The biggest song in the world right now considers two teenage rites of passage: learning to drive and losing your innocence. In Drivers License, the expansive yet intimate debut single by Olivia Rodrigo, she takes her maiden voyage as driver with an empty passenger seat, circling her ex-boyfriend’s neighbourhood and ruminating on their abandoned plans to celebrate this milestone. Had it come out a few years ago, when empowerment fuelled pop’s engine, it would have ended with Rodrigo driving off into the sunset, two fingers silhouetted against the sky. Instead, she’s stuck in purgatory: “Yeah, you said forever, now I drive alone past your street,” sings Rodrigo, who turns 18 on Saturday.
Released on 8 January, Drivers License broke Spotify records for one-day sales streams (for non-Christmas songs), and then broke that record the next day. It has been No 1 in the UK for five weeks (and may make it six today); in the US, it is the 10th single in history to spend its first five weeks at No 1. It would be easy to ally the success of a song about being stuck in the suburbs solely with lockdown’s Groundhog Day malaise, but the phenomenon has deeper roots.
Rodrigo is the flag-bearer for a wave of predominantly young women, non-binary and queer songwriters penning power ballads that are as emotional as ever, but project that emotion inward, trading bombast for hush. Immersed in heartache and mental health, this sound is sad but not melodramatic, more realistic than resilient. Tate McRae’s crushed You Broke Me First is heading towards the 1bn streams mark, the likes of Billie Marten, Holly Humberstone, and Griff are the industry’s most hyped new artists, while Phoebe Bridgers has surreptitiously grown from cult hero to the cusp of pop stardom.
“Empowerment still exists in pop,” says 25-year-old Dodie, a first-wave YouTuber turned songwriter in the vein of Laura Marling, “but now, being more vulnerable, being a little bit broken and presenting that as it is, is more celebrated.”
The needle has settled after a tumultuous decade of pop mood swings, from decadent post-recession maximalism to “we can’t stop” nihilism and depressive sounds rooted in theatricality and genuine horror, given the generation of young rappers lost to homicide and addiction. It’s the meeting point of the pessimism of Lana Del Rey, Lorde’s defiant suburbia, the indulgent ennui of Drake and emo rap; of Halsey’s post-tumblr candour, the gothic elegance of Billie Eilish and the songwriting acuity of Phoebe Bridgers and Taylor Swift, as well as Spotify’s algorithmic smoothing, the increased solitude of the listening experience and the evolution of “indie” from mindset to aesthetic.
Jensen McRae is a 23-year-old Californian songwriter who recently went viral for an incisive Bridgers parody (her original songwriting evokes Tracy Chapman and Mitski). “We’ve gone from fake happiness to ultimate despair to a more nuanced depiction of emotional range,” she says, Zooming from her bedroom (as did almost everyone interviewed). “It’s not like there’s not nuance in dark pop,” she says, referencing Lorde and Eilish, “but as opposed to darkness, despair and death being the predominant themes, [now] is about smaller, subtler displays of pain.”
Covid-19, the climate crisis and political tumult have entrenched a youth mental health crisis as an already uncertain future disintegrates. It’s no surprise that young writers are centring these subjects in their work, says Hayley Williams. The 32-year-old frontwoman of emo icons Paramore is another godmother to this moment, and recently released two solo albums in this vein.
“You know how lately it feels like asking anyone a simple ‘how are you?’ carries such a new and profound weight to it now that it just didn’t before?” she says. “Sometimes I feel like my real answer to that question is maybe just too much for people. But I damn sure don’t feel that way when I’m writing. I nearly overindulge when it comes to expressing points of pain or hard lessons I’ve learned, because I know that with myself, and most certainly in a song, I won’t ever worry if it’s too much.”
As well as personal struggle, many songwriters describe consoling a loved one in distress, without offering false hope. Holly Humberstone, a 21-year-old Lincolnshire songwriter, wrote Deep End for one of her sisters: “I’ll be your medicine if you let me,” she sings with fear and tenderness over loose electric guitar. It’s an experience she’s had with “so many of my friends”, she says. “The world is such a fucking brutal place these days, we have to look out for and nurture each other because everyone struggles in some way with mental health and everyone’s going through their own shit.”
A year ago, it was thought that TikTok would boil pop down into a viral splatter of memeable lyrics and goofy sound effects. That happened to a degree, but storytelling had a surprising resurgence, aided by spacious production that defies Spotify-addled attention spans.
