The best lovestruck pop of 2024

A belated rundown of the most bewitching and moving music of the last year

Love Me Jeje by Tems

This song is a lambent gift! As a mid-tempo Popiano track, it moves with a soft friction. Tems’ undulating melody is a balm and the weightless percussion but a gentle beckoning towards the embrace of a languorous sun.

Love Me Jeje is a monument to a blissful sway; felicity like none previously I’ve ever seen sculpted in music. Joy’s wave crests as Tems impresses “You're my sugar, my honey, my tender lover” with that final, sumptuously elegant accented hit. With a gently rousing chorus, love holds firm and assured.

I Want by Mk.gee

I think this is a masterpiece of a love song: subdued and suffering. No sweeping belts or grand proclamations to announce its ache, just a frisson of fear folded into its restrain.

When words fail Mk.gee, a steady moody drum leads him forward. His vocals feel bruised and sensitive - wholesome - but they can also sneak and scatter with a vulpine stride, as a sensuality pulsates in the song’s underside. I believe Sting, Springsteen, and Jeff Buckley possessed him in this moment and guided his spirit to the most longing lover boy sonics you've ever heard in your life. Like Springsteen’s I’m On Fire, it feels like he is about to burst: in the Polician middle 8, like emerging from chrysalis, something fuller and brighter surfaces - is he going to transform? Be released from intolerable repression? Alas, no. He gets close to a moment of outreach, but as the roomy synths and drums contract, it feels like he ultimately retreats. Good thing the magic only compounds in this injuriously tender state. God bless the inveterate yearner! (For me, the song evokes protracted, life-shattering eye contact between fated lovers in the Nighthawks bar. I need a dark blue-hued, chamber piece music video to accompany it!)

I cherish the endless repetition of a simple refrain, how it disinters new meaning with every recitation; refracts light and changes paths: “But lately, I am caught up / Right inside of your line of fire / I’m not your hero / But I got this desire / And I want what I want / Yes. I want what I want / And I want / Yes, I want what I want”. No affectations or saggy verbiage here. It is such a plain affirmation, I want, but one rightly sanctified.

Tiny Moves by Bleachers

When I listen to this song, first I picture its priming synth intro playing over the maestro tracking shot in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story (2021), in which excited young faces approach a dance hall, before an assemblage of bodies burst into kinetic paintings.

Then, I feel its fully-realised liveliness. Give me a song that’s giddy with adoration and I’ll give you my hours. Adorably, Tiny Moves is schoolboy-smitten, Antonoff is geeking-out over his girl (as he should be!). Take for instance, the way the vocal positively vaults on “SHAKE!”. To me that small but perfervid incline communicates a can't-believe-his-luck fist pump of gratitude, an epiphanic It doesn’t get better than this. God, it’s even better than I could’ve imagined type of buzz.

There aren’t many parts of Barbie (2023) I think about often except Ken’s weepy plead: “I only exist in the warmth of your gaze” (this line, a palimpsest evincing Greta’s true pen in the script, under the heavy ink of studio revision) and I think that desperate, melted self is so stirringly present in Tiny Moves’ narration. He lives and dies by her eye; birthed in the moment she looks at him, killed the moment she looks away. As the song's fizzy pep builds an infectious momentum, Antonoff’s lyrics signal being so in love that just one scintilla of their theirness spins you off axis, towards some brighter clearing that you could have ever located on your own. Life, now, irretrievably better.

Tiny Moves also has a perfect music video: a literal male gaze, sure, but I see the object and subject in active, loving symbiosis.

“The tiniest moves you make / Watching the whole world shake / Watching my whole world change”. It’s not a reductive you don’t know you’re beautiful edict, nor the greedy syphoning of a manic pixie dream girl’s insight and verve in order to expand himself. Understanding the divine providence enacted just for him to bear witness to her driving lifeforce, he embraces the full view from his passenger seat.

Everything Is Romantic by Charli xcx

Charli’s songwriting bravura is on full display here, specifically her nonpareil melding of melancholy and euphoria (see its glorious precedent in party 4 u) - very much catnip for holiday pictures in supercut, posted when deep in home-bound depression.

I think this song is a cultural companion piece to the book The Beauty of Everyday Things by Soetsu Yanagi. Here Charli gleans equal enchantment from a sprawling Mediterranean vista as she does the tacky charms of a cheap patina. It is at once elusive and ethereal, and deeply grounded and literal.

