marit Larsen—and not in a half-remembered borrowing way. I like that she leans on ABBA the same way Larsen did, not just as a pastiche but as foundation for her own personality (which is where I think she and Marit Larsen differ considerably). I have a lot more to say about Dawson and her role (or lack thereof) in the current A-pop ecosystem, but will maybe save it for after her EP drops tomorrow.

2. Big Freedia, SOPHIE: Blaze That Ass
US/UK

There is now a formal EP of the collaborations between Big Freedia and SOPHIE, including this song, which has been floating around on the internet since they recorded it in 2016. They sound great together.

3. Baauer: Calling Out for U
US

Baauer surprised me by putting out an incredible post-Flume pop dubstep album in 2016, three years after his breakthrough with “Harlem Shake.” And now he’s surprised me again ten years after that with a bright dance-pop album that might make my albums list again. It features lots of songs with Nigerian rapper Brazy, who seems like the Marta to his Tricky, a late period muse. This one doesn’t feature her, though; it’s just a sample of Cherelle’s “The Right Time” squeezed for every last drop of juice.

4. Maya Jane Coles, Rye Rye: Rise Up
UK/US

Speaking of promising early ‘10s personalities, I’m glad that Maya Jane Coles found some room for Rye Rye here. Her hopscotch flow sounds counterintuitively great against something this smooth.

5. Lvbel C5, Mohamed Ramadan: Pss Pss
Turkey

A major Turkish rapper whom I have featured before. I usually find him kind of lumbering, but setting him against dembow bounce creates an interesting counterpoint.

6. Aygün Kazımova: Məclis
Azerbaijan

An Azerbaijani diva barely brings herself above a whisper, but still manages to command dancers across circus set pieces and tigers through flaming hoops.

7. ANSTAY: Кажу Ні [Kazhu Ni]
Ukraine

Ukrainian pop shifts seamlessly from rubbery hip-hop into half-speed phonk.

8. Eloise Pezzner: Head
US

An early Billie Eilish-esque single for an early Billie Eilish-esque person. Which is to say she was born in <checks notes> 2010. I need to lie down.

9. A Certain Ratio: Lucinda (EM)
UK

This is the second appearance of A Certain Ratio on one of my mixes, and the second time I’ve thought “isn’t this a British post-punk band from the ‘80s” only to hear music that in no way corresponds to what I imagined I knew about them—this time out, loose indie disco. (I went back and listened to their older music and I’m probably thinking of a different band.)

10. B0YG1RL, NOVAGANG: My people will destroy you
Haiti-US/US

So this one poses a bit of a sticking point for me—I really disliked it on first listen and particularly disliked the arty framing it got in Pitchfork. I think that its avant hipster tendency to reduce global sounds to capital-N noise not only misses the spark in those sounds but often misses even the noise, like tuning your vacuum cleaner. The roughness—signifying as such—bothers me, because it’s too smooth, or smooth in the wrong way, like a rock tumbler’s artificial sea glass.

It has also helped me understand why Manny Farber included Jules et Jim in his White Elephant Art essay, a choice that made me lose the thread a bit when I first read it, because I found Jules et Jim scrappy and charming myself. There’s something about the totalizing control exhibited over this work that smothers the little embers—in performance, in rhythm, in noise—trying to fly out. In fact, the way Farber describes Jules et Jim is not far off from my thoughts about the album: “Jules et Jim, the one Truffaut film that seems held down to a gliding motion, is also cartoonlike but in a decorous, suspended way.”

But at the end of the day my body doesn’t reject this thing outright even though my brain is pretty convinced it’s right about this. Maybe it’s just a brain problem.

11. DJ SKYCEE, Miimii KDS, Lucky Iukee: Bodé
Guadeloupe

No brain judo necessary to enjoy another follow-up from the “Se MiiMii” team, which to be fair to them, was also Pitchfork-championed (by a better critic). It’s pretty good!

12. DJ Yams, L’as Biass: Chargée
France

Jonathan Bogart on Bluesky: “afro french pop is so caribbean in 2026: everything that isn't bouyon is konpa,” to which I responded “(complimentary).” I suppose you could also add shatta to the list. This has the annoying side effect of making it harder to source where exactly the low-stream artists come from, since “France” listed on streaming often means French Antilles. I think I confirmed it’s really France for this duo, though—at least for L’as Biass, who’s from Mantes-la-Ville according to his Instagram.

13. Bloody Civilian, Terry Apala, Boj: SpaceFuji
Nigeria

I’ve been trusting Lokpo to suss out emerging post-Afrobeats sounds in Nigeria. This one is maybe borrowing a bit from South African house styles but it avoids the now well-worn amabeats pipeline. Not to sound too much like Oblique Strategies, but when in doubt, try incorporating SPACE.

14. Ba Bethe Gashoazen, Nova sa style f. Westboy, Caeser, DJ Janisto: Skhethe
South Africa

15. PLG Chanty, Focalistic, King Master: Stofi Stofoza 2.0
South Africa

Two from a quick visit to the South African charts, which always nets great selections that I’ve missed or maybe just stuck onto a holdover list at a glance. Both of these lean away from amapiano proper, toward a brighter pop sound and gqom, respectively.

16. Chi Pu: Mirror
Vietnam

Vietnamese pop is really exploding right now—has been for a while, but at this point I’m almost guaranteed to find something I like every week without seeking anything out.

17. Leyla Ebrahimi: I’m a Little Flower
US

This is the part where I tell you about a song and/or artist that sounds like what I imagine Olivia Rodrigo is going for, but does it better at every level from production to melody to vocals to words. So this is maybe the part where you descend into the comments to tell me I’m nuts. If I’m right about this, which I probably am not, history will eventually vindicate me that Olivia Rodrigo was a middling pop star but a decent senator.

18. KUOKO: Miss You
Germany

Hamburg-based artist also beats Olivia Rodrigo, maybe not at her own game, but in showing other avenues for getting your confessional lyricism across without falling into gloopy synth traps or a generic approximation of indie jangle. My first thought was “thank god, who is the producer?” only to find that she is the producer. Maybe Rodrigo’s next step for cred if she doesn’t run for office should be to namecheck Everything But the Girl and get in the studio with KUOKO. (If she really wants to swing for the fences, she should try budots.)

19. Adelin: Molt
Sweden

20. Robbie & Mona: Le Jardin de Linda
UK

I won’t claim that the two wispy closers are actually all that close to Olivia Rodrigo, but it is a reminder that there are countless good songs released every week that very few people pay attention to. Which you probably knew already if you made it this far in the newsletter. And to you I say thank you! Sometimes I don’t even make it this far!

That’s it! Until next time, get in the studio with KUOKO I guess.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from Debbii Dawson: Where Have All the Good Men Gone?

This week I’m giving my grumblings about US and Anglosphere pop a break to go back to the heady days of 1988, which I’ve been exploring for an upcoming album tournament.

1988 was a year that I found even harder to slog through in a Discogs dive than 1989 was, and with no Jane Child jumping out as a rosetta stone for my music tastes.

But given that this year I’ve been consciously ratcheting up my listening to Caribbean dancehall styles, especially bouyon and shatta, it’s serendiptous that I found a gem that fits into the current Caribbean pop landscape in a similar way that Jane Child fit into the alt-rock-goes-teenager turn.

That album is Las Palé by the group Feeling Kréyol—three Guadeloupean singers who were plucked out of obscurity to front the quickie cash-in songs of producer Darius Denon trying to ride the burgeoning zouk wave. The three singers were strangers selected in an informal audition process who were shuttled into a studio and taught the songs quickly with little attention paid to the finer details of their performances, like completing a mix or synchronizing their vocals perfectly to the tracks. They ultimately only recorded six songs that by Denon’s own estimation were cost-cutting approximations of Zouk Machine or Kassav.

The result, seemingly by accident, is a loose, ramshackle, and joyous record that feels like an early glimpse of the feel of more contemporary Caribbean pop—“cutting corners” becomes provocative minimalism, “unfinished mix” becomes textured (or at least un-smooth) sonic interest, “not synchronized vocals” becomes a more distinct sense of vocal grain.

My other two big ‘88 finds are both by women doing rap with a harder edge than some of the other albums that appear in various tiers of my provisional ‘88 album list: L’Trimm, The Real Roxanne, Sweet Tee, J.J. Fad, Salt N Pepa.

Anquette’s Respect is only a few degrees tougher than their peers, with the trio siccing then-State Attorney for Dade County Florida Janet Reno on deadbeats who don’t pay child support (“Janet Reno”), and then making their own “Night of the Living Baseheads,” but enlisting the Monkees instead of the J.B.’s for the hook (“Mary Mary”).

Far more bracing is Manhandler by Cassidine, which is as explicit as anything I’ve heard from this period and achieved a shock value that I’ve never really experienced in macho counterparts like N.W.A. I felt like I gasped at something on every track.

Other observations: Japanese pop seemed to be back in ferment (if it ever left—my guess is no) as the avant-garde, new wave, and hairspray-pop all hit regularly in the albums I tested. Favorites included Yasuaki Shimizu’s alternately nervous and smooth new wave Dementos; After Dinner’s experimental hodgepodge collection Souvenir Cassette; and knowing 80s cheeseball pop sampler Miho Nakayama’s Mind Game.

A few other finds that made waves in my otherwise indie-pedigree-approved list (Spirit of Eden, Surfer Rosa, Nation of Millions, Daydream Nation, check, and in about descending order): Cardiacs’ A Little Man and a House and the Whole World Window; Scrawl’s He’s Drunk; Joe Smooth’s Promised Land; and Billy and the Boingers from Bloom County themselves, dorky hardcore band Mucky Pup with their album Can’t You Take a Joke? Much of what I’d call wiseguy post-hardcore tickled me—lots of authentic sneers on guys who you nonetheless doubt would really beat anyone up.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. LIA LIA: Boogiepop Blitzkrieg Blob
Germany

The moth is back!!!! It has now been four years without a proper Lia Lia album — I sort of like her this way, in little bite-sized dopamine spikes every couple of months. But it is the year of all of my favorites putting out amazing LPs, so it looks like she is joining the fray. New album is apparently called (or at least teased with the title) Music, Money, Sex, Fame, Love, Love, [rest of title obscured by cigarette ash].

