poptimism's return

this thread about olivia dean was a refreshing throwback to ilx of yore:

olivia dean "man i need" classic or dud

I think there have been quite a few good pop hits the past couple years, but I think there's also less of a sense of those songs being quite as culturally-saturating then a decade-plus ago. But that might also be that we're all older, LOL, or most likely, a combination of the two.

What I'm interested in is our fav Actually-Popular songs of the last year or two (meaning if it never touched Billboard GTFO). The idea is to pick the stuff that actually feels kind of musically compelling and also had some widespread success or sense of zeitgeist. I'm also less interested in New Jersey-type singles by uber-recognizeable tier one celeb artists unless the ilxor thinks its an especially noteworthy single w/in the artist's overall body of work ....

for my part, the first song that came to mind for me was Sombr's "12 to 12"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZgUiR31m-Y

here's Trevor Horn playing it on bass: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DUtI4ogiPS-/

you will have to copy and paste that instagram URL for trevor horn due to some weird url thing ILX defaults to

poptimism's return - which i pine for - would constitute a return to ewingist principles, namely, everything (within reason) is pop, everything is heard without prejudice, all musical points of view considered

what isn't poptimism is what you seem to think it is - namely, 'meaning if it never touched Billboard GTFO'

there are numerous incredible pop songs of the last few years that have barely got a mention on ILX, those would be prime candidates for a thread like this, instead we have American chauvinism as usual

have your thread idc

I love the success of "Choosin' Texas" and "Folded."

Folded is an incredible single because it's such a fully-inhabited performance as much as it is a well-written well-produced piece of music

A song that has a lot of impact with kids my son's age is that #6 hit by Djo-- "The End of the Beginning." Not sure it's been mentioned around here (expect maybe in relation to Stranger Things.)

poptimism's return - which i pine for - would constitute a return to ewingist principles, namely, everything (within reason) is pop, everything is heard without prejudice, all musical points of view considered

what isn't poptimism is what you seem to think it is - namely, 'meaning if it never touched Billboard GTFO'

there are numerous incredible pop songs of the last few years that have barely got a mention on ILX, those would be prime candidates for a thread like this, instead we have American chauvinism as usual

have your thread idc

― imago, Tuesday, April 14, 2026 11:48 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

you don't 'get it'. this thread is for actually-popular songs that are good. if you want to see infinite length lists of non-scaled music you can go literally anywhere else on the internet that isn't run by Stans. This is for neither -- the 'missing piece' of contemporary poptimism is not 'liking unpopular things'

"Folded" is def my fav song from last year.

"End of the Beginning" is so funny to me, I feel like that's been huge for like 2 years...it sounds like the most gentrified parts of Chicago to me so I struggle with it a bit. I'm sure it will be iconic nostalgia for future generations, but something about it feels deeply Millennial Cringe to me, like 2009 indie aesthetic scaled

I'm also fond of Pooh Shiesty's "FDO" and "Where is My Husband?!"

the way you phrased that is funny, like Pooh Shiesty had a song called "where is my husband"

Where is my Husband's beyonce-isms were a bit offputting to me but I only heard it once or twice

lol

I like "Where is My Husband" in the context of a radio hit; it sounds like a mid '00s throwback, maybe Amerie more than Beyonce?

"where is my husband" screams meghan trainor to me, i am sorry.

emghan trainor could never lay down verses with that alacrity.

the olivia dean record is nice! a lot of my students are very into her. i also really like lola young's 'messy,' and her album was a surprise—it reminded me of a lost kill rock stars-released huggy bear side project. 'folded' is fantastic, and i love the EP with all the guest verses.

I really liked Raye's turn on Jax Jones "You Don't Know Me" from a few years ago - I didn't think a vocal version of "Body Language" would ever be necessary but she did a great job putting peresonality into it. But I cannot stand "Where Is My Husband" because it feels like it's trying to be a meme rather than just organically idiosyncratic.

