The Top 40 Pop Songs Of 2024
For at least a decade now – since Billboard started counting music streams in its chart calculations in 2013, and probably before – the sound of pop music has been sharply bifurcated between the extremely online and extremely offline. The starlets you meme about on social media aren’t necessarily making the songs you hear 20 times on the radio on your commute, or in the coffee shop picking up breakfast, or out at the pool’s pumped-in speakers. 2024 had an especially sharp divide; compare the charts to the conversation, and you’ll see what I mean.
This makes talking about the year in pop kind of hard! Was the summer ruled by Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” a concoction made in a lab to max out every possible Song Of The Summer vibe? Or was it ruled by Post Malone and Morgan Wallen’s “I Had Some Help” or Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”, two genial, country-adjacent singles that achieved song-of-the-summer status on numbers, not vibes? Perhaps it was Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” which managed to rule both online and offline: Within hours, online rap heads and Genius-pilled beef watchers had drafted a grand, footnoted, unified theory of the downfall of Drake, which countless clubs and sound systems were already blasting into practice? Or perhaps you’ve heard of a thing called a Brat Summer….
If there’s one thing that unites all the strands of pop in 2024, it might be: more. Electropop’s gotten more sleazy. R&B’s gotten more sumptuous and refined. The folkies and country dudes have gotten more burly and wailed more loudly. And of course, there’s more of it all than ever before, – which makes narrowing the field to 40 songs harder in turn. We could have gone to 50 or 100 or more and still missed hundreds of objective bangers. But tradition is tradition, so here’s our top 40 countdown of 2024.
The Max Martin-est song that Max Martin was not directly involved with; it should come with a complimentary butterfly top, an ice-blue eyeshadow kit, and a subscription to YM. If sounding exactly like 2001 Max Martin is such an easy, proven way to get yourself a hit, why isn’t everyone else doing it? Addison Rae did, kind of, for a minute; I guess there’s only room for one Rae in the Cheiron Studios extended universe.
2024 was full of country dude crossovers, but once again, there can only be one – on this Top 40, at least. And it ain’t the guy who got filmed using racial slurs and managed to become less cancelled, nor is it his extremely-eager-to-please pop-rapping duet partner, nor even the guy who interpolated “Tipsy” (sorry!) It’s the guy who sings about hell and sounds like he’s tearing the demons out of the place.
All three vocalists are sinuous and striking in quite different ways; it’s a good year for music when something this genuinely strange can be considered pop.
Chater is one of many artists who are perpetually bubbling under the main-pop-girlie conversation, despite their material being often good and occasionally great. “Come Alive” is the latter, a dance-pop song that corkscrews around one tiny but evocative piano hook.
2024 was also full of sensitive dude folkies, and yet again, there can only be one. And if you’re ever caught somewhere with old-school terrestrial pop radio on the speakers, you’ll hear very quickly how hard “Beautiful Things” punches through the surrounding slurry of chill-pop and Lumineers-y folk, like a wife-guy Superman. Boone loves his girl so much that he’s willing to wage an entire loudness war on her behalf. That’s kind of beautiful!
ROSÉ’s solo debut Rosie is a no-nonsense album: the most consistent songwriters in pop bringing their most endearing material. “APT” (short for “apartment”) brings in writer Amy Allen, who quietly ruled the charts this year, and Bruno Mars, who’s fresh off another crowd-pleaser collab with Lady Gaga, and they do their respective things. “APT” is sassy and bratty (though not Brat) and, in a killer move, accompanied by a Korean drinking-game sesh that ROSÉ is happy to teach Western audiences. The song admittedly sounds a lot like “Shut Up And Let Me Go,” but there’s a reason the Ting Tings were in all those ads.