2. Nia Archives: Boys in Blue
Jamaica-UK

Nia Archives’ album is out in about a month, and seems like it continues her trend of living a double life as impish mad genius DJ by night and ragtag alt-pop star by day. I will try not to spend too much of the next few weeks worth of these mixes telling you that a song is better than anything on the Olivia Rodrigo album (though it will happen at least once and maybe twice next week), but this is better than anything on the Olivia Rodrigo album. And please don’t use this as a Streisand Effect-style opportunity to talk about the Olivia Rodrigo album here!!

3. Alewya: Maktoub
Saudi Arabia-Ethiopia-Egypt-UK

Kicking myself that I didn’t find Alewya (born in Saudi Arabia to Ethiopian and Egyptian parents and then raised in South London) before the Pop World Cup. This song wasn’t out yet and her connection to Saudi Arabia is somewhat tentative, but the M.I.A.-minus-M.I.A. sound might have appealed to the electorate. Golden Beatology of the week.

4. Fyore: Afrokeb
Haiti-Canada

Second appearance from Fyore in the same month suggests she’s one to watch more intently. (Album soon??) She got through to me this time sounding very little like what she sounded like last time, too, still Caribbean-oriented but gradually accelerates to a near-avant breakneck.

5. Tinashe: Too Easy
US

Really didn’t expect a successful meme to push Tinashe into chasing the high with a string of novelty dance singles, but I suppose I can’t complain. It’s not what I liked or expected from her—which was a canny navigation of slightly weird but not off-putting minimal R&B—but her issue has always been relative facelessness in a crowded field so I see the appeal finding any possible way to elbow through, and this certainly has elbows.

6. Wezza Montaser f. Btates El 7up, Aka El Arab, Tayer
Egypt

7. TUL8TE, Saint Levant: Nano
Egypt/Palestine-Jordan-France

Recent past and future of Egyptian pop represented: first Wezza Montaser, whose hits mostly date from five to seven years ago, especially in collaboration with Wegz; then TUL8TE, a white-knit-masked rapper on the MDLBEAST label (home of my favorite Saudi Arabian pop find, Asayel) collaborating with Palestinian artist Saint Levant on a track whose video, if you had any doubt was supposed to be fun, opens in a toy store on a bubblegum dispenser and the artist portrayed as a Barbie doll.

8. SHINee: Atmos
South Korea

SHINee is a second-gen K-pop boyband I never really hooked into at the time despite their stature in the scene, but maybe time has made the heart grow fonder, or maybe I’m more sympathetic to boybands now that there seem to be fewer of them reaching my radar screen, or maybe they just have some top-shelf material this time out. Whatever it is, the relentless electropulse against the vocal sheen really stood out.

9. Sébastian Tellier, Juliette Armanet: Attraction
France

This one stood out by…not standing out? I thought it sounded like the original version of a song that no one has remixed into some hypothetical better version I’m obsessed with, but it turns out it is a remix of sorts: the French version of “Thrill of the Night,” which appears on Tellier’s 2026 album with Slayyyter singing. Her replacement with Juliette Armanet is like a controlled experiment in A-pop that just barely passes measures of significance, but whose results probably shouldn’t be overstated as they would not survive replication.

10. C6ix: Wakaru6
Ghana-Japan

The rare rapper that gets by on vocal grain alone, with almost nothing else to recommend the track. He seems interesting beyond that—Ghanaian artist based in Tokyo, with lots of videos online about what he likes most about Japan, which is where I learned (if I understood the video correctly) that he likes Perfume. Me too!

11. Katarzia, Robin Galia: Pozvi ma, neprídem
Slovakia/Czechia

Two from Czechia this week — first one has a propulsive piano bass line that made me think of Kate NV, but at about the halfway mark they go half-speed and speak-sing, diluting the impact a bit and dooming them to the middle of the mix. I really liked the lyrics that I translated, though, including the song’s (and newsletter’s) title.

12. Sosyete ‘25: Yan
Turkey/UK

Bongo Joe knocks it out of the park again with a psych/funk group with Turkish singer and UK rhythm section.

13. Michael Boothman’s Family Tree: Tabu [1972]
Trinidad

An Afrorock jam from Soundway’s compilation Kaiso Power: Sound Revolution in Trinidad 1970-1980. Big drums, clanging keys, and a flute line in the lead, it all gels.

14. Mexican Institute of Sound, Meridian Brothers: Ritmo Babilonia
Mexico/Colombia

Have featured both of these artists separately, neither seems as weird or interesting together as they did in isolation, but if the standard is a median Santana song I guess they still bring a bit of irreverence to the table.

15. Constança Quinteiro: 1 e 1
Portugal

Portuguese, but with a lovely Afrobeats sound, reminds me a little of Tems’s “Love Me JeJe.”

16. Sasuke Haraguchi: Isan
Japan

A smoother sound than I’m used to from pop and Vocaloid producer Sasuke Haraguchi, though perhaps more characteristic of his solo releases than his work as a producer. This is the title track from a somewhat daunting hourlong, 31-track album I haven’t listened to in full yet.

17. Helena Gao: Lao Shi
China-Denmark

Danish-Chinese bedroom pop up-and-comer from the renowned Danish Rhythmic Music Conservatory, the same school that Erika De Casier and Smerz attended (among others) and which seems to have shaped a decent chunk of the alt-pop of the last few years.

18. Mess: Fckme
Czechia

Second one from Czechia this week. At first glance it’s your standard wall-of-sound hyperpop miscategorized as “shoegaze” but you can hear a catchy indie rock song happening somewhere under all the fuzz and fuckery.

19. Slippers: Wants for Everyone
US

There’s the Amerindie jangle quota satisfied even before we hit Wheatus drone.

20. Friday Night Plans: Fight and Loving
Japan

4-track (or approximate) guitar loop and ASMR-pop vocals from a Japanese artist who seems to be on an awful lot of playlists to help people “chill out” and “focus.” Have I discussed before how I absolutely cannot have music on in the background for any other task? I don’t even really like to hear music in restaurants; it’s very distracting! But even if I could listen to music while doing something else, I definitely would not play this.

21. Vines f. Wheatus: Teenage Dirtbag
US

Mark Sinker famously (well, famous to me, anyway) was ambushed by unexpected emotion when he encountered the part of “Teenage Dirtbag” where the singer goes falsetto to take on the perspective of the crush. Vines have made sure you couldn’t be ambushed by anything, the whole thing stretched out into mush, but in a way I find more interesting than a somber reimagining of a pop song for a movie trailer—it’s more like Justin Bieber 800% Slower. (This is probably closer to 50%.)

That’s it! Until next time, let me know what albums from 1988 I’ve missed.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title translated from Katarzia, Robin Galia: Pozvi ma, neprídem (“pozvi ma, neprídem”)

After one thinkpiece too many about the state of pop music in 2026 that only named US and Anglosphere artists when discussing the present and future of pop (it was this one), I jokingly started referring to the dominant names in pop conversations as CAPDY, which stands for Charli XCX, Ariana Grande, Kim Petras, Disney expats (Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter), and slaYYYter.

CAPDY is a music critic inside joke on top of another inside joke, a play on Christopher Weingarten’s acronym GAPDY that he coined in 2009, when he predicted that the critic polls of that year would converge around five indie bands: Grizzly Bear, Animal Collective, Phoenix, Dirty Projectors, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. All of them appeared in the top 10 of the Pazz and Jop critics’ poll that year, with only Neko Case breaking up the top 5.

I argued in my third A-pop installment that this seeming convergence was a symptom of a larger phenomenon, not only of indie music getting bigger but of the rest of the music industry shrinking in the years before streaming took off. GAPDY was a funny shorthand gesturing to several interrelated ideas about the state of both music and music criticism, some of which Chuck Eddy wrote about in his essay in Pazz and Jop that year:

The indie domination at the top of the album list is a harder nut to crack, but a few factors seem worth pondering. For one thing, the poll’s electorate has changed—freelance dollars aren’t flowing like the old days, and with dailies and weeklies chopping arts positions, newsprint dinosaurs have departed the vocation, voluntarily and involuntarily, in droves. Meanwhile, way younger bloggers and Tweeters who make even less money reviewing music have stepped in. Some vote, and plenty see eye-to-eye with Pitchfork.

Also, this is big: Used to be, when you filled out your P&J ballot, you hadn’t seen very many other Top 10 lists. Now, with websites pretending the year is over well before Thanksgiving and surviving print mags falling in step with their own premature year-end countdowns, it’s hard to avoid peering over your neighbor’s shoulder. A story snowballs through the year, so by December, critics who don’t hear many releases and the ones who’ve heard too many to sort through—enough Pazz & Joppers to pass as a consensus—have had the words “Animal Collective” pounded into their heads so incessantly that boarding the bandwagon seems like a no-brainer.

Probably also didn’t hurt that a few critically approved indie albums actually did OK commercially, at least in relation to stuff that did worse—Veckatimest and Embryonic both hit Billboard’s Top 10 in slow weeks; Phoenix and Yeah Yeah Yeahs have SoundScanned in the 200,000-unit range. The latter two even wound up listed among the “Top Billboard 200 Albums” of 2009, albeit at a modest #177 and #192, respectively; no other P&J Top Tenner made the list. Especially given the industry’s continued double-digit retail nosedive, that’s not saying much. It’s certainly not Susan Boyle or Taylor Swift. But it’s something.

There was a vague sense among critics who used the phrase “GAPDY” that these five albums were, if not bad, at least boring. (For what it’s worth, I loved one of them, hated one of them, and liked the others OK.) From what I remember, there was not a corresponding sense that some other specific albums should obviously take their place; it was just that there were so many other albums out there, many of them more interesting, adventurous, or whatever else. This wide field of alternatives was, in part, what helped those albums to do so well in 2009 to begin with—votes split across lots of different artists, genres, and scenes, with a small indie rock caucus rising to the top, but by very narrow margins.1

Despite the tenor of these GAPDY conversations and the title of Chuck’s essay—“The Year of Too Much Consensus” (which, to be clear, he did not choose and didn’t reflect what his piece was about; you can read a more recent essay of his on 2009 here)—when you look at the trajectory of the Pazz and Jop polls as a proxy for critical alignment or lack thereof, the story of the 2000s that culminates in the year of GAPDY was not a period of “too much consensus” but of eroding consensus.