Daniel Nigro, 38, produced Drivers License. “For a long time people were interested in a very maximalist wall of sound,” he says. “Now people are so much more interested in how to create open space. It’s about choosing the instrumentation more wisely so that you can have less there and still have as much impact.” You hear a lot of “indie girl voice” in this area: a broken, girlish tone that eschews prowess (and much influence of Black music) to elongate and chew on vowels, the effect lending focus to dreamy, vibe-oriented production. “They sing in cursive,” laughs McRae, who has a deeper, more natural delivery. “And I love it, but I can’t do it.”
Centring lyrics is another recent trend, says Nigro. “Something that differs from pop music even a few years ago is that everything is so lyrically-driven and about the concept of the song. Before, you could get away with making a vibe and the lyrics could come later.”
There are two reasons, he says: young artists are abandoning blind-date songwriting sessions – where they have to pour their heart out to a stranger – for lasting one-on-one creative partnerships (such as Jack Antonoff’s era-defining collaborations with Lorde, Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey). Nigro and Rodrigo recorded Drivers License and will finish her debut album in his “180-square foot” garage, flanked by a computer, a few keyboards, synths and mics, and a Peyote Poem scented candle. “Working in a very small environment that doesn’t feel imposing is really important to the process of making music.”
The other reason, says Nigro, is Taylor Swift, whose influence has been credited with flipping declining guitar sales. (Her two most recent albums, Folklore and Evermore echo this introspective moment, suggesting that the ever-canny artist is watching the weather.) “At least with the artists that I work with, she is a major influence lyrically on how to approach a song,” says Nigro. “It’s all about being honest. When I was making music in my early 20s, what was in vogue was to be more metaphoric or suggestive. Nowadays, you have to be as literal and specific as possible.”
“I don’t want to listen to an empty song trying to mimic a human emotion,” says the 22-year-old Texan songwriter Conan Gray, whose wistful music spins pessimistic fantasies about heartbreaks he has never known. “I wanna know the dirty details – the names, the places, the exact times. I love that about Lorde, Taylor … they aren’t afraid to say things as they are, because the nitty-gritty, sometimes unglamorous details are what make life and music true.”
Several of these artists have gone from vlogging to pop – and they all maintain strong social media presences – which thrive on unadulterated connection. “On a good day, I feel really proud that I’ve managed to round up my very vulnerable and abstract feelings into something beautiful, which has enough of a boundary to share and for me to still feel comfortable,” says Dodie. “And then in my worst moments, I’m like, Oh, my God, what have I done? I feel so intruded-upon.”
That demand for emotional authenticity might also stem from fear at getting caught out as a fake, says Jordan Jay, co-founder of songwriting company Karma Artists and a major label A&R. “Artists know that if you’re not being real, people find you out very quickly in this day and age.” But it also defies social media standards around idealised lives. Zoe Wees’s latest single Girls Like Us is dedicated to other young women who feel isolated by conventional beauty standards: it’s had 13m Spotify streams in less than a month.
“We’re on social media and everything is so perfect and you don’t want to talk about your struggles,” the 18-year-old German songwriter says sarcastically. “For my whole life, I’ve struggled with myself and I will always struggle with myself. I couldn’t see how beautiful I really am because I only see perfect around me. I know people are going through the same and I wanted to give them a feeling of hope.”
Claud is the first artist signed to Bridgers’ record label Saddest Factory. On the 21-year-old songwriter’s recently released debut album, Super Monster, they wanted to emphasise that “growth is not linear” despite the internet’s insistence on perfection. “That even when you’re messing up, you’re still worthy of love.”
Prof Robin James is the author of Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism, which theorises that pop that vanquishes hardship feeds capitalist patriarchy, and refusing resilience is a form of resistance. She sees in this cohort of young women a rejection of the now-tarnished “girl boss” figure that embodied one strain of millennial aspiration. “It’s definitely an attempt by a group who are expected to be strong and climb the corporate ladder to reject that gender norm.”
In contrast to millennial teenagers who craved worldliness, many of these songs and artists convey an explicit fear of adulthood: losing innocence is no longer about sex and drugs, which increasingly seem like bogeymen pushed by adults to distract from life’s innate disappointments. “Getting older’s getting scary,” Claud sings on Cuff Your Jeans. Says Conan Gray: “I’ve always felt a pressure to be older than my age, but in my young adulthood I feel I’m growing in reverse at times, finally accepting the youth in me that I stifled as a child in order to try to succeed as a member of society.” Humberstone is grateful that the pandemic gave her an extra year at home. “I feel like my childhood is slipping away and it’s really sad.”