The strings and woodwind intro is an ephemeral mist that evaporates come the cacophonous, glitchy stridency of the early verse, and the sparse rave beat of the pre-chorus. I love the richness of its lyrical concision, its definitive stance: everything IS romantic. Insisting on its Quixoticity, we now understand that everything has built-in poetry. She even ensouls tourist tat. Charli idealises the things already known and those new; simple mechanisms, manual drive; everything really is romantic, except AI!

Its outro repetition is a veritable incantation: “Fall in love again and again / Fall in love again and again”, ad infinitum. Doubling down on the promise of, well, everything, Everything is Romantic spurs you to unlock that enlightenment for yourself and graze life’s quotidian gold.

Talk, Talk by Charli xcx

Just SO cute. “I’ve been looking at you / putting holes in your head” .

We sense the vertigo of making the first move. Its tormenting desperation is candy wrapped in a bright bounce. Afire with anticipation, Talk talk is the definitive canticle for having a raging crush. The verses expand from a tentative intimation of desire into an incandescent call, her pure wanting reaching the mph of escape velocity: “I wish you'd talk, talk / Wish you'd talk, talk / Wish you'd talk, talk / Wish you'd just talk to me”

In the modulated outro, the yearning pierces the Kármán line: “Talk to me in french / Talk to me in spanish / Talk to me in your own made up language / doesn’t matter if I understand it / Talk right in my ear / Tell me your secrets and fears / Once you talk to me, I'll talk to you / And say, "Hey, let's get out of here / Shall we go back to my place?". (Its rapturous groove is befitting of a fan cam platforming the intergalactic band in Daft Punk’s 555 Interstella - beaming, completely lost in the music, and jigging within an inch of their life.)

After Hours by Kehlani

In my opinion, this should’ve been the song of the summer. It's a plaintive appeal in the guise of a party song. Big-time limerence, baby. The wilt of the melody in Kehlani’s delivery of ‘stayyyyy’ is so deftly deployed. Trying to perform nonchalance in the face of extreme personal stakes; that anxious discord between internal instinct and external perception, stirring music makes.

“Why don't you stayyyyy? Stay here after hours / I know you don't wanna leaveeeee / Stay here after hours”

After Hours is an outstretched hand, allegedly casual, suggesting I’m trying to be as cool as possible about this right now, but if I could spend even just one more minute with you, it would actually change my entire fucking life. Yearners are up 100 points with this one.

PUSH 2 START by Tyla

Here, Tyla delivers a languid groove so polished it’s actually ridiculous.

PUSH 2 START is infectious prosody and body rolls: “Pushing all my buttons with no hesitation / gas me up give me motivation / Tell me where we goin, pick a destination”. Tyla’s foreground vocal marshals the animated background chants, and these unison-shouts impact like water hitting sauna rocks.

The music video is a confluence of influence: Crazy in Love meets Pon De Replay meets Shut Up and Drive, and yet its ambit never feels defined by pastiche. Her presence has its own determining power. Tyla is a pop maven - this is her province. It feels so good to have a superstar in society again.

Witchy by Kaytrandra ft. Childish Gambino

Kaytranada is a surgeon and sorcerer. He services listeners with technical precision and then mystifies them with ineffable flair.

I love the flirty, playful veneration of the chorus: “you’re being witchy and I love it girl”. I think calling someone angelic is pretty pedestrian, but to invoke the occult? That’s a far cooler, sexier comparison in my eyes.

I also adore the video and its Paris, Texas-like partition:

I LUV IT by Camilla Cabello ft. Playboi Carti

As for the forced Charli xcx, PC Music et al. comparisons, I say that was bandwagon-jumped criticism. The Pop Pantheon podcast very astutely noted that I LUV IT actually aligns more with Rosalía’s expression of hyperpop, as she and Cabello now share a producer in El Guincho.

Indeed, I disagreed that I LUV IT was dead-on-arrival, stale mimicry. But in any case, contiguity of industry clearly results in a shared pool of inspiration. When Vogue intimated to Sally Rooney that there’s a whole crop of contemporary young women Irish authors taking from her form she responded: “When you look at how literature has developed in a broader historical way, there are [always] groups of writers who are in conversation with each other…Exchanging letters…going to the same cafés…reading each other’s work.” Accordingly, the pop girls are going to the same fashion shows… reading each other’s producer credits. Of course they are bound to overlap in some aspects - on the most basic level both C,XOXO and brat are odes to girlish delinquency and dizzying benders. (What’s that old tweet again? Sam Levinson think he Ryan Murphy. Ryan Murphy think he John Waters. John Waters think he the Hamburglar. Insert and interchange all your faves where appropriate.)