Many years ago, I calculated critical convergence in Village Voice Pazz and Jop polls—that is, the percentage of the electorate voting for the #1 and #2 albums of the year. Throughout the 1990s, the #1 ranked album regularly got votes from at least a third of the electorate. (The high point was 1996, when Odelay by Beck appeared on 47% of all ballots.) In the 2000s, these convergence numbers drop, technically bottoming out during the controversial 2006 poll (19% voted for the winner), when many critics boycotted after the Village Voice was bought by New Times and gutted the music section. If you exclude that year, the least critical agreement on a #1 album in the aughts happened in 2009, the year of GAPDY, when only 22% of critics voted for the #1 album, Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion.2

This trend mostly reversed in the 2010s, with more voters voting for the #1 albums at the same time the trend for #1 albums shifted from indie rock to critically acclaimed hip-hop and R&B. In 2010, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kanye West was on 38% of ballots; in 2012, Channel Orange by Frank Ocean was on 35%; in 2013, Kanye had 35% with Yeezus; in 2015, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly appeared on 44% of ballots; and in 2016, Blackstar by David Bowie appeared on 38% of ballots.3

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems possible that both the indie surge in the late aughts and the accompanying decline in the number of critics listing those albums were part of the same blip. I’m hoping that what I see as too much attention paid to a frustratingly thin bench of US and Anglosphere pop music is also a blip, because it really is a banner year for international not-in-English pop music—and by that I don’t even mean different forms of popular music that I happen to like more than pop as “genre.” Pop music outside the US and Anglosphere is regularly beating the CAPDY artists at their own game.

In 2026, it’s the US and Anglosphere capital-P pop albums that seem weak and safe to me, clustering in conversations while being far less interesting than those conversations would lead you to believe—though it’s too early to say if any of this will correspond to year-end lists. It’s not that there’s nothing to recommend any of the albums. Just like with GAPDY, I like some of them just fine, and dislike others. It’s more that the focus on these albums seems to ignore all of the other places where the action really is.

Look no further than Six Sex’s Ultra, which feels like an exorcism of this year’s comparatively drab Anglosphere pop (to be fair: everything seems drab in contrast to Six Sex’s Ultra). I haven’t heard an album with such combined ruthlessness and playfulness in a long time. Recommended if you like Peaches, Nadia Oh, Fannypack, L’Trimm, and, in places, M.I.A.’s Piracy Funds Terrorism mixtape (both albums have songs that share the bass line to “Murder She Wrote” by Chaka Demus & Pliers).

The album is outwardly filthy but reveals itself to be smarter and stranger than just filth. It reminds me of Courtney Pauroso’s Vanessa5000, where Pauroso portrays a glitchy A.I.-powered sex robot grappling with technical and existential meltdowns over the course of a show that constantly undercuts itself without weakening the bravura performance in the center. Ultra is a tough one to beat for album of the year, maybe the decade; it’s currently the best pop album in the world.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. LISA, Anitta, Rema: Goals (FIFA World Cup 2026™)
South Korea/Brazil/Nigeria

Should I use the official FIFA soundtrack to assess the state of A-pop theory? If so, LISA and Anitta and Rema are the powerhouse, Future and Tyla would be lagging behind them, Jelly Roll and Carin León would not be competitive, and Brazil’s phonk hit not included on the soundtrack would lap all of them from the sidelines. Which seems more or less right. But to be honest, all of these songs (aside from that phonk jam) are pretty sweaty. My favorite thing in “Goals” is that only one superstar deigned to appear with a ball in the video (Anitta), which makes you wonder whether it is an honor or if she drew the short straw.

2. aespa: Roll
South Korea

3. @onefive: M1X5R
Japan

LISA is now big enough for transnational pop events, but below the monsterverse level you can get away with nursery-rhyme-pop in South Korea and Japan. aespa annoy with “Row Row Row Your Boat” and @onefive dazzle (and annoy) with “Turkey in the Straw.”

4. Ako: Earl Gray
Japan

Or if you want to split the difference between FIFA and nursery rhymes, maybe try Ako, whose vocals I described last week like Addison Rae, sloshing around in the mix, and on this one sound like a mix of Vocaloid and millennial French house. A new idea for an A-Trak mash-up album?

5. LYSA: Crush Crush Crush
Italy

Someday I will recognize the Italian language in the wild—more pop ferment outside the Anglosphere.

6. Esa Williams: Kwanini
South Africa-UK

7. Konono N°1: Volta
Angola-DRC

8. Toya Delazy, Auka, Neekeetone: Amamenemene
South Africa-UK/Russia-Montenegro

Cosmo-pop suite! African diasporic music from South African-born and London-based Esa Williams, a reconstituted Konono N°1 which I think is in its third generation, and some dnb-heavy Afrohouse.

9. Abitemi: Do normal
Ghana

Can’t count out Afrobeats yet, I suppose, although I was surprised to find that this is from Ghana and not Nigeria.

10. SAGE FWI, DJ Digital: Whyne Nstick [2025]
Martinique

11. Bad Bitch, Natoxie: Discipline [2025]
Martinique

12. Says’z, Mikado: Tic [2025]
Martinique

This is the beginning of a long stretch of Caribbean dancehall and shatta songs. Occasionally as I look for new playlists, I’ll find one that, unbeknownst to me, has thrown a whole year’s worth of songs up as a “refresh” (i.e. to make it look like they’ve added a bunch of new music by copying and pasting the same tracks). So I ended up with about a dozen strong shatta songs mostly from 2025. I decided to keep three of these “oldies,” only one of them from an artist I haven’t featured before (the first one, SAGE FWI).

13. Tera Kòrá, FS Green, Freezy: Controlla
Netherlands

14. K-Rosif, BIGDA, LMG: Les Chabines
Réunion

15. Malcolm, Krys: Chalè
France/Guadeloupe

The next three songs are all likely from that same playlist, hard to tell, but every song is from this calendar year. First, the B-side of previously-featured “Get Busy” by a trio of Dutch artists, then bouyon from Réunion artist K-Rosif and a dancehall pop hit from Malcolm and Krys.

16. Dj Tk, DJ Rafinha, Mc Gw f. CCAU CHUU: Vai Começa a Sequência
Brazil

Some Brazilian phonk to transition out of the shatta suite, from a DJ who has annoyingly named himself “TK,” thus flagging this post as a draft not ready to be published.

17. m tú, Liu Grace: Nói Em Điên
Vietnam

One thing I didn’t really go into in my essay on pop melody the other week is the idea that some strong pop melodies may now code as various kinds of Asian pop—K-pop most obviously in terms of direct competition with US pop. This Vietnamese rock song has the sort of melody construction you used to get all the time during the US teen confessional era in the mid-aughts. It’s not even a particularly strong example of it, but it is a sort of pop-rock melodicism that seems somewhat out of fashion in the US.

18. Hamina: Hattarataivas
Finland

Kings-of-Convenience-core from Finland!

19. Ed O’Brien: Obrigado
UK

The George Harrison (I guess?) of Radiohead puts out a George sort of album, competent enough, stuck in the shadow of his bandmates but also less in-your-face about those bandmates’ style, far too long and indulgent and woo-woo. A very long and meandering Pink Floyd-ish jam takes up a majority of the ludicrous nine-minute runtime, but I had time for it this week even if you decide that you do not.

20. Kruder & Dorfmeister: Black Baby [1996]
Austria

Ending with a track from the 30-year anniversary of Kruder & Dorfmeister’s DJ-Kicks, the fourth ever in the series. Three minutes shorter than Ed O’Brien and feels about ten minutes shorter.

That’s it! Until next time, listen to the Six Sex album Ultra at least once and maybe ten times if you’re so inclined.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from aespa: Roll

Who needs another long essay about melody in contemporary pop music when you have a best-of-the-month installment to write! I’ve added a section for the monthly roundups on the main page, too.

This was a really strong month for Albums I Have Heard and Liked — a new #1 of the year to date and a bunch of good ones just below it.

11 Songs I Heard in May (unranked)

• Ana Lua Caiano: Uma Vida A Menos

• Cannelle: Stereo

• Champuru Makhenzo, Audio Addicts, Buzzi Lee, Amaza: 444

• Güner Künier: Kes

• Khun Narin: Poet Wong Pt. 1

• Les Poissons: Nature Boy

• Lurinha Costa, Dj Cabello, Dj Tchouzen: Six Seven

• Malcrida x NIÑOS GÓTICOS: Six Seven

• NASAAN f. That Mexican OT: Luke Combs

• Octo Octa: Survival Groove

• Starjunk 95: Error 4 on the Floor

10 Albums I Heard in May (lightly ranked)

• Myaap: Pixie Dust
  Think this one might just be a masterpiece in miniature—Myaap huffs and puffs through a thicket of avant bounce beats like an underdog against an imagined reigning champ, more floats like butterfly than stings like bee but she gets plenty of sharp ones in, Little Mac KOing Tyson in a flurry of punches and punchlines.

• North West: N0rth4evr EP
  Sorry not sorry, this thing is absolutely stunning and would maybe be in the top slot if it were long enough to satisfy the Beatles Second Album rule: at least 11 songs in at least 26:25 minutes.1 (Myaap stuck “Fairy” on as a bonus track to beat the clock by exactly forty seconds.) Patrick St. Michel has a good post on the incorporation of Vocaloid on the EP—I can attest that preteens these days are extremely into Hatsune Miku; not all of those preteens are capable of making this album, but who knows, maybe they would be if they had the right opportunities and resources.