I don't think we've mentioned Gracie Abrams anywhere here. Her music is hugely popular despite Gen Z's seeming frustration at nepobabies being successful. It's between her and Sabrina Carpenter for the acts who I'm most regularly requested to play things by when I'm DJing in the pub.

The one that really bewilders me is Sienna Spiro. I have no idea who or why she is currently holding multiple Top 40 positions, her music seems so lifeless and her voice uninteresting.

zara larsson's "midnight sun" remains on its phenomenally slow-burn run up the UK charts and just hit a new peak last week (#12), so on that basis that would be my nomination for this thread lol. one of my favourite songs of last year and the ululating section of the chorus is still such a rush of blood to the head

cf also the pinkpantheress "stateside" remix that she features on, which sounds like a timewarp to 2006

I don't know if this fulfils the Billboard criteria, although apparently it was #1 on UK iTunes. Anyway - I don't listen to the radio, so I might be wrong, but this feels it should've been bigger!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qme8Ydk8aT0

"Where is My Husband?" sounded like an Amerie tribute to me. I love Raye's breathlessness but I wish I could hear the lyrics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA3n-KUe3j0

poptimism's return - which i pine for - would constitute a return to ewingist principles, namely, everything (within reason) is pop, everything is heard without prejudice, all musical points of view considered

what isn't poptimism is what you seem to think it is - namely, 'meaning if it never touched Billboard GTFO'

there are numerous incredible pop songs of the last few years that have barely got a mention on ILX, those would be prime candidates for a thread like this, instead we have American chauvinism as usual

have your thread idc

― imago

i went through a short period of actual heartbeat-affecting embarrassment that i had posted on this forum recently, and even some of the content of my old posts wasn't up to my own standards...
i don't visit this place but every 10 days or so anymore...
i keep coming back to see posts like this one. they're always inevitably and definitively 2 things:
1. proof that i have *nothing* to be embarrassed about
and 2. the reason why no one else should / will ever engage with any of ya'll

get out while you still can.✌🏻

I was also thinking about "Midnight Sun," which seems like a song that another era of ILM would've been excited about. And it is a minor hit in the U.S, too; it barely cracked the top 40 in the U.S. a couple of months ago, and I have heard it on the radio in Chicago.

What do we think of "Love Me Not" by Ravyn Lenae? I am a little over this kind of retro-soul sound, but I never minded hearing the song on the radio (even if I prefer her non-charting "Sticky").

it’s a nice song, not her best by a lot but glad it was a huge hit

her new song “bobby” is a pretty great bit of chipper bedroom pop. the guitar is positively ariel pink-ian (value neutral statement)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM1FJutkhpU

Very amusing to see this revisionist insistence that “Ewingist principles” had/have nothing to do with a consideration of chart success.

there are many nations, each with their own chart. the closest thing to a universal chart now is youtube playcounts, not billboard!

imago, why was your post so damn surly? D-40's OP wasn't jingoist about American charts.

I'm not right or left wing
my principles are actually 'ewing' ;)

*date leaves*

the closest thing to a universal chart now is youtube playcounts, not billboard!

I mean the closest thing to a universal chart is literally Billboard (the Global 200): https://www.billboard.com/charts/billboard-global-200/

D-40's OP wasn't jingoist about American charts.

― boners for bombs (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, April 15, 2026 9:42 AM (thirty-six minutes ago)

I think there's an implied US/UK/(CAN/AUS/NZ) focus here, but I don't have a problem with that because the point seems to be to comment on songs that are "culturally-saturating" and part of a "zeitgeist" — obviously there are ilxors all over, but I don't think it would make sense for me to post, e.g., a super-popular-in-Kenya song here as I don't know anything about the Kenyan zeitgeist (crossovers would be another story though). sometimes it's okay/better to focus on observations you can make from within a culture, and I'm pretty D-40 isn't only trying to compile a list of cool tracks

There's a critic I follow on Bluesky who calls himself (the other) Dave Moore and he via Youtube and elsewhere writes about pop songs from many countries around the world and he calls American pop A-pop (just as "we" have K-pop and J-pop), and he participates in that Tom Ewing poll of songs from multiple countries that I see there on Bluesky

ok i love "A-pop"

Dave Moore, Jonathan Bogart, Frank Kogan and some others are all writing about pop music from non-US non-UK non- Europe countries

Dave wrote the Pitchfork review of Arcade Fire that broke them. He's an occasional Singles Jukebox contributor.