I LUV IT bites with a narcotic hook. Its heady lust and careening impulses are given elegant form (“And I’m bad (uh) diabolic (uh) // I'm blackin' out, I'm on a spiral (yeah) / I need you now … and tomorrow”). Meaghan Garvey of Pitchfork adroitly described the song’s brave pursuit: “valiantly trying to have the craziest night of your life”. Cabello evokes every Spring Breakers marker of wild misbehaviour and volatility: balaclavas; dollar bills in bras; bare midriffs; cigarettes burning arms; hot-wiring cars; masticating gum as you hold on the back of a lover’s motorbike zipping down the freeway.

Much was made about the intelligible words of Playboi Carti’s verse. I rate the enigmatic, falling, silvery trail of words; the evanescence of his phrasing in harmony with the fleeting night.

In response to a tweet lamenting I LUV IT’s misunderstood reception, one user perceptively said “I got it, I just didn’t want it from her”. Cabello’s popularity has rightly reached an impasse due to serialised racist remarks and a bad personality.

Taste by Sabrina Carpenter

Short n’ Sweet … and sweet and salty! This pop-rock-Shania fusion, man… the announcement of the slackened guitar…delicious and instantly memorable.

Taste has a cutesy valence that cuts. It’s a taut, embittered smile delivering a saccharine direct address…Never has chagrin been obscured with such charm. I love the knowing cattiness, the petty, brackish rancour. She’s not rising above, she’s actively taunting, taking a cue from Ariana’s best bad-girl anthems. Referencing the infamous Rodrigo-Bassett-Carpenter triangle, the intertextual riposte of “I know I been known to share!” is the stuff of pop dreams. Between the vivid verses and the Antonoff-ian bridge, you can hear Sabrina’s ever-animated countenance.

*It must be said Please Please Please is the best song on Short n’ Sweet but I don’t have sufficient words to describe its multi-genre alchemy.

Bed Chem by Sabrina Carpenter

LUSH! The assonance of “bet we’d have really good bed chem”?, babe just has a way with words. Her Sabrina senses are tingling: there’s an intuition that needs to be brought to fruition.

I love the textures in this song: the chimes and careful whisper like a negligee rippling in the night air, like a lover leaning on a balcony door jamb. The “pick me up, pull ’em down, turn me round” is like peeling an orange in one swoop motion, the falsetto flourishes like flower petal confetti. “Where art thou? Why not uponeth me?” - I remember the involuntary grin that took over my face when out on a walk, listening to this for the first time. She straddles the silly and substantive like no one else.

Juno by Sabrina Carpenter

I immediately screen recorded the gleeful promenade from 500 Days of Summer to this. The way Sabrina’s voice sustains would put pep in anyone’s step.

I think a métier of Sabrina’s in her pop arsenal is her brightness. This track radiates because of its unabashed joy, its basking, beatific expanse. It’s the chirpiest possible request to get knocked up; there is no furtive underbelly to this desire, it’s an upfront, wholly sunny vision of love without any shame, oblique gestures, or verboten hang-ups. Her landscape of love and libido is not slight, it is robust and consequential in its liberated beam. She luxuriates in love with conviction.

Modern Girl by Bleachers

I like that this is a little cheesy. To me, this song is a swing dance hall resounding with youthful freedom, very V-Day in Times Square.

I relish the way the crisp saxophone vibrates against his loose “WOAHHHH!!!” drunken-sailor vocals. Modern girl has such a buoyant, lived-in fever. I feel like Antonoff really believes and feels everything he sings. “All the modern girls shaking their ass tonight / and all the modern boys are going out tonight” evokes a T Birds and Pink Ladies call-and-response as they playfully goad and skip, but since Antonoff doesn’t offer equal ass-shaking opportunities for the all the modern boys, I guess they are just slapping each other's chests heartily.

2 Hands by Tate McRae

The Frank Ocean-esque pitched-up background vocals give this song formidable dimension. I don’t think McRae’s voice is extraordinary - it doesn’t move with any irrepressible personality - but its leanness here works.

This is an electric, didactic ode to physical love. The central “A little less talk / and a lot more touch” is of course riffing on Elvis’ “A little less conversation / A little more action please” and by extension Ariana Grande’s irresistible hook “a little less conversation and a little more touch my body” from Into You (aka the most distinguished pop song ever recorded).

