Summer is the most pop of seasons, yet as far as pop albums in July go… there isn’t much! There are albums by pop-adjacent artists, like Porter Robinson or Clairo or Childish Gambino. There are albums that would have been big pop records a decade ago, like OneRepublic or Eminem (boy, has he tried). Culture-capturing event albums, though? Basically nil.

This is not to say that July has lacked for moment-making. The month in pop was less about any one song, and more about capturing the public ear through big splashy events – or attempts at them, at least.

The One You Knew Was Coming

The biggest musical event of July by far was not really a musical event at all: Brat Summer, the sorta-ironic, sorta-not celebration of Charli XCX’s general vibe that has grown more and more detached from the actual Brat, the thing you can listen to. At least when Charli and Lorde squashed their beef, they had a remix to work it out on. But Brat Summer is not about a record so much as an aesthetic, a result everyone wants to get on a metaphorical personality quiz. As Charli said on TikTok earlier this month, it’s “that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes… like, does dumb things. But it’s brat. You’re brat. That’s brat.”

Brat is pretty egalitarian, as far as aesthetics go. No PhotoShop wizardry is required to join in, just the ability to turn an acid-green background and a vertically stretched font into a flash-fried JPEG – or to navigate to the inevitable meme generator to do it for you. And no debauched cocaine binges in bar bathrooms were needed to join in (although they certainly happened). All that was needed was the desire, however repressed or aspirational, to be a little extra.

But there’s a catch. The thing about giving the whole world, hard partiers and otherwise, permission to be brat is that they might actually do it. You know how it went. Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race on July 21 and endorsed vice president Kamala Harris as his successor, all but guaranteeing her nomination. Harris was already being provisionally turned into a meme by the extremely online set for various mildly odd moments in her public appearances; why couldn’t she absorb one more? Charli tweeted out the connection TikTok had already been making via various videos setting Harris’ speeches to Brat snippets: “kamala IS brat.” The Harris campaign jumped right in on Twitter by adopting the branding. Buttoned-up news anchors claimed that they aspire to be brat, and New York mayor Eric Adams – a notorious partier who calls himself the Nightlife Mayor – claiming that he doesn’t.

Unsurprisingly, people started to declare Brat Summer dead at various points in this cycle. We’re now in the stage where people are starting to hand-wring about it being marketing for which we all have fallen, unknowingly. The mood is penitent, like the proverbial student who parties hard on Saturday night then shows up to church Sunday, like we all want to start Christian Girl Autumn early.

But every generation invents a big sweeping movement through which to justify its partying. This particular phenom feels less forced than it could have, and more bottom-up: more like fancam bombing than Rihannaplane gimmicks. It feels less like a product of record-label marketing than of the semi-fragmented nature of the modern web. Like Carly Rae Jepsen and Sky Ferreira before her, Charli XCX has existed primarily as an online phenomenon: pop for people who read about pop on the internet (hi there), not so much for people who listen to it on the radio or in other popular settings. The last time she had true mainstream cachet was with a Hilary Duff demo from weepie film The Fault In Our Stars – both very unbrat – and a duet with Iggy Azalea. (Iggy Azalea, in being messy and having said dumb things, is provisionally brat.) Brat, the record, has not moved the needle commercially – no single from the album has cracked the Top 40, probably because the amorphous nature of this whole phenom means there isn’t one song for people to rally around and turn their memes into streams. Yet in zeitgeist terms, it’s the biggest album in the world. She’s in a strange place, fame-wise. Messy, you could say. Good for parties.

The Ones From Long Ago

Brat Summer may or may not be dead, but escapism is not. And few forms of escapism are more proven than tapping into people’s dreams of returning to 2011. Nostalgia is never new, and nostalgia for the early 2010s has been with us for some time. The charts have been quietly nostalgic for 2013 all year, and still are – new singles are continually cranked out by Lumineers-adjacent folkies, and they keep getting rewarded for it with hit placements. (One of the more recent tracks, Myles Smith’s “Stargazing,” even has millennial whoops!)

But this sort of nostalgia is quiet and unassuming: recreating the music of the 2013s in order to slot unobtrusively onto playlists with the actual contemporaneous stuff. The artists who really went big with it were the ones who turned their ambitions a little earlier: to revive the turn of the 2010s, the last great reign of the Main Pop Girl. And the person doing it hardest was one of those girls: Katy Perry, whose single “Woman’s World” will go down in history as the world’s first big millennial midlife crisis.

Perry has tried several times to get back to her Teenage Dream career peak; one of those attempts named this column. In 2024, she decided a brute-force approach was in order. “[Perry] knew exactly the album she wanted to make and put together the team to make it happen,” a label representative told Rolling Stone in June. That team was largely composed of Teenage Dream personnel. There was Norwegian duo Stargate, whose early-2010s reign was immortalized, in a not-especially-flattering way, in a 2012 excerpt from John Seabrook’s The Song Machine. There was immortal hitmaker Max Martin: unsurprising. And, unfortunately, there was Dr. Luke.

