2024's Biggest Pop Albums, Reviewed

This is kind of a bonus spin-off issue of Jamwise - a Friday side quest, if you will. The regularly scheduled 90’s deep dive will continue next week as planned with an exploration of almost everyone’s favorite year in music, 1994.

With all the new music flying around in 2024, this seemed like a good time to come up for a breath of fresh air and see what’s going on in modern times before continuing to relive the 90’s, as every Millennial dreams of doing.

The premise of this post started when I got a free trial to SiriusXM in my car, turned on Today’s Hits channel, and realized I couldn’t identify a single song for like ten songs in a row. Through the low-resolution satellite-beamed signal, the tunes of Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, and even the internet’s current favorite Chappell Roan were foreign to me, almost blurring together - the only conclusion I drew was that there’s a very 2024 sound to a lot of these artists, a subgenre of sorts forming at the top of the charts, and I wanted to know more about it. I knew these artists were everywhere and probably wouldn’t fit my typical genre preferences (an assumption I’m trying to stop making), but I just wanted to understand.

I’ve written a lot about the way I used to approach music before starting this newsletter - I had lots of disdain for Pop as a genre, which was partly inherited and partly me trying to act cool and smart about music as many insecure humans like to do. Part of the reason I’m doing this project is to figure out why this disdain existed, and to prove to myself that it was dumb and preventing me from enjoying a bunch of dope music. I’m figuring that out, but I still find myself getting little cringes when I hear poppy pop music, little echoes of my old self bleeding through: “what are you doing, this isn’t Pearl Jam” or “Pop is for regular people but you’re a unique and special boy, you shouldn’t listen to this” or “you’d get verbally assassinated and possibly assassinated for real if you admitted you like this on Reddit.”

I’m going to be brutally honest - 2 years ago I would have, and probably did, make fun of people who liked the artists I’m writing about here. What I didn’t consider at the time was that if you’d asked me what I liked that was so much better, so much more deep and meaningful, I would have crumbled like a house of cards, mumbling something that sounded like “pearljamzeppelin…chilipeppers…basicboymusic”. This has been the best and most freeing revelation in my music appreciation career: it turns out the old me actually knew nothing, and I was missing out. I don’t have to like all the Pop I hear, but I at least need to listen to it with open ears to form my own opinion.

Since then I’ve been expanding my music listening as much as humanly possible, in many genres including pop. I’ve discovered enough awesome pop music to mostly get past those little judgy impulses, but there’s still room for improvement. So now, it’s time to see if all the listening I’ve been doing has, in fact, made me a better listener. To do so, I’m gonna hit myself over the head with some poppy 2024 poparific pop.

“But Dave,” you might ask, “doesn’t everyone already know all of these artists? Surely we don’t need another online person talking about them?”

You’re right, but that’s not what this is about. This is about demonstrating that growth as a music listener is both possible and fun, and listening to pop music happens to be an area in which I personally wanted to grow. It’s a test of how open my ears have become. And most importantly, it’s to show that when you listen critically and reflect on what you’re hearing, you tend to find the good in things more than you did before, even if the negatives are still there. That’s what I want to get better at - finding the good in music even if I ultimately dislike it. That will lead to a more balanced attitude and allow more good music to find its way into my brain.

This selection of albums is based on pretty much 2 things - they’re new, and they’re impossible to miss if you search “music” on Google in 2024 (note: yes, I’m a Millennial so yes, I know this is sub-optimal Google search technique). By the time this is published there will be ten more albums in this category, and I’ll just have to get to those another time - it’s not meant to be complete. I thought very little about it, to be honest, like a well-meaning kewl dad just trying to fit in with the kids these days who picks up the first album he sees in the Walmart music section.