(Singles Jukebox also covers non-English music)

The best culturally-saturating pop music from the last few years were the Kpop Demon Hunter soundtrack, imo. I think a lot of what's been posted in this thread is very dull sounding. Is it very lyrics based?

It’s been very strange over the last 5-10 years watching the term Poptimism warp into the Enemy that people project on when they want to complain about totally unrelated negative trends in music - stan culture, people harassing journalists, the gradual collapse of print media, etc.

like, having been lurking around here back in high school during the start of the initial Poptimism wars and then started posting and dipping my toe into writing shortly after that, the rockism vs. Poptimism debate was never about whether pop as a genre was superior or a demand that it be celebrated uncritically nor was it based in the idea that if music was popular it was necessarily good

it was a debate about the sometimes unspoken premises of certain then-dominant strains of music criticism that placed inherent value in album-oriented rock written composed and performed by auteurs and took it as a premise that deviating from that necessarily made music less talented or meaningful or good or worthy of engagement.

the point wasn’t to say that all popular music needed to be celebrated it was that popular music was worthy of engagement and serious music criticism…which could include negative criticism. it was just about understanding and assessing different genres of music on their own terms rather than dinging 12” disco singles for not being a rock concept album

Stan armies that harass people who give albums negative reviews don’t exist because music criticism took a “poptimist” turn, they exist because of the rise of social media and the same cultural shifts that produced the rise of all the other mass online harassment campaigns of the last decade.

But uh if this is just a rolling thread cataloguing currently charting pop songs that we enjoy, I apologize for the digression lol

re this: “I think there have been quite a few good pop hits the past couple years, but I think there's also less of a sense of those songs being quite as culturally-saturating then a decade-plus ago. But that might also be that we're all older, LOL, or most likely, a combination of the two”

I think that just in general everything popular is less culturally saturated than a decade or two ago. Dave Moore’s A-Pop idea gets into this and he also did a recent multi post blog series about Taylor Swift’s career that sort of looks at her as one of the last monocultural figures because of the timing of when she debuted and certain other market idiosyncrasies.

Chart success these days seems to be much more driven by a bunch of different very big niches that elevate singles that are popular in those niches but often have little recognition outside of it. Radio listening is down, social media virality is declining post-Musk’s Twitter acquisition, so it’s a lot of people streaming in their own bubbles and then unpredictable TikTok trends

OMG HELLO

also uh. Hello posting for the first time in years because I rediscovered Zing in my apps which makes it easier to read and scroll lol

wait holy shit wb AiM

but yeah I left Twitter post-Musk, Bluesky doesn’t have widespread music talk the same way, so my music discussion tends to be in random private discord servers and that’s a different vibe that sort of reflects how the awfulness of the current internet has shifted all cultural discussion and consumption!

God, I missed your posts Alex

I’m not sure if Folded is my favourite song of last year but it’s success on the charts felt good because it’s a great classic song and also because the recent shifts in chart trends made me worried that it was getting incredibly difficult for R&B to chart well and somehow a plain good old school song managed to slowly climb

God, I missed your posts Alex

relearning quote tags etc. after years of disuse.

rediscovering that message boards are a better/less mentally harmful way to multitask when stressed out drafting briefs than the endless sea of stimulation and awful news on generic social media sites.

the other reason it’s hard maybe to answer the favourite charting songs question is that the charts seem to change a lot more slowly now in the streaming era. songs hang around in the top of the charts FOREVER. it feels less dynamic.

hi, Alex!