• Robounoishi (路傍の石): Album 13

  A recommendation from Ryo Miyauchi, who described this only as “indie rock / Vocaloid,” a combination I haven’t run across before and sounds so good in this particular formulation that I may have to rethink my whole approach to music-making (mostly because I can’t sing to save my life).

• JayJayy: Detour

  If you find yourself totally lost keeping up with any of my musings on South African dance music and amapiano, this album is a decent sampler to dive in—JayJayy has threaded a needle between spotlight and texture as a vocalist in a texture-heavy genre so there’s a bit more to hang on to if you’re looking for pop hooks, but it’s also just got a huge roster of many of the best amapiano producers all doing great work with her.

• LinLin: Disco Inferno

  French pop heatseeker LinLin is playing fast and loose with the Beatles Second Album Rule—12 songs in 29 minutes, but padded with a bunch of atmosphere and interstitials to stretch it out. It’s not a terrible strategy, CD-era album bloat for streaming-friendly maxi-singles.

• Tayna: Genesis
  Need to give this one another listen—on first pass it takes on the Whatever, Just Be Rihanna project more successfully than most attempts at this, but it still feels a little anonymous. I prefer it when it’s doing more formalist South African crossover stuff even though I’m glad that the album expands beyond that.

• La Joaqui: Electra
  Less electrifying than it needs to be, but strong qua album as neo-reggaeton goes, mostly Gusty dj productions.

• 63OG: 63PROBLÈMES
  No better way for me to pay attention to your album than to remove it temporarily from streaming while I’m trying to put a newsletter together! I would say this one doesn’t really hold together across its indulgent hourlong/23-song runtime but it’s an interesting grab-bag of styles: hypertrap, coupé decalé, Afrobeats, and more, but too much ho-hum trap beat filler.

• Uncle Waffles: 4 Da Streets! EP
  Dependable collection from Uncle Waffles in collaboration with Royal MusiQ. Satisfies only one of the Beatles Second Album criteria (over 26 minutes but under 10 tracks, plus it calls itself an EP) and is most promising for a few of its singer pairings—JayJayy, Zee Nxumalo, Cowboii, and new-to-me rappers BarbieSZN and BXKS.

• Ako: Lovely Moments
  My first thought was “huh, J-pop Addison Rae,” but this really only refers to Ako’s vocals, which sound like they’re sloshing around in the mix in a similar way, i.e. not going for a recessive sound but using a recessive strategy. I like the effect overall, but the album is hit-or-miss with actual songs.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. Ana Lua Caiano: Uma Vida A Menos
Portugal

Portuguese artist who combines folk elements with electro-pop, though here she seems to throw in plenty more besides—bagpipes, a classical piano middle 8, flamenco handclaps, hiccuping vocal loops, and cows (just in the video and not on the soundtrack that I can tell).

2. Fyore: Fyore
Togo-Canada

It’s “Fyore” by Fyore from the album Fyore! Unfortunately the “album” is just the name of the single; fingers crossed the whole album is also called that so that she can join the ranks of “Imarhan” by Imarhan from the album Imarhan. Francophone pop is on fire in all corners of the world this year—this one’s from Montreal.

3. Daniya Kanwal: Banwari Basanti
Pakistan

Have been waiting for a recently-added Pakistani music playlist to yield a few mix inclusions and this week I got two—one closes the mix and this one nearly opened it, catchy sitar and reggaeton fusion from a Karachi artist who puts “influencer, content creator, choreographer, and actress” before music, as is the style I suppose.

4. Shams: علم قلبي [Ealam Qalbi]
Syria

Originally thought that Shams was a Saudi artist, which would be funny because one of the Saudi artists in the Pop World Cup (recently completed—Saudi Arabia was knocked out in round 4, but Other Dave Fave “Darbuka” by Eftalya Yagci got second place!) had a song named “Shams.” But no—the Saudi Shams is a different Shams. This one is a Syrian artist based in Cairo.

5. Nando Garcia f. Chini.png: Perros
Chile

One of my favorite artists from last year, Chilean indie-rocker Chini.png, teams up with a less-exciting Chilean indie rocker who nonetheless meets her in the middle on the highlight from his otherwise somewhat dreary album.

6. Thee Sinseers: Did Ya Know?
US

Incredibly, this band is not on Daptone, but they do use the “Thee” styling and have rented a vintage car that probably accounts for 80% of the budget of their video, which got me googling them one last time before publishing this to confirm (it turns out they have a single out on Daptone, but it’s not their main label).

7. Dear Tommie: The Rough
Australia

You know, I really don’t mean to keep unintentionally affirming A-pop theory by discovering that the one country song I’ve selected in several weeks is from an Australian. My kid asked me in the car what genre this was, and when I said “country,” they replied “but it sounds like something else, though” and indeed it does, and I didn’t have a good answer!

8. Daughn Gibson: Bala Cynwood
US

I really like Daughn Gibson, haven’t kept up with him as much as I should since All Hell. I guess this must be the best song ever written about Bala Cynwyd by default? He had a great interview about his least favorite song he has ever written with Matt Korvette of Pissed Jeans in the Yellow Green Red newsletter. His pan of his own track made me want to hear it: “At the end of it, we added so much horseshit to that damned chorus, just to get it to keep up with a snare drum that was already leaving the song bereft of dynamics in the verses. Chasing around a Sasquatch when I had something menacingly delicate in the first half hour of the song’s life.” (It’s a good song, I like the stuck-together feel of all of the stray elements scrambling around the vocal, maybe more Katamari than Sasquatch; if I were more Eno-ish I’d say something annoying and cryptic: “keep piling until it breaks” / “what’s left?” / etc.)

9. Yangın: Zenginleri Ye
Turkey

10. Lil Jolie: Passaporti e Caramelle
Italy

11. MUGRE: Calle Miramar
Spain

A quick tour of international indie — guitar, bass, drums, what more do you need, really. (Preferably a singer, but not a dealbreaker.)

12. Kuzco: Ha Ha Ha
Australia

Spacey, silly electro that mutters and laughs to itself, walks around nervously in little circles.

13. Masal, Emma Anderson: Pause the Rain (Xylitol Remix)
UK

I really liked the Xylitol album from this year, which I referred to as “gentle jungle?” and don’t really have a phrase or question to beat it. This is like that, plus little arpeggiated harp-like figures that do sound a little bit like rain.

14. Mashudu, Wesley Keys f. Cnethemba Gonelo, Frank Mabeat: Ngiphuma Khona
South Africa

Some amapiano of the slow crescendo dream piano variety, from a group of artists whose names didn’t ring a bell, but apparently I have featured Mashudu twice in the before, both times on a Kabza De Small song (including his epic “Kabza Chant”).

15. Fuyuni Wakarete: A Whisper of the Wind
Japan

This one reminded me of something specific, maybe Elephant6-adjacent? Though features ethereal harmonized coos that are a bit softer than whatever referent I’m half-thinking of.

16. LAÏ, Liliane Chlela: Msh Akeed
Lebanon

Lebanese trip-hop that maybe doesn’t quite earn its extended half-speed denouement but doesn’t drag on as long as you might think.

17. Alejandro Falcón: Tambores En Colores
Cuba

18. Upupayāma: Mystic Chords of Memory
Italy

19. Pablo Lapidusas: Lágio Marinho
Argentina-Brazil

Classy cool down time: a nice if “world”-ish Cuban jazz ensemble—more info at Bandcamp—a nice if cosmo-ish Italian psych band—more info at Bandcamp—and a nice, if sketchy, Rhodes and piano piece by an Argentine artist based in Brazil that is not even available on Bandcamp as far as I can tell.

20. Zaw Ali: Aarzu
Pakistan

Ending with a lovely if soppy (not sappy) Pakistani pop ballad that mucks around in Mixolydian to lightly hypnotic effect.

That’s it! Until next time, maybe try the Myaap album?

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from Kuzco: Ha Ha Ha

I saw an interesting video the other day on the spread of a specific melody line that a YouTuber refers to as “the gen alpha melody” — a melodic motif in a minor key that builds its melody around consistent intervals: from the minor sixth down to the second, up to the fifth, and then back down to the root.

Two older songs that the YouTuber points to as precursors are Anastacia’s “Left Outside Alone” (“ALL my life I’ve been WAITin’ for you to bring a FAIRY tale my WAY”) and the Beatles’ “It’s Only Love” (“it’s only LOVE and that is ALL, why should I FEEL the way I DO?”) To me the most obvious referent is Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”—the intro and post-chorus phrase “ohhhh…caught in a bad romance”—though that melody phrase technically lands on a different note because it ends in the relative major chord.1

The melodic anchors themselves are pretty common, and there are lots of ways to hit them without directly copying a specific melody. I also don’t love the phrase “gen alpha melody,” as it doesn’t describe the melody itself and precludes the possibility of identifying other common melodic motifs. I can’t resist a counter-neologism, so how about the “tritone swoon,” which focuses on the most notable part of the melody, going from the minor sixth down to the second.

Despite this melodic phrase being used in dozens of songs, to my ears none of the contemporary examples have great melodies outside of the motif. The motif itself almost feels like a placeholder, a pretty phrase that signifies melancholy before moving on to some other point of interest in the song—and rarely further melodic interest. One clear example is its use in ROSÉ’s “APT.,” where the melody features in a pre-chorus to provide some texture before the song’s real hook: the “ah-puh-ta-puh-tuh” chant.

This got me thinking about melody in contemporary chart pop more generally. There are a lot of weak melodies in pop hits, though there has been a recent resurgence of smaller songwriting teams re-centering traditional pop structure in the long aftermath of the EDM boom. By weak melody, I mean the melody doesn’t really develop or conclude; it’s often distinctively undistinctive, impossible to remember, a kind of anti-earworm. There are exceptions that show up on the US charts: Chappell Roan, Billie Eilish, “Golden” from KPOP Demon Hunters.2 But more often I almost wish it were easier to get popular songs stuck in my head.

I’ve written before about structural changes to pop melody that have happened in the past 15 or so years. In the ‘10s, rappers introduced restrictive melody patterns into their music in a way that opened up possibilities for mildly improvisatory melodies. In some sense these melodies are “weak,” but in another sense they are just doing something different from what melody does in other forms of songwriting. I wrote a long piece about Taylor Swift’s melody strategies along these lines a few years ago, suggesting that something similar has happened in a lot of other pop music.

