Design by Tyler Farmer.
Welcome to a messier and more daring era of pop music.
July 23, 2026
BY Laura David
As an only child with several effortlessly cool older cousins, I spent a lot of my childhood impatiently waiting for the day I’d become a teenager. It felt like whenever I spent time around them, I could feel their teenage know-how spread by osmosis. One of said older cousins, nearly a high school senior, lived just around the corner and occasionally drove me to first grade. I brattily slid into her back seat and requested the only station my little ears could stomach back then: Radio Disney.
“Oh my god, no” she said, aghast. She was going to play real music. She connected her iPod, gave me a grin, and cranked “Disturbia” by Rihanna. There was something so addictive, so energizing, so guttural about it. My six-year-old brain was blown wide open. I, from that moment on, was addicted to pop music.
Pop music has long been a spectrum. On one end sits what obsessives of the r/popheads forum and various stan communities define as “main” pop girls: commercial heavyweights like Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, Ariana Grande, and Sabrina Carpenter. Even this class can be divided into tiers (The Untouchables, The Veterans, The Princesses), but its defining features are staying power, showmanship, and enormous cultural impact. On the other end sits art pop, flowing from legacy greats like Kate Bush, Björk, Fiona Apple, and Grace Jones, seen today in the likes of Grimes, FKA Twigs, Aldous Harding, and, perhaps most importantly, the late SOPHIE. These artists deal in subversiveness, brash theatrics, and often-abrasive arrangements that revel in thumbing the nose at the smoothness of mass-market pop music.
Over the past few years, a new breed of pop star that sits in the middle of these poles has been on the rise. Artists like Zara Larsson, Eli, Meg Stalter, ADÉLA, Kim Petras, Slayyyter, PinkPantheress, Audrey Hobert, MUNA, and even Charli xcx are pushing pop into edgier, campier, more daring places.
In a way, their version of pop feels like the uncanny valley foil of polished main girl pop. The work is closer to mainstream pop in mission, but they approach it with a throw-the-rulebook-out-the-window art-pop lens that allows for bold experimentation. What they do pull from the conventional pop star playbook is often maximalized, satirized, and thus ratcheted up into high-camp. It’s fit for girls who have Diet Coke cans—or, to borrow a phrase, Diet Pepsi—littered through the passenger seat of their car but still blast Gaga and Britney down the freeway. It’s for the girls who can’t quite get it together, who don’t really want to, but who still never doubt their starpower.
Discussing the inspiration behind her song “BEAT UP CHANEL$” in an interview with Switched On Pop, Slayyyter said, “I can’t afford Chanel out of the store. I’ll take someone’s aunt’s fucked-up purse from their closet, like, I’ll buy that off you for $100. I want that, that’s luxury to me.”
This is one of the best articulations of this circle of pop’s worldview. Being “that girl” is less about the title being bestowed upon you lavishly and rather you claiming it for yourself. Where the traditional circuit of pop icons evokes Sex And The City, this offshoot reads a bit more like Girls.
Here, to be a pop star is simply to perform the pop star, even if you’re not selling out stadiums or breaking the Hot 100. This idea isn’t new. As Kelefa Sanneh wrote in his seminal history of American popular music, Major Labels, claiming “pop” as an identity dates back to Boy George, who defied “anti-orthodox orthodoxy” by “embracing the trappings of show business.” Even then, being pop still came with certain commercial prerequisites. Boy George was one of the biggest chart-toppers of the era, as were others who “claimed pop” like Madonna, arguably the first “pop girl” idol.
Eli. Photo by Charlotte Rutherford.
Over a Zoom call, I shared my silly little “Disturbia” story with Eli, one of pop’s most promising next-of-kin. Without even giving much away about my ideas or my definition of the new scene as I saw it, she understood.
“The ‘Disturbia’ video was the scariest thing I’d ever seen, but I also thought about it for so long, and it was, like, empowering and alluring,” she told me. “I feel like I was always living for the girls whose [messiness and imperfections] cut through in little ways, even though there are so many things at play [in the culture] that don’t support that.”
