It’s nearly summertime, and we’re all doomed.
So says Charli XCX, who’s abandoned the party in her new music and trained her gaze instead on death and destruction: “The world is gonna end, no hope for any of it,” she sings in “SS26,” her latest single. Charli and preeminent pop divas Olivia Rodrigo and Ariana Grande are releasing some of the bleakest music of their careers just in time for summer, the traditional season for party anthems and celebratory bangers.
Charli is facing down the end of the world on her newly announced album “Music, Fashion, Film,” whose cover art is a black-and-white photo of aging legends of the respective fields: John Cale, Marc Jacobs and Martin Scorsese. Based on their glowering expressions, the trio seems to agree with the assertion Charli makes in her new single — “nothing’s gonna save us, not music, fashion or film.”
Where on “Brat” Charli wanted to “dance all night” in sweaty euphoria, in her new music, Charli sounds like she’s lost hope. In “Rock Music,” the first single off her new album, Charli says she thinks “the dance floor is dead.” On “SS26,” she splits the difference between boredom and resignation about the impending apocalypse: “We’re walking on a runway that goes straight to hell.”
Charli isn’t pretending the world’s ills are curable through a sweaty night dancing with friends. The US is waging war in Iran. The economy is on the verge of what feels like constant collapse. Sweltering nights are just one more sign that the planet’s climate is overheating. Club classics can’t do much about that.
Rodrigo, whose previous songs about love have skewed grungy and triumphant, has soured on romance in her new summer singles. Love is a sickness and lust will kill you, she announces on her forthcoming album, “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love.”
“It don’t matter how your love feels anymore/It’ll never be the cure,” she sings.
And Grande, she of powerful belts, sticky choruses and ear-splitting whistle tones, sounds downright lethargic on “Hate That I Made You Love Me.” “It’s all bad news,” she drones in her most downbeat single in nearly 15 years of pop superstardom.
Fans don’t quite know what to make of the gloomy dissonance. Many listeners who dug the grinding, club-ready sound of “Brat” are cooler toward the simplistic, slower beat and elementary lyrics of “Rock Music.” (Anthony Fantano of the viral Needle Drop online series and devoted Charli fan called it “disappointing.” Another self-professed fan bluntly said it was “straight-up rotten ass cheeks.”) Grande’s new single is so subdued and vocally bland that New York Magazine deemed it “one of her worst.”
With the rejection of the dance floor dies the hope that one of these women will produce the song of the summer, a traditionally upbeat, pool party-friendly earworm. A few summers ago it may’ve been “Espresso” or “Not Like Us” or “Hot to Go!” A song about “real incestuous vibes,” like Charli’s “Rock Music,” is a harder sell. It’s possible, too, that listeners don’t want a frothy summer anthem anymore, that it’s not an honest representation of their bleak present.
As the young pop superstars abandon partying down for just feeling down, their existential crisis presents an opportunity for an inexhaustible 67-year-old. Madonna has promised a sequel to “Confessions on a Dance Floor,” her 2005 club odyssey, in early July.
“The dance floor is not just a place…..it’s a threshold,” said Madonna in an Instagram post for a credit card rewards company. “A ritualistic space where movement……replaces language.”
But the other major pop stars of the day don’t seem interested in catharsis this summer. They’re not indulging escapist fantasies in their new music but planting themselves in reality with their listeners, where the vibe is negative and the end feels inevitable.
Madonna has made music through various calamities that at the time felt world-ending — wars, political unrest, financial collapse — so the terrors of 2026 don’t seem to faze her.
“If your Dance floor feels dead,” she wrote in another post, “Maybe you’re playing the wrong music.”
Scottie Andrew, CNN