Dave wrote the Pitchfork review of Arcade Fire that broke them. He's an occasional Singles Jukebox contributor.

(Singles Jukebox also covers non-English music)

And this is how I learn that the Singles Jukebox still exists. I hadn't been visiting the site since they said "Goodbye" in 2022. Didn't realize they were doing weeks of monthly reviews since February 2024.

_Dave wrote the Pitchfork review of Arcade Fire that broke them. He's an occasional Singles Jukebox contributor.

(Singles Jukebox also covers non-English music)_

And this is how I learn that the Singles Jukebox still exists. I hadn't been visiting the site since they said "Goodbye" in 2022. Didn't realize they were doing weeks of monthly reviews since February 2024.

Yeah we did end of year stuff for two years and then the second year we all talked about if we could revive it in a more manageable way. Monthly is what we came up with (he said, still too busy with legal briefs to contribute regularly these days lol)

re this: “I think there have been quite a few good pop hits the past couple years, but I think there's also less of a sense of those songs being quite as culturally-saturating then a decade-plus ago. But that might also be that we're all older, LOL, or most likely, a combination of the two”

I think that just in general everything popular is less culturally saturated than a decade or two ago. Dave Moore’s A-Pop idea gets into this and he also did a recent multi post blog series about Taylor Swift’s career that sort of looks at her as one of the last monocultural figures because of the timing of when she debuted and certain other market idiosyncrasies.

Chart success these days seems to be much more driven by a bunch of different very big niches that elevate singles that are popular in those niches but often have little recognition outside of it. Radio listening is down, social media virality is declining post-Musk’s Twitter acquisition, so it’s a lot of people streaming in their own bubbles and then unpredictable TikTok trends

― no longer in MTL (Alex in Montreal), Wednesday, April 15, 2026 2:42 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

yea I def get that feeling -- also theres just like, the number of kids who are stanning streamers or rando celebs online over musicians feels like a marginalization of the pop star...all that said, sometimes you see a clip like this and you remember that when you're a kid, your understanding of the popular feels a lot more firm:

https://www.instagram.com/p/DWg9J2NjIFW/

Relatedly, I want to add "Big Guy" by Ice Spice to my list of great pop songs on this thread

many xposts to imago but "the closest thing to a universal chart now is youtube playcounts, not billboard!" is...not really correct given that youtube use for music listening is well down from what it used to be circa 10 years ago. generally, the music video as a format seems to be dying a slow death. spotify playcounts are a far more accurate gauge of global popularity

not really. spotify play counts are a far more accurate gauge of global popularity on spotify

There's a critic I follow on Bluesky who calls himself (the other) Dave Moore

fyi he is also a longtime ilxor, although he doesn’t post as much these days. (he posts as "cr4bdbgs" and was "dabug" before that.)

I initially assumed “the other” meant we were talking about a Dave Moore music critic who was not a cure 4 bedbugs and became extremely curious about this Golyadkin situation.

Welcome back Alex in Montreal! Pro-tip: you can save time on legal briefs by copy pasting the lyrics to Destiny’s Child’s “Say My Name”.

poptimism is back baybee!!

poptimism according to stans is the combination of mainstream artists increasingly being covered by publications that previously would have shunned them + metacritic scores being higher than they used to be (they ignore that the latter has occurred in part because of their own harassment of journalists on social media, bc they anticipate these scores in the same way they do album sales figures)