For Eli, the call to pop music came in moments like watching Britney’s legendary “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, you’re cool, fuck you, I’m out,” from the “I Wanna Go” music video and hearing the raucous screams echo through Rihanna’s “Disturbia.” A closeted trans woman in a Catholic home, the promise of pop music to Eli wasn’t held in just a catchy earworm. Pop music is often seen as trite and indulgent, but Eli wholeheartedly believes in its ability to be a saving grace. She’s drinking the Kool-Aid: “It’s a delicious one that is sustainable and cares about people and will not kill you when you drink it,” she said. It’s that love of pop iconography and belief in its promise, that thrill of watching quintessential showgirls ascend to the highest level, that seems to be the thing propelling this generation of pop stars that Eli exemplifies.
This iteration of pop music is less about selling out stadiums or appearing on the cover of Tiger Beat-adjacent teen magazines, and more about embodying a certain chaotic bravado. In doing so, they’ve made a niche out of indulging wholeheartedly in—and, in part, poking fun at—the role play behind music’s biggest genre.
“From a songwriting perspective, I like the idea of trying to be simple but also weird, interesting, or, dare I say, innovative, like SOPHIE. It’s making electro, super fucking disgusting metallic sounds, but also transcending that niche and pushing it forward into the cultural center, if there even is one,” said Eli of her own process and sound.
Her debut record, Stage Girl, leans hard on the early 2000s Claire’s-adjacent aesthetic and calls back to Timbaland-era club hits. It embraces the pomp of pop girl showmanship while bringing that aspect of the genre down to earth. In the promotion for Stage Girl, Eli shared clips of herself online singing not onstage to thousands of fans but in her room, bed unmade, clothes strewn everywhere, and still in full glam.
Last November, I stumbled somewhat absentmindedly down to The Lower Third, an intimate venue in London, to watch ADÉLA make her UK live debut. I didn’t really care much about ADÉLA at the time, and I knew little about her except for a few clearly hyperpop-influenced tracks that I enjoyed and that she’d parlayed a stint on Dream Academy—the reality television competition that recently launched KATSEYE—into a solo recording contract. I left her show blown away, convinced that not making KATSEYE was the best thing that could have happened to her.
The room she played in was tiny, packed wall-to-wall, teeming with sweat from enthusiastic dancers, and absolutely buzzing due to ADÉLA’s mesmerizing stage presence. It was a performance that just as easily could have been in MSG or Wembley; in other words, she brought the stadium to her. Her version of pop music was angstier, kinkier, and darker than what I’d expected. She sang about running after her father’s homewrecking mistress. She incorporated operatic elements into her set. The cover of her debut EP was, quite literally, someone peeing on a wall, and it was called The Provocateur. These are places the tightly-run machine of KATSEYE and the pop mainstream would be more hesitant to go. But in this adjacent, twisted world of pop, she thankfully can, and her music is all the better for it.
Responding to a 2023 article by the writer Shaad D’Souza on pop as an aesthetic, one Reddit user pointed out: “What happens? The gays pretend they are popular.” This scene’s core tenets are rooted in the belief that pop music should be shocking, bizarre, and, above all, fabulous. They see this form of pop as an escape, a point made all the more relevant given this scene has coalesced in the wake of the pandemic and ensuing geopolitical chaos. While pop music has always been about making yourself bigger than you are, it’s important to note that this subset of the genre’s more daring figures are more queer-aligned than ever.
“A decent amount of the things that are intrinsically pop cannot be separated from queerness, because queerness is to exist on the fringe, and to ask why you have to fall in line when you just have an instinctual feeling in yourself that you are not going to suppress your identity or way of being,” Eli says. “So, you’re met with all this resistance and the only way to process it, I think, is to make and consume art.”
This alignment is what has often brought the queer community and pop divas so close—that desire to search for more, that willingness to stand out against ridicule. “When a straight woman sings a song about being yourself and when the music is uptempo and joyful and weird, it doesn’t matter who is doing it, we all want that,” Eli said. “It is queer people and minorities who are often more open to the invitation that art provides.”
Even the online fan communities that allow these artists to “go niche” are intrinsically tied to queer spaces. It’s often in online stan communities that young queer people can come into their own and find likeminded peers, particularly when their offline communities turn them away. It seems reasonable to suspect that the future of pop music will flow out from these kinds of communities and circle around the cult pop icons who they treat like deities. As we hurtle into a post-monoculture moment, the kind of broad appeal that once defined pop stardom will be less easy to come by. Instead, it will be in the artists taking a subversive and niche approach to the pop attitude who will thrive.