If you’ve been paying attention, the uppermost reaches of the Billboard Hot 100 look, feel and sound a lot like a default early 2020s TikTok For You Page.
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At the turn of the decade, as the world slowly emerged from the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, terms like “soft life” and “clean girl aesthetic” ran social media algorithms. Users inundated the timeline with attempts at dressing like “old money,” seemingly everybody caught the sourdough baking bug, and influencers championing the “tradwife” movement quickly gained massive followings.
As it always has, pop music responded to and reflected that cultural shift with a notable change in sonics. Taylor Swift’s woodsy Folklore and Evermore albums set the tone in 2020, and a few years later, pop radio was overpopulated with a host of singer-songwriters crafted in her image — in one way or another. Olivia Rodrigo, Gracie Abrams and, more recently, Audrey Hobert have built on the approachable, diaristic, varyingly verbose, sometimes self-deprecating “normal girl” lyricism that Swift traded in for her first few records.
Meanwhile, if you were a pop hitmaker who wasn’t conforming to Swiftian songwriting standards, you were certainly moving away from the trap domination of the late 2010s and going for a more synthy, guitar-driven approach à la Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan. And lest we forget, America’s general conservative swing (which coincided with the resurgence of country music) has also set the stage for country stars to become the new pop girls this past year, from Ella Langley and Megan Moroney to Stella Lefty and, well, Swift again, thanks to her chart-topping, back-to-basics Toy Story 5 hit “I Knew It, I Knew You.”
Mind you, it was still earlier this very decade that rap girls were deemed the “new pop girls,” with Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, Doja Cat and Nicki Minaj all topping the Hot 100 with tracks dripping with venom, sexual liberation and unmistakable Blackness. It felt like Rihanna’s “How could you be so hood?/ But you so f–king pop?” lyric (from 2012’s “Phresh off the Runway”) had come to predict the near future.
But shortly after, the trap-infused, “pussy rap”-centering hip-hop of the late 2010s was almost immediately replaced with clean, safe, guitar-heavy tunes that still mine rock, soul and hip-hop while also softening their edge in favor of a sound tailor-made for unobtrusive listening in an autoplay-driven consumption landscape. In hindsight, songs like “WAP” and “Super Freaky Girl” marked the end of top 40’s fascination with rap this decade — and with Black women in pop not named Beyoncé, Rihanna or SZA. And when Black women leave the room, so do the swag, soul and je ne sais quoi that have kept pop music running for decades on end. Just look at the way Manon Bannerman’s hiatus from KATSEYE has dominated discourse around the group for nearly eight months and counting.
It’s not a coincidence that the phasing out of Black women at the forefront of pop happened alongside the global domination of The Eras Tour, Barbie and more cultural phenomena that ultimately centered white womanhood above all else. And even as the country has gotten more conservative — aesthetically and socio-politically — white pop stars have been allowed the space to challenge some of those tropes. Think Sabrina Carpenter attempting to satirize the male gaze with her Man’s Best Friend album cover, or Olivia Rodrigo (who also frequently celebrates her Filipino heritage) sporting babydoll dresses onstage and releasing searing call-outs like “Serena Joy,” or Slayyyter and Chappell Roan injecting elements of sex positivity and queerness into standard Midwest aesthetics.
But as a new class of pop stars has established themselves as formidable commercial forces across metrics, there’s a glaring absence of Black women. This year, Olivia Dean and RAYE have continued to reign with late 2025 releases, while SZA appeared via Doechii’s late-December surprise “Girl, Get Up,” and a handful of R&B stars and rappers also scored entries this year. But Bella Kay (“iloveitiloveitiloveit”) and PinkPantheress (“Stateside,” with Zara Larsson) were the only Black women in pop to score true breakout hits on the Hot 100 with non-2025 chart holdovers. (Tyla also appeared for two weeks with “She Did It Again” — which is coincidentally also a Larsson duet — and Beyoncé hit the top 40 with the R&B jam “Morning Dew (Donk).”)
By comparison, several rising white pop stars have had massive Hot 100 breakthroughs with 2026 releases — including Hobert, ADÉLA, Slayyyter, Sienna Spiro, Alyssa Grace and Ashe. As it stands, there’s seemingly no avenue for Black women to exist at the forefront of pop music, let alone challenge its dominant aesthetics within the existing framework. So, this year, the Black pop girls have done what Black folks always do — make a space where there is none.
