2019: The Bops
The first couple weeks of January turned into an unmitigated disaster and then I went on vacation, so these lists got massively delayed. Still, the show goes on, and the Bops must reach the masses. Here were my five favorite pop albums of 2019.
5. Lizzo — Cuz I Love You
This album kicks off big, loud, and victorious, and it never ever pumps the brakes. In that first track, the title track, Lizzo introduces herself to the world as someone you need to know, someone you should have known all along — it’s the kind of song that you hear and you think, how have I not known who this was my whole life? It’s a microcosm of the ten tracks that follow, showcasing Lizzo’s penchant for massive, bassy, glitzy beats as well as her dynamic voice which goes from belting long, operatic high notes to spitting bouncy, jokey bars.
Look, I’m not going to say anything about Lizzo that you haven’t already heard. She was 2019’s one great universal success story (weird doxxing incident with a wayward pizza delivery guy, notwithstanding). But it’s likely that you know her mostly from the two resurrected singles released a few years ago that miraculously found massive radio play last year, and if that’s the extent of your Lizzo experience, you need to just jump all the way in. “Juice” is the single that never got the love it deserved, a delightful, shimmering romp through disco beats and new wave synths that showcase Lizzo having more fun than I think is legal in any of the midwestern states. “Better in Color” sees Lizzo preaching from the pulpit that her “big dick energy tastes like collard greens” in the middle of what I guess you’d have to call an anti-racist anthem for modern love. The whole thing would teeter on the edge of pure silliness if it was delivered by a less confident, less enthusiastic voice, but it turns out Lizzo is uniquely suited to this refreshing, wild brand of positivity, and goddamn but did we need it.
Lizzo has a lot to say, and it probably is the case that she gets away with some stuff that other pop artists wouldn’t be able to. I mean, look at the skinny-shaming album highlight, “Tempo” that brings Missy Elliot in to rap over some gigantic subbasement beats. Is this just a better version of Nicki’s “Anaconda”? Kind of. But is it a way more original take with a much better sense of humor the sense that all of this is coming from the right place? Absolutely.
In the end, Lizzo is here for real now and pop music is *so* much better for it.
4. Caroline Polachek — PANG
If you took Headlock-era Imogen Heap and let those sounds simmer in a broth of early 2010s Robyn beats, Artpop Lady Gaga theatrics, and the crisp, hooky song structures of Sia’s best work, you’d have a soup that tastes a lot like this new Caroline Polachek album, PANG. She has songwriting credits with collaborators from Beyonce to Charli XCX, and though she’s done some solo work before this under the Ramona Lisa moniker, this is the world’s first full, unadulterated dose of Polachek’s full artistic vision. The result is the pop equivalent of stained glass light filtering through to an Yves Tanguy painting: gorgeous, tinkling, and dreamily transportive.
The production on this album is pristine, and while the soundscapes are complex, deeply layered affairs — as on “Door” where acoustic plucking interweaves with fat synth basslines and glassy armonica tones — Polachek knows that its her voice that makes the music stick. The tone of her vocal is clear in a way few pop artists are, and the precision of her vocal arpeggios are frankly stunning to hear. Deep into the era of autotuned R&B and pop, Polachek’s voice achieves an eerily artificial effect without any electronic modulation, delivering listeners with a haunting, uncanny valley of cybernetic sounds.
And yet, the album is so, so addictive. Songs like “Hit Me Where It Hurts” turns out a lilting chorus earworm that turns the masochistic, head-over-heels lovelorn lyrics into a cathartic sing-along. Part of what makes these songs so delicious is frequent appearance of Polachek’s wry, self-deprecating sense of humor. After listening to “Caroline Shut Up” you’ll feel like you just spent a wild night with three pints of ice cream and your smartest best friend after a bad breakup. She also has a flair for the melodramatic on tracks like “Ocean of Tears” (it’s as literal as it sounds) and “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings”, the latter of which you could see as a more likable, more dramatic version of Taylor’s “Gorgeous” from a couple years back.
The main achievement of this album is balance. It’s a huge sound driven by a huge voice going through some huge MOODS, but it never feels off base — in fact it grows and grows on you. When she sings “sometimes I wonder if I love you too much” you’ll be telling yourself to shut up too, because there’s no loving this album enough.
