100 Years of Music / Chapter 11 of 11
2020s: Chaos and Connectivity
The feed becomes the radio, the genres stop holding, and the loudest decade in a century is still being written.
Opening
March 2020. Every venue on earth locks its doors in the same fortnight. The crew cases stay packed. The tour buses sit in a lot in Nashville with the tags expiring. For the first time since the invention of the phonograph, the live music business simply stops.
What replaces it is a phone. People sing into cameras in their kitchens. A man on a skateboard drinks cranberry juice to a Fleetwood Mac song from 1977 and puts it back on the charts. Two producers argue over a webcam and invent a hit format. The industry that had spent twenty years being disrupted by the internet finally gives up and moves in.
That is the argument of this chapter. The algorithm became the radio programmer, the record store clerk and the A&R man at once, and it did not care what genre anything was. A Puerto Rican reggaeton album goes to number one in the United States in Spanish. A country song from a Black woman from Houston tops the country chart. A Nigerian singer, a South African teenager, a British jungle producer and a Korean animated girl group all land on the same American chart in the same year. Nothing has one lane any more, because the feed does not have lanes.
It is also the decade the argument turned nasty. Two of the biggest rappers alive spent a spring trying to end each other in public. A ticketing company got sued by the government of the United States. Machines learned to sing in other people's voices, and the people whose voices they were went to court. Money poured back into recorded music, and most musicians still could not live on it.
One warning before you start. This chapter is not finished, because the decade is not. It runs from January 2020 to the summer of 2026, which is where the record stops as this is written. Some of what is here will look different in 2029. That is the price of writing history while it is still happening, and it is worth paying, because this is the part your kids will remember first.
The World
The year the stages went dark
The World Health Organization declared a pandemic on 11 March 2020. Within days every tour on the planet was cancelled or postponed, and they stayed cancelled for most of two years. Touring is where the modern musician actually earns, so the shutdown did not just silence the shows: it removed the income of every crew member, driver, sound engineer, merch seller and support act at once. When the doors reopened in 2021 and 2022, the pent-up demand rebuilt the business bigger than before, and much more expensive.
The summer of 2020
George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer on 25 May 2020. On 2 June the music industry observed Blackout Tuesday, an idea started by two Black women executives, Jamila Thomas and Brianna Agyemang, under the name The Show Must Be Paused. Feeds filled with black squares. Some of it was real reckoning and some of it was a graphic. What is not in doubt is what came out of the speakers that summer: Lil Baby wrote a protest record in a week, and it was the best-selling one of the year.
TikTok is the radio now
A fifteen-second clip could do what a radio programmer used to take three months to do. Labels signed artists off view counts. Old songs came back from the dead because a video used them. Songs were mastered loud and front-loaded so the hook arrived before a thumb could scroll, and sped-up edits made by fans became official releases. When Universal Music Group pulled its entire catalogue off the platform for the first three months of 2024 in a licensing fight, the silence in millions of videos was the clearest proof of how much the app mattered.
The money came back, unevenly
Streaming rebuilt the industry it had nearly killed. The RIAA reported United States recorded music revenue of $15.9 billion in 2022, then $17.7 billion in 2024, the year paid streaming subscriptions passed 100 million in America for the first time. In 2025 wholesale revenue hit a record $11.5 billion, and by the first half of 2026 revenues were up another 6.9% year on year, with streaming at 82% of the total. None of that says an individual musician was paid well. Most of the argument of the decade is about the gap between those two facts.
Vinyl, catalogues and the price of the past
The strangest business story of the decade is that the oldest format grew fastest. Vinyl kept climbing for a twentieth straight year, and old songs became assets: Bob Dylan sold his songwriting catalogue to Universal in December 2020, Bruce Springsteen sold to Sony a year later, David Bowie's estate sold in 2022. Reported prices ran into the hundreds of millions and the figures were estimates that sources never agreed on. Taylor Swift responded to her own catalogue being sold out from under her by recording it again, and in May 2025 she finally bought the originals back.
The ticket problem
In November 2022 Ticketmaster's system collapsed under demand for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, and the resulting anger turned into a Senate hearing and then, in May 2024, an antitrust lawsuit from the United States Department of Justice and a coalition of states aiming to break Live Nation and Ticketmaster apart. The states won the monopoly case in 2026 and asked a judge to force a sale; the Justice Department then settled instead, and rivals including AEG and SeatGeek publicly called the deal too weak. Meanwhile the total box office taken by stadium shows rose at more than eight times the rate of inflation from 2016 onward.
The machines learn to sing
In April 2023 an anonymous producer put out a track called "Heart on My Sleeve" using cloned voices of Drake and the Weeknd. It was pulled inside a fortnight, and the question it raised never went away. Tennessee passed the ELVIS Act in March 2024 to protect a performer's voice. The major labels sued the AI music firms Suno and Udio that June. By 2026 the fight had split in two: Warner and BMG signed licensing deals with Suno, while Universal and Sony kept litigating, and courts on two continents disagreed about whether training on records is fair use.
Wars, riots, fires and the halftime show
A mob stormed the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021. Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, and three months later a Ukrainian rap-folk group won Eurovision on a wave of public votes. Wildfires burned through Los Angeles in January 2025 and the music industry answered with FireAid, benefit concerts that raised around $100 million. And every February the Super Bowl halftime show became the biggest single stage in music, watched by more people than the game itself.
The Sounds
The algorithm age: viral heat, drill beats and genreless genius
This is the most chaotic, connected and algorithm-driven era in hip-hop history. The labels still exist and the superstars still tour, but the internet runs the game. TikTok decides hits. Artists break from their bedrooms. Trends live for weeks, not years. Hip-hop is still the pulse of the culture, it is just moving faster than anyone can file it.
Phase one, 2020 to 2022, is the pandemic and the playlist. With no touring and everyone online, short-form video reshaped the whole playbook. Roddy Ricch's "The Box" was a squeaky-door sample and a number one. Lil Nas X turned a meme into a career with "Montero". Jack Harlow took Southern charisma to the top of the charts, and Coi Leray, BIA and Latto turned viral hooks into real catalogues. Baby Keem, Kendrick's cousin, made glitchy, restless rap on "The Melodic Blue". Ice Spice arrived from the Bronx with "Munch" and a delivery so flat it was funny.
Drill went global. It started in Chicago, went to Brooklyn through Pop Smoke rapping over beats made by producers in London, and came back out everywhere: Central Cee, Headie One, Digga D and Unknown T in the UK, Fivio Foreign and Sheff G in New York, Lil Durk and G Herbo still in Chicago, and scenes in Paris, Dublin and Sydney. The recipe is a dark piano loop, a sliding 808 that bends under the beat, and a flow that sits slightly behind it. It is the most exported sound of the decade.
The trap kings kept their thrones with deeper catalogues: Future, 21 Savage, Lil Baby, Gunna, Moneybagg Yo, EST Gee. Young Thug and Gunna were pulled out of the game by a Georgia racketeering case that turned their lyrics into evidence. Melodic rap stopped being a subgenre and became the default: Trippie Redd, the Kid LAROI, Lil Tecca, and a posthumous Juice WRLD catalogue that kept shaping the mood after his death.
And the thinkers never left. Kendrick Lamar made an album about therapy and generational damage and then, two years later, ended a rivalry in public with the biggest rap song in a decade. Tyler, the Creator made two of the decade's best-made records. J. Cole stayed sharp and then, unusually, apologised. Little Simz and Dave and Stormzy proved London could write at that level too. billy woods, Earl Sweatshirt, JID, Denzel Curry and Vince Staples built careers with no interest in the chart at all. In August 2023 hip-hop turned fifty, and every one of these people was standing on the same Bronx rec room floor.
The star system splinters, and everybody writes their own diary
Pop in the 2020s stopped pretending to be one thing. The old machine still worked, and Max Martin's descendants still built choruses, but the biggest records of the decade were written from inside somebody's actual life and sold on that basis. Taylor Swift wrote two records of imaginary people in a cabin in 2020 and became the most powerful person in the business. Olivia Rodrigo turned a break-up at seventeen into the fastest-moving debut of the decade. Billie Eilish and her brother kept making records in a bedroom in Highland Park and kept winning.
Then the 2024 class arrived at once, and it was the best pop year since 2013. Charli XCX made a sweaty, self-loathing club record called "Brat" and accidentally named a summer and a colour. Chappell Roan came up through drag aesthetics and years of getting dropped, and "Good Luck, Babe!" made her a headliner in eighteen months. Sabrina Carpenter turned innuendo into craft on "Short n' Sweet". Every one of them wrote or co-wrote their own material, and every one of them was funnier than pop stars are usually allowed to be.
The old guard did not go anywhere. Dua Lipa made the best disco record in forty years while the clubs were shut. The Weeknd finished a trilogy about dying under stage lights. Beyoncé made a house record and then a country record and finally won Album of the Year. Adele sold 839,000 copies of "30" in a week in 2021, in a market that was not supposed to sell albums any more. Lady Gaga went back to being frightening on "Mayhem" in 2025.
And pop stopped being American or British by default. K-pop put BTS at number one on the Hot 100 in 2020 singing in English, then the band paused for military service and the field opened up: Stray Kids topped the Billboard 200 with everything they released, Blackpink headlined Coachella, and NewJeans made the best pop singles in the world for two years before their label fight swallowed them. In 2025 the biggest pop song on earth came from an animated film about a girl group who fight demons, sung by session singers most listeners could not name.
Slow songs, long tails: the decade R&B stopped chasing the radio
R&B spent the 2010s being told it was in trouble. In the 2020s it stopped listening. The commercial model changed in its favour: streaming rewards records people return to for years, and R&B albums are records people return to for years. SZA's "SOS" came out in December 2022 and was still taking weeks at number one in 2025. That is not how the old business worked at all.
The writing got more specific and less polite. Summer Walker made break-up records with the arguments left in. Brent Faiyaz built a whole aesthetic out of not answering the phone. Steve Lacy played guitar on a bedroom recording and took "Bad Habit" to number one. Victoria Monét spent a decade writing hits for other people and then won Best New Artist for her own. Tems sang eight bars on a Wizkid record and became one of the most in-demand voices alive.
The old-fashioned end had its best decade in years too. Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak formed Silk Sonic, made a record that sounded like 1974 and swept the Grammys with it. Usher headlined the Super Bowl. Beyoncé's "Renaissance" traced Black dance music back through house and ballroom to the people who invented it, and put the credits on the sleeve.
Spanish stops being a niche and starts being the chart
For a hundred years the American chart treated Spanish-language music as a curiosity that occasionally crossed over. That ended in this decade, and one person did most of it. Bad Bunny's "El Último Tour del Mundo" went to number one on the Billboard 200 in December 2020, the first all-Spanish album ever to do it in the chart's sixty-four year history. He did not sing a word in English to get there. "Un Verano Sin Ti" was then the most consumed album in the United States across all of 2022.
Reggaeton was only half the story. The other half came out of Sinaloa and Jalisco: corridos tumbados, old Mexican ballad forms about outlaws and heartbreak, played on requinto guitar and tuba by kids raised on trap. Natanael Cano started it, Peso Pluma made it enormous, and Fuerza Regida, Junior H, Grupo Frontera and Eslabon Armado filled in the rest. "Ella Baila Sola" put regional Mexican music in the American top ten for the first time. Luminate measured regional Mexican streams growing 56% in a single year.
Around them, the women took the biggest rooms. Karol G's "Mañana Será Bonito" was the first all-Spanish album by a woman to top the Billboard 200. Shakira turned a divorce into a Bizarrap session that half the Spanish-speaking world learned by heart in a week. Rosalía made "Motomami", a flamenco-trained singer breaking her own record into pieces, and then in 2025 made "Lux", an eighteen-track album recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra.