Earlier this month, after riding a slow and steady commercial resurgence with 2024’s “Nasty” and the following year’s Disco Lines remix of “No Broke Boys,” Tinashe finally scored her first Billboard 200 top 10 album with Popstar (No. 6). The 16-track set is a truly thrilling journey through the relentless ambition and restless psyche of a young Black woman who’s dedicated her life to navigating the notoriously tumultuous music industry.
From an Arca-produced opener (“Sunglasses”) to rock-infused R&B power ballads (“I’d Rather Be Alone”), hyperpop hysteria (“Cloud 9”), Nine Inch Nails-meets-Shania Twain knockouts (“Nobody Wanna Dance Anymore”) and runway-ready dance-pop anthems (“Melatonin”), Popstar finds Tinashe acting as her own throughline. Sure, she’s pushing herself into new sonic spaces, but they all feel like natural offshoots of the sound she’s built over the past 15 years; that continuity ensures the authenticity of her expressions of those sounds.
Black performers carry a very specific quality of soul and swagger with them no matter what genre their art is slotted into. That’s the energy that evokes hints of gospel in Tinashe’s “Cloud 9” vocal performance, captures hip-hop-specific braggadocio in “Crash Out” and “Pillow Fight,” and brings even more gravity to the cutting lyricism of “Twentyfive Eight.”
And as its title implies, the whole thing is still undoubtedly pop; not only is the album in direct conversation with the very concept of a “pop star,” but it’s also running the current zeitgeist with everyone from Charli xcx to Clairo to Tove Lo to even Duo from DuoLingo rallying around it. “Uplift Tinashe” became the rallying cry of Popstar release week — and it worked. (The album is yet to produce a Hot 100 hit, though if it continues to grow, “Melatonin” could be on its way.) Now is the time to apply that same energy to the litany of Black pop girls who are making pop fun again and helping it move away from the slow, unsexy and at times downright boring place that it’s currently in.
“As a black woman, I fought [hard as f—k], for years, to be considered ‘pop’ by my label without changing my sound because of the inevitable ceiling I felt was put on the urban and rhythmic departments,” Tinashe reflected in a 2020 post on X (formerly Twitter). “Then the pop department didn’t find my music acceptable, so I molded it for them [and] in an attempt to make my sound more pop department friendly, the public rejected it, I lost my spirit/inspiration as a creative [and] had to part ways with the label entirely. Luckily, I’ve thrived as an independent artist, but I know firsthand how insidious [and] traumatizing this is.”
The concept of genre in American music has always been explicitly tied to race. After all, we’re not even 40 years removed from Billboard officially retiring “Hot Black Singles” as the name of its Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs Chart. White pop stars can pull from R&B vocal stacking techniques and sing over trap beats and gospel samples and still be called pop, while a Black pop girl could drop a 1:1 Katy Perry cover and still be slotted under R&B on DSPs.
Take Jae Stephens and Chxrry, for example, two rising Black pop girls who dropped their debut albums this year. Both are pop records whose R&B elements seemingly supersede their claim to the pop label; case in point, Chxrry’s LP is listed as “R&B/soul” on DSPs. Stephens’ bold Audacity draws directly from Britney Spears and Janet Jackson-esque Y2K pop, while Chxrry’s darker U, Me & My Ego finds her singing over rattling synths that wouldn’t sound out of place on a BLACKPINK project. “F—k a pop star, baby, I’m a cinema,” she proclaims in album opener “Blockstar”; why clamor for the “pop star” label when you can reject it entirely in favor of something even grander? Those lyrics ring especially poignant in the intersecting contexts of Black pop stars historically having to be larger-than-life and a modern market that primarily trades on how much the average white listener 1) can relate to you and 2) likes you. (Just look at how Doechii pulled out all the stops — from hot pink body paint to high-octane choreography — for her Daisy Chain Fields set, a reminder of how hard Black performers have to go to prove that they belong at the forefront of spaces led mostly by white artists.)
“I think pop made by Black girls is always gonna have that extra flair that blurs the lines a bit in a way that’s only accepted as pop when white girls do it (could [Sabrina Carpenter’s] ‘Bed Chem’ be an example lol?),” mused Stephens on X in November 2024. “We should be allowed to explore that nuance in the same way instead of automatically being boxed as R&B!”
