I made myself a star

2026 Mix 04: The decade with no name, girl groups meta and otherwise, stiff competition from Spain, and loose jams from everywhere else

Be your own industry

There is apparently online chatter looking back at the year 2016. There are many reasons I’m not eager to look back to 2016, but I am thinking a bit about the pop music of the ‘10s in preparation for yet another music challenge. (Yes, I have hobbies for my hobbies.) And when I finally started to put my picks together, 2016 had the most tracks for a single year. But music is good every year, so I don’t know if that tells you much.

To be honest, my sense of the ‘10s as a Decade in Music has been shaped a lot by my changing understanding of the music landscape through the ‘20s so far. There are so many global sounds and trends that I was unaware of or only vaguely aware of in the ‘10s, never really taking the time to dive in and explore. So the decade feels like a transitional phase—maybe just for me personally, though I made some sweeping general claims about the decade in an unwieldy but I think pretty good A-pop installment, too.

Toward the end of 2019, I put together a list of 150 songs from the 2010s that seemed to defy my attempts to categorize them. I called the playlist “What do you even call this decade???” (I’ve settled on “the tens”). It was focused on novelty—some obvious novelty songs, but others that were novel but not “novelty music,” per se. These were not my favorite 150 songs (in fact I would say that at least two or three of my top 5 songs of the decade don’t appear on the playlist), but they were the ones that had little cartoon question marks forming over my head when I listened.¹

The challenge is to select my favorite 50 singles from the decade. I’m somewhat surprised so far that I’m not drawn to much of the big charting pop music of the middle of the ‘10s or other people’s preliminary picks of big (non-charting) singles, even songs I used to like.

I would also bet that the middle stretch of the decade is still hiding a lot of music I would have loved but wasn’t paying enough attention to notice—precursors to the explosions in many different global scenes that I now try to track more diligently. The story of the ‘20s seems to be how global innovations of the ‘00s and ‘10s have been supercharged through streaming and especially TikTok, mutating into new forms or finding new audiences.

I don’t have enough time to revisit the decade for this particular challenge, but it does suggest I need to do some work to follow some of the strands of this newsletter into the recent past.

---

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. Girl Group: SuperDrug
UK

Lots of meta and alternative takes on girl groups this week. This is the first British girl group I’m aware of that models itself in a post-Lola Young mode, pretty but defiant, skirting indie but not removed from it. Their story sounds a bit like the art school version of putting together a hit boyband on a reality show, which is to say if you squint it might just be a band forming at university. But they present themselves as a group of singers, not a band, a sort of non-corporatized UK take on Katseye. …Er, Kats-oi?

2. ily: ปิ๊งป่อง (PINGPONG)
Thailand

I guess you need to go to Thailand these days to get the sort of chirpy “ping pong” hook you’d get in K-pop fifteen years ago. Or maybe I’m just listening to the wrong K-pop.

3. Tomatomat: Collect Call Garage
South Korea

Meanwhile I think contemporary K-pop has sounded best recently when it’s either going bold with pop sonics (NewJeans in 2024, NMIXX in 2025) or competing more ruthlessly with American pop styles (like the BLACKPINK solo material, or maybe Jeon Somi’s “Closer”). Alternatively you can go weird (KIIRAS, some recent Le Sserafim) or put on a heavy charm offensive (YOUNG POSSE). Tomatomat, a K-pop trio Michael Hong recently recommended, achieve both alternatives here, I think—weird charm offensive. Plus they’ve got a bossa nova.

4. Mimi Kiddy: I Am ME?
Japan

And speaking of weirdo charm offensives, here’s a J-pop group that, in the words of one regular source of recommendations, Patrick St. Michel: “calls upon young producer cva beatz to create a speedy song featuring a steady bounce and, by the end, the members’ voices being sliced up into samples.”

5. No Na: Work
Indonesia

Partial credit for the above rec also goes to Jel Bugle, but Jel gets sole credit for sharing this song: an absolutely electric Timbaland-style thump with terrible lyrics that are perfectly conveyed by an Indonesian girl group on 88rising.

6. Zsá Zsá, Lucry & Suena: Pornstar
Germany

Germany’s deluge of viral smut-pop has not abated. This one gets extra points for riding a beat reminiscent of Robyn’s version of “Cobrastyle.” (I might stick one of the new Robyn songs on a mix at some point. Do you still need me to share Robyn songs? I feel like people are well-enough informed.)

7. Afro Bros, Monq, Kalibwoy: Bubble Up
Netherlands/Suriname-Netherlands

Kalibwoy’s name rang a bell and a quick search reveals this is the Surinamese-Dutch dancehall/etc. artist’s third appearance in three consecutive years.

8. Luna Ki: Bomba de Amor
Spain

9. Dora, Marlon Collins: Rákata
Spain

10. Miranda!, bailamamá: Despierto Amándote
Argentina/Spain

11. Asha: Turista
Morocco-Spain

12. Rosalinda Galán: Mataora
Spain

And now an extended block of five songs all from Benidorm Fest, usually Spain’s national competition for Eurovision, except Spain isn’t competing so this is it. Last year was also a strong year for Spain’s qualifiers, but this year they have so far blown the other countries out of the water, not least by bringing in at least one ringer from Argentina.

