What a waste of time

2026 Mix 23: Listening to Six Sex as an antidote to CAPDY overload, and plenty of other music from outside the US and Anglosphere

Three global megastars but only one ball?!

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.

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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.

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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

1. From my perspective, a lot of the best albums of that year were big pop and R&B albums: Rihanna’s Rated R (#125 in Pazz and Jop that year), The-Dream’s Love vs. Money (#16), Shakira’s She Wolf (#267), Lily Allen’s It’s Not Me It’s You (#23), and Taylor Swift’s Fearless (#58 in 2008 and #183 in 2009), and I think you could make a strong case for Lady Gaga’s The Fame Monster (#31).

Super nerdy Pazz and Jop note: if an album has votes across two years, it can combine them if it gets more points the second year, but not if there are more points the first year. So Lady Gaga got carryover votes from 2008, but Taylor Swift didn’t. If she had, she would have been at #45 in 2009.

2. For posterity, here is the share of voters voting for the #1 and #2 albums in Pazz and Jop for every year from 1990-2016. I’ve also calculated the ‘80s but won’t list them here—nothing at #1 is below 34% of ballots. Michael Jackson’s Thriller was on 48% of ballots (higher than Beck), but the all-time leaders are Bruce Springsteen and Prince, whose 1984 albums were both on the ballots of 57% of voters!

1990: 1st: 36%, 2nd: 30%
1991: 1st: 45%, 2nd: 29%
1992: 1st: 38%, 2nd: 20%
1993: 1st: 35%, 2nd: 30%
1994:1st: 41%, 2nd: 26%
1995: 1st: 43%, 2nd: 26%
1996: 1st: 47%, 2nd: 25%
1997: 1st: 39%, 2nd: 35%
1998:* 1st: 34%, 2nd: 35%
1999: 1st: 27%, 2nd: 20%
2000: 1st: 36%, 2nd: 25%
2001: 1st: 38% , 2nd: 25%
2002: 1st 29% , 2nd: 20%
2003: 1st 42% , 2nd: 29%
2004: 1st 31% , 2nd: 21%
2005: 1st 29% , 2nd: 27%
2006*: 1st: 19% , 2nd: 20% ←New Times boycott
2007*: 1st: 24% , 2nd: 26%
2008: 1st: 27% , 2nd: 18%
2009: 1st 22% , 2nd 20% ←GAPDY
2010: 1st: 38%, 2nd: 21%
2011: 1st: 19%, 2nd: 18% ←Record low
2012: 1st: 35%, 2nd: 26%
2013: 1st: 35%, 2nd: 24%
2014: 1st: 27%, 2nd: 27%
2015: 1st: 44%, 2nd: 35%
2016: 1st: 38%, 2nd 33%

*In 1998, 2006, and 2007 the album with fewer voters still won because of Pazz and Jop’s point allocation system. Miseducation of Lauryn Hill had more voters than winner Lucinda Williams’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road; TV on the Radio’s Return to Cookie Mountain had more voters than Bob Dylan’s Modern Times; and Radiohead’s In Rainbows had more votes than winner LCD Soundsystem Sound of Silver.

3. 2011 technically has the lowest number of voters voting for the #1 and #2 album in the period I calculated—tuneyard’s whokill with 19% and PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake with 18%. In 2024, D’Angelo’s Black Messiah and Run the Jewels’ RTJ2 both had 27%, the exact same number of voters (163), but Black Messiah received more points.

There were also polls in 2017 and 2018, but the stats are very annoying to calculate. From what I can tell, both winners—Kendrick Lamar’s Damn and Kacey Musgraves’s Golden Hour—got votes from over 30% of the electorate.