The institutions followed the money. The Latin Grammys left the United States for the first time and were held in Seville in November 2023. And in February 2026, Bad Bunny's "Debí Tirar Más Fotos", an album about Puerto Rico losing itself, won Album of the Year at the Grammys, the first primarily Spanish-language record ever to do so, a week before he played the Super Bowl halftime show almost entirely in Spanish.
The biggest genre nobody in the cities was watching
Country had the strangest decade of any American genre: commercially enormous, culturally contested, and constantly arguing with itself about who counts. Morgan Wallen's "Dangerous" spent its first ten weeks at number one on the Billboard 200, the first album to do that since 1987, and it did most of it after a video of him using a racial slur got him pulled from every major radio group in the country. Fans bought more, not less. Nobody in Nashville had a plan for that.
The other half of the story is that country got looser. Zach Bryan recorded on a phone in a barracks and ended up with the biggest streaming week ever for a rock album. Tyler Childers, Sierra Ferrell, Charley Crockett and Billy Strings pulled the sound back toward old-time and bluegrass and filled theatres doing it. Jelly Roll came out of rap and jail and sang about it. Lainey Wilson brought back the seventies. Chris Stapleton just kept being the best singer in the building.
Then 2024 blew the doors off. Beyoncé released "Cowboy Carter" and "Texas Hold 'Em" made her the first Black woman ever to top Hot Country Songs, a chart that had existed since 1958. Country radio mostly ignored it and the argument that followed was about a hundred years of who gets called country. Shaboozey, a Nigerian-American from Virginia, then spent nineteen weeks at number one on the Hot 100 with a drinking song, tying the all-time record. Luke Combs took a Tracy Chapman song to number one on country radio and put its writer on the Grammy stage. Post Malone made a country album with everyone in Nashville on it.
Rock became a mood, an energy and a tool
The 2020s are still unfolding, but one thing is already clear: rock did not vanish. It became a mood, an energy, a tool. This is the decade of hyper-fragmentation, cross-genre fusion and vibes over boundaries. The guitar might not rule the charts, but it haunts the edges of almost every genre, and when it hits, it hits different.
It is not about domination any more. It is about connection. Rock is the underground signal. It is the loop under a bedroom pop track. It is the distorted scream buried under a viral banger. It is still here, shapeshifting with every scroll and stream.
Garage, post-punk and indie sleaze came back hard and stylish. Fontaines D.C., IDLES and Shame brought UK punk revivalism with brains and rage. Wet Leg were witty, infectious and completely unbothered. Black Country New Road, Squid, black midi and Dry Cleaning came out of one small south London venue, the Windmill in Brixton, sounding like art students who had heard everything. The Last Dinner Party arrived fully formed in 2024 and English Teacher won the Mercury Prize.
The elders had a loud decade too. Bob Dylan opened it at seventy-nine with "Rough and Rowdy Ways", the best-reviewed record of his late career. The Rolling Stones made "Hackney Diamonds" without Charlie Watts. The Beatles put out a last song built from a 1977 cassette and a machine that could separate John Lennon's voice from his piano. The Cure came back after sixteen years with a record about death and went straight to number one in Britain. Oasis reformed in 2025 and their ticket prices became a government matter.
Sad online gets smart: indie, bedroom pop and the emo revival
The 2020s did not just bring emo back, they recontextualised it. This is the era of sad online music, of introspection, of DIY aesthetics meeting genuinely expensive production. Phoebe Bridgers was the ghost of Elliott Smith with meme fluency and a stadium reach. Ethel Cain made Southern Gothic dreamrock with a cult around it. Beabadoobee took Britpop and 2000s emo and became a Gen Z guitar icon. MUNA, Soccer Mommy and Mitski wrote emotionally dense, rock-rooted records that sounded nothing like each other.
The scene organised itself around collaboration rather than competition. boygenius, the trio of Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, made "The Record" in 2023 and took three Grammys with it. Big Thief made a double album in four studios that sounded like it was recorded in a field. Waxahatchee and MJ Lenderman made country-shaped indie records that outsold most actual country records in the cities. Clairo, Japanese Breakfast, Snail Mail and Bartees Strange all did their best work in this decade.
The common thread is narrative. These are songs with people and places and specific rooms in them, sung quietly over ambient guitar tones, and the audience knows every word because the lyrics are the point. It is the opposite of the fifteen-second hook, and it turned out both could be enormous at once.
Pop-punk renaissance and the new hardcore
Yes, pop punk came back, and it came back loud, viral and Gen Z as hell. Driven by nostalgia, trap fusion and digital charisma, the Warped Tour energy returned in hybrid form. Machine Gun Kelly went from rap to full-blown pop punk on "Tickets to My Downfall" and took it to number one. Travis Barker produced half of it and then produced everything else. Olivia Rodrigo's "Sour" had the angst, riffs and hooks of 2000s teen rock. jxdn, MOD SUN, KennyHoopla and Royal & the Serpent blended punk with pop, emo and electronic edges. blink-182 got Tom DeLonge back in 2022 and had a number one album a year later.
The heavy end was healthier than the chart end. Turnstile, five men from Baltimore, made "Glow On" in 2021: hardcore with Cure guitars and gang vocals, and it ended up on NPR and at the Grammys without losing a single kid from the pit. Knocked Loose from Kentucky made the most violent record any major festival has ever booked and played it on late-night television. Soul Glo, Zulu and Scowl brought political edge, racial diversity and underground fire back into a scene that had gotten comfortable.
Underneath all of it, the internet's own punk kept mutating. Hyperpop and digicore, from 100 gecs to glaive to underscores, ran punk energy through broken synths and blown-out beats. It is fast, glitchy, auto-tuned and experimental, and it treats distortion as a feeling rather than a genre. SOPHIE, who built the sonic language most of them use, died in Athens in January 2021.
Masks, ambience and a farewell in Birmingham
Metal in the 2020s got weirder and bigger at the same time. Sleep Token, an anonymous British band in masks who mix djent riffs with R&B ballads and refuse to give interviews, went from a cult to arena headliners on "Take Me Back to Eden", and their next record topped the American album chart. Spiritbox and Lorna Shore turned metalcore and deathcore into something ambient and enormous. Ghost dressed heavy metal up as theatre and won.
The underground got ambitious. Blood Incantation made a death metal record with a Tangerine Dream side. Deafheaven kept blurring black metal and shoegaze. Gojira, from France, played the French Revolution as a metal song from the windows of a Paris palace at the Olympic opening ceremony in July 2024, the first metal band ever to perform at one.
And the decade said goodbye to the man who started it. On 5 July 2025, Ozzy Osbourne sat on a black throne at Villa Park in Birmingham and sang with the original Black Sabbath line-up for the last time, in front of a bill of bands who existed because of them, none of whom took a fee. He died seventeen days later, aged 76.
Dancing again: garage revivals, amapiano and the return of the club
Electronic music spent 2020 and 2021 mourning the dancefloor and 2022 onward celebrating getting it back. Fred again.. built a career out of exactly that: field recordings of voices from the internet, chopped into house tracks on his "Actual Life" records, one of which is literally called "Marea (We've Lost Dancing)". His Boiler Room set in London in 2022 spread far outside dance music, and by 2023 he was closing Coachella with Skrillex and Four Tet.
Britain went back to its own history. UK garage, jungle and drum and bass came back through PinkPantheress, whose songs are ninety seconds long and built from Y2K breakbeats, through Nia Archives, and through Eliza Rose's "B.O.T.A.", a bassline house record that went to number one in the UK in 2022. Jamie xx, Overmono, Bicep and Barry Can't Swim made records for actual rooms with actual sound systems.
The centre of gravity moved south, though. Amapiano, built in the townships of Gauteng out of deep house, kwaito and a rubbery log-drum bassline, went from South African taxis to the entire world. Kabza De Small and DJ Maphorisa built the sound and Uncle Waffles made it a spectacle. Tyla, from Johannesburg, took "Water" into the American top ten and won the first Grammy ever awarded for Best African Music Performance.
And in February 2021 Daft Punk, who had shaped forty years of this, posted an eight-minute video in which one robot blew the other up, and quit.
London swings, and jazz stops being a museum
The most surprising thing to happen to jazz this decade happened in London. A generation of players who came up through Tomorrow's Warriors and church bands, raised on Afrobeat, grime and dub as much as on Coltrane, made jazz that people danced to. Ezra Collective's "Where I'm Meant to Be" won the Mercury Prize in September 2023, the first jazz album in the prize's history to do it, and their bandleader used his speech to thank a youth club.
In America the tradition and the experiment both did well. Samara Joy, a singer from the Bronx in her early twenties, won Best New Artist at the Grammys in 2023 singing standards. Jon Batiste won Album of the Year in 2022 with a record that had gospel, hip-hop and New Orleans parade music in it. Kamasi Washington kept building his enormous spiritual jazz. Laufey, an Icelandic-Chinese cellist, wrote songs that sounded like 1955 and sold them to teenagers on TikTok.
It was also a decade of funerals. Chick Corea died in 2021, Pharoah Sanders in 2022 after making one last masterpiece with a dance producer, Wayne Shorter in March 2023, and Quincy Jones, who connected almost every part of this century's story, in November 2024.
Dancehall goes viral, and Kingston buries its founders
Jamaica lost an extraordinary amount in three years. Toots Hibbert, who put the word reggae in a song title in 1968, died in September 2020. Bunny Wailer, the last living Wailer, died in March 2021. Lee Scratch Perry, who invented most of what a studio can do to a recording, died that August. Between them they built the grammar of the music.
What came after was loud and online. Byron Messia, from St Kitts, made "Talibans" and it spread through the diaspora in weeks. Shenseea crossed into American pop. Skillibeng and Valiant pushed dancehall into harsher, stranger shapes. Koffee, who was nineteen when she became the youngest person and the first woman to win the Best Reggae Album Grammy in January 2020, spent the pandemic writing "Lockdown", which is what its title suggests and is also a love song.
And in July 2024 Vybz Kartel walked out of prison in Kingston after his murder conviction was overturned, having recorded a decade of hit records from inside. On New Year's Eve that year he headlined Freedom Street in the national stadium. Two months earlier, a biopic of Bob Marley had made most of a billion dollars' worth of noise about a man who died in 1981.
The praise break goes to number one
Contemporary worship became one of the most-streamed genres in America without most of the music press noticing. Maverick City Music, a deliberately multiracial collective out of Atlanta, put out "Jireh" with Elevation Worship in 2021: eight minutes long, one repeated line about being enough, and hundreds of millions of plays. They took home Grammys in 2022 and again after. CeCe Winans, who has been doing this since the 1980s, made "Believe for It" and won for it too. Kirk Franklin kept producing everyone.
The strangest gospel story of the decade belongs to Kanye West, who spent 2019 and 2020 running Sunday Service, a travelling choir performance, and then made "Donda" in 2021, a gospel-adjacent album launched with stadium listening events. What he did afterward is a different and much uglier story, and it does not undo the fact that a generation of choir arrangers got work out of it.
Quiet records for a loud decade
Folk in the 2020s was where people went to be still. Taylor Swift went there first, in July 2020, with a record made over email with Aaron Dessner of the National, and it changed what a global pop star was allowed to sound like. Noah Kahan turned New England winters into stadium singalongs. Hozier wrote a song about being loved too gently and it went to number one. Sufjan Stevens made "Javelin" after the death of his partner, and Bon Iver made a record in 2025 that was, for the first time in his career, mostly happy.
The elders came back to the campfire. Joni Mitchell, who had a brain aneurysm in 2015 and had to relearn the guitar, walked onto the stage at the Newport Folk Festival in July 2022 and sang for two hours. Tracy Chapman, who had not performed on television in years, sat down at the Grammys in February 2024 and played "Fast Car" with a country star who had grown up on it. Both moments went round the world in a day, which is the one thing this decade is genuinely good at.
