You don't belong to nobody, baby

2025 Mix 23: Titans of hypo-pop, political pop expected and left-field, and Jonathan Bogart's song of the summer...of 2024.

…Our mother’s wealth?

My obsession this week is Addison Rae’s Addison. I’d already heard about half of the songs on the album before it was released, but as a whole it, as they say, hits different.

I have described it with the following backhanded compliments:

• Diet Princess Peach Snapple

• It’s not “diet” but it’s like when they made a breakthrough that actually made diet taste more like the original, even though you could tell it was still fake. A-Pop Zero

• She’s somehow created a whole new way of being annoying: under-the-top

• Tabula rasa pop

• Addison Rae album is the Adam Scott meme “do you think an A.I. generator could make THIS?” (complimentary)

• A-pop AOTY (derogatory)

• AG Cook should be listening to this like a supervillain in a movie watching his plans collapsing

• HYPO-POP

Should probably try to write about hyperpop (and hypo-pop?) at some point. It’s gone from being a term I find very irritating to capturing something essential about the current (or recently passed) pop moment. Like many things, it seems most relevant to me when it’s “over,” but I suppose hindsight is 20/20. (I like to think my foresight can get up to 20/30 on occasion.)

Anyway, hypo-pop queen and Titan of A-Pop Addison Rae is locked in at my number one album slot so far, which says more about my album listening than it does about Addison. It is pure pleasure, but it’s wafer thin—literally anything could knock it from its perch, but I’ll respect it even more if it stays on top anyway. (This week I heard a whole bunch of pretty good albums, many of which I’ll list below.)

Here’s the best shot I’ve taken so far at describing Addison:

The Addison Rae album is vaporware (not -wave), but it is doing something that no one else is actually doing well. It really is the closest we have to the inverse of the Farrah Abraham album, insular and weirdly impenetrable with lots of flashes of something interesting, like trying to make out little objects hidden in a Jell-O mold. There are a lot of non-pop-aspiring artists who do vapor, but they aren't simultaneously doing it in a main stage sort of way.

Addison Rae and Tate McRae both have a certain accidentally meta approach to pop—there’s a guilelessness to them; it comes across as flimsy without being insincere. For Tate it’s this extremely affected way of signifying pop celebrity, like an alien impersonating a human. Addison Rae is doing something more interesting to me, which is completely giving herself over to the music—what she reminds me of is Vanessa Paradis working with Lenny Kravitz on “Be My Baby,” which I wrote about last year:

It’s particularly bold to name your song after the Ronettes and then roar out of the gate with a neo-Motown arrangement that begs what can only be a diminished comparison to it, but Paradis, a paper-thin presence who nonetheless produces just enough signal to beguile, immediately undercuts it by slithering underneath the music instead of riding on top of it like Ronnie Spector would. Wasn’t aware of Lenny Kravitz ever producing anything like this, but he’s not really the star of the show here, is he.

That’s exactly what Addison Rae does across the whole album, she slithers under instead of getting on top, but without this being an indie move where you’re self-consciously hiding yourself. As I described it last year comparing her to Ava Max, she’s “not so much minimalist as the other pole: recessive maximalism.”

If you’re interested in non-Addison Rae albums, here’s my very rough albums of the year list so far, since Stereogum has published theirs a little too early (their list does not inspire great confidence that I’m missing anything from music publications).

1. Addison Rae: Addison

2. Juana Rozas: Tanya

3. ALT BLK ERA: Rave Immortal

4. Mei Semones: Animaru

5. PinkPantheress: Fancy That

6. Dj Aguilar: Direto do Alto Vol 1

7. Aléman: De Vuelta a las Andadas

8. Marilina Bertoldi: Para Quien Trabajas Vol. 1

9. Yeule: Evangelic Girl Is a Gun

10. BunnaB: Bunna Summa (Ice Cream Summer Deluxe)

11. Mellow & Sleazy, Tman Xpress: Midnight in Diepkloof

12. Ano: Bone Born Bomb

13. Bambi: Trap or Die

14. Samantha Crain: Gumshoe

15. Deep Sea Diver: Billboard Heart

16. Laguna Bollente: Fanta Sbocco

17. KIWI: sama

18. Salin: Rammana

19. Marina Satti: Pop Too

20. Juicy BAE: El Secreto

(Bb trickz has decided to go the “edgy” praising fascist shitheads on podcasts route in her public persona, so her incredible 80z has been quietly demoted to EP status, which is probably where it belongs anyway.)

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Previous 2025 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube

1. Fiona Apple: Pretrial (Let Her Go Home)
US

Starting off my second mix in a row with an earnest political song, which seems appropriate. I enjoyed but wasn’t enamored with Fetch the Bolt Cutters, so taking its homey construction and applying it to a coherent political project—in this case, Apple’s experiences as a courtwatcher, seeing lives ruined from cruel pretrial detention—is maybe the hook I needed.

2. Nelly Furtado: Marriage
Canada

That said, this is the most striking “political” song of the week, I think, in part because like most things with Nelly Furtado it comes out of left field. I like that she called this “Marriage” and not “Divorce.” The key idea is that you don’t belong to nobody, which may precipitate a divorce but doesn’t have to.

3. Isabella Lovestory: Gorgeous
Honduras

4. KAROL G: Latina Forever
Colombia

Two big releases from Latin America. Isabella Lovestory has carved out an idiosyncratic pop career for herself, leaning in and out of the mainstream like a slalom skier. Karol G is firmly of the monsterverse, and, as is common with these megastars, usually leaves me lukewarm, but I like this new one. I am rooting for it to do well against many of the oversized slugs currently squatting on the charts like it’s the top of the Empire State Building, but so far it hasn’t made a huge impact.