3. Carly Rae Jepsen — Dedicated
Popheads made Carly their queen the instant those blurry saxophones blared out the hook off “Run Away With Me” on 2015’s E•MO•TION, and ever since her stans have been among the loudest in pop fandom. Their tenacity has fallen on mostly deaf ears with the general pop-listening public though, as you might realize, like I did, when you found yourself biting your tongue at work when someone else refers to her as “that Call Me Maybe girl, isn’t she Canadian?”
From the bottom of my heart, this is an absolute crime and you all need to be part of the solution by listening to Dedicated. It’s probably not the best record of her discog — that title still belongs to the aforementioned 2015 pop classic — but it remains a shining beacon of nostalgia-laced poptimism, a sparkling affirmation of feeling that sees Carly expanding the palate of her signature sound to incorporate an ever widening circle of 80s and 90s pop music in a way that nevertheless true to Carly’s unique perspective. It’s a pretty long record, but it’s the kind of album where you’ll have it on in the car and when a song starts you’ll be like “Oh man I forgot how much I LOVE this song,” but then three minutes later you’ll say the same thing for the next track. Rinse, repeat, fifteen times and you’ve got Dedidcated.
Album opener “Julien” starts us up with whippy, fuzzy synths as Carly whisper-sings about a summer lover over a killer kick snare beat, but its when the chorus breaks in with a shimmering starburst that the album really introduces itself. Songs like “Happy Not Knowing” and “Too Much” see Carly playing with her manic pixie pop queen image, enthusiastically putting pretty sounds and images in front of you one three and a half minute bite at a time. But where on previous albums you might be forgiven for characterizing that enthusiasm as childlike, here Carly seems a bit more knowing. She sings on “No Drug Like Me”, “If you make me feel in love / then I’ll blossom for you / If you make me open up / I’ll tell only the truth”, and yeah it’s pretty standard cutesy pop love song stuff, but it’s also Carly playing with the radical optimism of her reputation as a live performer where she welcomes all into a utopian dance floor of good, good feeling. Her lyrics have also shifted from being a singular focus on her feelings of longing to her feelings of being longed for, as on “Everything He Needs” in which Carly helpfully explains how all-consuming Carly fandom can really be.
Dedicated is an effortless bite of sunshine, a kiss of warm breeze, a gentle rush of endorphins that asks you to remember how good it can be to just exist. And in that sense, it is a little bit escapist, but its exactly the kind of escapist a good vacation is. Just because Dedicated isn’t how the world is all the time doesn’t mean that, at least while you’re listening to it, it isn’t how the world is right now.
2. Tove Lo — Sunshine Kitty
The queen of sad girl fuck music returned in 2019 with a slow burner album that cements Swedish pop maven, Tove Lo, as one of the industry’s most criminally underrated perennials. Best known for her twin hits off 2014’s Queen of the Clouds, “Habits (Stay High)” and “Talking Body”, Tove is your go-to-girl if what you want are downbeat club music for nihilistic sex and inappropriate wedding jams.
If you’ve talked to me at any length about pop music, you probably know I stan Tove a little too hard, and honestly, I don’t have a good explanation for that. I’m not seeing this record on anyone else’s end of the year lists, so maybe it’s a super homer pick after all. But HOW THO? Tove’s sound evolves beautifully on this record — it’s not just raunch and depression this time around, though Sunshine Kitty has both in spades. There’s something more complicated at play here,that moves her sexual empowerment politics into a more communal space, something grounded in shared need, and not just for oblivion. Tove is looking past the sex and designer drugs on this one, she’s ruing the way men trash her girlfriends’ lives on “Glad He’s Gone”, she’s venting about the failed promise of a new girlfriend who turns out to be just as “Bad as the Boys”, and she’s resenting the way she can’t keep herself free of love the way she wishes she could on “Come Undone”. None of this is new ground, particularly, but Tove has the refreshing directness that lays bare the truth beneath the tropes driving so much other pop music.
