2024 was the year of the pop femininomenon

Those of us who live and breathe pop music know that the girls do it better. But in 2024, it seems the rest of the world has finally woken up to that fact, too. Over the past 12 months, artists like Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, Charli xcx, Taylor Swift, Addison Rae, Tyla, Billie Eilish, SZA, Ariana Grande, Rosalía, Beyoncé, and Lady Gaga have dominated the genre. This summer especially you couldn’t escape pictures from the Eras Tour, the grimy electronics of Brat, the chanting refrain of “Hot To Go!”, or someone somewhere uttering the phrase “that’s that me espresso”.

It wasn’t always this way. In 2019, the BBC shared research that revealed a growing gender gap in pop. According to data from the Official Charts Company from the previous year, three times as many men appeared on the top 100 most popular songs of 2018 in the UK, with 91 men or all-male groups appearing on the list, compared to just 30 female acts.

In the US, meanwhile, a study by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative revealed that between 2013 and 2018 a total of 90.7 per cent of all Grammy Award nominees were men. As if to prove the point, during the Grammys that same year, only one woman, Alessia Cara, won an award in one of the major categories, causing the hashtag #GrammysSoMale to trend on X (then known as Twitter).

Speaking to Variety at the time about the disparity, former Recording Academy president, Neil Portnow, suggested that female artists had work to do. “I think it has to begin with women who have the creativity in their hearts and souls, who want to be musicians, who want to be engineers, producers, and want to be part of the industry on the executive level,” he said. “[They need] to step up.”

Pop, of course, has always been sex obsessed. But Carpenter is no mere sexual object, or at least not entirely. While aesthetically she draws from the sirens of Old Hollywood (she was described by Pitchfork as “a Gen Z Betty Boop”), her sex-positive lyrics swap titillation for sexual agency – as she sings on the breezy “Juno”: “I’m so fuckin’ horny.”

Given how supposedly chaste Gen Z are when it comes to sex, the success of Carpenter’s overtly sexualised lyrics and performances is curious. However, her approach to sexual content could explain why her music has resonated. Carpenter understands the ever-changing dynamics of desire, how one can switch between submissive and dominant, often objectifying a man in one breath only to want that for herself in the next. That she manages to do so with flippancy speaks to a level of sexual fluency: Carpenter understands how unserious (and unsexy) sex can be and isn’t afraid to deliberately shatter her blonde bombshell illusion.

Still, none of this goofy concupiscence comes at the expense of Carpenter’s sensitive perceptivity, with songs like “Don’t Smile” capturing the messy contradictions of a failed relationship. You find similar conflictions on Charli xcx’s album Brat, which initially positions itself as a record for hedonistic club rats but soon unravels, its author’s sweat-stained insecurities dancing up against euphoric narcissism, bleary-eyed confessions, unabashed eroticism and the strobing confusion involved in the performance of modern-day womanhood.

Chappell Roan, for example, pulls heavily from the world of drag in her artistry. So much so, in fact, that she’s delineated between her musical persona and her life outside of music, leading to broader (and necessary) conversations about the consumption of celebrity, the entitlement of access embedded in modern pop fandom, and the way fame can erode the self

Brat was the album that launched a thousand memes. From its pungent lime-green album cover to the evolution of “brat” as a lifestyle (“Just, like, a pack of cigs, and, like, a Bic lighter, and, like, a strappy white top. With no bra,” according to Charli herself), the record came to define the latter half of 2024. But amid the album’s autotuned vocals and squelching electronics, Charli lays out jealousy and bitchiness alongside self-doubt and existentialism. “Girl, so confusing” and “Sympathy is a knife” expose the lie of unconditional female solidarity, while “Rewind” and “I think about it all the time” find Charli craving both the simplicity of girlhood and discussing her uncertainty about whether she wants children with lyrics so conversational yet meaningful that you could be overhearing them in the smoking area at 3am: “Should I stop my birth control?/‘Cause my career feels so small in the existential scheme of it all.”

Centring such realism differentiates Brat from pop’s usual penchant for artificiality. However, that’s not to say that there’s no honesty to be found in that space, either. Chappell Roan, for example, pulls heavily from the world of drag in her artistry. So much so, in fact, that she’s delineated between her musical persona and her life outside of music, leading to broader (and necessary) conversations about the consumption of celebrity, the entitlement of access embedded in modern pop fandom, and the way fame can erode the self.