However, I don’t include rap and R&B melodies like that here, and think “minimal” might be a better framework for the impact of this style rather than “weak.”

I should also note that (1) there have always been weak melodies in pop music (the bigger point I’d make is that right now there are just not a lot of strong melodies to compare to the weak ones) and that (2) having a “weak melody” doesn’t mean the song is bad, while there are many songs with strong melodies I really dislike—including that allegedly foundational Anastacia song. Lots of artists have a mix of songs with strong melodies and weak ones, used for different purposes in different places.

So just think of this as a bit of a riff on some melodic moves I notice in chart pop right now. Some of my examples I don’t like, and some I do. Every example has plenty of historical antecedents, versions of it that work really well, etc.

• Phrasal battering: one of the most common melody strategies, this is where a half of a melody line (or less) just gets repeated over and over again without any resolution. “Ordinary” by Alex Warren is an example.

• Fleetwood suspension: A very close and cyclical chord progression—between two chords formed on the same bass note or maybe a note apart—allows the singer to meander around a few notes in a pleasing way that is in no hurry to go anywhere. Here it’s the chords, not the melody itself, that never seem to resolve, so there’s always some tension in the melody without the melody itself having to do much work. This move works in lots of songs (I once wrote a long essay on The-Dream’s “I Luv Your Girl,” one of my favorite songs ever, which uses a pattern like this). But I think it’s hard to really knock you out with a melody at the same time—that’s something Fleetwood Mac was good at (like in “Dreams”), balancing the sway and the knockout. Olivia Dean’s “Man I Need” and Lola Young’s “Messy” are good examples of it working with perfunctory melodies.

• Timbre swap: This is where a change in octave, performance, or vocal timbre obscures how little melody is actually happening in the song. Olivia Rodrigo does this a lot, changing her vocal sound or rhythm, jumping up an octave, or going back and forth from speak-sing without actually changing up her melody very much.3 Taylor Swift is the queen of timbre swap, which I’ve written about a lot (maybe too much?). This is a place where I’d be interested to think through the direct influence of hip-hop more.

• Genre illusion: The use of a traditionally melodic genre—piano ballad, American songbook standard, country music—to suggest that you will be met with a memorable melody, but no such melody arrives. This describes a lot of Laufey’s songs, all of the Sienna Spiro songs I’ve heard, and…probably “Choosin’ Texas.”

• Half-borrowed melody: This is where one melody vaguely recalls a different melody without really adding anything new to it, but not always as an interpolation or reference. This has always been a feature of pop music, and I only include it here because it particularly stands out when there aren’t lots of other contemporary melodies to compare it to. Chappell Roan half-borrows a lot—I think one reason “Pink Pony Club” has some of the endurance it does is because it feels unborrowed. Ed Sheeran does it all the time.4 “Half-borrowed” results aren’t always bad—in some cases the result might be better than the original—but the melody scans as an imitation of something else.

• The good-enough hum-along: Honestly, the most common problem I hear in pop melodies right now is a lack of interest in crafting melody at all, a feeling that melodies are a bit of an afterthought to atmospherics, as if someone were humming a melody somewhat randomly around the production. I was really struck by an interesting new album by Eli that does explicit Max Martin Y2K cosplay, but it sounds like someone making up melodies around all of the old hits, or maybe singing the harmony parts. PinkPantheress has a more conscious melodic strategy around this, making it part of noticing samples and allusions in her songs.

I think the “gen alpha melody” slots into these strategies because it is a way to tip one’s hat to the idea of having a strong melody in your song without bothering to actually come up with one. Unlike the YouTuber, I don’t believe there is an obvious source; I think it’s more broadly memetic, drawn from lots of sources of contemporary inspiration because it signifies a strong melody quickly in a minor key. It’s like ticking something off of a checklist so that you can return to what you really want to be doing, which is (seemingly) anything else.

This is a fairly long-term trend, if you trust the results of a recent study on melodic complexity on the charts that Tom Breihan wrote about skeptically in the Guardian in 2024. The short story is that over time, there are more words conveyed in pop songs within a more restricted range of notes, which seems plausible to me.5

I love strong melodies, but plenty of the music I love doesn’t need a strong melody to win me over, and not all strong melodies make for good songs. There are a few US and Anglophone artists who do seem to have a consistent gift for putting strong melodies in good songs, including Billie Eilish, Debbii Dawson, Willow, and <checks notes> huh, sombr, whattaya know.

If I had to guess, I would say that the previous era of Strong Melodies in US chart pop are connected to EDM and more broadly what I’ve called “pop mirage,” which had a mercenary and oddly detached approach to melody-writing, often farmed out to a top-liner who had no reason to connect a strong melody to the rest of the song.

The ‘20s has seen a resurgence of songs with fewer noticeable sutures, and are probably better overall, melody strength notwithstanding. I think the blunt-force melodic approach of the previous decade generally had much worse results than the weak but holistic melodies we get in US chart pop in the ‘20s, and the idea of a Sia-style unholy melody graft has rightfully become unfashionable. But I do think we should find a few more new stars out there who are in tune with the spirit world, who wake up with a melody in their head along with all those pesky words.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. Cannelle: Stereo
France

Can you believe how many great pop stars there are out in the world right now that do not get write-ups in aggressively myopic Guardian thinkpieces about “trash pop”?? This isn’t even my favorite pop song from this year! It might not even be the best pop song I heard this month! (Hm…it probably is, though.) I am pleased to find that I wrote about Cannelle after I heard her for the first time (at the end of 2024) that she could remain nobody forever or could be the hugest star in the world by 2026. Not a nobody, not yet the hugest star in the world. Fingers crossed!

2. Ibibio Sound Machine: Return to Sender
Nigeria-UK/UK

My yearly-ish Ibibio Sound Machine banger, I guess? It’s good!

3. Natasha Kay: Entasi
Greece

I don’t hear enough Greek pop to know if this is Marina Satti-fication or just a random attempt to keep up with electro trends. Gonna continue to tell my kids that [literally anything that’s not Charli XCX] is Charli XCX. I’d hate to admit to liking Dad Rock.

4. Zuchu: Aye
Tanzania

Zuchu is back—last year’s “Amanda” was a bongo flava barnstormer, with poor Amanda trapped inside the barn, while this one merely…uh, singes a silo? But sparks still fly.

5. QINGA: Do Rana
Poland

Euro-thump juiced with extra accordion, very much up my street. You will probably know within the first five seconds whether it is up your street.

6. Joalin: Toke
Finland-Mexico

Finnish-Mexican reggaeton-pop is exactly as light (and brief) as it needs to be to get the job done. Cursory research revealed her participation in Simon Fuller’s Now United, a global girl group scheme I should probably look into more even if just for morbid curiosity’s sake.

7. MilliMax: Instagram
South Korea

8. Dean Turnley: Actin’ Tough
Australia

Two trifles before the six-seven sequence. First, the closest you can get to hypertrap elevator music from South Korea, and then a particularly grim grinding down of a load-bearing vocal sample, from an Australian producer who probably should have capped the length at 2:00.

9. Laurinha Costa, Dj Cabello, Dj Tchouzen: Six Seven
Brazil

10. Malcriada, NIÑOS GÓTICOS: Six Seven
Mexico

My kids inform me that the “six seven” trend is now horribly dated (school years are still useful hype cycle limiters), but don’t tell Latin America, where a viral Brazilian funk hit and a viral-ish goth-pop hit with the aptly named all caps NIÑOS GÓTICOS have found new stores of energy in a seemingly passé meme. Fad frackers!

11. DJ JEJEDAZS, Malu Silmon, DANNA, MC Kenny RP: Rock Perverso
Brazil

Get your double-digit YouTube view funk on one of my mixes with this one weird trick: add a guitar.

12. Trim: Coconut Water
US

Yes, we are in a golden age of Joyful Rap by Women, and yes, even the minor stuff sounds great, and yes, the Myaap album is probably my album of the year, more on that next week.

13. Minyo Crusaders, Frente Cumbiero: Hanagasa Ondo
Japan/Colombia

Interesting project where a Japanese group mixes Japanese folk with international styles and collaborators, emphasizing Latin and Caribbean pop forms. Took me ages to find the right placement for this thing on a mix but glad I found a spot for it.

14. Vlntna B: A Mi Manera
Chile

That’s Valentina B, dreamy if somewhat insubstantial Chilean reggaeton-pop.

15. Jenevieve f. Freddie Gibbs, SALIMATA: Flight Risqué
Cuba-US/US

16. Paco Moreno: Enamorado de ti
Spain

17. Güneş Özgeç: Üzdü
Turkey

Three very different varieties of ultrasmooth, or maybe I’m just calling that the common thread to save email space. First, boom-bap like butter and strong rap features help give substance to Jenevieve’s post-SZA wispiness, which I think works in contrast here, but I haven’t checked out the rest of her album. Then some Spanish indie pop with little flecks of AM gold, and finally Turkish indie pop that, whattaya know, has a perfectly lovely little melody, not too weak, not too strong.

18. Uncle Waffles, Royal MusiQ f. Zee Nxumalo, Shakes & Les, Shoes Meister: imission
South Africa

A holdover amapiano collaboration I didn’t have room for last week but am happy to feature here—not sure how often Uncle Waffles has worked with Zee Nxumalo, but I haven’t heard them paired together before.

19. Dames Brown, Amp Fiddler: Take Me As I Am (Moodymann Remix)
US

20. goat (JP): Orin - Ricardo Villalobos Variation
Japan/Chile-Germany

21. Octo Octa: Survival Groove
US

Not much space for any more words this week, but plenty of time on the mix for three long dance tracks from reliable house virtuosos—Job de Wit clued me in to this great Moodymann remix with Dame Brown, Ricardo Villalobos works his minimalist magic, and Octo Octa makes the dorkiest synth sounds seem cool as hell.