Black, who’s evolved from virality victim to hyperpop-adjacent singer to electro siren, has yet to escape her meme-induced reputation. On “Trust,” she looks that reputation in the eye and trolls them right back. The song speaks the musical vernacular of the gossip blogs – Blackout and Circus-era Britney – and of the last generation of pop brats like Kesha and Luciana. The intro to the video, meanwhile, contributes to this year’s banner crop of Regina George references, and it’s funnier than the one Ariana Grande did.
Kehlani will be making another appearance on this list, so why not celebrate them in advance? Adetunji achieves what hundreds of artists you’ll never hear of didn’t: release a song blatantly inspired by another musician that isn’t keyword-baiting slop. And when the musician of the hour makes their grand appearance, Adetunji’s nimble vocals hold their own against them.
I’m all for the return of vaguely disreputable sleaze (note to musicians of 2025: please keep this on the defensible side of “vaguely”); definitely all for pop sounding more like post-punk.
Purists will complain, but after years of country crossovers in all directions – country to pop, country to rap, country to R&B, country to rock, country hooks to EDM hooks, and just about every other way around – the bounds of the genre aren’t just blurred but almost erased. Three years ago, Anna Dasha Novotny sounded like a tamer Pussycat Dolls. Now she’s the country-music Reesa Teesa, spinning increasingly wild theories about an ex who’s skipped town. Country suits her; her expressive vocals and writing voice thrive in a genre that’s all about storytelling.
Tommy Richman - "Million Dollar Baby" (ISO Supremacy/Pulse/Concord/Universal)
Like the Artemas song, “Million Dollar Baby” has no business being as good as it is. The song was, the team has admitted, a rush job; the initial marketing strategy was basically to make the TikTok snippet really loud. Stranger yet, the reason for its shocking not-sucking is definitely Tommy. The instrumental is as funky as it needs to be and no more (synth cowbell stays winning though); it’s Richman’s utterly committed and actually pretty competent falsetto that jolts the life into it.
Immaculately slinky, like most of Kali Uchi’s work. Kali and Peso’s voices just work so well together; they feel like swanning around in sumptuous fabrics does.
Cowboy Carter may not have had the “World – stop!” impact of Bey’s past decade, but that’s about the most stratospheric bar there is in music. Of the album’s lead singles, “Texas Hold ‘Em” was the cute scene-setter, but “16 Carriages” is the real deal: a showcase of gravitas and old-fashioned vocal command Beyoncé hasn’t summoned this strongly since 4.
“Boom Boom Bass” is the group’s more conventional K-pop/rap single, but the high-energy garage-house of “Impossible” is the fresher sound. Refreshing to hear tracks that clearly wouldn’t exist without NewJeans but aren’t cynical ripoffs.
Every Kesha single these days is a moral victory: triumphant in its self-determination, if not on the charts. On “Joyride,” Kesha’s healing her inner Ke$ha, rebooting Animal’s gloriously obnoxious bangers and female-frat-bro persona with cowriters who aren’t Dr. Luke. When she crows “I’ve earned the right to be like this,” she’s actually being humble – she earned that 13 years ago.
All R&B guys eventually find their careers aligning with Usher’s. In 2024, that happened in reverse: Usher’s recent singles like “Ruin” with Nigerian producer Pheelz (#41 on this list) are low-key and modestly sung in a way that’s a lot like the muted, introspective sound Khalid’s honed for years. Is it sacrilegious to say Khalid does it better?
The year’s big Afrobeats crossover – it’s been nominated for a Grammy for best African music performance – and the success is extremely deserved. Sampling Seyi Sodimu’s 1997 Nigerian hit of the same name, the track turns familiarity into shared joy like all the best hangs do.
It’s been too long since Mother Monster sounded monstrous – though she’s definitely still been mother.
“River” was a huge breakout hit in 2016, but UK singer-songwriter Bishop Briggs never quite recaptured those heights; her musical cohort these days includes, uh, Dick Van Dyke and Howie Mandel: whom she beat on The Masked Singer last year. In retrospect, maybe she peaked a bit early; I imagine her music would have been a better fit for the 2024 charts, alongside Olivia Rodrigo and Gracie Abrams. But if you could score a #1 hit on sound alone, then “Mona Lisa On A Mattress” absolutely would; it has one of the most enormous, undeniable pop-rock hooks of the year.