Roan has paired this new brand of celebrity, with its clear boundaries and focus on artist wellbeing, with frank exploration of queerness. Along with Billie Eilish, whose song “Lunch” was an explicit ode to eating a girl out, Roan joins Reneé Rapp, supergroup Boygenius and Muna (to name just a few) who are leading the great lesbian renaissance in pop.

However, what’s significant about Roan’s debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, was that it was written before she had ever explored her queerness. “I had never even kissed a girl when these songs were written,” she told the LA Times. “It was all what I wished my life could be.” Instead, her lyrics draw from fantasy. But unlike, say, Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl”, the make-believe exists for self-exploration as she spins sapphic desire into kaleidoscopic narratives filled with missteps and quivering trepidation.

On “Naked In Manhattan” a sleepover with a crush becomes the site of experimentation. “Red Wine Supernova” is flush with the heart-hammering excitement of hooking up with a girl, only for Roan to find herself “choked up, face down, burnt out”. Even songs that are less about queer experimentation, like “Pink Pony Club” and “My Kink Is Karma”, are plump with wish-fulfilment: the former finds Roan dreaming of stardom as she dances at the gay bar, while the latter is like the aural equivalent of a voodoo doll.

What’s thrilling about Roan’s music is how she’s stepped out of the fantasy into reality. The loosey single “Good Luck, Babe!” is weighty with experience. Charting a secret and “sexually explicit kind of love affair” with a closeted woman, the song rails against queer shame and compulsory heterosexuality as she sings: “When you wake up next to him in the middle of the night/With your head in your hands; you’re nothing more than his wife.”

At a time where the ugliness and violence of sexism and misogyny feels overwhelming, it’s reassuring to know that, in the world of music at least, 2024 belonged to women reshaping and disrupting pop in their own flawed, complicated and beautiful image

There’s a similar, if admittedly less subversive, anger simmering below Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department. However, unlike Roan, Swift isn’t muddying the status quo of celebrity, and likely with good reason. Her Eras Tour is likely to earn $2 billion, making it the highest grossing concert tour of all time, and she brought in an estimated boost of £1 billion to the UK economy when she played here over the summer. Meanwhile, her record breaking The Tortured Poets Department is likely to be the bestselling album of 2024, shifting over 10.3 million units since its release in April.

Nevertheless, the rage in the music remains. Riding the racing heartbeat of “So Long, London” is the injustice at a man’s ability to step away from long-term commitment without consequence, while “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” explodes to expose the cruel behaviour of a fuckboy. And, to be fair to Swift, she does poke at the consumption of her personal life and her celebrity, baiting those feasting on her life on the galloping “But Daddy I Love Him” (“I’m havin’ his baby/ No, I’m not, but you should see your face”) and hissing on “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” (“I wanna snarl and show you just how disturbed this has made me”).

As was the case with Charli on Brat, Swift also says the quiet part out loud: “The Prophecy”, taken from the extended Anthology version of Tortured Poets, is full of the kind of exposing desperation (“Let it once be me,” she sings on the chorus) that girl boss independence would shudder at. Meanwhile, “Clara Bow” meditates on pop’s obsession with youth: “Them’s the breaks, they don’t come gently,” she sings on the bridge, her voice wounded with resignation.

There’s undoubtedly even more that can be drawn from the work of these artists. There are also others pushing the boundaries of pop further (you could likely write a book about how Beyoncé twists and bends genres with Cowboy Carter). And, naturally, there are those simply having fun and leaning into the vibes (“Diet Pepsi” and “Aquamarine” by Addison Rae fit the bill).

Whether any of this will be recognised when the Grammys come around in 2025 remains to be seen, although it would be an egregious injustice should it not. Still, at a time where the ugliness and violence of sexism and misogyny feels overwhelming, it’s reassuring to know that, in the world of music at least, 2024 belonged to women reshaping and disrupting pop in their own flawed, complicated and beautiful image. Katy Perry’s comeback may have been an unmitigated disaster, but she wasn’t wrong when she sang: “It’s a woman’s world and you’re lucky to be living in it.” Long may that remain true.