That’s it! Until next time, try to keep your melodies strong but your ideas stronger.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title translated from Cannelle: Stereo

A non-US/Anglosphere mix this week, partly the result of having three mixes to arrange simultaneously. It has me thinking about the state of various regional music scenes. I wrote last year that I couldn’t figure out what was happening to Afrobeats, which seemed to have disappeared from global charts compared to its heyday from the late ‘10s into the early ‘20s:

So…any idea what’s happened to Nigerian pop this year? Has its devil’s bargain with amapiano short-circuited its own development? It is approximately nowhere on the global charts, and the Nigerian charts seem to have pulled away a bit, too, a few breakthroughs like Shallipopi notwithstanding. But I could be totally wrong here, might need to do a regional dive soon to see what I’ve been missing.

So I was glad to see an article about this in the Guardian (h/t Collin Smith at No Chambers).

I think there are some important observations here. One, there is a sort of double-edged sword to what I’ve been writing about as the post-A-pop era of regional competitors: regions rise and fall according to the social dynamics of the globalized monsterverse. From artist Joeboy: “Afrobeats’ global rise has made the world interested in not just our music but our culture, our fashion, our swag.” But this “world interest” can be fickle.

Two, although the piece is neutral about how Afrobeats has adapted its sound to incorporate South African dance music (including amapiano’s log drums and now 3-step, see Zinoleesky’s new one below), I think that this has been a serious trap for the scene and it’s put itself in a position of always sounding a step behind what it’s borrowing from.1 But maybe it’s the other way around, and interest started to decline first — a marketing manager in the piece says, “Amapiano no longer seems to be working. In fact, nobody knows what works and that’s causing a lot of panic.”

And finally, there’s a compelling theory put forward in the piece that part of what drove the Afrobeats ascent was a pandemic bubble where people were exploring new music at the same time the world was also experiencing an acute “brain drain” episode, especially from west Africa to the UK.

Whether these diagnoses are correct or not I’m not qualified to say, but I do wonder about them. They all seem plausible but also somehow insufficient to describe the global pop environment, where the erosion of gatekeepers belies the piece’s repeated invocation of industry decision-makers. (I don’t doubt that these decision-makers still play a huge role, but they don’t play the only role in popularity.)

There’s one section of the piece that bothered me, and it’s how Afrobeats’ perception in the United States is framed: “Industry experts also worry that the rise of conservative politics and ethno-nationalism in the west has contributed to Afrobeats’ dwindling popularity.” The article’s author connects this to one interviewee’s comment on the success of country music on the Billboard Hot 100: “The resurgence of country music and other traditionally white genres, he argues, gestures at the kinds of budgets being approved.” This seems like a specious correlation to me: if there was a resurgence of country music on the US Hot 100, it happened at the same time that Afrobeats and rap music also ascended between 2019 and 2021. So the question isn’t whether country has risen at the expense of other music like Afrobeats or rap but whether resources are being pulled from Afrobeats but not from other places, and then whether this actually has anything to do with ethnonationalism or a conservative political turn.

I think a more compelling frame here would be to think of regionalization as a phenomenon that also affects the US, where country music and to a lesser extent R&B function as regional styles that don’t tend to translate globally at the same scale they hit in the US.2

A regionalization perspective suggests that regions will cyclically come in and out of fashion in unpredictable ways. The main thrust of the A-pop series was that the US itself has to be thought of now as one of many regional competitors, and that US pop music specifically doesn’t have a history of being framed in this way. But the flip side is that different regional styles will also rise and fall, and that it’s hard to know when and why precisely because the global landscape has changed so much so quickly.

One thing to look out for, and something that my own somewhat haphazard listening methods sometimes help me get an intuitive sense of, is how different regions’ music is faring internationally. From the vantage of my listening (just my impressions), Caribbean rhythmic genres like shatta and especially bouyon seem globally ascendant in a way that Naija pop and Afrobeats was at the end of the ‘10s. Southeast Asian regional pop forms loosely based on K-pop and J-pop seem to be developing quickly, while K-pop struggles with a complicated role as a center of gravity without the benefit of more robust US-style cultural dominance, and J-pop continues to operate in a more stable parallel universe.

Japan’s longstanding pop industry might be a better model to understand what’s been happening in, e.g., South Africa and Brazil, two areas seem to have stable and adaptable scenes, both with fairly open-ended templates (Brazilian funk and South African house music) that have never quite broken through with a specific transnational megastar, but also continually inspire absorption and copying in other regions.3

I am equal parts curious and ambivalent around how music spreads now, and just-so narratives don’t capture the fundamental shift in global listening to omnidirectionality and unpredictability. Structural patterns can be clear in hindsight without always having obvious causes (which is not the same as saying that there’s no cause, just that you can only determine them after the fact in ways that are basically unrepeatable). I find this very exciting as a listener, but for artists and business interests, not to mention journalists, it’s maybe a different story.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. LinLin: +
France

2. Fallon: Bisous
Martinique-Guadeloupe-France

As promised and/or previewed in my April roundup, here are two Caribbean-pop-indebted French pop stars to watch: LinLin’s “+” sounds like a superstar in the making charging out of the gate, while Fallon doesn’t grab as hard but demonstrates an insinuating adaptability to her surroundings that reminds me of someone like Cassie, avoiding making an obvious mark in any given moment but lingering with you afterward as having indelibly stamped herself into the material.

3. Dj Glad, N’Ken, Bilouki: Chaud (3X)
Martinique

Shatta and bouyon are both traveling well to new regions, but their respective scenes are still full speed ahead; I’m not fielding a weekly deluge of content like in funk or amapiano, but there’s more than enough to specialize if you were so inclined.

4. Zinoleesky: Nostalgia
Nigeria

I’ve come a long way with my pharmacy that only plays Nigerian music, and correctly ID’ed a Zinoleesky song when I walked in the other day (I kept this information to myself).4 He is still one of my favorite Nigerian vocalists, but I am struck by how sweaty the surroundings are, a lot of effort for what should be a more effortless 3-step sound.

5. Champuru Makhenzo, Audio Addicts, Buxzi Lee, Amaza: 444
South Africa

6. JayJayy, Mordecai: Mngani Wami (Jaydecai)
South Africa

Meanwhile South African house music itself seems to have no such crisis. As I said up top, I think the various dance subgenres have demonstrated a resiliency that many other scenes don’t have. The one that to my ears sounds like a global crossover smash (3-step blend, a hook in English) has not really taken off, while the fantastic debut album from an up-and-coming amapiano singer, JayJayy, brings many of amapiano’s best producers together and they all sound great without really making compromises for amapiano outsiders. (JayJayy is a find from the ILM Rolling Afrohouse thread.)

7. Maandy: Hainaga Mambo
Kenya

My inability to get a bead on Kenyan pop, as does my enjoyment of Maandy, who never seems to put out the same sort of song twice. This time out she opts for dancehall.

8. 15 15: Take Off Late
Tahiti-France

Interesting project from the Tahitian-heritage Paris-based group that imagines a mythical Polynesian island where the tide is always right for surfing and the beats follow suit in rolling waves, can’t seem stay still for more than a minute at a time.

9. Tayna: Vena
Kosovo-Albania

I’ve been eagerly awaiting Tayna’s album since liking her amapiano-indebted pop—like LokpoLokpo, I assumed this would be something like my “Rihanna needs to make an amapiano album” dream from 2023. It includes bits of that but is more expansive and genre-ambivalent. This song, though, is pretty much exactly what I’ve wanted, and I’m surprised more people haven’t cracked it, give or take a few Tyla songs.

10. DJ Jeeh FDC, Mc Gw, Yuri Redicopa: Ritmada Do MJ2
Brazil

One I’d slotted into my Brazilian holdover list until Frank Kogan put it in his ongoing 2026 singles list, at which point I kicked myself for missing the “Earth Song” sample. (I know I glossed over this at the time because there’s a zero percent chance I would have kept it off of a mix if I’d really noticed.) Consider it harm reduction for the Michael soundtrack—are these sorts of huge samples in Brazilian funk authorized and paid for? I hope not!

11. DJ Danilinho Beat, MC Rafa 22: Medley pro DJ Danilinho Beat #3
Brazil

No idea why this song in particular jumped out to me, but it does provide a good example of what I once referred to as “melody literacy” in Brazilian funk. I was thinking about the role of melody in funk on the 20-year anniversary of Girl Talk’s Night Ripper, which I’ve come to really dislike over the years for its cavalier approach to every element of a song that isn’t the BPM. I wrote over on Bluesky: “There are times when he will let songs [in keys] that are one or two steps away from each other just play for a minute (worst ever offender might be ‘Rude Boy’ and ‘Waiting Room’)—even the most extreme Brazilian funk DJs don’t do this because it’s not ‘abrasive,’ it just sucks.”

There’s a smooth match in this song between melodic quality in the rap and the key of the song—I couldn’t tell you whether this is done intuitively by the MC or more deliberately by the DJ afterward (I imagine in different songs, either option might be in play). I think the abrasion and jaggedness in funk wouldn’t work if it was totally artless—the songs start with a kernel of something beautiful and will then bury it to see if you can still sense it underneath, like the princess and the pea. (This particular song sticks the pea on top of the mattress, though.)

12. 63OG, Minz: La tourelle
Cameroon-France/Nigeria

Interesting blend of coupe-decale with a plainer rap vocal. Should note that as I write this, the song and its accompanying album, 63Problemes, seem to have been taken off of YouTube and streaming. [Note: the song is back up just before this is scheduled to publish, hooray! But I don’t have anything else to say about it at the moment.]

13. Eizzyboi: Ninu Eko
Nigeria

Can’t quite place this—it struck me as having some of the frenetic motion of Nigerian cruise music, with log drum providing some thrown elbows. This is refreshing after the log drum sound has generally mellowed in a lot of post-amapiano production. Eizzyboi’s other music is a combination of upbeat Afrobeats and more straightforward hip-hop, so not sure exactly what this is or where it came from.