Perry has taken a lot of understandable shit for inviting Luke, widely being accused of sexual assault, onto what she’s pitching as a big comeback album – on a song she claimed celebrated the “feminine divine.” But this announcement was just the end of a years-long rehabilitation project. In 2018, Dr. Luke was back in business as a producer, but hid his involvement in tracks under a series of juvenile pseudonyms in production credits. On later tracks by artists like Doja Cat and Kim Petras, he no longer felt the need to hide. Nobody was really advertising his involvement as a songwriter, though, until Perry’s big announcement. The backlash was swift, but also came with a sense of inevitability, as if the concentration of Martin, Luke, and Perry into one place was guaranteed to spawn a hit against everyone’s will.

In 2011, that probably would have happened. In 2024, it resulted in a lead single, “Woman’s World,” that has been trashed all over. It does feel like it should work – or, at least, like the kind of thing a label executive might think would work. The single takes its melody from “We Are Family” and its girlboss verve from the turn of the decade – which is to say it also sounds a lot like Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way,” which itself sounds a lot like “Express Yourself.” As Madonna would say, it feels reductive. The video, meanwhile, casts Perry in the same pinup cheesecake costumes she’s worn since One Of The Boys – they worked every time, after all! Perry backpedaled almost immediately, claiming that this deeply earnest single was satirical – an excuse previously associated with the “it’s all a joke, bro” genre of men. Truly, women can do it all.

“Woman’s World” isn’t even the best 2010s homage released this year. One name conspicuously missing from Perry’s millennial dream team was Bonnie McKee, who wrote the toplines for many of Perry’s big singles. It’s unclear why she didn’t participate – there were no prior reports of any beef – but her own album, Hot City, is like a parallel-universe “Woman’s World.” The album is a compilation of McKee’s actual demos from the era, and “SLAY,” in particular, sounds like what “Woman’s World” was trying to be. Even it, though, feels out of step with the times

Other artists are revisiting earlier pop eras not to relive them vicariously, but to renegotiate their terms – or at least try to. A few days ago, Halsey heavily interpolated Britney Spears’ “Lucky” in a single of the same name that, like Britney’s track, expressed a deep alienation with the celebrity lifestyle. The two songs share a chorus, but they’re not quite the same. Spears’ “Lucky” is told in the third person: “a story about a girl named Lucky.” Halsey’s song dips into third person in the second verse, where they inhabit the sneering voice of the media commentariat, but everywhere else, Halsey presents the song as being a confessional about themself and specific events in their life. And where Britney’s Lucky is a glamorous but inaccessible figure, who suffers mostly alone, Halsey’s suffering star is someone “who does it all just to be liked by strangers that she met online.” The villains aren’t the tabloids, but the entire parasocial apparatus of fans’ attachment to artists and artists’ need for their attention.

This is a dispatch from the 2020s’ specific variety of parasocial celebrity hell, the same kind that made rising star Chappell Roan want to “pump the brakes” on her fame. (In a sadly ironic twist, Spears posted, then retracted, an angry message after hearing Halsey’s “Lucky,” claiming that its portrayal of her made her feel “harassed, violated, and bullied.” The mixup, honestly, is understandable; while Halsey is singing about themselves with “I feel her, but I can’t relate cause I’d never end up in that state/ A girl like that is a mother, must be tough,” you can absolutely see how one might interpret this as being about Spears.)

Alongside Spears and Perry in the 2010 pop pantheon was Kesha, whose Animal era cast her as a party menace. Those songs are fraught to listen to now, from their genesis as a Dr. Luke idea to the fact that the first line of Kesha’s first solo single celebrates the finally disgraced Diddy. Kesha has been understandably ambivalent about that era. Even in 2012 she had said she felt “forced” to record tracks like “Die Young,” with their nihilistic undertones. Her post-Luke singles wavered between sedate, like 2017’s “Praying” and last year’s hollowed-out “Eat The Acid,” to songs like Big Freedia collab “Raising Hell” that were fun but not debauched, parties that ended promptly at 10 PM.

“Joyride,” her latest single, is different: it’s Kesha fully clawing back her Animal image on her own terms. She gets herself back into the rotation of current pop hitmakers: Zhone, who produced Troye Sivan’s “Rush,” and Madison Love, who wrote toplines for many many recent pop songs. And she reclaims the band-of-freaks camaraderie of her past singles, as well as the drunk-girl sleaze; lines like “label whore, but I’m bored of wearing clothes” would fit right onto her old records. The fact that it probably will not chart high (please prove me wrong) is almost immaterial to the personal victory it represents – a victory others are invited to share in.

POP TEN

CLOSING TIME (NOT BRAT THIS MONTH)