I am very busy this week so it’s time for a brief odds and ends intro!
Go participate in the Black Pop History Month poll over at People’s Pop on Bluesky or FreakyTrigger. These polls are yearly highlights — I have dozens of favorite new tracks just from these BPHM events. This year’s poll covers 1986-1989. I entered two new favorites from my 1988 research (Feeling Kréyol’s “Las Palé” and Anquette’s “Janet Reno”) and two new to me finds from 1986 (Hotline’s “Fella’s Doing It in Lagos” and Antoinette Konan’s “Abidjan Adja”).
An interesting NPR article from Sheldon Pearce about the failure of African pop to continue crossing over to the US. The piece ends with an A-pop-ish reflection on de-centering the US as the rubric for popularity, but I think the US-centric framing itself undermines a lot of the analysis. What would it look like to assume—even just as a thought experiment—that the US was a secondary market for popular music?
Katherine St. Asaph’s column in Stereogum is still a must-read. The latest is on ADÉLA and I’m not only sharing it because she references Self, but it’s not not a reason I’m sharing it.
Via Collin Smith at No Chambers, Natasha May at the Guardian profiles up-and-coming Southeast Asian girl groups, including Indonesian group no na and Filipina group BINI. I’ve noticed a huge uptick in music from the Philippines in my mixes this year, should probably do a country-specific breakdown in my year-ends.
Hey look, it turns out I can do a country-specific breakdown after all! Top three gains in songs on my mixes for individual countries between 2025 and 2026 are #1 France, #2 Guadeloupe, and #3 Philippines. Top three losses among countries from last year to this year are #1 US, #2 UK, and #3 Sweden. None of this should be too surprising to regular readers/listeners, though I do wonder what poor Sweden did to earn its bronze medal demotion. (It’s worth noting that the US and UK have lots of songs to lose—US is still by far the top individual country for total songs on mixes this year, followed by Brazil, UK, Japan, France, and South Africa.)
1. ROSÉ: New Trick
New Zealand-South Korea
ROSÉ continues her mecha-Godzilla/antipope strategy of competing directly with the biggest US stars, setting her sights closer (lower?) to Rodrigo—I can’t help but hear “kapow, bitch, I know The Cure” as a sneak dis, even though it’s probably just a coincidence. Whatever her intent, this particular song, which somehow even sounds like its video was shot exclusively on the new iPhone 18, has so far fallen short on the charts, if not in our hearts, where 2006 never died. Also makes for a better, if ambiguously intentional at best, skater grrl send-up than the overwrought but sonically perfect Disney-pop piss-take from Kyle Gordon, “Freak Out.” (Gordon is generally better sending up the guys—“If You Break Up with Me” is a highlight of an album that’s a little too contemptuous for my taste in style parodies.)
2. VIIS: โดน (Don’t)
Thailand
3. Bugoy Na Koykoy: Tatlong Wife
Philippines
Two songs where Southeast Asian pop shines—this is the first one from Thai girl group VIIS since I featured their clumsier but better Barbie song back in 2023, while Filipino budots-pop finds a new gold standard, a song that has shot up the Koganbot song rankings as Six Sex falls behind two TikTok memes that clock in at a combined fifty-four seconds. (Fair enough—plus the transition sounds great.)
4. Bekkaa: Wir gehen dumm (meine Besties)
Germany
Decidedly un-raunchy (as far as I can tell) German pop that celebrates besties going dumb against even-keel post-Charli hyperpop. What do you call this nominally hyper stuff with the edges all sanded down? Hyperchill?
5. Ebru Polat, Ezgizem: Bro
Turkey
Turkish novelty is very good at getting across how I feel when my kids call me “bro.” (It’s funny and very annoying.)
6. Tiakola f. Jorja Smith: Jet Lag
France/UK
Will 2027 be the year that a French-language pop song makes it onto the Hot 100? Hate to complain about A-pop framing in that NPR article and then immediately fall into the same trap myself—what I mean is it feels like we’re very close to a global French-language smash coming from an up-and-coming Francophone star, maybe as a feature on a bigger artist’s song or paired with an inexplicable DJ superstar like Hugel or something. But it would be cool if it was French pop on its own terms that merely featured an Anglophone artist—Jorja Smith sounds playing along on this one.
