Last year after Olivia Rodrigo's "Good 4 U" hit, I wrote a Spin piece about one of my favorite topics, rock songs by pop singers, hoping that we'd get a wave of guitar-driven Top 40 confections like we did after "Since U Been Gone." So far that wave has been hit and miss -- I don't really like Gayle's "abcdefu" but her other songs are pretty good, the Machine Gun Kelly-adjacent pop punk revival has had a mild impact on pop radio, and the great rock songs on Halsey's album didn't get the attention they deserved. But "She's All I Wanna Be" is a gem -- Tate McRae's breakthrough "You Broke Me First" felt like MOR pop with a Billie Eilish-derived vocal style, but her voice sounds much better on a big gleaming Greg Kurstin guitar pop jam. Here's the 2022 singles Spotify playlist I update every month. 

One Direction was also very often in my beloved guitar pop niche, and Harry Styles's solo career has been a little more dad rock but also pretty consistently excellent. "As It Was" is notable as probably as maybe the fastest Hot 100 #1 with live drums in years, if not decades, kind of emulating the vague "Take On Me" '80s synth pop vibe of "Blinded By The Lights" with a slightly more low key, handmade aesthetic. 

I really liked If Orange Was A Place, the solo EP that Tems released last year after the success of "Essence" that made me wonder if it would be Tems rather than Wizkid that would become a longterm fixture on American R&B radio. But as it turned out, an older song Tems released back in 2020 has really become her big follow-up to "Essence." 

The success of Tems and other Afrobeats artists is just part of an interesting moment where American rap/R&B radio sounds more international than perhaps ever before right now. A big driver of that is drill, which started in Chicago, then took on a new form in London, which then became the current sound of New York. Brooklyn drill hits take a lot of their production cues from UK drill, which to my ears always sounded more like a descendant of previous British rap movements like grime than Chicago drill, but up to this point we've mostly gotten Americans like Pop Smoke and Fivio Foreign rapping over those UK-influenced beats. So it feels notable that JNR Choi is from London and we've now got a full-fledged British rap song all over American rap radio -- there's a remix with Gunna that's definitely helping but I don't consistently hear that version on the radio as much as the original. "To The Moon" is also funny because it's built on a loop of unknown British singer Sam Tompkins covering a song from the first Bruno Mars album. So circa 2022 retro R&B Bruno is on the airwaves right alongside a remnant of early 2010s pop crooner Bruno. 

A lot of established stars have jumped on drill beats right now with varying levels of musical comfort or commercial success, but Cardi B feels like one person who's still so well keyed into the energy of young New York that it just sounds completely natural for her to storm into the middle of a posse cut with 3 young drill rappers and steal the spotlight. "Shake It" is 1 minute 58 seconds and has 4 rappers on it, so the mic is getting passed around like a hot potato, but it somehow works for the whole thing to dart in and out so quickly. 

My wife loves Florence + The Machine and has made me a fan too over the past few years, especially after we saw them live in 2018 and it was just an amazing show. I was a little skeptical to hear that the ubiquitous Jack Antonoff worked on the new album, but all four of the advance singles from Dance Fever have been great. The one that's stuck with me the most has been "Free," partly because of the video, which co-stars Bill Nighy and is quite cute and charming. But then the song's bridge, and the final shot of the video, which is followed by a note that it was filmed in Ukraine last November, before the war broke out, really kind of hit me with this emotional gut punch. 

I don't know why Shawn Mendes stopped working with Teddy Geiger, that was really the magic combination behind all his best music. But "When You're Gone" is pretty good, a little mellower than his other uptempo songs but has a nice bittersweet melody. 

Fergie's "Glamorous" is a classic and I kind of like that she's finally being treated properly as white rap royalty being sampled on someone else's #1. Harlow still has this tedious careerist vibe that seeps out here and there in every verse but he's definitely found his footing as a hitmaker, I get why this is the one of his last few solo singles that blew up, although that "sweet sweet semen" line is pretty terrible. 

A couple months ago I grudgingly admitted to enjoying one of Yung Bleu's many songs that have been ubiquitous on the radio, and another one has grown on me since then. I like how much empty space there is in this song in between the sections with drums, and his voice sounds good contrasting with Kehlani's. 

"Pop Music" is not my favorite song from Dope Don't Sell Itself but it's a fun one, 2 Chainz is one of the few established rappers who has just the right energy for a Beatking track. 

I'd seen Bring Me The Horizon's name around for years without actually hearing their music, but I'd seen descriptors like 'metalcore' and assumed there music was pretty heavy. So I was a little surprised when I heard a song on the radio that sounded like The Kid Laroi that turned out to be Bring Me The Horizon, this shit is terrible. 

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