Embracing a childlike aesthetic, this group rejects conventional sexualisation. “It really short-changed a lot of female artists in the past who either were pushed 100% in that direction and not allowed to express any sort of real vulnerability,” says McRae. “And for artists who were completely denied that part of themselves, a lot of them had a huge 180 when they escaped the clutches of whatever machine was denying them that part of themselves.” McRae might embrace it on her terms one day, while Dodie worries that “promiscuous moments” on her new album might jar with the “squeaky clean, angelic character that people might have built up of me, because I’m not that at all”.
James hears this in their music. “Music theorists have often talked about how tension and release structures in songs map cultural narratives about sexual attraction and conquest. So the lack of tension and release in Driver’s License shows how the narrative we use to experience sexuality is changing.” It chimes with the prominence of queer devotion in this sound. (“Do you listen to Girl in Red?” teens ask on TikTok, the yearning Norwegian songwriter’s name adopted as code for finding queer friends.) “Vulnerability and the opportunity to talk to millions of each other through social media really expedited the process of the youth proclaiming who they are and who they love,” says Conan Gray. “There is more acceptance for intimate true music, because we as a generation accept that humans need to feel in order to truly be alive.”
Not long ago, female musicians were struggling to break through, while balladeering boys clogged the charts. Adele and Amy Winehouse led the last wave of sad women who found major pop success, sophisticating their pain. Before that came Alanis Morissette, Fiona Apple, Gwen Stefani and the Lilith Fair wave, boosted by the rise of US alternative radio. (These 90s trailblazers also followed the empty cipher of the first-wave 80s girl boss.) “The Angry Young Woman is articulate and sexually explicit, both a lover and a fighter,” New York Times critic Jon Pareles wrote in 1996. “Her anger isn’t generalised or (usually) channelled into conventional politics; it’s personal, self-involved.”
Anger hardly breaches this current moment of introspection. “There’s lots of things to be angry about,” says Humberstone. “But I feel more stress and fear.” When McRae rages at US politics, it quickly turns to “anxiety and crying, because it’s so out of your control”.
When much of this music is extremely soft and tasteful, and the most visible artists making it are willowy and conventionally beautiful, does it entrench stereotypes about femininity as gentle and unassuming? Actor and writer Tavi Gevinson, 24, ran the influential teenage girl website Rookie from 2010-18. “Phoebe [Bridgers] and Fiona Apple are good examples of music that to me is feminist, even if it doesn’t necessarily have a capital-F, capital-M feminist message, because of the honesty and specificity.”
Newsletter author Safy Hallan-Farah wrote the viral essay All Alone in their White Girl Pain, reflecting on the “internet sad girls” of the 2010s. “I have a feeling these artists are not preoccupied with how to signal taste as much as they are expressing the contents of their inner world,” she says. “I can’t say it’s radical, but I do know that this music will be a boon for a generation of sad girls.”
Robin James says that white fragility allows many of these artists to reject cultural expectations of strength. “White women are not seen as somehow dangerously failing [when they refuse to perform resilience].” Says Gray: “The world opens up for white artists and songwriters, whereas people of colour are expected to crash through walls and exist in absolute perfection to receive even an ounce of the acceptance and love that white artists are given.”
Whenever McRae read articles about “women in rock”, “they would just list like, seven white women”, she says. She found her voice writing White Boy, about feeling lesser than a white girl in a crush’s eyes. It prompted her to write about “the vulnerability and the fragility that Black women feel like they can’t express. There’s a few songs on my album about how I put on a happy face and how I find myself often being comic relief for people instead of actually talking about my mental health struggles.”
Gray suggests that the internet is changing things. “For the first time ever, popular music is being decided directly by the people. People of colour are finally starting to be shown the power and influence in the industry that has always rightfully belonged to them, but there is still a very, very long way to go.” And McRae highlights that Olivia Rodrigo is Filipino-American. “It’s not lost on me that she is a brown girl,” she says. “I think that’s really powerful that she is performing the kind of vulnerability and complexity that previously was really only afforded to white women.”
Another positive is that this multiplicity of artists removes the pressure of representation from any individual, says Tavi Gevinson: “It’s hard to think of any female pop star that bears the burden of role model in the way that they would have 10 years ago.”On that note, says Karma Artists’ Jordan Jay says, he doesn’t imagine record labels launching a gold rush to find “the next Olivia Rodrigo” (although Nigro says he has received a “comedy” amount of collaboration inquiries), more that her stripped-back sound will shape pop until the next cyclical shift. Given the terrible state of this world, perhaps fantasy and the invention of vivid new ones is next. “Although I’m almost always writing about some terrible emotion that I can’t ignore, I think it’s foolish to discredit the joys of fantasy and escape,” says Gray. “Sometimes life feels larger than reality.” For now, smallness abides, trapping big feelings with nowhere to go.
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