"It Will Rain" from one of the Twilight movies has always been one of my favorite Bruno Mars songs, so I'm happy that he got back in his soundtrack power ballad bag for this song. A lot of duets between two pop superstars kind of wither under pressure but I like that Bruno and Gaga did something like this that taps into their shared love of '70s schmaltz. It's kind of funny that "Die With A Smile" is practically the only thing involved with Joker: Folie a Deux that's commercially successful, and it's not on any of the 3 albums released in conjunction with the movie (the soundtrack album, the score, and Gaga's fairly worthless surprise album Harlequin). Here's the 2024 singles Spotify playlist I update every month. 

Sabrina Carpenter has had a remarkable year that's included three #1 hits on pop radio. So far "Taste" hasn't quite broken into the top 10 but it's my favorite of her 2024 singles. I've been listening to a lot of One Direction this week after Liam Payne's death, and Julian Bunetta made so many great shiny guitar pop songs for 1D and "Taste" is his one Sabrina Carpenter production that gets closest to that vibe. I guess it kinda makes sense, then, that "Taste" is her biggest hit in the UK, with 8 weeks and counting at #1. 

Artists have been extending the lifespan of an album with deluxe versions more and more in recent years, but it really feels like there's been an insane glut of deluxe albums in the last couple months, several major ones every week. Victoria Monet's deluxe version of Jaguar II is probably the most essential of them because she essentially added a whole extra album, 10 new songs, although it's kind of a playful set with minor works like the very funny "Dick At Nite," collaborations, and a Sade cover. The Usher duet feels like the most significant addition to her catalog, but there's multiple potential singles on there. I like that DJ Camper is in her stable of producers now, he's been doing consistently great work for over a decade. 

"You Should Probably Leave" from his last album is probably my favorite thing Chris Stapleton's ever done, so I like that something with a similar brooding groove is the second single from Higher. 

With the dearth of girl groups in modern R&B, I'm glad that someone like Kandi Burruss, a member of Xscape who wrote huge hits for Destiny's Child and TLC, is trying to revive the tradition by mentoring a new group and writing songs for them. "Sober" is very promising, hope it's the beginning of a big career, the name PsiRyn is a little goofy but it's fine. 

Chloe X Halle's Ungodly Hour is probably the best R&B girl group album of the last decade, but they pretty quickly moved onto solo projects when Halle Bailey got The Little Mermaid gig and Choe Bailey released "Have Mercy." There was an assumption that Halle would be making more wholesome all-ages solo music while Chloe did the sexy clubby stuff, and her first couple non-film soundtrack solo singles bore out that impression. But "Because I Love You" is a step more into the grown-and-sexy lane and it's really good, feels like the closest either of them have come to Ungodly Hour in the last few years. 

I absolutely love the piano sound on this song. It's funny that Muni Long has made pop and country and all these different kinds of music for the first decade of her career but she's an absolute natural with straight up R&B. 

Neon Trees are one of the definitive two hit wonders of the 2010s, but I wish they had more sustained success because they've got a lot of songs just as good as "Animal" and "Everybody Talks." 

Luke Bryan is one of those Nashville stars that doesn't write much of his own material, and I don't particularly like his voice. So even when he occasionally releases a single I like, I start wishing someone else recorded it, but he does well with his one. 

I'm firmly on the record as preferring The Weeknd's sellout pop stuff with Max Martin to his edgy mixtape stuff, but man this is such a dud, just garbage from the first listen. 

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