But this is a list for the Bops, and that’s the real reason Tove’s here at number 2. Sunshine Kitty is wall-to-wall 100% certified grade A BANGERS. It’s track after track after track of slinky, mid-tempo stunners. Despite a 13 song track list (with one castoff skit track) there’s nary a skip among them. You’ve got the dramatic, hazy synths and bass on “Mateo” where Tove snarls her superiority to a paramour, calling out the “pretty girls that wanna love you / that never heard the words its not about you.” Then there’s the dynamic, arpeggiating loop that runs underneath that catchy-as-hell chorus on “Shifted” — “I’m done done putting in work”. Kylie Minogue is brought in for eurotrashy clubber “Really Don’t Like U” where the two women sound so good together struggling to maintain female solidarity when a lover has moved from one woman to the other.
And that’s the struggle of the whole album. It’s an album about being just done with this shit, wanting to just be with the girls but struggling to maintain those relationships in the face of modern sex and self destructive tendencies. The album’s centerpiece, “Are U gonna tell her?” is not only the best distillation of Sunshine Kitty’s sound, it’s also the album’s worldview in perfect frame. A single synth lead keeps the track in tight flux from start to finish, only blossoming out into weird, drugged out Stranger Things territory for the second round of each chorus. It’s a woozy, groovy cut that sees Tove celebrating a lover — “We’re making love passed out / we look so damn good tonight” — while two lines later asking “Are you gonna tell her?” It’s an intoxicating tension that Tove sustains for the entire length of Sunshine Kitty, and I don’t know, maybe I’m just a trash person with trashy tastes, but this thing moved me.
1. Dorian Electra — Flamboyant
Flamboyant may be Dorian Electra’s first full release, but they’ve been putting music out for the entire decade, first getting attention for bubblegum music videos about the philosophies of Friedrich Hayek, Frank Jackson, and Ray Kurzweil before connecting with Refinery 29 to make a series of music videos exploring intersectional feminism and queerness on topics ranging from the history of vibrators to the politics of the clitoris. So when I say that Flamboyant is a culmination — and in many ways, a massive leap beyond — Dorian’s decade of work, it should key you into how smart, fun, and straight up bananas this record is. It’s a triumph of excess and camp aesthetics after irony, deploying early 2000s pop production and a promiscuous palate of fetishes to make 2019’s most consistent collection of of certified bops.
Unlike some of the other artists on this list, no one element of Dorian’s music stands out apart from the whole. In part, this is because no element of Dorian’s musical approach seems fixed. Sounds shift around constantly. Dorian closes out their toxic masculinity deconstruction, “Emasculate” with a harpsichord underneath the sounds of cracking whips, transitioning seamlessly into the lush, fuzzy synth bassline on “Man to Man” that would be at home on a Soft Cell record. The mutability of Dorian’s sound reaches a fever pitch on album centerpiece, “Musical Genius” where the opening notes play out across four individually featured instrumentals before crashing into dub-influenced electronic mayhem. The overall effect is that of pure cybernetic futurism, like a mad drag expression of Janelle Monae’s Archandroid, or closer to the source of those influences, Prince as the T-1000. By the time the chorus on the title track rolls around, “I’m flamboyant, I go all the way,” the only possible response is yeah, no shit.
The back half of the album feels like Dorian went back in time to 2013 to personally rescue every musical and lyrical idea from Lady Gaga’s Artpop and give them the platform they always deserved but weren’t given. “Guyliner”, “Adam & Steve”, and “fReAkY 4 Life” all revel in the pure, joyous energy of gender’s transformation into life-giving plaything rather than restrictive codification. The chorus to “Adam & Steve” is such straightforward, powerful subversion of reactionary sexual politics, it’s hard not to grin the whole way through: “And God made man — and he loves me, and he loves me.” In the middle of that Pride Week run is the album’s best slow burn track, “Live by the Sword” which brings metal influences into the sonic field of play, resuscitating something like, and I hesitate to even say this, mid-2000s CRUNK rock. And of all the absurd things this album pulls off, this particular sound is maybe the most improbable — to draw from Lil Jon’s darkest moments and BROKNCYDE’s best moments and somehow make something this listenable in 2019 is a musical achievement verging on the messianic.
Dorian is doing something magical here. The transfiguration of mundane office life into shimmering sex appeal on “Career Boy” and the lines on “Daddy Like” about the power dynamics of cohabitation “I pay your rent / The rent check sent / That’s money well spent” show off the unbridled, anarchic movement that animates Flamboyant from start to finish. It’s a blast from the transhumanist future, a cyborg explosion from the last forty years of synthetic pop music and gender politics, and its absolutely essential.