14. cKovi: Kora Kora
Mexico

Mexican…acid-kawaii? (My attempt to figure out how to define the “weaponized cuteness” that has broken containment from J-pop and started to show up all over the world.) It’s interesting in how it models itself after J-pop consciously, or self-consciously, but ends up sounding like a lot of other Latin American pop finding the same weapons from different directions.

15. Torfi: Ásdís Rán
Iceland

We need as many songs with the “Wearing My Rolex” synths as possible.

16. Mandyspie: Last Dance
Canada-France

French-Canadian hypertrap that sounds ready made for some hypothetical mall of the future, sounds great.

17. Tshegue: Psycho
DRC/France

Tshegue is one of the rare acts that I now give multiple listens to on principle. This one was a grower, so I’m glad I slowed down for it. Unfortunately you need to build up a lot of goodwill before I can do this, so I will continue to skip right past dozens of good songs each week. Sorry!

18. Viviane Chidid f. Bakhaw Dioum: C’est dieu qui decide
Senegal

19. Xduppy, Angekebabuye Mc f. Focalistic, Benzoo, DJ Maphorisa, Uncle Waffles, Mluusician: Lwetse 2.0
South Africa

Two leads from Lokpo—the rolling Senegal YouTube chart playlist hits predictable polyrhythmic paydirt from Viviane Chidid (I should really have an alert out for her releases). Then an update of a song I already had kicking around in my South African house holdover list brings in an all-star cast to join its already pretty all-starry cast.

20. Colkaze, Mbuxx f. Loony Q, Pablo Eddie: Wehh Mbuxx
South Africa

Another amapiano song I’m finding hard to describe—it strikes me as somewhat unfashionable and outdated. If amapiano development is like dog years, then four years’ nostalgia feels like ten. This particular song secured its status as a mix closer by doing that annoying thing where the song sputters to a close with several false endings, fade-outs, and silences, in a way that sounds like it might have been an editing mistake. Check your waveforms before you upload these things!

That’s it! Until next time, please try not to make any mash-ups with two songs in different keys.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title translated from Tshegue: Psycho (“Même dans la dérive, j’reste une diva”)

Do I dare wade into recent online conversations about the “quintessential millennial song?” It combines two things that I find annoying—first, imagining that being born at a particular time imparts obvious and universal features to a very broad cohort of people (the conversation almost immediately broke down even among Bluesky spitballers between British and American respondents). And second, projecting one’s individual taste onto how a diverse group “hear” something. I mean, just imagine— casting yourself as the voice of a whole generation! Er…don’t google that.

All that said, I resist waving away generational discourse altogether. I think that there are probably important effects of generation size, and of the aging of what is currently the largest generation in US history (sorry Boomers, we’re number one now!). I just don’t think this is necessarily related to how particular songs from the past might operate socially now. Most of the examples cited online appeal to multiple generations, and the ones that don’t often weren’t (and still aren’t) very popular within any particular generation according to the imperfect measures of popularity we have (lots of indie rock).1

The importance of there being a “millennial music generation” to my mind has mostly to do with how the size of this age cohort interacted with changing norms in marketing and distribution as they/we grew up. These are ideas I’ve been kicking around in a stubborn draft of the Disney series that won’t seem to get itself together enough to publish: more kids meant more consumers, specifically in a time when consumer targeting by narrow demographic characteristics exploded. The rise of cable television in particular provided a way to organize lots of young consumers without needing to appeal to broader (that is, older) demographics.

In doing some research on the millennial teenpop boom—where music marketing crashed into cohort size—I was interested in how the term “teenpop” evolved over time in the press, using NYT’s archives to get a sense of its use in that publication. Here’s what I have sitting in my draft folder:

The person who used it the most frequently in the 1970s was New York Times columnist John Rockwell (styled “teen-pop”) to describe a wide range of contemporary artists—David Essex, Paul McCartney, Bootsy Collins—usually in comparison to some more “mature” counterpoint. His use of the term was part of a larger grappling with the shifting tastes of aging Baby Boomers outgrowing the tastes of their childhoods. In 1977, he captured the point at which this generation was growing too old for childish things and into a maturity that record labels would need to address:

“Americans are getting older, and after 25 they don’t seem to hit as many records as they do when they’re younger. Though the record industry has been able to grow steadily without worrying unduly about how to attract the adult buyer, one of these years the moguls are going to have to sit down and retool their promotional effort. But given the stakes and the fact that a good deal of present‐day popular music is a lot more mature than teen‐pop used to be, one doesn’t feel too concerned.”

Discourse about music “for millennials” is similarly grappling with a large aging cohort, and there are probably some interesting things to say about this. I think the jury’s out on how the age cohort of US millennials will make their generational size felt in a music industry that has changed in ways that I think are bigger than US demography no matter how you slice it.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. Lavalove: Go Go Boots
US

Anything that reminds me of the Dollyrots will probably make a mix at some point, and this is no exception.

2. Güner Künier: Kes
Turkey-Germany

Are there any US artists that make their sequencers throb and thrust like this? Seems like a waste of one of the great affordances of the technology to make it sound so damn soft all the time.

3. Tallandskiinny: I Wanna Dance
Canada

Montreal artist is inspired by Jersey club but to my ears gets closer to the tamborzão of classic Brazilian funk. Had never really thought about the possible connection between the two (which probably runs through Miami bass?).

4. Juana Rozas, Six Sex: Splash
Argentina

Have enjoyed all of the team-ups I’ve heard between Juana Rozas, my artist of the year last year, and Six Sex, potentially my artist of the year this year. (Their collab “I’m a Star” from 2024 is currently in the second round of the Pop World Cup and it’s up against my team.) There is supposedly a Six Sex full-length album in the works, which would immediately shift the balance of power in the Other Dave Moore Yearly List of Albums I Enjoyed Universe.

5. IRENE: Don’t Wanna Get Up
South Korea

Red Velvet singer with a mid-tier midtempo melodic bonbon.

6. Crescendo: Diam-Diam Suka
Indonesia

The occasional K-pop-style Indonesian pop number not by No Na to make it through.

7. Starjunk 95: Error 4 on the Floor
Japan

8. MilMoon: True Mind
Japan

Two different approaches to hyperactive J-pop, via triple-shot espresso from a hip coffee shop and novelty oversized Pixy Stix from an abandoned arcade, respectively. The hipsters probably merit an album listen. The Pixy Stixers are singles only for the time being.

9. NASAAN f. That Mexican OT: Luke Combs
US

10. Trap Dickey f. Key Glock: Down South
US

Two rap tracks that have finally gotten ubiquitous rappers That Mexican OT and Key Glock onto my mixes. The first one sets a terrible joke accent against a trap beat without really achieving Trap Daniels velocity (probably better for it as song and as joke). The second one uses a reliable Other Dave mix hack—throw in the “Rump Shaker” sax.

11. Dallo: El 2ashash
Egypt

Egyptian electro palate cleanser. I’m not beating the “doesn’t include Egyptian music unless it’s augmented with some arty cosmopolitan adornment” allegations.

12. ERISTHEPLANET: Geezer [2025]
US

Glad to hear that Vayda’s casual whispery flow has some traction in the wider world of up-and-coming MCs, via DC rapper Eristheplanet. Less glad to discover as I write this that this is originally from April 2025 (woops) and went viral early this year soundtracking Drake gambling content. But on the plus side, I also learned that the first album she ever bought was Selena Gomez & The Scene’s Kiss & Tell: “I loved the album cover and it was the first album I had downloaded on my iPod Nano as a purchase. I was like eight years old but I knew what I liked.”

13. SY3: Tell Me
China-US

Chinese-American group based in L.A. on a Dutch label. A bit caught between stools, too slow for contemporary electropop and too upbeat for throwback downtempo trip-hop. They claim it’s influenced by ‘00s Chinese pop from Faye Wong and Zhou Xun, which is as good an excuse as any to listen to Faye Wong’s 2000 album Fable.

14. Ea Othilde: Florence
Norway

Whither windowpane? I think my indie installment in the A-pop series has aged most poorly so far (if you don’t count the continued implosion of Eurovision, which to be fair I accounted for in the fourth installment). My fascination with a deluge of mush-pop was probably just noticing the glut of a landfill at the end of a trend. I hear far less uncanny valley indie rock/adult contemporary this year—even this one, which puts me in mind of it, clears out some of the mush and falls more cleanly on the indie side. I do think that Sombr is the Bruno Mars of this particular era of indie/pop, so maybe he just “won” the mush landscape, gave it a shave and a haircut, and is on his way to becoming a sui generis monster. (Yes, I can link three A-pop installments in one blurb, what of it.)

15. Rachel Lime: Jangdan
US

A nifty little art-pop number that has the feel of being in 12/4. Lime’s vocals are really the only part of the mise en scène operating as wallpaper, which suits her, like the vocals are printed as a Magic Eye and you need to relax your vision for them to really pop out (I’ve never been able to do a Magic Eye but would probably ace a Magic Ear).

16. Daisy Grenade: Girls Are So Lucky
US

Third or maybe fourth lifetime appearance from neo-(neo?-)teenpop duo Daisy Grenade, who no longer sound like Skye Sweetnam with cursing and now sing glittery but grizzled songs about life on the road (“full glam in the minivan,” which I misheard as the better line “four grand and a minivan”).

17. MikkyZia, Club Dangdut Racun: Skip Dulu
Indonesia

18. Thắng, Wala: Hoá Ra Là
Vietnam

Two watery R&B numbers, sloshing aimlessly but not unpleasantly. The first I think is from a hipdut playlist (which from what I can tell just means “alt R&B from Indonesia”) whereas the second is one of many contemporary V-pop songs that makes it onto my radar each week without having an organizing subgenre that I’m aware of.

19. Vanessa Carlton: Woke Up High
US

Vanessa Carlton woke up high, but not that high. Sounds more like Earl Grey.

20. Rachel Kitchlew, DOUGH: Spook
UK

21. Lyra Pramuk: Ending (Djrum Endless Rework)
US-Germany/UK

22. ((( O ))): Evolve
US

Ending with three mostly-instrumental mood pieces. The first is a heist scene jazz jam by harpist Rachel Kitchlew, the second a defacement of Lyra Pramuk’s already pretty viscous experimental vocal pop stretched into a rictus smirk by DJrum, and finally, mix-closing standby ((( O ))) brings things to a soft landing sounding like she’s trying to smother some Afrobeats in a sweater.