Timeline
Pop Smoke is murdered in Los Angeles
Bashar Jackson was twenty years old and had been famous for about a year. On 19 February 2020 he was shot during a home invasion in the Hollywood Hills; the coroner recorded a gunshot wound to the torso. He had taken drill, a Chicago sound rebuilt by producers in London, and given it a Brooklyn baritone. Four months later his posthumous album went to number one, and every drill record made since is downstream of him.
The world stops touring
In the week of 11 March 2020 the live music business closed. The Rolling Stones postponed a stadium tour. Festivals, award shows and club nights went with them. Touring is where working musicians actually earn, so this was not a pause in entertainment, it was the removal of an entire industry's income overnight, from the headliner to the person selling shirts at the back. It stayed mostly closed for two years.
The Weeknd's After Hours and the biggest song of all time
After Hours arrived on 20 March 2020 and went to number one with 444,000 units. Its second single, "Blinding Lights", was a synth-pop record built on an eighties pulse, and it simply refused to leave: forty-three weeks in the Hot 100's top five. In November 2021 Billboard recalculated its all-time chart and named it the biggest Hot 100 song in history, ahead of Chubby Checker's "The Twist". A song about driving around a city at night became the soundtrack of a year when nobody could.
Dua Lipa releases Future Nostalgia into an empty world
Future Nostalgia came out on 27 March 2020, a disco record made for rooms that had just been closed. Dua Lipa considered delaying it and did not. It won Best Pop Vocal Album at the 2021 Grammys, and for two years it was what people played in kitchens instead of clubs. Nostalgia was the whole idea; the timing made it accidental therapy.
Verzuz turns a webcam into a stage
Swizz Beatz and Timbaland started Verzuz as an argument on Instagram Live: two producers or artists, twenty songs each, taking turns. It became the format of the lockdown. When Beenie Man and Bounty Killer faced off in May 2020, both had their best streaming days of the year off the back of it. Erykah Badu against Jill Scott, Gladys Knight against Patti LaBelle, Brandy against Monica: a whole audience got a music-history class from their sofas.
Fiona Apple's Fetch the Bolt Cutters
Recorded largely in her own house with dogs audible on the tape and objects used as percussion, Fetch the Bolt Cutters landed on 17 April 2020 into a world that had just been sent home. It is a record about refusing to be small, played on whatever was lying around. It won Best Alternative Music Album and Best Rock Performance at the 2021 Grammys, and it remains the most convincing argument of the decade that a record does not need a studio.
Little Richard dies
Richard Penniman died on 9 May 2020, aged 87. He had spent the 1950s inventing the physical language of rock and roll: the shriek, the pounded piano, the eyeliner, the speed. Every performer in this chapter who has ever thrown themselves across a stage is quoting him, whether they know it or not.
Lil Baby writes The Bigger Picture in a week
Released 12 June 2020 and built partly from audio recorded at Minneapolis protests, "The Bigger Picture" debuted at number three on the Hot 100, a career high for him at the time. It is not a slogan record. It is a rapper working out in real time what he thinks, contradictions included, over a beat that never raises its voice. It is the protest song the summer of 2020 actually produced.
Blackout Tuesday and The Show Must Be Paused
On 2 June 2020, a week after George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, the music industry stopped work for a day. The idea came from two Black executives, Jamila Thomas and Brianna Agyemang, and it spread further than they intended: millions of black squares posted by people who had no idea what the original demand was. The organisers spent the following days trying to turn a hashtag into an actual programme of hiring, funding and ownership.
Taylor Swift disappears into the woods: Folklore
Announced in the morning and released at midnight on 24 July 2020, Folklore was made remotely with Aaron Dessner of the National and Jack Antonoff. It is quiet, wooden and full of invented people. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 while "cardigan" debuted at number one on the Hot 100, the first time any artist had opened at the top of both charts in the same week, and it won Album of the Year in March 2021. The biggest pop star on earth had just proved she could sell an indie record.
BTS take Dynamite to number one
"Dynamite", released 21 August 2020, was BTS's first single entirely in English and their first Hot 100 number one, on the chart dated 5 September 2020. A Korean group had reached the top of the American singles chart by singing in English about disco. It opened a door that within five years would not need English at all.
Machine Gun Kelly takes pop-punk to number one
Tickets to My Downfall, produced by Travis Barker of blink-182, debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 on the chart dated 10 October 2020. A Cleveland rapper had made a 2003 pop-punk record, and a generation who were not born in 2003 bought it. Barker went on to produce for half the scene, and the revival ran for the rest of the decade.
A skateboard, a cranberry juice and Fleetwood Mac's Dreams
In late September 2020 a man named Nathan Apodaca filmed himself longboarding to work drinking juice and lip-syncing to "Dreams", a song from 1977. By mid-October Fleetwood Mac were in the top ten of Billboard's global charts alongside BTS. Nothing about the record had changed. The distribution had. This is the clearest single example of what the algorithm did to music history: it flattened time.
The first all-Spanish number one album in America
Bad Bunny's El Último Tour del Mundo, released 27 November 2020, debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with 116,000 units. In the chart's sixty-four year history no all-Spanish-language album had ever topped it. He did not make a crossover record, cut an English version or bring in an American guest to explain himself. The audience simply arrived.
Playboi Carti's Whole Lotta Red splits the room
Released on Christmas Day 2020, Whole Lotta Red debuted at number one. It is deliberately ugly: distorted, shrieked, punk in tempo and attitude, and half of Carti's own fanbase hated it on arrival. Within two years it was the most imitated rap record of the decade, and the rage-beat sound it launched was everywhere.
MF DOOM
On 31 December 2020 Jasmine Dumile announced that her husband Daniel Dumile, the rapper who performed in a metal mask as MF DOOM, had died on 31 October, aged 49. He had spent twenty years writing the densest, funniest, most internally rhymed verses in the music, and refusing to be a star while doing it. Every rapper who cares more about the sentence than the single is in his debt.
drivers license and the seventeen-year-old
Olivia Rodrigo released "drivers license" on 8 January 2021 and it debuted at number one on the Hot 100 on the chart dated 23 January. It is a piano ballad about driving past a house, written by a teenager, and it broke streaming records because everybody on the internet decided at once to work out who it was about. Her album Sour followed in May and made her the most convincing new songwriter in pop.
SOPHIE dies in Athens
SOPHIE, the Scottish producer whose plasticky, enormous, physically strange synth sounds built the whole language of hyperpop, died in Athens on 30 January 2021 after a fall, aged 34. She had produced for Charli XCX and Madonna and made records that sounded like nothing had before. Everything glitchy and maximalist that follows in this chapter is using her vocabulary.
Morgan Wallen, a slur, and an audience that did not care
On 8 January 2021 Morgan Wallen released Dangerous: The Double Album. In early February a video showed him using a racial slur outside his house. His label suspended him, iHeartMedia pulled him from around 135 stations, Cumulus from 400, and CMT, SiriusXM and Pandora removed him. His sales went up. The album spent its first ten weeks at number one on the Billboard 200, the first record to do that since 1987. It is the decade's hardest lesson about who the gatekeepers actually are now.
Daft Punk break up
On 22 February 2021 Daft Punk posted an eight-minute clip in which one helmeted robot detonates the other, captioned Epilogue, and that was the end. For twenty-eight years they had connected French filter house to disco, to Kanye West, to EDM and back again. Their split is the closing bracket on an era of dance music that had a face, even if the face was a helmet.
Promises, and a saxophonist at the end of his life
Released 26 March 2021, Promises pairs the electronic producer Floating Points with Pharoah Sanders, then eighty, and the London Symphony Orchestra. It is one forty-six-minute piece built on a seven-note phrase that repeats while everything around it changes. Sanders had played with Coltrane in 1965. He died the following year, and it is the best possible last word.
Fearless (Taylor's Version) and the re-recording war
After her first six albums were sold to a company she did not want owning them, Taylor Swift began recording them again from scratch. Fearless (Taylor's Version) arrived on 9 April 2021 and went to number one, the first re-recorded album ever to do so. She was teaching a generation of listeners that a master recording is a legal object, not just a song, and other artists started reading their contracts.
DMX dies
Earl Simmons died in April 2021, aged 50, days after a heart attack. He had been the loudest, rawest voice in rap at the turn of the century: five consecutive number one albums, a bark instead of a hook, and prayers on his records that were not a pose. Swizz Beatz, who produced much of his best work, called him a humanitarian.
Turnstile's Glow On drags hardcore into daylight
Glow On, released 27 August 2021, debuted at number thirty on the Billboard 200, which for a Baltimore hardcore band is roughly impossible. It has breakdowns and gang vocals and also Cure guitars, a Blood Orange feature and songs that sound like sunshine. It did not soften hardcore to get there. It just refused to accept that the audience had a ceiling.
Little Simz makes Sometimes I Might Be Introvert
Released 3 September 2021 and produced entirely by her childhood friend Inflo, Simbiatu Ajikawo's fourth album has string sections, Nigerian interludes and a narrator, and it is about being shy in a loud profession. It won the Mercury Prize on 18 October 2022. It is the best British rap album of the decade and the clearest proof that London's writing was operating at the same level as anyone's.
Ten people die at Astroworld
On 5 November 2021 a crowd of about fifty thousand at Travis Scott's Astroworld Festival in Houston compressed toward the front of the stage. Ten people died, all of compression asphyxia; the youngest was nine years old. A grand jury declined to indict Scott or the organisers in June 2023, and hundreds of civil claims were settled. It is the worst thing that happened at a concert this decade, and it forced a real argument about crowd safety at festivals.
Rosalía breaks her own record apart on Motomami
Motomami, released March 2022, is a flamenco-trained singer taking reggaeton, bachata, industrial noise and a Soulja Boy sample and refusing to sand any of the edges. Half the songs stop before they finish. It is the record every ambitious Spanish-language artist of the next three years measured themselves against.
Jon Batiste wins Album of the Year
At the Grammys on 3 April 2022, We Are, a record made by a New Orleans pianist and bandleader out of gospel, hip-hop, brass-band parade music and social justice, took Album of the Year over Olivia Rodrigo, Kanye West and Taylor Swift. Batiste won five awards that night. It was the sort of result the Grammys almost never produce, and the room did not see it coming.
Bad Bunny's Un Verano Sin Ti becomes the year
Released 6 May 2022, Un Verano Sin Ti was the most consumed album in the United States across all of 2022, in any language. It is a beach record with dembow, indie guitars, Dominican mambo and a broken heart in it. The same year, on-demand audio streaming in America passed one trillion plays for the first time. Those two facts belong in the same sentence.
Young Thug is arrested and his lyrics become evidence
On 9 May 2022 Young Thug was arrested on a 56-count Georgia racketeering indictment naming him and 27 others, in which prosecutors used his lyrics as evidence of intent. Gunna took an Alford plea that December and spent a year being accused of snitching. The trial became the longest in Georgia history. Thug pleaded guilty on 31 October 2024 and walked out with time served and fifteen years of probation. Two of the most influential voices in modern rap lost three years to it.
Kalush Orchestra win Eurovision for Ukraine
Three months after Russia invaded, a Ukrainian group mixing rap with traditional flute and folk singing won Eurovision on 14 May 2022, carried by an enormous public vote across Europe. Their song was written for the singer's mother. It is the clearest example in the decade of a song contest doing something other than being a song contest.
Kate Bush goes to number one thirty-seven years late
"Running Up That Hill", released in 1985, was used in the fourth season of Stranger Things and by July 2022 it was topping charts around the world and back in the Hot 100's top five. Metallica's "Master of Puppets" got the same treatment from the same show. A television sync could now do more for a catalogue than any radio campaign, and the entire licensing business reorganised itself around that fact.
Beyoncé's Renaissance sends the credits to the source
Released 29 July 2022, Renaissance is a house and disco record that traces Black dance music back through ballroom, Chicago house and 1970s New York, and puts the pioneers in the credits rather than the samples. It arrived when everyone was desperate to dance again, and in August 2022 it put her at number one on the Billboard 200 and the Hot 100 in the same week.