Luna Ki has a fairly straightforward Latin pop number, while Dora and Marlon Collins’s “Rakata” would be considerably edgier, a menacing, plodding reggaeton number. The ringer is Argentine group Miranda!, a personal favorite from way back, with light Pet Shop Boys dance-pop. After that is a Moroccan-Spanish singer mixing Arabic and Spanish, and finally moody electro flamenco from Rosalinda Galán.

When I wrote my A-pop installment on Eurovision, I imagined these country competitions surfacing more and more boundary-pushing pop that was synthesizing niche or fringe sounds for mass audiences. I doubted whether I was right about that given the ongoing crisis of the competition itself, but I think Spain is demonstrating exactly what I was imagining, and in fact was one of the regions that got me thinking about the idea in the first place at this time last year.

13. Mel Semé: 20AÑOS
Haiti-Cuba

A rare Cuban playlist comes through with its first minor ping of my radar of the year, a ballad from the star of the Buena Vista Social Club Broadway adaptation, a role that ratcheted up his name recognition considerably from a long singer-songwriter career in Spain.

14. xiangyu f. Gimgigam: 結局シャリ [Kekkyoku Shari]
Japan

15. 143leti, Awesome Pierre: Venite haacia mí
Argentina

Two artists layering in Brazilian funk hard clave in a way that seems like an organic fit and not mere trend-hopping. First is xiangyu, the savvy and globally-minded Japanese rapper I’ve featured several times, who on this one alternates between dubstep wubs and funk clangs. Argentine pop star 143leti takes an even bigger swing that I think pays off, hyperpop buzz gives it a vaguely phonk feel but the clave anchors the whole thing without it feeling derivative.

16. Natoxie, Kenjox, Twinsizz: Grégoire
Martinique

Natoxie is back with another shatta banger and also some ill-advised and suspiciously A.I.-ish hyperrealistic cartoon avatars. So you may want to close your eyes to enjoy it.

17. P.L.L., 1T1: 97Volts
Guadeloupe

The latest single featuring 1T1, whose 2025 hit “Bouwéy” I had in this slot but decided to just link it and put something released for Carnival instead. One to keep closer tabs on.

18. Juls, Xico: 3AM in Kaapstad
UK-Ghana/Nigeria

Afrobeats producer with a bit more of a pan-African-pop hodgepodge here, a little bit of an Afrohouse chillout tent vibe, an amapiano jazzy piano line, Amabeats log drum accents.

19. Yin Yin: Spirit Adapter
Netherlands

I stopped wavering on a song I’d pulled from the big weekly playlist after Kel recommended the album over on Bluesky. Sadly I can do no better than their PR: “a joyous mix of disco, funk, surf, psychedelia, and Southeast Asian motifs.” Cosmo-pop ahoy!

20. Tiara: Nawi Aaleih
Lebanon

I suppose it would be gauche of me to invoke Timbaland again here, especially since a lot of what he was drawing from (or, not infrequently, sampling or copying without credit) came from Middle Eastern music and not vice versa. But I have a very tight self-imposed deadline here, so.

21. Carolina Chocolate Drops: Here Rattler
US

I remember seeing Carolina Chocolate Drops live many years ago at a festival and liking them enough to purchase at least one of their albums (I own two but can’t remember if I bought both there). Rhiannon Giddens has had pretty incredible career since then, but I do like returning to their older reconstructions of traditional folk music, which manage to avoid being too academic, though not un-academic. There is something exciting about hearing this music interpreted in crackling high fidelity in the present. It makes me wonder how things are panning out with one of the few slam-dunk use cases for A.I. tech—salvaging and isolating stems from rare or deteriorating recordings—during the great A.I. hype freakout (I still have a whole year before I will be obligated to share a firm opinion). This is a bonus track on the 15-year anniversary rerelease of Genuine Negro Jig, and I wonder if they performed it when I saw them; it sounded familiar.

22. Tyler Ramsey, Carl Broemel: Elizabeth Brown

Tasteful instrumental Americana is timeless so I will overlook that this came out in early November of last year. I probably should have found a different closer, but it’s nice!

That’s it! Until next time, let me know what you call the previous decade.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title translated from Zsá Zsá: Pornstar (“ich hab' mich selbst zum Star gemacht”)

1. Three songs on this list aren’t available on streaming anymore. Two are on Youtube— “Chick Chick” by Wang Rong and “Facebook Uh Oh Oh” by Valentina Monetta.

The third, “Becky” by Haley Georgia, was scrubbed pretty thoroughly from the internet a few years ago. I still have a copy of it, but feel weird making it available against the wishes of the artist. You can get a sense Haley Georgia’s Kesha-gone-country humor in her song “Ridiculous.”