5. Lali X Lola, Rappidd: Go
Ghana

Ghanaian twin-pop — identical twins Lali & Lola also bring in their brother to produce and father to manage. Hard to define the sound, which is earthier and funkier than Afrobeats. Hate to fall back on “cosmo-pop,” but I do need a global miscellaneous category for this sort of thing.

6. Nonô: Old Skool
Brazil

Have featured Nonô before, another cosmo-popper who has hints of millennial baile funk to get the party going but keeps it well outside the white-hot center of the funk zeitgeist, which probably suits her. (Hard to tell whether funk is still at the same level of ferment this year: I noticed that billdifferen’s 50 songs of the year so far featured very little funk, only two if I’m remembering correctly, and I’d heard them both already.)

7. iza tkm: t esucho al pensar
Mexico

Dreamy and hyper in equal measure, really putting the lie to the hyper/hypo distinction that my brain is still trying to calculate like the math lady meme.

8. Girl Ultra, Chromeo, Empress Of: Tomás
Mexico/US

Chromeo hasn’t been on something this fun in ages, and Empress Of leveled up considerably to my ears last year on For Your Consideration, probably the best thing I’ve heard from her yet. Mexican singer Girl Ultra is one for me to check out.

9. L’Eclair, Gelli Haha: Run
Switzerland

Golden Beatology of the week goes to this lightly proggy Swiss pop, which sounds better than anything I seem to be able to write about it.

10. Itoa, なかむらみなみ: Oh No [2022]
Japan

Important mix spackle that turned out to be from 2022 — oh no, indeed! But I have another older song on here so I’ll pretend it was intentional.

11. badactress: Фіолетово
Ukraine

Ukrainian electro-rock is very Veronicas mk 2—it’s amazing how easily I fall for this sort of song, especially when the lyrics sheet is written in Cyrillic.

12. Nailah Blackman: Pressure [2024]
Trinidad

This is Jonathan Bogart’s #1 song of 2024. I missed it at the time, along with the vast majority of the songs in his always essential Top 50 of the year. Caribbean pop is very poorly represented on Spotify’s playlists—you’re much better off with YouTube’s algorithm to unearth things unless you can slowly cobble together the few individuals who keep up-to-date playlists. I’ve been able to keep more or less aware of Francophone shatta that way, but Cuban, Trinidadian, Jamaican, and lots of Western African pop are harder to find without some detective work.

Jonathan and I don’t generally have super well aligned tastes—the artists he turned me on to in 2024 are ones who don’t even appear on his lists. But when they connect, as they do with Nailah Blackman, they really connect. I will resent not championing this as the song of last summer for a while.

13. Ysa C: NoNoNo
Colombia

Another Bogart tip—he mentioned Ysa C’s “Click Clap” from 2023 on the very same day that this new one was released. The former is much more fun; this one is light and airy in a nice mid-mix sort of way.

14. Kipili: Je t’aime beaucoup
Belgium

Interesting to find Carribbean styles also show up in this week’s haul in unexpected places, like this kompa pop from Belgian artist Kipili.

15. Myra: Bare Barn
Norway

Some light hypopop(?) from a Sierre Leone-born Norgwegian singer who competed on Norway’s version of Strictly Come Dancing/Dancing with the Stars.

16. gugusar: SÁLFRÆÐI
Iceland

Trip-hoppy song from an Icelandic artist who throws her voice into a bunch of filters as she rap-sing-whispers through it.

17. Madeline Kenney: Scoop
US

I don’t want to put strict boundaries around windowpane, but I have been culling a few entries from my 2025 windowpane playlist. (I usually don’t listen to songs all the way through multiple times before I add them to my holdover lists in the way I do for the main mixes.) It is an I know it when I hear it sort of designation, and this one just skirts it, I think, and hits full indie, but ymmv.

18. Ляна: Пастка
Ukraine

More alt/indie/electro from Ukraine.

19. Ffa Coffi Pawb: Chwaer Yr Haul [1991]
UK

Some Welsh jangle from an early Gruff Rhys band that translates to “everybody’s coffee beans” but sounds like “fuck off, everyone” when you say it aloud. At least one of the band’s songs later appeared on Mwng, which probably remains my favorite Super Furry Animals album, but clearly did not move me enough to listen to any previous work. The album this is from, Clymhalio from 1991, was rereleased and made available on streaming for the first time last month.

20. Vondré: 00:00
Mexico

Shoegazey Mexican rock from a group that recently opened for Evanescence. This reminds me that I should really write something about the second season of The Rehearsal, especially the relevant Evanescence episode, which is up there for unexpected masterpieces of music criticism in television and film, along with the gorilla drummer in the Cadbury commercial, the credit sequence of Young Adult, and any number of scenes from the Magic Mike series.

21. Orbital f. Tilda Swinton: Deepest
UK

Well, if you’re going to reboot your 1989 techno song built on faceless meditative narration, you could do worst to recast the lead with Tilda Swinton.

22. Milena Casado f. Brandee Younger, Nicole Mitchell: Lidia y los Libros
Spain/US

A dreamy jazz off-ramp for the mix from trumpeter and composer Milena Casado’s new album, with Brandee Younger on harp (Younger has an album using Alice Coltrane’s harp out this week) and Nicole Mitchell on flute—elsewhere on the album Michelle Ndegeocello plays bass. It’s nice!

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That’s it! Until next time, remember that hyperpop means you had too much sugar and hypopop means there’s not enough. (You can get fairly hyper without immediate danger but it may do damage in the long-term, whereas a serious hypo can be life-threatening.)

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from Nelly Furtado: Marriage