Ravyn Lenae — who earned her first Hot 100 top five hit last year with “Love Me Not,” almost a decade after she signed to Atlantic Records — brought this discourse to a fever pitch during the promotional campaign for her third studio album Blue Island. The album expands the Chicago-raised artist’s R&B foundation (which she reaffirms with standouts like “Never Let Me Go”) with arena-ready pop hooks (“Handle”), sad girl dancefloor bangers (“Saturday Night”) and brash, unpredictable amalgams of electronic and indie pop (“Potential”). And in her live shows, like her terrific Governor’s Ball 2026 set, Lenae’s animated facial expressions bring to mind one of pop’s most important foremothers: Diana Ross.
The success of “Love Me Not” brought along a lot of discourse that picked apart Lenae’s racial identity, as if she wasn’t a real person with her own thoughts and feelings and experiences. Regrettably, the song’s smashing success also brought raised commercial expectations that Blue Island failed to live up to, as the album missed the Billboard 200 entirely. “Love Me Not,” which hit No. 2 on Pop Airplay, also raised the question of Black women operating in lanes that are, at least contemporarily, coded as “white.” When the song popped off on TikTok on its road to over one billion official on-demand U.S. streams, many users were shocked to find that Lenae was Black. In fact, some thought she was British! The album’s thesis, “Babygirl,” features Doechii — one of the few Black, especially dark-skinned, women to find meaningful, sustained Top 40 success in the post-SZA landscape. “Breakin’ them walls/ Babygirl, why go through the window?/ Could never be wrong even if you don’t go whеre everybody goеs?” Ravyn coos in the chorus.
Part of the Blue Island discourse was predicated on the language some Black artists sometimes use to express their frustration around their art being inaccurately labeled. Words and phrases like “boxed in” imply that R&B is a stifling genre despite it arguably being the most expansive sonic and cultural space in existence. And, understandably, R&B diehards have watched the industry co-opt the genre’s arrangements and vocal stylings — both of which are directly sourced from the overall Black music tradition — and give them to white artists, while continuing to strip investment in the Black artists who pioneered those approaches. But two things can be true at the same time: R&B is far from a restrictive space to be “boxed” into, and it’s also important to accurately categorize music based on its sonics and signifiers and not the color of the performer. It’s only a disservice to true R&B acts when they are lumped together with artists explicitly working in other traditions.
Kelela expertly navigated this conversation while promoting her immersive New Avatar, which surveys indie rock, shoegaze and grunge from an R&B vantage point. “What I’ve done is find my way on a landscape that isn’t typically approached with R&B vocals and maybe has some intersections that haven’t been explored as much,” she told BBC Radio 1xtra this summer. “It’s expanding rock; I feel like the guitar genres are more rigid, more narrow than R&B. Guitars have been in R&B for a long time, and this is all Black music.” New Avatar turns rock on its head and reclaims Black women’s space in the genre the same way her Raven album did for the dance arena in 2022. Featuring fellow genre-agnostic Black women like PinkPantheress and Fousheé, the 12-track set is one of the most enrapturing listens of the year. And even though New Avatar only reached No. 34 on Top Album Sales, clearly the sound is resonating with people, given that the accompanying tour is selling out theatres across the country.
This year’s Black pop girl renaissance is also global. Tyla helped set the tone when she announced the title of her sophomore studio album at the 2026 Grammys: A*Pop. Though Tyla has struggled to fully articulate exactly how she interprets the title, the album offers a solid attempt at a definition. A*Pop is pop music through an explicitly African lens. Afropop bangers like “Chanel” and “Is It” live peacefully alongside steamy pop duets (“She Did It Again”), sweltering R&B tunes (“Hot Tubs”) and a closing section that circles back to Tyla’s amapiano roots.
Ayra Starr similarly expanded her sonic profile on the sleek Starrgirl, which finds her reveling in dance-pop (“Where Do We Go”) and bringing Caribbean styles like bouyon a bit closer to the mainstream (“Mrs. Paper). British girl group FLO took a successful stab at pop with its buzzy hit “Leak It,” and other global stars like Moliy, Yseult, Amaarae, Bree Runway, Leigh-Anne, Theodora, Shenseea and Aya Nakamura continue to redefine what “pop” can look, sound and feel like — and who can lay claim to that label. These acts all have starry, limitless ceilings, but they’ve each somewhat struggled to secure and maintain a stable Stateside commercial foothold as they move from project to project.