7. Andi K: Arrêter
DRC-UK
A UK artist of Congolese heritage (as best as I could tell from socials) with the kind of sweet R&B with more complex West African rhythms that I also liked from (D)Juno earlier this year.
8. Andrike$ Black: Répétition
Canada
Bouyon in Montreal, continues to sound good as it mutates and mellows.
9. El Tito: Le Paiya
Côte D’Ivoire-France
Woops, already mentioned African diasporic pop with interesting rhythms, maybe should have paired this with Andi K to save myself a blurb, but it sounded better in this slot. An Ivorian party, though a less raucous one than twice-featured Team Paiya.
10. Rey Tony, Helabusador: Pirapal Palo Po
Cuba
Reparto that takes a bit to warm up but is worth the wait for the interpolation a minute in, which I will not spoil for you. Consider this a test to see who actually listens to these! (It’s fine, you don’t have to, I’m just happy you’ve made it this far.)
11. DJ Biel Beats, WR Original: Carro Ta Balançando, Ai Ai To Comendo
Brazil
An interesting funk track with a jaunty guitar figure like a balalaika, which, true to the form, is more arresting than the literal car alarm going off intermittently.
12. Bb trickz, Chapo 240: Algo bien
Spain/Dominican Republic
Bb trickz continues to be one of the more interesting budding superstars who I can’t make heads or tails of. I wanted to better describe the tuba oompah, but I got sidetracked stumbling onto a totally different “Algo bien” that came out a few days ago by Og Bankzz, a New York rapper who does bilingual drill and completely blew away and (I will probably put it on next week’s mix). That in turn sent me down another rabbit hole that revealed that BloodHound Q50, the Chicago rapper whose rap playlist mainstay “Don’t Blink or Stare” made me queasy last year, was murdered three weeks ago.
13. Lismar: Tripeando
Dominican Republic
Don’t know if I can confidently claim this song, from Roc Nation-signed Dominican rapper Lismar, for the Great Bouyon Speed-Up, but it is a good reminder that having the tempo so fast means you can go half-speed and maintain sing-rap vibes pretty well—so you get two opposed eras of rap together, the somnabulant modal rap era with its 70BPM tempos and bouyon tempos going up to 140-150 BPM.
14. Kohti Tuhoa: Valmistaudu sotaan
Finland
OK, the transition from the Lismar track to this Finnish indie hardcore via Post-Trash was too good to pass up.
15. Bellringer: You Leave
US
Which also gives me a good spot to put this rec from nu-CREEM, degraded 4-track indie, a gambit that works once in a while.
16. Wafia: Girl Is a Gun
Iraq-Syria-Australia
Thought I’d featured Wafia before but apparently lumped her in with the waning days of windowpane. There’s no sign of wane or pane here, even if it’s not much of a weapon.
17. Moody Judy: Average Joe
US
An interesting one—this is maybe the closest I’ve heard in some time to what could formally be a Taylor Swift song but could also plausibly have been arrived at from other indie singer-songwriter routes. I think it’s important to remember that Taylor Swift didn’t start out see-sawing above and below the root tone in a near-monotone until relatively recently, and she was likely encouraged from other pockets of indie/pop hybridization, some of which she ripped off pretty shamelessly (Lorde and Lana Del Rey) and others that just sort of went like that for other reasons having to do with generalized indie wispiness and vocal recessiveness. I saw a video about how the bridge to Swift’s “Patient Zero” reminds them of those bewildering long A.I. generated “explainer” pop song, but I think the influence could be the other way around: the robots likely trained on a lot of Taylor and learned that you can just waver between the root and second interval for eight minutes.
18. Cheyada: ม่านฝัน [Dream Curtain]
Thailand
The occasional reminder that the real good wispy indie is in Thailand.
19. brakence: ready or noT
US
I think I’d filed Brakence under neo-Pitchfork art fraud, but I might be confusing him with someone else, and anyway he’s the first US pop (of a sort) English-language artist not to sound totally at sea against Brazilian funk clave.
20. 斯丹曼簇 [Mamcú]: INFJ
China
Best indie-pop song of the week comes from Chinese artist Mamcú, taking the post-Pantheress speed-up down dark and winding paths. Her triple-digit play count on a “topic” YouTube set off my alarm bells to download this thing immediately on the off chance it disappears before the end of the year.
That’s it! Until next time, back up your songs!!
—Dave Moore (the other one)
Title from ROSÉ: New Trick