In fact, McRae is unequivocally doctrinaire about touch being her love language. She denounces receiving gifts (“You ain't gonna win with the jewelry”) and denounces words of affirmation (“Don't need the cute fuckin' names (no) // You don't need to tell me you love me / 17 times in a day (yeah) / I don't need to hear I'm your number one / And everybody's second place” // “Baby, I ain't sayin' you don't know me well, it's / Just not the shit I need”). Physical touch doubles as an act of service (“Want your two hands on me like my life needs savin' (life needs savin') / Let 'em all know (I want your two hands) / Can you do it like that? Yeah”) and quality time (“We could do it in my room all day”). Palms not diamonds as adornment please! It can be likened to YUCK by Charli xcx in its attestation that a certain type of action speaks louder than words.

The “like my life needs saving”…This is serious business. It’s urgent. Very Nicole Kidman at the end of Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

Diet Pepsi by Addison Rae

I still reserve skepticism for Addison Rae. However. Oh, the great however. Diet Pepsi is very good. And considering the continued savvy effort to fortify a more eccentric artistic persona, she has emerged as an undeniably interesting subject.

Rae ruminates over a formative interlude “Losing all my innocence in the backseat” and delights in a carbonated rush - “ah”. The single cover art for Diet Pepsi being a denim derriere shot is kind of inspired - Born In The U.S.A, made-over by the Bling Ring squad.

Diet Pepsi is just so irresistibly embodied. Its chorus writhes like a rhythmic gymnast’s ribbon, like diaphanous organza. I adore the small vignettes that, with a few key details, dial you into a fully-realised world (The Lana Way). The precipitous, halting pacing of “Untouched. Young. Lust. X. O. Let’s. Go.” has the slow strut of a semaphoring ring girl. I turn to Shaad D’Souza from Pitchfork for the best insight into Rae’s essence: “A good star would play this song off with a wink; a great one, like Rae, plays it straight.”

Guilty pleasure round:

Selfish by Justin Timberlake

My relationship with Justin Timberlake’s music is like my appetite for a Zane Lowe interview, I actually get a lot out of it but I don’t like to broadcast that fact.

The soft doting shuffle of “put you on a frame boo / glad your momma made you / you must be an angel” is an extremely pleasant ear worm. Let’s discuss JT’s romantic writing faculties - they’re strong. He can make compelling sensual pop music. Let’s not forget his contributions to the Beyoncé Self Titled album, the most multivalent sensual pop album of all time. Selfish is discerning, competitive with contemporary R&B, and redolent of his best work from The 20/20 Experience - see Pusher Love Girl and Spaceship Coupe - it’s the most vulnerable Timberlake has sounded in a while. Historically, he never offers actual revelation, not because of conscious obfuscation like Dua Lipa but because of absolute limitation. He can’t do real emotional explication, just broad noughts and crosses of a relationship, little spots of exposure here and there. But here, despite the banal offering of “you must be an angel” (John Milton wept) the sonics and tone combine to deliver something like an ascetic confession. He disambiguates his behaviour and gets honest about his demurring.

So he’s at his best when he’s feeling dysphoric. I love that Selfish feels like a genuine plea, he’s anxious about restitution. When it comes to the final bringing-the-beat-back “So if I get jealous”, I feel the full cathartic jolt of it. Owning your pathetic insecurity looks good on you, JT!

Aperol Spritz by The Kid Laroi

A young, intractable white boy grunting and braying in a baggy silhouette? I think I’ve seen this film before: Laroi’s de facto mentor, Justin Bieber.

Aperol Spritz is obnoxious, objective dross. Like a conspiracy from the record label in The Other Two, working to telegraph Chase Dreams’ new, provocative adult status (“walk into the club like what up I got a big cock” was the North Star koan in the studio when recording). “But can't nobody fuck with my bitch, ayy // Say he can only do it for you sometimes / Said he got a whip, but he got no drive (Ayy)” trembles with its infirm Harlowian lyricism and yet I was moved by the song’s inventory of the other guy’s shortcomings in the face of his far-superior “bitch”. Lol.

Honourable Mention

The version of Rihanna’s S&M used in the first Challengers trailer (technically released in 2023, but it saw a lot of rotation from me in 2024 in the run up to the film’s spring release).

Now this is how you remix Rihanna. It builds on the maximalism of the primary source: compounding its sense of danger in a divinely drawn-out, pugilistic crescendo of “Cmon, cmon, cmon”. Every “I like it, like it ” is a lethal strike.

Dishonourable mention

Rightfully, barely anyone acknowledged its existence but Spicy Margarita by Jason Derulo and Michael Bublé attacked me like a wrestling suplex, slamming my consciousness to the concrete, and I had to report it. This song is a sex offence.