Years later, Justice are still reliably cranking out euphoric French house, and unlikely pop star Kevin Parker lets his voice dissolve into the groove. I wish Parker’s other big collab this year, Dua Lipa’s Radical Optimism, sounded more like this.
NLE Choppa & Whethan - "Slut Me Out 3" (Feat. Carey Washington) (Warner)
Stay with me here. For those unfamiliar with the filth that rapper NLE Choppa has now iterated on three times (not counting remixes), imagine Kool Keith making a blog-house version of “Hot In Herre,” and you’ll be close to this.
Illit’s role in the HYBE/NewJeans feud might have sullied their music to some – to recap, the embattled K-pop megagroup has accused HYBE of grooming Illit to be their newer, more compliant replacements. But these machinations are rarely the artists’ fault, and the airy “Magnetic” would be charming in any context.
“Birds Of A Feather” was the slightly bigger Billie hit, and probably the better single in the solid-songwriting, Grammy Song Of The Year sense. But “Lunch” is the more exciting track: horny sapphic mumblecore that’s both crushed-out and louche, like an updated take on ’90s dirtbag alt-rock. I guess the world wasn’t ready to match Billie’s freak.
Equally reminiscent of Travis Scott trap and of that moment in the late 2000s when R&B started to shade into moody dance – think “Closer” by Ne-Yo.
Twigs can coin as many questionable words as she wants, if the songs they’re attached to are this crystalline and euphoric (sorry, eusexual).
Rico Nasty - "Arintintin" (Feat. Boys Noize) (Sugar Trap/Atlantic/Big Beat)
Noisy as fuck (complimentary).
Mexican artist Bruses last appeared in our roundup this spring, and she’s followed her appearance up with a couple more singles: the abrasive-on-purpose “I’m So Happy” and the deceptively smooth “Coma Party.” But “Bestia” combines those two singles and more: trip-hop moods, a pounding club breakdown with the lightest possible violin, a distorted My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy outro.
It’s a little strange at first hearing Rina, valedictorian of the neo-Y2K class, on a house track that’s more Y1993. Any thoughts of anachronism fade fast, though; Salute’s instrumental is wonderfully pneumatic and chromed-out, and Rina’s vocals are suffused with empathy and warmth.
A girl-group whirlwind that’s nearly impossible to resist. “All the girls are girling” is up there with anything off Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” (very unsurprising spoiler: that’s coming up) as an objectively silly line that nevertheless describes a thing so perfectly that it makes the other ways to say it sound silly. What, indeed, is pop music but all the girls girling?
This list’s gone hard on the uptempo bangers, despite this very much not being a banger of a year – politically and, for some, personally. “No One Noticed,” a post-crush shy girl wallow, is for the latter folks – and based on its sudden popularity, there are a lot of you. The song feels online: not just because of its virality, but because it’s very much about the way the Internet can conjure an illusion of immersive closeness and constant reminders for relationships that usually end up ephemeral, their flames smothered by distance. Basically, it’s PinkPantheress’s “Capable Of Love,” but brooding.
One of the most enticing grooves of the year, Kehlani’s “After Hours” captures those last few minutes before you escape the party to a more intimate location. Seven years after SweetSexySavage, and in light of Kehlani’s struggles breaking into the male-dominated R&B industry – it’s heartening for them to finally have a hit like this.
The Weeknd sings about nothing but highs, but his music doesn’t often sound like a high so much as the pre-gaming or the dingy comedown. Brazilian superstar Anitta changes that. Abel Tesfaye has two superpowers: to make late nights moody, and to blend perfectly into any genre he attempts. It’s thrilling when he applies both of those to something this explosive.
