The Gen-Z writing style (with Bella Kay)
Bella Kay almost shelved the song "iloveitiloveitiloveit." Instead she posted the song to TikTok and it changed her life. The song became a top 20 hit and launched her music career. Bella Kay joins ho...
10 Marras 43min
A unified popstar theory from Tinashe
On her eighth studio album Popstar, the criminally underrated multihyphenate Tinashe finally asserts herself as a Main Pop Girl, crafting a record about what it means to be a celebrity in the modern e...
3 Marras 46min
The 'bummer hope' of midwest emo (ft. Yvette Young and Mike Kinsella)
A few months ago, Nate came across a glittering guitar riff unlike anything he had ever heard before; it managed to perfectly balance careful optimism with plaintive melancholy, stirring the spirit. T...
27 Loka 30min
The rise of surrealist pop: KATSEYE and ADÉLA
The music of global girl group KATSEYE might be confusing on first listen. A less-generous read might consider their songs to be rudimentary: the lyrics are mostly nonsense, the instrumentals evoke le...
20 Loka 48min
Why we need bad music
For the 500th(!) episode of Switched on Pop, Charlie and Nate try to answer the question that has stumped critics and philosophers since the dawn of sound: does bad music exist? Their quest to answer ...
14 Loka 1h 1min
Has Taylor Swift jumped the shark?
One year after the release of her twelfth studio album The Life of a Showgirl, Taylor Swift is back with an encore. Specifically, The Encore, four tracks that have polarized critics and Swifties alike...
6 Loka 47min
Carly Rae Jepsen’s pop pedagogy
Five years after her first appearance on Switched on Pop, Carly Rae Jepsen returns to the podcast to talk all things Day and Night, her latest album. Born out of Swedish disco, big emotion, and substa...
29 Syys 49min
Tove Lo wants her music to sound out of control (ft. Tove Lo)
Swedish singer-songwriter Tove Lo’s new album ESTRUS can be summarized in the opening lyrics of the album’s closing track, “source of life”: “Feral, fragile, numb, ecstatic / sad, euphoric, catatonic ...
22 Syys 38min