Joni Mitchell sings at Newport
On 24 July 2022 Joni Mitchell, who had a brain aneurysm in 2015 and had to teach herself the guitar again, walked onto the stage at the Newport Folk Festival for a surprise set arranged by Brandi Carlile. She sat in a chair, held court for two hours and played a guitar solo. Newport is where Dylan went electric in 1965. It has a habit of hosting the moment.
Midnights takes the entire Hot 100 top ten
On the chart dated 5 November 2022, every one of the top ten songs in America was from Taylor Swift's Midnights. No artist had ever done that. It was the clearest sign of what streaming had done to the singles chart: a big enough album no longer produced a hit, it produced a wall. Three weeks later Ticketmaster's system collapsed under the demand for her tour.
The Ticketmaster meltdown
The Eras Tour presale on 15 November 2022 broke Ticketmaster, and the resulting fury produced a Senate hearing in January 2023 and, in May 2024, an antitrust lawsuit from the Justice Department and a coalition of states. Attorney General Merrick Garland said it was time to break the company up. A pop fanbase, not a regulator, started the biggest antitrust action in the history of live music.
Takeoff is killed in Houston
Kirsnick Ball, 28, was shot outside a bowling alley in Houston on 1 November 2022. As one third of Migos he had helped build the triplet flow that reorganised how rappers count bars for a decade. He was the quiet one, and the best technician of the three.
SZA's SOS refuses to leave the chart
Released 9 December 2022, SOS debuted at number one with the biggest streaming week an R&B album had ever had. Then it stayed. In May 2025, two and a half years later, it took a thirteenth non-consecutive week at number one, something no R&B record had done since The Bodyguard. SOS is the definitive artefact of the streaming era: an album that succeeds by being lived with rather than bought.
Shakira turns a divorce into a Bizarrap session
Released 11 January 2023, BZRP Music Sessions #53 put Shakira over an Argentine producer's minimal beat, naming names about the end of her relationship with the footballer Gerard Piqué. Half the Spanish-speaking world learned the words in a week. It is also a neat picture of the new pipeline: a YouTube producer's series had become a bigger platform than a label campaign.
The Grammys throw hip-hop a fiftieth birthday party
On 5 February 2023 the Grammys staged a fifteen-minute, three-act history of hip-hop, musical-directed by Questlove: Grandmaster Flash, Run-DMC, Chuck D, Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliott, Queen Latifah, Salt-N-Pepa, Method Man, Ice-T, then GloRilla and Future to close it. It was the moment the music industry formally admitted that the thing it had spent thirty years being frightened of was now the whole building.
The Eras Tour opens
Taylor Swift's Eras Tour began on 17 March 2023 and became the first tour in history to gross more than a billion dollars, passing that mark by December 2023. By the time it closed in Vancouver on 8 December 2024 the totals reported ran to around two billion, with Pollstar putting it at $2.2 billion from just over ten million tickets and other counts landing nearer $2.08 billion. Local economies measured the effect. Nothing in touring had ever been this size.
Heart on My Sleeve: a hit by nobody
In April 2023 an anonymous producer released a track using AI-cloned voices of Drake and the Weeknd. It was streamed millions of times before the label had it removed, and neither artist had been in a room. Tennessee passed the ELVIS Act in March 2024 to give performers a right in their own voice, and in June 2024 the major labels sued the AI music companies Suno and Udio. By 2026 Warner and BMG had licensing deals with Suno while Universal and Sony were still in court.
Peso Pluma and the corridos tumbados boom
"Ella Baila Sola", by Eslabon Armado with Peso Pluma, became the first regional Mexican song to reach the Hot 100's top ten in 2023, and Peso Pluma's Génesis had the biggest week by units any regional Mexican album had ever had. Requinto guitar, tuba and trap phrasing, sung by kids from Sinaloa and Jalisco. Luminate measured regional Mexican streaming in America up 56% inside a year.
Sprinter and the summer of UK rap
Dave and Central Cee released "Sprinter" in June 2023 and it spent ten weeks at number one in Britain, the first UK rap song ever to reach double figures at the top, and the biggest weekly streaming total a British rap single had recorded. Its tenth week fell on hip-hop's fiftieth birthday. British rap had spent twenty years being told it was regional; it was now the biggest thing in its own country.
Tracy Chapman goes to number one on country radio
Luke Combs' cover of "Fast Car" topped Country Airplay in July 2023, making Tracy Chapman the first Black woman ever to write a solo number one on that chart, thirty-five years after she released the original. In February 2024 she came out of a long retreat from television to play it with Combs at the Grammys. The song is about escaping a small life. Its second act became a lesson about who country radio had been leaving out.
Hip-hop turns fifty
On 11 August 1973 an eighteen-year-old DJ called Kool Herc played his sister's back-to-school party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx and stretched the drum breaks. Fifty years later to the day, Yankee Stadium hosted Run-DMC, Snoop Dogg, Lil Wayne, Ice Cube, Lil Kim, Remy Ma and the surviving pillars, and morning television ran Busta Rhymes and Fat Joe. A party trick in a rec room had become the largest music culture on earth.
Zach Bryan and Oliver Anthony arrive from nowhere
Within three weeks in August 2023 two men with no radio support went to number one. Zach Bryan's self-titled album had the biggest streaming week any rock album had recorded, and "I Remember Everything" with Kacey Musgraves topped four separate Billboard charts at once, a first. Then Oliver Anthony, an unknown from Virginia filmed in a field, debuted at number one on the Hot 100 with "Rich Men North of Richmond", the first artist ever to do that with no prior chart history of any kind.
Ezra Collective win the Mercury Prize
On 7 September 2023 Where I'm Meant to Be became the first jazz album to win the Mercury Prize in the award's history. Ezra Collective are five Londoners who met at a youth club, and their bandleader Femi Koleoso used the acceptance speech to say so. Their jazz is a party: Afrobeat, reggae, highlife and hard bop played fast enough to dance to.
The last Beatles song
"Now and Then", built from a 1977 cassette demo of John Lennon using machine learning to separate his voice from his piano, was released on 2 November 2023 and went to number one in Britain a week later. It was the Beatles' eighteenth UK number one, sixty years after their first: the longest gap between an act's first and last chart-topper ever recorded. The same technology that frightened everybody in the Heart on My Sleeve story made this possible.
Texas Hold Em and a chart that had never done this
Beyoncé released "Texas Hold 'Em" during the Super Bowl on 11 February 2024, and on 20 February it debuted at number one on Hot Country Songs, making her the first Black woman ever to top a chart that had existed since 1958. Cowboy Carter followed on 29 March and went to number one on the Billboard 200 and on Top Country Albums. Country radio mostly did not play it. The argument that followed was about a hundred years of who gets counted.
Universal pulls its catalogue off TikTok
At the end of January 2024 Universal Music Group, the largest music company in the world, removed every recording and composition it controlled from TikTok after licensing talks broke down, partly over what the platform wanted to do with AI music. For three months a huge share of popular music was simply missing from millions of videos. A deal was struck in May 2024, and a wider one followed in 2026, with clauses about removing unauthorised AI-generated music.
Like That, and the battle begins
Kendrick Lamar's guest verse on Future and Metro Boomin's "Like That", released 22 March 2024, dismissed the idea that he, Drake and J. Cole were equals. It debuted at number one on the Hot 100 and stayed three weeks. J. Cole answered, then apologised on stage at his own festival on 7 April and pulled the song from streaming five days later. Drake did not apologise.
Not Like Us
Over eight days at the start of May 2024 Kendrick Lamar and Drake released six songs at each other. Kendrick's last one, "Not Like Us", produced by DJ Mustard and out on 4 May, debuted at number one on the Hot 100 with 70.9 million streams, with two more of his diss tracks in the same week's top ten. It became a stadium chant, a wedding song and a civic event in Los Angeles. In February 2025 it won five Grammys including Record and Song of the Year, and Drake sued his own label over it.
Brat summer
Charli XCX released Brat on 7 June 2024. It debuted at number three, which undersells it completely: the lime-green cover became a meme, a political slogan and a shorthand for a whole mood, and the record's mixture of hard club production and unflattering honesty made it the most talked-about album of the year. It won three Grammys. A decade of pop stars had been polished; this one sounded hungover and told you why.
Gojira play the French Revolution at the Olympics
On 26 July 2024 the French metal band Gojira performed at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics from the windows of the Conciergerie, the prison where Marie Antoinette was held, with the mezzo-soprano Marina Viotti. The piece, "Mea Culpa (Ah! Ça ira!)", won Best Metal Performance at the Grammys the following February. No metal band had ever been given a stage like it.
A Bar Song ties the all-time record
Shaboozey, a Nigerian-American singer from Virginia, spent nineteen weeks at number one on the Hot 100 with "A Bar Song (Tipsy)", tying Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" for the longest run in the chart's history. Both records are by Black artists working in country, and both were argued about on those grounds. Post Malone's country album F-1 Trillion topped the Billboard 200 the same month.
Oasis announce a reunion, and a pricing scandal
On 27 August 2024 Liam and Noel Gallagher announced they would tour together in 2025 after sixteen years apart. Within days the sale had turned into a national argument, as tickets advertised at £135 rose above £350 under dynamic pricing. Promoters cancelled more than fifty thousand resale tickets, and in March 2025 the UK competition regulator said Ticketmaster may have misled fans. The biggest reunion in British rock became a consumer-protection case.
Chromakopia and Tyler's second act
Released on a Monday, 28 October 2024, with almost no warning, Chromakopia debuted at number one with 299,500 units from only four days of tracking. It is a record about turning thirty-three, about a mother's voice on tape, about not wanting the life you asked for. Tyler had gone from provocateur to one of the two or three most careful album-makers in American music.
GNX arrives with no warning
Kendrick Lamar put GNX out at around noon on 22 November 2024 with no announcement. It debuted at number one with 319,000 units and 379 million streams, "squabble up" debuted at number one on the Hot 100, and he took the entire top five of that chart, something only Taylor Swift, Drake and the Beatles had managed. Six months after winning a rap battle he had made the most confident record of his career.
The Cure return after sixteen years
Songs of a Lost World entered the UK chart at number one on 8 November 2024, the Cure's first number one album in thirty-two years and their first record of new material in sixteen. It is eight songs about death, played slowly, by a man in his sixties who has been writing the same beautiful gloom since 1979 and finally had the world's mood match it. It swept the alternative categories at the 2026 Grammys.
Quincy Jones and a year of endings
Quincy Jones died on 3 November 2024, aged 91. He had arranged for Count Basie, produced Michael Jackson's Thriller, scored films and connected almost every thread in this century's story. Wayne Shorter had died in March 2023, Pharoah Sanders in 2022, Chick Corea in 2021, Tina Turner in May 2023, Sinéad O'Connor and Tony Bennett in July 2023. The generation that built the modern record was leaving.
Bad Bunny makes a record about losing Puerto Rico
Released on a Sunday, 5 January 2025, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS uses plena and salsa and old Puerto Rican forms to argue about displacement, gentrification and what happens to an island when the people who grew up there cannot afford to stay. It climbed to number one on the Billboard 200 within a fortnight. He then played a thirty-date residency at home in San Juan, reserving the first nine nights for island residents.
Los Angeles burns and FireAid answers
Wildfires tore through Los Angeles in January 2025, destroying whole neighbourhoods including homes belonging to musicians and crew. On 30 January the industry staged FireAid across two arenas. The concerts raised around $100 million, and when questions were later raised about where the money went, an outside law firm reviewed it and reported no misconduct in September 2025.
Beyoncé finally wins Album of the Year
At the Grammys on 2 February 2025, Cowboy Carter won Album of the Year and Best Country Album. Beyoncé was the first Black artist to win the country category, and the first Black woman to win Album of the Year since Lauryn Hill in 1999. Doechii won Best Rap Album for a mixtape, only the third woman ever to take that award. Chappell Roan won Best New Artist and Sierra Ferrell swept the roots categories with four wins.