"12 to 12" is my fav sombr single, not that that sets a high bar or anything

i would be genuinely impressed if meghan trainor had released "where is my husband" lol

i sometimes find "end of beginning" cute and sometimes a rather embarrassing (YOU TAKE THE MAN OUT OF THE), shallowly wistful chicago song for ppl who went to college there a few years. it made like a 'chart comeback' on the heel of the stranger things return (even tho it's not in the show afaik) but yeah it honestly never really went away

gracie abrams is abominable. taylor swift's legacy as a pop star has been a net negative, i hate to say

loved "love me not", have enjoyed but not been super crazy about ravyn generally. that said i haven't really explored her catalog in depth. she has a new song with dominic fike lol

that song with dominic fike is probably the worst song ravyn has ever released. but I agree with voodoo chili that "bobby" is great

as far as recent 'pop' from this year there isn't all that much that excites me. "stateside" yes, absolutely, banger. glad to be hearing "midnight sun" more too, making its predictably glacial rise up 'stateside' radio playlists

the term a-pop is great. i do think america's hitmaking apparatus is particularly dysfunctional/embattled lately, but i welcome this as an opportunity for other countries' to continue building in influence. us top 40 programmers still believe the source of their ratings woes is that they have played too many streaming hits, not that they add songs 4 months after no one cares anymore lol

like, bruno mars's new album has a multi-week #1 airplay hit with "i just might" and an obvious followup hit with "risk it all" and yet it all seems like such a non-event. harry styles's album also feels very here-today-gone-tomorrow, his 'left-field' superstar indulgence "aperture" having failed to connect + the relatively safe/unchallenging "american girls" feeling like it's not going to fare any better

(i like/d "aperture" tho)

speaking of Dominic Fike, it's pretty insane that "Baby Doll" is *just now* having its huge moment nearly a decade after it was first released, but it's totally a deserving song, that first project he made was really special

re: Top 40 radio. I listen from time to time but barely ever hear anything that isn’t 6 months old or older. I guarantee you if I turn it on right now they’ll be playing “Die With a Smile” or “Flowers.”

One of my fav hits of the last couple years -- scraping into the bottom of the hot 100, though it was very much the kind of thing that could have done better with more label support -- was emmanuel cortes' "Amor"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C29r956v40

it went viral off wholesome tiktok videos of couples dancing

https://www.tiktok.com/@mododiosmx/video/7569408005049945374

I could see it becoming one of those evergreen records that keeps bubbling up over time and charting even higher in the future (it did get to no. 6 on the latin charts)

oh my god yes "amor". that accordion line is an instant classic earworm

xp for the greater part of a decade now (probably longer) the radio consultants have been recommending that the way to winning ratings (or at least ratings that are less shitty than ones' competitors) is to add songs later and hold onto them for as long as possible. stations that defy this advice and manage to do well are a small minority, sadly. san francisco comes to mind as a city that has actually listenable top 40s that do well

a-pop (and Alex in Montreal) alerts!

I don't post much here but if anyone's interested, this is the first essay in the series.

https://www.otherdavemoore.com/p/the-rise-or-fall-of-a-pop

love a lot of dominic fike, hi grace and the great pretender a couple recent personal classics. white keys seems to be the track with the most momentum atm but its just ok imo.

alex these people target and harass disabled posters for their music tastes. maybe stay away unless you feel like that also represents your priorities.

not sure what that thread's about

will imago play by the rules now

https://www.billboard.com/music/chart-beat/slayyyter-worst-girl-in-america-number-1-top-dance-albums-1236216677/

no youtube on hot 100 now seems to be damaging prospects on that chart for latin music, one of the few areas where youtube is still strong for music

like a song i like recently/currently is "dardos" by romeo santos and prince royce. it got onto the bubbling under chart late last year before youtube pulled its data. if wiki is to believed tho it is a #1 hit in spain? that's good if true. i guess regional mexican music is likelier to chart in america these days than bachata anyways

their collab album is called better late than never. tbh if the thought of them collaborating had even occurred to me several years ago i would have dismissed it as ridiculous, like surely santos is above recording with the comparatively basic prince royce. but i guess in the end it works!

the other song i've heard from the album "lokita por mí" i'm not so fond of, the fact that they literally sing "you're my crazy bitch" on it (in english) kinda pulls me out of it. sometimes i wonder how many spanish-language songs i would stop liking if i actually understood the lyrical content