One would think the historic, Grammy-winning success of SZA’s SOS would encourage labels to invest in Black women who can thrive in alternative spaces. But that would mean no longer propping SZA up as the exception to the rule — and we know how that goes. Luckily, the voice behind some of the biggest crossover hits of the decade has dedicated her Instagram page to platforming the next generation of stars. Among those artists are English singer-songwriter Flowerovlove, Canadian-born singer-songwriter Girlsweetvoiced and rising North London pop princess Natanya.
It’s quickly becoming a true golden age for Black pop girls, but few of them are getting the level of attention and success that their music and artistry generally merit. RYL0 is doing excellent work bridging the electronic and pop worlds; Hemlocke Springs is one of the most enthralling new songwriters right now; iKeda is firing off dope fusions of dancehall and electro-pop; Alemeda is bringing a youthful pop-punk energy to TDE and Chenayder is infusing her explorations of bedroom pop and shoegaze with neo-soul. And that’s not to mention Momo Boyd killing it as both a soloist and a member of her sibling band Infinity Song.
U.K. singer-songwriter Rachel Chinouriri is one of the most long-lamented “should be bigger” artists of the bunch. On Friday (Oct. 16), the Brit Award-nominated artist will release her sophomore studio album I Think I Spoke Too Soon. Two weeks earlier (Oct. 2), she confronted an X user who posted a video tearing down a promotional poster for Spoke Too Soon, writing, “It’s tough enough for Black artists in pop to get exposure but ripping down a poster I paid a lot of money and put 10 years of hard work convincing people I’m good enough for this marketing… is just quite mean.” This is the reality Black women in pop deal with: After convincing the machine that they’re worth even a fraction of the investment given to their white counterparts, they then have to face a buying public that has yet to truly wrestle with its own implicit biases and misogynoir.
Which is not to say there aren’t currently Black women slaughtering the pop scene right now. PinkPantheress, Bella Kay, Olivia Dean and RAYE all had massive hits in the past year and will almost definitely have major moments at next February’s Grammys. But it’s important to note that all three ladies benefit from not being immediately coded as Black by the general public, despite them never running away from and always embracing their complete racial identities. Part of that is due to colorism and their mixed-race identities, and part of that is due to their respective sounds.
“People are less willing to listen to electronic music that is made by a Black woman. That’s just fact,” PinkPantheress told The Hollywood Reporter last year. “There’s some considerations I would like to get as an artist which I might not be getting right now, since maybe it’s harder to put me into a genre.” Meanwhile, the most charming part of RAYE’s “Where Is My Husband!” is her Ghanaian grandmother’s cameo; Dean dedicated her best new artist Grammy win — and basically every “Carmen” performance — to her late Guyanese grandmother and Kay reflected on being both Black and mixed-race on “A Father’s Lament.”
Very little of this conversation is new. Whitney Houston was infamously booed when her name was announced as a nominee at the 1989 Soul Train Music Awards, because some in the Black community felt her sound was shifting too “pop,” to the point of selling out. Defending herself, Houston told Essence the following year: “If you’re gonna have a long career, there’s a certain way to do it, and I did it that way. I’m not ashamed of it.”
Of course, she was referencing the necessity of worldwide appeal — even if that meant toning down the soul and gospel elements of her vocal performance — to ensure career longevity. But the point is that the word “pop” was still considered a bad word. “Pop” meant white, which meant the opposite of soul and Blackness at large. For today’s Black women in pop, nearly 40 years after that Soul Train moment, “pop” is a word to be embraced, word to Tinashe. And, like Houston, these women are not allowing their Blackness to be questioned in that pursuit. We can’t afford to wait on institutions built on exclusion or mechanisms that no longer exist to catch up to what these ladies are doing — let’s uplift them now.
Whitney was Black and pop, as were Dionne Warwick and Patti LaBelle before her. And Janet Jackson alongside her. And Beyoncé, Rihanna, Santigold, Dawn Richard, Lizzo, SZA, Doja Cat and Chlöe after her. All these ladies existed in multiple spaces, and their pop appeal doesn’t negate the other arenas in which they thrive. For decades, we’ve watched white artists freewheel across genres and be respected, awarded and accurately categorized with each pivot. Black women, and Black artists in general, deserve that same freedom and respect. After all, we’re all dancing and singing in the house that Black music built.