Kendrick Lamar plays the Super Bowl
On 9 February 2025 Kendrick Lamar became the first solo rapper to headline the Super Bowl halftime show, with Samuel L. Jackson as Uncle Sam, SZA and Mustard as his only guests and Serena Williams dancing. An estimated 133.5 million people watched, the largest audience a halftime show has ever had, more than watched the game itself. He performed the song about Drake, and the whole stadium sang the part he did not.
Morgan Wallen and Sleep Token own the album chart
Ghost took their first American number one on the chart dated 10 May 2025. A fortnight later Sleep Token, a masked British band who mix djent with R&B and give no interviews, took theirs with Even in Arcadia. A week after that Morgan Wallen's I'm the Problem opened with 493,000 units, the year's biggest week for any album. Country and heavy metal, the two genres the industry pays least attention to, were running the chart.
Brian Wilson and Sly Stone die two days apart
Sly Stone died on 9 June 2025, aged 82, after a long illness. Brian Wilson died on 11 June, also 82. Between them they invented most of what a pop record could be in the 1960s: Wilson made the studio an instrument, Stone put a multiracial band on stage and made funk out of gospel and rock. Losing both inside three days felt like a door closing on the century this project has been walking through.
Back to the Beginning, and then Ozzy
On 5 July 2025 the original Black Sabbath line-up played together for the last time at Villa Park in Birmingham, three miles from where they formed. Ozzy Osbourne sang four songs from a black throne because he could no longer stand. Forty thousand people were there and 5.8 million watched the stream; none of the bands on the bill took a fee. He died on 22 July, aged 76, seventeen days later.
Golden: the biggest song in the world is from a cartoon
"Golden", performed by the fictional group HUNTR/X from the Netflix film KPop Demon Hunters, reached number one on the Hot 100 on the chart dated 16 August 2025 and kept coming back. Billboard counted it the ninth song from the world of Korean pop to top the chart, and the first led by women with ties to the genre. In February 2026 it won Best Song Written for Visual Media at the Grammys.
Drake loses in court
Drake sued Universal Music Group in January 2025, claiming the company had promoted a defamatory record about him. On 9 October 2025 Judge Jeannette Vargas dismissed the case, holding that in the context of a rap battle a reasonable listener would not take the lyrics as statements of fact. He filed an appeal three weeks later. A rap battle had ended in a written judicial opinion about what a diss record is.
A Spanish-language album wins Album of the Year
At the Grammys on 1 February 2026, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS became the first primarily Spanish-language album ever to win Album of the Year. Kendrick Lamar won five awards and passed Jay-Z as the most-decorated rapper in the award's history. Olivia Dean won Best New Artist and the Cure swept the alternative categories. Nearly half the televised acceptance speeches touched on immigration enforcement in the United States.
Bad Bunny plays the Super Bowl in Spanish
On 8 February 2026, at Levi's Stadium in California, Bad Bunny headlined the Super Bowl LX halftime show almost entirely in Spanish, with Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin as guests, and closed by naming the countries of the Americas. An estimated 128.2 million people watched, the fourth-largest halftime audience recorded, and Telemundo's Spanish-language broadcast peaked during it. The set drew heavy criticism from the American political right, including the president, and won seven Primetime Emmys, more than any halftime show in history.
Drake takes the top three places at once
On 15 May 2026 Drake released three albums on the same day. On the chart dated 30 May they were numbers one, two and three on the Billboard 200, the first time any act had held all three positions since the chart went weekly in 1956. He also charted forty-two songs in a single week. Two years after losing the biggest rap battle of the century in public, he was still the most commercially dominant artist in the format.
The money keeps growing and the argument does not stop
By the first half of 2026 American recorded music revenue was up 6.9% year on year, with streaming making up 82% of it and double-digit growth in vinyl, CDs and sync licensing. Meanwhile a court had found Live Nation to be an illegal monopoly, the Justice Department settled rather than force a sale, and rivals called the deal feeble. The industry has never made more money or trusted its own structure less.
Artists
Kendrick Lamar
The most decorated rapper of the decade and the one everyone else measures against. Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers is an album about therapy, generational damage and his own hypocrisy, which is not what anyone wanted from him and is why it matters. Then in 2024 he won a public fight with the biggest star in the format, turned the winning song into a stadium chant, and played it at the Super Bowl to the largest halftime audience ever counted.
- Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers
- Not Like Us
- GNX
Bad Bunny
Benito Martínez Ocasio did not cross over. He made the rest of the world cross to him. He put the first all-Spanish album at number one in America, had the most consumed record in the United States in 2022 in any language, made an album about Puerto Rico being priced out of itself, won Album of the Year with it, and played the Super Bowl in Spanish. He also wrestles, paints his nails and refuses to explain himself in English.
- YHLQMDLG
- Un Verano Sin Ti
- DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS
Taylor Swift
The most powerful person in the music business, and she got there by writing. In 2020 she made two quiet folk records in lockdown and won Album of the Year for the first of them. Then she re-recorded her own back catalogue to take it back from the people who bought it, filled every slot in the Hot 100 top ten with one album, and ran the first tour in history to gross a billion dollars. In 2025 she bought her original masters back.
- Folklore
- Midnights
- The Tortured Poets Department
Beyoncé
She spent this decade doing archaeology. Renaissance traced house and disco back to the Black and queer people who built them and put their names in the credits. Cowboy Carter did the same for country, a genre that had spent a century pretending she and everyone like her were not part of it, and made her the first Black woman to top the country songs chart. It won Album of the Year in 2025, on her fifth attempt.
- Renaissance
- Cowboy Carter
- Texas Hold 'Em
Drake
The decade's most reliable commercial machine and its most public loser. Certified Lover Boy, Her Loss and For All the Dogs all opened at number one; in 2026 he put out three albums at once and held the top three places on the chart, which nobody had ever done. He also lost the biggest rap battle of the century in front of everyone, and then sued his own record label about it.
- Certified Lover Boy
- Her Loss
- For All the Dogs
SZA
Solána Rowe writes like she is talking herself out of something and losing. SOS is twenty-three songs long, moves between R&B, grunge and country, and admits to jealousy, revenge fantasies and bad decisions in the same verse. It also would not leave the chart: two and a half years after release it was still taking weeks at number one. Nobody in modern R&B has a bigger or more forgiving audience.
- SOS
- Kill Bill
- Snooze
The Weeknd
Abel Tesfaye spent the decade making a trilogy about a man dying under stage lights. After Hours gave him "Blinding Lights", which Billboard eventually named the biggest Hot 100 song of all time. Dawn FM is a concept record set on a radio station in purgatory. He headlined a pandemic Super Bowl at his own expense and then announced he was retiring the name.
- After Hours
- Blinding Lights
- Dawn FM
Olivia Rodrigo
She released her first single at seventeen and it went straight to number one. Sour is a break-up record with pop-punk guitars and a Broadway singer's diction, and Guts is funnier and angrier. She made a generation of teenagers pick up guitars again, and she made the 2000s teen-rock sound the default setting for young pop.
- drivers license
- Sour
- Guts
Billie Eilish
She and her brother Finneas still make records in a bedroom, and it still sounds like it: whispered vocals, sub-bass you feel more than hear, silence used as an instrument. Happier Than Ever and Hit Me Hard and Soft both dealt with fame arriving too early. She won an Oscar twice before turning twenty-three.
- Happier Than Ever
- Hit Me Hard and Soft
- BIRDS OF A FEATHER
Charli XCX
She spent ten years as pop's most interesting underachiever, writing hits for other people and making experimental club records with SOPHIE and A. G. Cook. Then Brat put all of it in one place: hard synths, party anxiety, jealousy of her friends, and a lime-green sleeve that became a cultural shorthand for a whole summer. The mainstream finally caught up to where she had been standing.
- How I'm Feeling Now
- Crash
- Brat
Chappell Roan
Kayleigh Amstutz was dropped by a label, moved home, worked in a drive-through and kept writing. The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess is theatrical, filthy and completely sincere, built on drag performance and small-town queer loneliness. "Good Luck, Babe!" took her from support slots to festival headline billing inside a year, and she used the platform to argue publicly about how badly the industry treats new artists.
- The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess
- Good Luck, Babe!
- Pink Pony Club
Sabrina Carpenter
A former child actor who spent a decade being nobody's idea of a pop star, and then wrote the best-constructed pop songs of 2024. Short n' Sweet is full of jokes that land on the beat, and "Espresso" is a nonsense hook delivered with total conviction. She is the decade's proof that craft and silliness are not opposites.
- Espresso
- Short n' Sweet
- Please Please Please
Doechii
Jaylah Hickmon can rap in six different voices in one verse and does. Alligator Bites Never Heal is a mixtape, not an album, recorded in a live-band jazz-rap style with the seams showing, and it won Best Rap Album, making her only the third woman ever to take that award. She is the best pure performer to come out of American rap this decade.
- Alligator Bites Never Heal
- DENIAL IS A RIVER
- Anxiety
Tyler, the Creator
He started as a shock merchant and became one of the most careful record-makers alive, arranging his own strings and designing his own sleeves. Call Me If You Get Lost is a luxury travelogue with a mixtape host shouting over it; Chromakopia is colder, built around his mother's voice on tape and the fear of turning into your parents.
- Call Me If You Get Lost
- Chromakopia
- Dont Tap The Glass
Morgan Wallen
Commercially the biggest artist in American music for stretches of this decade, and the most awkward fact in it. Dangerous spent its first ten weeks at number one after a video of him using a racial slur had him pulled from every major radio chain in the country. His records are hip-hop-inflected, hook-heavy and enormously effective, and his career proved that radio and awards no longer decide anything.
- Dangerous: The Double Album
- One Thing at a Time
- I'm the Problem
Zach Bryan
A Navy sailor who recorded songs on a phone in a barracks and put them on YouTube. He never sanded the edges off: the vocals crack, the band sounds like a room, and the words are about small towns, dead relatives and bad decisions. His self-titled album had the biggest streaming week any rock record had ever had, and "I Remember Everything" topped four different Billboard charts at once.
- American Heartbreak
- Zach Bryan
- I Remember Everything
Shaboozey
Collins Obinna Chibueze is the son of Nigerian immigrants, raised in Virginia, and he spent a decade making records that were too country for rap radio and too rap for country radio. "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" tied the longest run at number one in Hot 100 history. He appeared on Cowboy Carter the same year, which is not a coincidence.
- A Bar Song (Tipsy)
- Where I've Been, Isn't Where I'm Going
Karol G
Carolina Giraldo spent years being told reggaeton had no room for a woman at the top. Mañana Será Bonito was the first all-Spanish album by a woman to reach number one on the Billboard 200, and it is a breakup record that moves from bachata to salsa to a huge pop chorus without losing its nerve. She headlines stadiums in two hemispheres.
- KG0516
- Mañana Será Bonito
- Provenza
Peso Pluma
Hassan Kabande Laija sings corridos, the old Mexican ballad form about outlaws and the people who love them, in a thin nasal voice over requinto guitar and tuba, with trap phrasing underneath. Génesis had the biggest week by units any regional Mexican album had recorded. He took a hundred-year-old regional style and made it the sound of teenagers on both sides of the border.
- Génesis
- Ella Baila Sola
- Éxodo
Rosalía
Trained in flamenco, which she takes seriously enough to break. Motomami is reggaeton and industrial noise and a voice that can do palmas and Auto-Tune in the same bar. LUX, in 2025, is an eighteen-track record with the London Symphony Orchestra sung in more than a dozen languages. No other pop star this decade has taken bigger swings and landed more of them.
- Motomami
- LUX
- SAOKO
Central Cee
The most exportable rapper Britain has produced. His delivery is conversational and unhurried, sitting behind a drill beat rather than attacking it, and his subject is money and the anxiety that arrives with it. "Sprinter", with Dave, spent ten weeks at number one in Britain, the first UK rap song to reach double figures at the top of that chart.
- Sprinter
- 23
- Can't Rush Greatness
Little Simz
Simbiatu Ajikawo writes like a novelist and raps like she is running out of time. Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, produced entirely by her childhood friend Inflo, has orchestral scores and a narrator and won the Mercury Prize. Her subject is contradiction: shy person, huge voice; British and Nigerian; enormous ambition and no interest at all in the game around it.
- Sometimes I Might Be Introvert
- No Thank You
- Lotus
Playboi Carti
He uses words as texture more than as sentences, and his fans treat him like a cult leader. Whole Lotta Red split his own audience with its distorted, shrieked, punk-tempo production, and then became the template for half the rap made in its wake. MUSIC in 2025 had the biggest streaming week any rap album had had in years.
- Whole Lotta Red
- MUSIC
- Sky
GloRilla
"F.N.F. (Let's Go)" is a woman shouting about being free of a bad relationship over a Hitkidd beat, and it is one of the great joyful records of the decade. She has a Memphis rasp that cuts through anything, a church background that shows up in her phrasing, and a knack for choruses people scream in cars.
- F.N.F. (Let's Go)
- Glorious
- TGIF
Megan Thee Stallion
A technically excellent Houston rapper with a Southern drawl and a freestyle background, who spent the decade being both a superstar and the subject of a national argument after she was shot and then disbelieved. Her 2020 duet with Cardi B had the biggest first streaming week any song had ever had. She finished a university degree while headlining festivals.
- Good News
- Traumazine
Lil Baby
The most consistent voice in trap this decade: a conversational, slightly weary Atlanta flow that sounds like he is thinking out loud. My Turn had the biggest streaming week of 2020 up to that point. "The Bigger Picture", written during the protests that June, is the rare protest record that argues with itself instead of sloganeering.
- My Turn
- The Bigger Picture
- It's Only Me
Pop Smoke
He was famous for about a year and changed a genre. Over drill beats built by producers in London, he brought a huge, gravelly Brooklyn baritone and a sense of menace that did not need volume. He was murdered at twenty in February 2020, and his posthumous album went to number one twice.
- Dior
- Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon
- For the Night
Turnstile
Five men from the Baltimore hardcore scene who added Cure guitars, dance beats and a genuine sense of joy without losing a single breakdown. Glow On got them to number thirty on the album chart; Never Enough got them to number nine and then won Best Rock Album. They are the proof that heavy music did not need to soften itself to get big.
- Glow On
- Never Enough
- BLACKOUT
Fontaines D.C.
Five Dubliners who met studying poetry and started out sounding like a post-punk band shouting about their city. By Romance in 2024 they had become something stranger and bigger: shoegaze textures, hip-hop cadences, dyed hair and stadium-sized choruses. They are the most convincing guitar band to break out of these islands this decade.
- Skinty Fia
- Romance
- Starburster
Wet Leg
Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers wrote "Chaise Longue" as a joke and it made them famous. The trick is that the deadpan hides real songwriting: sharp guitar figures, jokes with sadness under them, and a refusal to explain the punchline. Their second album went straight to number one in Britain in 2025.
- Chaise Longue
- Wet Leg
- Moisturizer
Phoebe Bridgers
She writes about death, ex-boyfriends and driving, in a small voice over guitars that keep getting louder until they scream. Punisher arrived in June 2020 and became the record a lot of people spent lockdown inside. With Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus she formed boygenius, whose album The Record won three Grammys.
- Punisher
- Kyoto
- The Record
boygenius
Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus, three solo songwriters who decided that being in a band together was more fun than competing. The Record has three-part harmony, three completely different writing voices and a lot of jokes. They took three Grammys in 2024, including Best Rock Performance, which nobody expected.
- The Record
- Not Strong Enough
- The Film
MJ Lenderman
He sings about failing men in flat, funny detail over Neil Young guitars, and he plays in Wednesday as well as leading his own band. Manning Fireworks is the best-reviewed American indie record of 2024, and it is essentially a country album made by someone raised on nineties college rock.
- Boat Songs
- Manning Fireworks
- She's Leaving You
Mitski
She writes short, brutal songs about wanting things, and she has spent the decade uneasy about how enormous that has made her online. Laurel Hell went synth-pop; The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We went country and orchestral. Her audience treats her lyrics as scripture, which she has said, politely, is a problem.
- Laurel Hell
- The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We
- Working for the Knife
Sleep Token
An anonymous British band in masks who claim to worship a deity called Sleep, refuse interviews, and mix djent riffs with R&B ballads and piano. It should not work. Take Me Back to Eden made them arena headliners and Even in Arcadia took them to number one in America in 2025, the biggest week a rock album had had in a year.
- Take Me Back to Eden
- The Summoning
- Even in Arcadia
Knocked Loose
The most violent band to reach a mainstream stage this decade. Bryan Garris sings in a strangled shriek, the riffs stop and start like a machine breaking, and they played it on American late-night television without turning anything down. Their 2024 album charted in the top twenty-five and got a Grammy nomination.
- A Different Shade of Blue
- You Won't Go Before You're Supposed To
- Suffocate
Ozzy Osbourne
He invented the job. With Black Sabbath he made the first heavy metal records, and as a solo act he made the genre a mainstream business. Parkinson's disease and a spinal injury took his ability to stand, so on 5 July 2025 he sang from a black throne at Villa Park, three miles from where he grew up, with the original band. He died seventeen days later.
- Paranoid
- Crazy Train
- Patient Number 9
Fred again..
Fred Gibson was a producer for Ed Sheeran and Stormzy before he started making records out of voice notes, video clips and things people said on the internet, chopped into house tracks. The Actual Life albums are a diary with a beat. His Boiler Room set in 2022 spread far outside dance music, and by 2023 he was closing Coachella.
- Actual Life (April 14 – December 17 2020)
- Marea (We've Lost Dancing)
- Actual Life 3
PinkPantheress
She made ninety-second songs in her university bedroom over UK garage and jungle breaks and put them on TikTok, and accidentally taught a generation of teenagers what a two-step beat is. "Boy's a liar Pt. 2" with Ice Spice took the sound into the American top five. Nostalgia for a scene she was too young to attend, done properly.
- to hell with it
- Boy's a liar Pt. 2
- Heaven knows
Tyla
"Water" took amapiano, the log-drum house music built in the townships of Gauteng, and put it in the American top ten. Tyla won the first Grammy ever awarded for Best African Music Performance in February 2024, at twenty-two. She sings quietly on top of a very physical rhythm, which is exactly what amapiano is for.
- Water
- Tyla
- Truth or Dare
Burna Boy
He calls it Afro-fusion, and it is Nigerian Afrobeats with dancehall, reggae and Fela Kuti's politics in it. Twice as Tall won Best Global Music Album in 2021, and "Last Last" was the sound of the following summer in half the world. He filled Madison Square Garden and then a London stadium, which no Nigerian artist had done.
- Twice as Tall
- Love, Damini
- Last Last
Wizkid
Ayodeji Balogun sings softly over Afrobeats rhythms and lets the groove do the persuading. "Essence", with Tems, became the first Nigerian song to chart on the Hot 100, and the remix with Justin Bieber pushed it into the top ten. It is the record that convinced American radio that Lagos was a hit factory.
- Made in Lagos
- Essence
- More Love, Less Ego
Ezra Collective
Five Londoners who met at a youth music charity and play jazz you can dance to: Afrobeat, highlife, reggae and hard bop, driven by Femi Koleoso's drums. Where I'm Meant to Be became the first jazz album ever to win the Mercury Prize, and the acceptance speech was about youth clubs, which is the whole point of the band.
- Where I'm Meant to Be
- Victory Dance
- Dance, No One's Watching
Samara Joy
A singer in her early twenties from a gospel family who sings standards straight, with a huge warm tone and a real understanding of what Sarah Vaughan was doing with a phrase. She won Best New Artist at the Grammys in 2023, which the pop world found baffling and the jazz world found overdue.
- Linger Awhile
- Guess Who I Saw Today
- Portrait
Jon Batiste
A Juilliard-trained pianist from a New Orleans musical family who led a late-night television band, marched with a melodica during the 2020 protests, and then won Album of the Year for a record with gospel, brass-band parade music and hip-hop on it. He is the decade's best argument that the New Orleans tradition is a living thing.
- We Are
- FREEDOM
- World Music Radio
Laufey
An Icelandic-Chinese cellist and pianist who writes original songs that sound like 1955 standards and sells them to teenagers through short-form video. Bewitched won Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. Purists argue about whether it is jazz. Meanwhile a generation of sixteen-year-olds learned what a ninth chord sounds like.
- Everything I Know About Love
- Bewitched
- From The Start
Koffee
Mikayla Simpson was nineteen when she became the youngest person and the first woman to win the Best Reggae Album Grammy, in January 2020. She raps and sings in a bright, clipped delivery over roots and dancehall rhythms, and her songs are about gratitude, which is rarer than it should be.
- Rapture
- Lockdown
- Gifted
Noah Kahan
He writes about New England winters, small towns you cannot leave and the mental health of the people who stay, in a big banjo-and-shout arrangement that a stadium can sing back. Stick Season spent two years growing rather than peaking, largely through short-form video, and turned him from a mid-level singer-songwriter into an arena act.
- Stick Season
- Stick Season (We'll All Be Here Forever)
- Dial Drunk
Maverick City Music
A deliberately multiracial worship collective with a rotating cast, built to break the segregation that had run through American church music for a century. "Jireh", made with Elevation Worship, is eight minutes long and repeats one line about being enough, and it has been streamed hundreds of millions of times. They have won multiple Grammys.
- Jireh
- Old Church Basement
- Kingdom Book One
Silk Sonic
Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak, with Bootsy Collins introducing them, making a Philadelphia soul record as if the last fifty years had not happened. Live instruments, close harmony, string arrangements, and jokes. "Leave the Door Open" won every Grammy it was nominated for. They made one album and stopped, which was the right call.
- An Evening with Silk Sonic
- Leave the Door Open
- 777
BTS
The group that made K-pop a global default rather than a curiosity. "Dynamite" was their first Hot 100 number one, in 2020, and their first single entirely in English. They paused as a group in 2022 for South Korean military service, all seven completed it, and they returned in 2026 with a number one album and single in America on the same week.
- Dynamite
- Butter
- Proof
NewJeans
Five teenagers making K-pop out of UK garage, Jersey club and Baltimore breakbeats, with no key change and no big finish, produced by a team who understood restraint. For two years they made the best pop singles in the world. Then their producer's fight with the parent company turned into a contract war that ran through the Korean courts into 2026 and swallowed the group.
- Ditto
- OMG
- Get Up
Sierra Ferrell
She busked and rode freight trains before anyone recorded her, and she sings old-time country, western swing and Appalachian ballads in a voice that could be from 1935. Trail of Flowers won four Grammys in one night in 2025, sweeping the American roots categories, which is about as loud as the quiet end of country music gets.
- Long Time Coming
- Trail of Flowers
- American Dreaming
The Cure
Robert Smith has been writing beautiful gloom since 1979 and finally released the record about death he had been circling for sixteen years. Songs of a Lost World went straight to number one in Britain in 2024 and swept the Grammy alternative categories in 2026. He also spent the decade publicly fighting Ticketmaster over what fans were being charged to see him.
- Songs of a Lost World
- Alone
- A Fragile Thing
Kaytranada
A Haitian-Canadian producer whose drums always sit slightly off the grid, which is why his tracks feel physically different from everyone else's. Bubba won the first Best Dance/Electronic Album Grammy of the decade, and Timeless in 2024 collected half of contemporary R&B onto one record without losing his signature swing.
- Bubba
- Timeless
- Witchy
Records
Taylor Swift
Folklore
Put it on and there is no drum machine and no chorus designed for a stadium. There is a piano, Aaron Dessner's guitars, and stories about people who do not exist: a teenage love triangle told from three sides, a woman who inherited a house and threw parties in it. It was announced in the morning and out by midnight, and it won Album of the Year. The biggest pop star alive had made a record for headphones.
The Weeknd
After Hours
A concept record about a man in a red jacket destroying himself in Las Vegas, and also the home of the biggest chart song in Hot 100 history. "Blinding Lights" is a-ha's synth pulse played straight, with a chorus that lifts like a car cresting a hill. The rest is darker and slower and worth staying for. It sold 444,000 copies in a week the month the world shut down.
Dua Lipa
Future Nostalgia
Eleven songs, no filler, every one built on a bassline. "Don't Start Now" struts, "Physical" sprints, "Levitating" floats. It is a disco record released the week the clubs closed, which turned it into the thing people played in kitchens for two years. The best pure pop album of the decade's first half and the one that made everyone else start using live bass again.
Fiona Apple
Fetch the Bolt Cutters
The percussion is furniture, walls and dog bowls. The dogs are on the record. Apple sings about being talked over, bullied at school and underestimated for thirty years, and the arrangements circle and stumble on purpose. It sounds like being in a house with somebody who has stopped pretending. Nothing else this decade is built this way.
Bad Bunny
YHLQMDLG
The title is short for a phrase meaning he does whatever he wants, and the record proves it: old-school Puerto Rican perreo, dembow, a punk-adjacent guitar track, and "Yo Perreo Sola", a song about a woman dancing alone because she wants to, with a video of him in drag. It peaked at number two in America, the highest an all-Spanish album had ever gone at that point.
Phoebe Bridgers
Punisher
It starts almost silent and ends with everybody screaming. In between are songs about the end of the world, an ex who is not worth it, and going to Kyoto and feeling nothing. "Kyoto" has the trumpets; "I Know the End" has the apocalypse. Released in June 2020, it became the record a lot of people spent that year inside.
Pop Smoke
Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon
Released five months after he was murdered, and assembled by other people, which you can hear. What survives is the voice: a Brooklyn baritone so heavy it sounds like it is coming through a wall, over the sliding basslines of UK drill. It went to number one twice. It is the sound of a career that was two records from being enormous.
Lil Baby
My Turn
Twenty songs of Atlanta trap delivered in a tired, conversational voice that never oversells anything. It had the biggest streaming week of 2020 to that point and spent five non-consecutive weeks at number one. Play it next to "The Bigger Picture", released four months later, and you can hear a rapper realise he has an audience and decide what to do with it.
Machine Gun Kelly
Tickets to My Downfall
A Cleveland rapper and a blink-182 drummer made a 2003 pop-punk album in 2020 and it went to number one. The choruses are huge, the guitars are compressed to within an inch of their lives, and there is not a single ironic moment on it. It reopened a door the whole decade then walked through.
Playboi Carti
Whole Lotta Red
Twenty-four tracks of distorted, shrieked, deliberately unpleasant rap, dropped on Christmas Day, and half his own fans said it was unlistenable. Two years later everyone was copying it. The vocals are an instrument rather than a message, the beats are closer to hardcore punk than trap, and the whole rage subgenre of the mid-decade starts here.
Bob Dylan
Rough and Rowdy Ways
A seventy-nine-year-old man with a wrecked voice released his best record in decades in June 2020, and the last song is seventeen minutes about the Kennedy assassination and everything American music did afterwards. It name-checks half the people in this project. The band plays quietly behind him like they are in a small room, because they were.
Olivia Rodrigo
Sour
Eleven songs about one break-up, written at seventeen, and it moves from a piano ballad to a screamed pop-punk chorus in two tracks. "good 4 u" borrows Paramore's energy so obviously that Paramore ended up in the credits. What makes it last is the specificity: the driving, the suburb, the exact insult you replay at two in the morning.
Little Simz
Sometimes I Might Be Introvert
It opens with a string section and a choir, and the first line is a rapper explaining that she is a shy person doing a loud job. Inflo produced all of it and it sounds like a film score with a narrator between chapters. "Introvert", "Woman" and "I Love You, I Hate You" are the best three-song run on any British rap record this decade. It won the Mercury Prize.
Turnstile
Glow On
Thirty-five minutes, fifteen songs, and it never stops moving: hardcore breakdowns, dream-pop guitar, a Blood Orange feature, hand percussion, and a chorus on "BLACKOUT" that a festival field can shout. Baltimore hardcore bands are not supposed to get on the album chart. This one did, without turning anything down.
Silk Sonic
An Evening with Silk Sonic
Thirty-one minutes, no wasted seconds, Bootsy Collins introducing every track like a variety show host. Real strings, real horns, close harmony, and two singers audibly enjoying themselves. "Leave the Door Open" won Record and Song of the Year. They made one album and split, which is the most 1974 thing about it.
Tyler, the Creator
Call Me If You Get Lost
DJ Drama shouts over it like it is a 2006 mixtape, which is the joke and also the structure. Underneath, it is one of the most beautifully arranged rap records of the decade: bossa nova, a Gravediggaz sample, boat trips, and a long song in the middle about being the second choice. It won Best Rap Album.
Adele
30
A divorce record with a voice memo to her son in the middle of it, which is a hard thing to sit through and the reason the album is not just a collection of ballads. "Easy on Me" is the single; "To Be Loved" is the one that costs her something. It sold 839,000 copies in America in a week, in a year when nobody was supposed to buy albums.
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra
Promises
One piece, forty-six minutes, nine movements, built on a seven-note figure that never leaves. Sanders, eighty years old, plays around it, sometimes barely at all, and eventually sings. The orchestra swells once and it feels enormous. It is the calmest and strangest record in this chapter, and it was the last major statement of a man who had played with Coltrane.
Jon Batiste
We Are
New Orleans parade drums, a high school marching band, a gospel choir, Zadie Smith reading, and a pianist who trained at Juilliard refusing to pick a lane. It won Album of the Year over Olivia Rodrigo and Kanye West, which almost nobody predicted, and it holds up because it is the sound of a city rather than a genre.
Bad Bunny
Un Verano Sin Ti
Twenty-three songs about a summer and a breakup, with beach sounds between them. It has dembow, Dominican mambo, indie guitars from Bomba Estéreo and The Marías, and a track that argues with Puerto Rico's politics. It was the most consumed album in the United States across all of 2022, in any language, and it never once slows down to explain itself.
Beyoncé
Renaissance
A continuous mix, not a track list. It runs from Chicago house to ballroom to disco to bounce, and the credits are the argument: Honey Dijon, Ts Madison, Big Freedia, the estates of the people who built this music. "BREAK MY SOUL" quotes Robin S. and a New Orleans bounce record in the same breath. It arrived the summer everybody wanted to dance again.
SZA
SOS
Twenty-three tracks and it should not work. "Kill Bill" is a murder fantasy sung sweetly; "Nobody Gets Me" is a country ballad; "F2F" is pop-punk. What holds it together is a voice that admits to things most records edit out. Two and a half years after release it was still taking weeks at number one, which is the streaming era's version of a classic.
Rosalía
Motomami
Songs stop halfway through. A bachata gets interrupted by industrial noise. There is a flamenco palmas breakdown and a Soulja Boy interpolation. It is sixteen tracks in forty-three minutes and it feels like being shown around somebody's brain at speed. The most formally adventurous record any major pop star made this decade.
Big Thief
Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You
Twenty songs recorded in four studios across America over five months, and it sounds like it: some tracks are barn recordings with a fiddle, some are drum machines, some are Adrianne Lenker alone. It should be a mess and instead it is the warmest indie record of the decade. Put on "Simulation Swarm" and then start again from the beginning.
Wet Leg
Wet Leg
It arrived on a wave of hype off one joke song and turned out to have twelve good ones. The guitars are tight and dry, the delivery is deadpan, and under the punchlines there is real anxiety about being young and adrift. "Chaise Longue" is the hook; "Angelica" is the one you keep.
Noah Kahan
Stick Season
Banjo, acoustic guitar and a man shouting about Vermont in the part of autumn after the leaves fall and before the snow. It is about the friends who left, the ones who did not, and going to therapy. It grew for two years instead of peaking, and turned into arenas full of people singing about a state most of them have never visited.
Ezra Collective
Where I'm Meant to Be
Jazz that is unembarrassed about wanting you to dance. Femi Koleoso's drums drive Afrobeat, highlife, reggae and salsa into each other, with guests from Sampa the Great to Emeli Sandé. It became the first jazz album to win the Mercury Prize, and if you have ever thought jazz was homework, this is the record to prove otherwise.
Ethel Cain
Preacher's Daughter
A seventy-five-minute concept album about a girl leaving a Southern town, and it does not end well. Hayden Anhedönia sings in long, slow, hymn-shaped melodies over guitars that take four minutes to arrive. It built a devoted cult without radio, without a major label and largely without interviews. American Gothic as a record.
boygenius
The Record
Three songwriters who could each carry a record, sharing one. "Not Strong Enough" has the harmonies, "Cool About It" has the knife, "Not Strong Enough" won Best Rock Performance. What is striking is how little competition you can hear: they hand each other the good lines. It won three Grammys and made a lot of people jealous.
Zach Bryan
Zach Bryan
Sixteen songs, no polish, a band that sounds like it is in a room with the tape running. Kacey Musgraves, the War on Drugs' Adam Granduciel and Sierra Ferrell all show up. "I Remember Everything" topped four Billboard charts at once, a first. It had the biggest streaming week any rock album had ever had, which tells you how blurred the category had become.
Sleep Token
Take Me Back to Eden
It opens like an R&B ballad and then a djent riff arrives and knocks the furniture over, and it keeps doing that for an hour. The band wear masks and never explain anything. "The Summoning" has three separate endings, one of which is a funk breakdown. It is ridiculous and it is also the record that made a masked British band into arena headliners.
Peso Pluma
Génesis
Requinto guitar, tuba, a thin nasal voice, and songs about people the authorities would like a word with. It is a hundred-year-old Mexican ballad form with trap phrasing laid over the top. It had the biggest week by units any regional Mexican album had recorded, and it won a Grammy. Play "Ella Baila Sola" first and then go backwards.
Karol G
Mañana Será Bonito
The first all-Spanish album by a woman to top the Billboard 200. It is a breakup record that refuses to be miserable: "TQG" with Shakira is two famous women comparing notes on the same subject, and the title track is the pep talk. Bachata, salsa, reggaeton and a huge pop chorus, sequenced like a recovery.
Beyoncé
Cowboy Carter
Twenty-seven tracks, framed as a radio station hosted by Linda Martell, the first Black woman to play the Grand Ole Opry. Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson appear; so do Shaboozey, Tanner Adell and Brittney Spencer. It is a history lesson about who built country music and who got written out, wrapped around "Texas Hold 'Em" and a cover of "Jolene" that changes the ending. It won Album of the Year.
Charli XCX
Brat
Hard, cheap-sounding club synths and a woman being honest about envy, ambition, drugs and whether she wants children. "360" is the pose, "Sympathy is a knife" is the wound, and "I think about it all the time" is the one that stops the party. The lime-green sleeve became a shorthand for a whole summer, which almost obscured that it is a very good album.
Kendrick Lamar
GNX
Twelve tracks, no announcement, out at noon on a Friday. It is a Los Angeles record: Mustard's basslines, a mariachi singer opening it, unknown local rappers given whole verses. "squabble up" debuted at number one and he took the entire Hot 100 top five. Made by a man who had just won the biggest public argument in rap and sounded like he had nothing left to prove.
Tyler, the Creator
Chromakopia
His mother's voice opens and closes it, giving advice he has spent his career ignoring. Released on a Monday with days of warning, it went to number one on four days of tracking. It is about turning thirty-three: fear of children, fear of settling, fear of the version of yourself you built to survive being famous.
Doechii
Alligator Bites Never Heal
Officially a mixtape, which is why its Grammy was such an odd and good result. It is built on live-band jazz-rap with the seams left visible, and Doechii switches voice, accent and character constantly. "DENIAL IS A RIVER" is a therapy session with a comedian's timing. It made her only the third woman to win Best Rap Album.
MJ Lenderman
Manning Fireworks
Songs about men who have run out of excuses, sung flat over guitars that owe everything to Neil Young and Drive-By Truckers. The jokes are very funny and then very sad about four seconds later. "She's Leaving You" has the year's best line about a hotel and a rented car. American indie rock's best record of 2024.
Fontaines D.C.
Romance
The Dublin post-punk band came back with dyed hair, shoegaze guitars and hip-hop cadences, and it is their biggest and strangest record. "Starburster" is built around a panic attack, complete with gasping. "In the Modern World" is enormous and slow. It entered the UK chart at number two and turned them into a festival headline act.
Knocked Loose
You Won't Go Before You're Supposed To
Twenty-seven minutes of the most physically unpleasant music to reach a mainstream chart this decade, and that is meant as praise. The riffs lurch and stop, Bryan Garris shrieks, and "Suffocate" has the pop singer Poppy screaming over the top. They then played it on American late-night television without softening a single second.
The Cure
Songs of a Lost World
Eight songs, forty-nine minutes, and the first vocal does not arrive for three and a half. It is about dying: Robert Smith's parents, his brother, all of us. It is also gorgeous, slow and enormous, and it went straight to number one in Britain sixteen years after their last record. Play "Alone" in the dark and let the intro take as long as it takes.
Kaytranada
Timeless
Twenty-one tracks and half of contemporary R&B on the guest list, all of it pulled into his particular swing, where the drums never sit quite where you expect. Childish Gambino, Anderson .Paak, Tinashe and PinkPantheress all show up and all sound better than usual. It is a party record with an engineer's attention to the low end.
Sabrina Carpenter
Short n' Sweet
Twelve songs, thirty-six minutes, and the jokes land on the beat. "Espresso" is nonsense delivered with total conviction, "Please Please Please" is a plea to a man not to embarrass her, and "Taste" is about meeting the ex. It is an old-fashioned pop album in the best sense: economical, funny, and built by someone who has been doing this since she was fourteen.
Chappell Roan
The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess
Synth-pop with drag-show theatrics and a Missouri girl's homesickness underneath. "Pink Pony Club" is about a gay bar in West Hollywood and the mother who would not understand; "Casual" is about being someone's convenience. It sold slowly for a year and then all at once, which is how the algorithm era rewards a record people actually love.
Billie Eilish
Hit Me Hard and Soft
Ten songs, no singles released in advance, meant to be played start to finish. "BIRDS OF A FEATHER" is the biggest thing on it and "CHIHIRO" is the best: a bassline, a whisper, and a slow reveal. She and Finneas still record in a bedroom, and the record's dynamic range, from almost silence to a physical low end, is the argument for headphones.
Bad Bunny
DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS
Plena, salsa and jíbaro music used as an argument rather than a costume. The record is about Puerto Ricans being priced out of Puerto Rico, and the videos and the sleeve carry the same case. It went to number one in America and then won Album of the Year at the Grammys in February 2026, the first primarily Spanish-language album ever to do so.
Turnstile
Never Enough
Softer in places, stranger in others, with piano, drum machines and a Faye Webster feature next to the breakdowns. It debuted at number nine in America, their first top ten, and won Best Rock Album at the Grammys in February 2026. A hardcore band from Baltimore ended up holding the establishment's biggest rock prize without asking permission.
Sleep Token
Even in Arcadia
Their major-label debut and their first American number one, with 127,000 units, the biggest week any rock album had had in a year. The formula has not changed: piano ballad, R&B vocal, then a riff that arrives like a door being kicked in. Nobody knows their names, they still do not do interviews, and it was the biggest heavy record of 2025.
Rosalía
LUX
Eighteen tracks recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, sung across more than a dozen languages, with Björk and the fado singer Carminho on it. It debuted at number four in America, her first top ten there. Nothing about it is a commercial decision, which is exactly why it works, and it is the strangest record any major pop star released in 2025.
Morgan Wallen
I'm the Problem
Thirty-seven tracks, 493,000 units in its first week, the biggest week of 2025 and its biggest streaming week too. Musically it is exactly what came before: hip-hop-inflected country with big radio hooks, sung in a Tennessee rasp. Commercially it is the clearest possible statement that country is now the most powerful mainstream genre in America.
Various Artists
KPop Demon Hunters (Soundtrack)
The soundtrack to a Netflix animated film about a girl group who fight demons, sung mostly by session vocalists including EJAE. "Golden" went to number one on the Hot 100 in August 2025 and kept returning, then won Best Song Written for Visual Media at the Grammys in February 2026. The biggest pop song of 2025 belonged to characters who do not exist.
Bon Iver
SABLE, fABLE
Justin Vernon spent fifteen years making records about isolation and then made one about being fine. The first half is spare and wintry; the second opens out into horns, gospel backing and something close to joy. "Everything Is Peaceful Love" is the pivot. It is the least fashionable thing an indie elder can do, which is cheer up in public.
Ghost
Skeletá
Their first American number one album. Tobias Forge writes hooks that would work on a 1985 pop-metal record and delivers them in costume as a fictional Satanic pope, and the joke has now lasted nearly twenty years because the songs are genuinely strong. "Satanized" is the one that gets stuck.
Ice Spice
Like..?
Six songs originally, and none of them try very hard, which is the entire appeal. Bronx drill beats built on sped-up samples, and a deadpan delivery that sounds like she is texting. "Munch" and "In Ha Mood" are the ones that turned fifteen seconds of video into a career.
The Mixtape
The decade in tracks, in the order that tells its story. Press Listen on any of them.
Blinding Lights
The WeekndStart where the decade started: a 1985 synth pulse, a chorus that lifts like a car cresting a hill, and the biggest chart song in Hot 100 history. A record about driving around a city at night, released the month nobody could.
Dior
Pop SmokeThat voice over a sliding UK drill bassline. He was twenty when he was killed. Every drill record since is standing on this one.
Fetch the Bolt Cutters
Fiona AppleFurniture for drums, dogs in the room, and a woman who has stopped being polite about being talked over. Nothing else this decade is built like it.
cardigan
Taylor SwiftThe biggest pop star alive going quiet in a cabin, and debuting at number one on both charts in the same week for the first time in history.
The Bigger Picture
Lil BabyWritten in the week after George Floyd was murdered, with protest audio in it, and it argues with itself instead of sloganeering. The protest song 2020 actually produced.
Dynamite
BTSA Korean group singing in English about disco, at number one in America. The door opens here; by 2025 it did not need English at all.
Essence
WizkidWizkid and Tems over a soft Afrobeats groove, the first Nigerian song to chart on the Hot 100. Lagos as a hit factory, on its own terms.
drivers license
Olivia RodrigoA seventeen-year-old, a piano and a suburb, straight to number one, with the whole internet trying to work out who it was about. Pop as a group investigation.
Leave the Door Open
Silk SonicReal strings, close harmony, Bootsy Collins on the intro. A 1974 record made in 2021 that won Record and Song of the Year.
Introvert
Little SimzA string section, a choir, and a rapper explaining she is shy. The best opening track on any British rap album this decade.
BLACKOUT
TurnstileHardcore with Cure guitars and a chorus a festival field can shout. Proof heavy music never needed to soften itself to get big.
Marea (We've Lost Dancing)
Fred again..A voice note from the Blessed Madonna about missing nightclubs, turned into a house record. The lockdown's grief, with a beat under it.
BREAK MY SOUL
BeyoncéRobin S.'s organ stab and a New Orleans bounce record in the same breath, with the pioneers named in the credits. The summer everyone wanted to dance again.
Tití Me Preguntó
Bad BunnyDembow that changes tempo three times and a joke about how many girlfriends he has. From the most consumed album in America that year, in any language.
Kill Bill
SZAA murder fantasy sung like a lullaby. From the album that kept returning to number one two and a half years after it came out.
Ella Baila Sola
Eslabon ArmadoRequinto guitar, tuba, and Peso Pluma's thin nasal voice: the first regional Mexican song in the American top ten, and a hundred-year-old form going global.
Boy's a liar Pt. 2
PinkPantheressTwo minutes, a Y2K garage break, and Ice Spice sounding entirely unbothered. A whole revival of UK dance music, delivered to American teenagers.
Sprinter
Central CeeTen weeks at number one in Britain, the first UK rap song to reach double figures at the top. Two Londoners, conversational and completely in control.
Water
TylaAmapiano's log-drum bassline in the American top ten, sung softly by a twenty-one-year-old from Johannesburg. It won the first Grammy for African music.
I Remember Everything
Zach BryanTwo voices, one bad relationship, no polish. It topped four separate Billboard charts at once, which no song had ever done.
TEXAS HOLD 'EM
BeyoncéBanjo by Rhiannon Giddens, and the first Black woman ever to top a country chart that had existed since 1958. The argument it started is the point.
Not Like Us
Kendrick LamarA Mustard beat, a rap battle ended in public, and a song that became a stadium chant and then a Super Bowl centrepiece. Five Grammys and a lawsuit.
A Bar Song (Tipsy)
ShaboozeyNineteen weeks at number one, tying the all-time record. A Nigerian-American from Virginia making country music the industry did not have a box for.
360
Charli XCXHard club synths, total self-awareness, and the record that turned a colour into a summer. Pop stopped being polished right here.
Espresso
Sabrina CarpenterA nonsense hook delivered with absolute conviction over a soft-disco groove. Craft and silliness are not opposites, and this is the proof.
DENIAL IS A RIVER
DoechiiA therapy session with a comedian's timing over live-band jazz-rap. It made her the third woman ever to win Best Rap Album.
She's Leaving You
MJ LendermanNeil Young guitars and jokes that turn sad four seconds after they land. American indie rock's best song of the year.
Suffocate
Knocked LooseA pop singer screaming over Kentucky metalcore, played on late-night television with nothing turned down. Heavy music refusing to be house-trained.
Alone
The CureThree and a half minutes before the first word. It is a song about everyone dying, and it took them to number one in Britain sixteen years after the last record.
NUEVAYoL
Bad BunnySalsa, a sampled classic, and a record about Puerto Ricans in New York, from the album that became the first primarily Spanish-language Album of the Year winner.
Golden
HUNTR/XThe biggest song of 2025 came from an animated film and was sung by a group that does not exist. Then it won a Grammy. End the mixtape there and let your kids explain it to you.
What Came Next
Nobody knows how this one ends, because it has not. What is already clear is that the container broke. Genre no longer sorts an audience, a language no longer limits a chart, and the biggest song of 2025 was performed by cartoon characters. The chart is now a single global pool, and the things that win in it are the things people keep coming back to rather than the things a radio programmer agreed to play.
Three fights will decide the rest of the decade. The first is about machines: whether a model trained on a century of records owes anything to the people who made them. By 2026 some labels were suing and some were licensing, and courts in different countries were reaching different answers. The second is about tickets, because a court found the biggest promoter in live music to be an illegal monopoly and then the government settled instead of breaking it up. The third is the oldest one in this whole project: whether the people who make the music get paid. Revenue keeps setting records. Most working musicians still cannot live on recorded music alone.
Here is what a hundred years of this suggests. Every single time a new machine arrived, the same thing happened. Radio was going to kill live music. The tape recorder was going to kill the record. Sampling was going to kill songwriting. Napster was going to kill the industry. Each time the machine won, and each time somebody young picked it up and made something nobody had planned for: a Bronx DJ stretching a break, a Detroit kid with a drum machine, a teenager in a bedroom with a laptop and a phone. The technology never decides what the music is. It only decides who gets to make it, and lately the answer has been almost anybody.
So play the records. Argue with the list. Find the one artist in this chapter nobody told you about and follow them backwards through the century until you land somewhere in the 1920s, in a room with a single microphone and someone singing about a flood. That is the whole point of this project, and it is the only instruction that matters.