That’s it! Until next time, don’t be afraid to speak for yourself rather than your whole generation (note to self).

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from Vanessa Carlton: Woke Up High

No time for chit-chat — it’s April in review! Hope you’re well.

11 Songs I Heard in April (unranked)

• Courtney Barnett: Mantis

• Dani Lia: Schwindelig (omgomgomg)

• Deli Dünya: Qamar

• DJ Mandrake 100% Original: Piano do Mal

• heavy / bloom: Бруд [“Brood”]

• LinLin: + [“Plus”]1

• Natalia Doco: Hacha

• Quỳnh Anh Shyn: Girl Phố

• Six Sex: Not Ur Mom

• VICKY: Bunte Scheine

• Yuri: てきとうメイク [“Tekito Make”]

10 Albums I Heard in April (lightly ranked)

• RAYE: This Music May Contain Hope
  Haven’t really grappled with this thing yet. It goes long (really long) on the promise of artful/joyful/theatrical R&B-pop at the end of the aughts, which I don’t think ever really produced anything quite this maximalist and overstuffed. But it leaves a strong aftertaste that I can’t quite figure out. I have determined the aftertaste is NOT: Britishness! musical theater! meta asides! indulgent set pieces! or FUN! But it might be: flattened production where many different styles feel mashed together rather than set against each other. Weirdly, I think what I really want is a well-produced live stage show recording of the same material—as if this is a studio reproduction of the real thing I want to hear.

• LØLØ: God Forbid a Girl Spits Out Her Feelings!
  Feel similarly about this as I do about RAYE, from a different angle—every piece fits together nicely but the album taken as a whole feels a bit washed out. It’s like the blueprint for a perfect mid-aughts alt-confessional album, but it sort of works on those terms—I think any more discernible grain or personality from LØLØ herself might even ruin the effect.

• Fallon: Winter Princess
  A decent full-length of the continued integration of bouyon into French pop music, in a variant Fallon apparently calls RnBouyon. (As a pathological genre neologizer, I must respectfully say: no thank you.)

• Zee Nxumalo & Dlala Thukzin: Inznja Zam Vol. 1 [EP]
  A no-brainer collab between one of my favorite vocalists in amapiano and a producer who is, if not exactly a favorite, an accepted titan.

• Ashley Monroe: Dear Nashville
  Really slept on Tennessee Lightning last year, and am determined not to sleep on this solid but slight follow-up, which is less oomph and more craft, goes down a bit easier despite having fewer highlights. (Stephen Deusner at Pitchfork says: “aggressively modest.”) Like watching a good spring training game.

• Julia Cumming: Julia
  Sunflower Bean lead singer gave a charming interview on a podcast I listen to and I liked the songs from this that they played. It’s very piano forward and overwritten in the same way the stuff I sometimes try to write is. It briefly inspired me to try to write some songs, which were all bad.

• Vanessa Carlton: Veils
  I don’t think I consistently underrate Carlton like I do Michelle Branch, but maybe there are other Carlton albums I’ve missed? (It looks like I’ve longlisted her albums twice in the last 20 years, in 2007 and 2020.) A lot of echo and space: bedroom pop, but it’s a big bedroom and maybe haunted—just a little, not so much that it keeps you up.

• Makthaverskan: Glass and Bones
  Featured one of the songs from this jangly Swedish indie rock album on a mix after Isabel recommended them. The other ones are good, too.

• YUNA: Ice Cream [EP]

  Which K-pop EP to feature this month? YUNA gets the nod on pure banger ratio, but I was probably more interested in the hyperpoppish alt-K variant from HEYOON, seriously unserious (that’s the title, not my judgment of it).

• Ilykimchi: Prenup [EP]
  One of a bundle of potential recs from George Henderson tracing the current gnarly little family tree branches of Weird Girls Who Dance But Ambiguously Take the Piss, edging out Lil Mariko (who is more obviously taking the piss).

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. Laufey: Madwoman
Iceland

Is Laufey…good? I think no, but I find her popularity fascinating. She’s in Fortnite! She got one of the hockey show guys in the video! This sort of zombie songbook pastiche irritates me but I’m not immune to its charms; with a dollop more irony she could aspire to Touch & Go. Her songs work occasionally when the bones are good, good enough in this case that I can overlook a repeated syllable emphasis clunker like “something SO vex-ING ‘bout YOU.”2 Oh god, there’s a Katseye cameo in the video, too? Hm—is Laufey the neo-songbook Katseye? In true ‘90s bachelor pad fashion, consider this song the “negative track” on the CD that you have to rewind backwards from 0:00 to get to.

2. Kumail, Nickson Dufala: Vultures
India-Portugal/DRC

A lot of Golden Beatology this week, with plenty of three-digit YouTubes and, when available, Bandcamp links. This one feels very much like an album intro, which in context it literally is.3 It was also used for a short documentary about the project soundtracking a day in the life of chef Nickson Dufala in Kinshasa, where Kumail lived for 5 years. I think it stands on its own when the groove settles around 90 seconds in.

3. Les Poissons: Nature Boy
Norway

I’m pretty sure that every cover of “Nature Boy” (the Eden Ahbez standard) is good, but I’ve never tested the theory of whether every song even called “Nature Boy” is good. This is evidence in favor of that theory.

4. Narasimha: Fanga
US

Fun single from Ninja Tune, glimmers of “Mutant Brain” by Sam Spiegel and Ape Drums, soundtrack to what just be a top 5 perfume ad music video. Some day when someone finally makes me the music coordinator on a children’s animated show I will be sure to include this song in a chase scene.

5. Jorge Drexler f. Rueda de Candombe: El tambor chico
Uruguay

Bittersweet to win a round in the People’s Pop World Cup against this catchy and warm samba from Uruguayan singer Jorge Drexler.

6. Asimptot: Kes Deri
Turkey

Shambling Turkish indie with a bit of Weezer in the DNA, but more ramshackle than that comparison suggests. Maybe Weezer should start writing and performing songs without practicing and with one arm tied behind their backs.

7. isbit: Brodder
Norway

Jazz-pop from Norway, gets a little brassy as it goes on but the vocals never take the bait to compete.

8. nikocorlin: Something Wrong with Your Hands
Denmark

We have Miya Folick at home, if we happen to live in Denmark. (Yes I have used this joke template before, possibly several times…and I’ll do it again.)

9. Serebii, KAJJA: Bends Not Breaks
New Zealand

Electropop pulses create a certain buoyancy, but the singer has the good sense to stay underwater.

10. MARO: It Ain’t Over
Portugal

Maro represented Portugal at Eurovision in 2022 with “Saudade, Saudade,” which is wispy and mushy in a way that this one threatens but mostly avoids by perking up in the chorus. Would still probably prefer it in Portuguese.

11. Dana and Alden f. Mei Semones: Lee’s Greenhouse
US

Mei Semones street team mode in full effect! She’s just vocalizing to a flute melody on this one (ha, “just,” as if), but it’s great. Why can’t she be in Fortnite??

12. Bolbec: Le Prof de Gong
France

Stereolabby French hipster swing with all the right accoutrements and with very little else going for it, in a way that I think probably helps it.

13. Negadeza, Zuri Ribeiro: Mestra Querida
Brazil

14. Edssada: No Mato No Sertão
Brazil

Two from the more tastefully-minded Brazilian (i.e. non-funk) lists I pull from, one from the granddaughter of Selma do Coco and the other from the singer from Brazilian group A Outra Banda da Lua.

15. Yassine Nana: Telephone [c. 1984-1989]
Mauritania

Great find from Bongo Joe, ‘80s Mauritanian pop salvaged from little-circulated cassettes (little-circulated enough not to get a more precise date for this song from skimming Discogs). From Bandcamp:

Recorded in Mauritania as well as during stays in Paris and Rabat, these songs integrate drum machines, synthesizers and electric guitars into Saharan musical structures.

Influenced by reggae, soul and new wave, the group develops a sound that reflects the circulation of music and technology in the 1980s, while remaining firmly rooted in Mauritanian languages, themes and melodic systems.

16. Antonio Carlos & Jocafi, Adrian Younge: Rala-Bucho
Brazil/US

Another canny international jam sesh opportunity from Adrian Younge, who brings Bahia duo Antonio Carlos & Jocafi into the studio to provide another good flute on the mix.

17. Ezra Collective: Chapter 7 (Live at NPR’s Tiny Desk)
UK

Can never remember what these guys’ deal is—would have pegged them as US, but they are British enough to have won the Mercury Prize (that is, very British). This is the only thing I’ve heard from them that has earned inclusion on a mix, and since it is NPR Tiny Desk I have an excuse to share this video again.

18. Nettle DJ, Dumo the Vocalist: Amahlathi
UK

Afrohouse from a UK producer that could maybe use more of the hard angles of the face mask she wears in live performances.

19. Khun Narin: Poet Wong Pt. 1
Thailand

Rural Thai psych-rockers, playing what they call phin prayuk, went town to town blasting this stuff from a homemade soundsystem until an L.A. producer heard them on YouTube and enlisted interpreters from a local Thai restaurant to reach out on Facebook about recording them. They put out their first album in 2014 and this is a long-awaited album 3, their first recorded in a real studio.

20. Dagmar Zuniga f. Austyn Wohlers: Even God Gets Stuck in Devotion
Nicaragua-US/US

Have noticed a lot of praise for this album, a scrapbook of demos recorded on a Tascam, though I don’t fully understand the appeal. This is the one I settled on, a slow guitar figure and languorously stretched-out syllables with (via?) author Austyn Wohlers. Suspect this might be my lo-fi Laufey, so let’s call it the bonus “secret track” on the far side of the disc.

That’s it! Until next time, let me know what your favorite secret CD tracks are on either end of the disc.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title translated from Kumail f. Nickson Dufala: Vultures (“Na likolo parmi ba vautours”)