Even when she’s in no-thoughts-head-empty mode, Carpenter’s a smart songwriter. Lines like “that’s that me espresso” are the exact sort of goofy, flirty shit you say to someone when you know you’ve got them absolutely smitten. “Espresso” was so ubiquitous both on streaming and in the real world that people spun all sorts of conspiracy theories about its success. But it’s very much not a bombshell that labels pour lots of money into promoting their star artists, and the inescapability of “Espresso” gave everyone endless opportunities to notice how it enhances any summer activity: in a pool, on a beach, going 80 on the highway, at a water park, at an ice cream parlor, with an actual espresso (iced, of course), on a chill afternoon in, packed onto a lightly sweaty dancefloor, really anywhere with a breeze.
I, too, am nostalgic for the sound of 2011.
What is there to say that hasn’t already been said? The song gathers gravitas by the day; hundreds of singles this year sound huge, but “Good Luck, Babe!” sounds like more than that: it sounds important.
G.O.O.D. Music’s breakout rapper was essential to RAYE’s “Escapism,” one of the best songs of 2023. And “Into Your Garden,” from her recent album Petrichor, is the most spellbinding, heartbreaking R&B track of the year. Love, here, is a garden that’s gorgeous and enticing and palpably fertile (the song sounds humid); probably poisonous and definitely dangerous; and impossible to enter without the thorns closing in around you. The song’s also a star turn for JT of City Girls, who machetes her way through the thicket of yearning.
One of many charming facts about Doechii: is the first rapper (to my knowledge) to launch her career with a single named after a Junie B. Jones book. If that didn’t grab your attention, then “Nissan Altima” will: the single is a showcase of technical talent and sheer raw charisma that’s short in the same way that killshots are.
Pick only one song off Brat challenge for your year-end lists challenge (IMPOSSIBLE). To me, it’s gotta be “365”: the Lorde and Billie Eilish remixes got the bloggers blogging, but the Brat spirit is not about thinkpieces but grimy club debauchery. The anarchic acid house of “365” embodies that best; if someone told me when True Romance came out that she’d be making this in 11 years I would have quit everything in my life and devoted my efforts toward building a time machine. (And then I’d take “365” back with me to 2013.)
Nothing unites the country more than dunking on Drake. DJ Mustard got the kind of hit he hadn’t had since the Obama administration. Kendrick Lamar got the kind of omni-genre smash hit he hadn’t had since… ever, really. The playlists of every sports league in America got fed for years. Drake got so thoroughly obliterated that he sued his own label, accusing them of doing promotional machinations at a level he hadn’t seen since Spotify refunded people for spamming them with Scorpion. It all just really struck a chord.
(Disclaimer: Universal Music paid me no money to write this blurb.)
“Angel Of My Dreams,” the thrilling debut single by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall, is colossal simply as a song: the kind of massive pop hook that British production royalty Xenomania pumped out by the dozens for girl groups in the 2000s, grafted onto a throbbing electro breakdown that Animal-era Kesha would have trashed six parties for, and packaged with a music video that’s both lookbook and meme feast.
Yet despite sounding like it belongs in another time, “Angel Of My Dreams” meets the moment exactly. The public loves their diss tracks in this year of Kendrick/Drake, and JADE’s barrage of subliminals toward her old svengali Simon Cowell hit with undeniable “oh shit” impact. Artists like Chappell Roan have also forced a reckoning (again) with the psychic toll and exploitative labor practices of the pop industry, and unlike the many lesser songs about how celebrity life sucks, “Angel Of My Dreams” is clear not just about the emotional cost of fame but the material cost, down to the itemized receipts. And it isn’t just about fame, so much as a kind of all-consuming, unkillable ambition that demands absolute fealty and makes everything in life feel unsatisfying compared to its impossible ideal. The title seems like love-song fluff, and then it clicks: One’s dreams can be one’s destroying angel.
Stream a playlist of all 40 tracks:
