On Lorde’s 2021 album Solar Power, the New Zealand pop star ditched fame. She threw her phone in the sea, sang “if you’re looking for a saviour, well, that’s not me” and advised looking to nature for answers instead. But her sun-bleached third album proved divisive, so much so that just a year later, she placated fans by promising she was making “bangers” again. This April, her comeback single What Was That returned to the incandescent synth-pop of her beloved 2017 album Melodrama; her new album Virgin opens: “It’s a beautiful life so why play truant? / I jerk tears and they pay me to do it.” Lorde was back roaming the streets, swapping Auckland fishing trips for New York Citi Bike rides, addicted to her phone again, playing Glastonbury at 11.30am and then disappearing to get high at Four Tet.
Where Solar Power was introverted, Virgin is hungry for experience and connection, sticky with sweat and other bodily fluids. But it’s also still preoccupied with the cost of finding fame at the age of 16 and how to carry it at age 28. The erratic album has divided critics again: is the sometimes spindly sound and lyrical status anxiety another attempt by Lorde to push listeners away? Or are the intermittent Melodrama 2.0 bangers her giving in to expectation? Ever alert to her own myth, she said recently: “I just am this person who’s meant to make these bangers that fuck us all up.”
While Lorde is figuring out her relationship to celebrity, an emerging group of pop stars are striking straight for its jugular – hungry for success and toying with its aesthetics – no matter what cautionary tales previous generations of superstar have been telling them about the perils of your dream coming true.
Just a few years ago, Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift dialled down the intensity of their work as they’ve sought privacy and reckoned with wounds sustained from lifelong visibility. Justin Bieber has stressed how negatively media invasion has affected his life. After her Vegas and Munich residencies, Adele has split the scene. And the revelations about the abuse of Britney Spears prompted a host of documentaries in which 90s and Y2K pop stars including Robbie Williams aired their damage.
These stories are in stark contrast to the playfulness of the current moment. Unsurprisingly, Brat parted the waves. In the video for lead single Von Dutch, Charli xcx led a bloody fight against a paparazzo stalking her around an airport – something unlikely to have happened to the still not-quite-mainstream pop star before the release of her sixth album. Then Brat became a phenomenon and Charli a household name. Commanding, spontaneous and feckless, she made being a celebrity look like a monstrously good time that she couldn’t get enough of. Charli admitted to calling the paps on herself and exposed the lie of humility among her peers: “It would almost be seen as inauthentic now for a musician to say, ‘I want to be famous’, because it’s supposed to be all about the art,” she said in a conversation with actor/model/It-girl Julia Fox.
Pop stardom has always been about the art of being famous, one that can take many forms. Retreating from it is its own kind of pose; admitting to its seductions in the slipstream of its deserters may feel somewhat subversive. Lorde’s album campaign drew nakedly from the Brat playbook, and she clearly wanted some of the freedom and notoriety her Girl, So Confusing collaborator had found. Renée Rapp’s return flaunts her hedonistic A-list life; former Little Mix member Jade launched her career with the fantastically nuts Angel of My Dreams, which lurched through her love-hate relationship with stardom: “When the camera flashy, I act so happy / I’m in heaven when you’re looking at me,” she sang, and also battled paps in the video.
The year’s breakout pop star, Addison Rae, has been candid about pursuing fame at any cost. She found attention as a dancer on TikTok, a start that invited scepticism on her move into pop, and how a figure some perceived as culturally lightweight won patronage from more left-field acts in Charli xcx and Arca. She told the New York Times of her dance days: “When I reflect back on that time, I’ve recognised how much choice and taste is kind of a luxury.” Rae grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana, and her parents had a troubled relationship. She said she had been “strategic” with building a career to change her situation. “It was a lot about like: ‘How am I just going to get out of here?’ It wasn’t about like: ‘Let me show the intricacies of myself right now.’”
As a pop star, Rae’s image is startlingly close to that of vintage Spears: low-rise skirts, dancer’s abs, full choreo. They share Louisiana roots and comparable origin stories. But the distance between where their respective escape routes landed them stretches the whole arc of how fame, once ordained by record label boardrooms, can now be self-determined. At 43, Spears may be freed from her abusive conservatorship arrangement but exists in a sort of purgatory. Rae, 24, has found freedom and taunts her detractors: “When you shame me, it makes me want it more.”
In that sense, pop stars admitting their desire to be famous also feels wildly appropriate to the times: more than half of gen Z aspire to be influencers (and 41% of adults) according to a 2023 survey by Morning Consult. When Eilish, Swift and Lorde retreated from celebrity, it chimed with the hopeless feeling of the first Trump presidency – a time Pitchfork recently called “nearly banger-less” – as well as Covid-era antipathy towards superstars, as best embodied by the backlash to the video of Gal Gadot and pals singing Imagine to inspire hope during the pandemic. You could read their retreat as good business sense, as if they were saying: look, we don’t like this any more than you do.
But listening to famous people complain has never been relatable, even if audiences have become more sympathetic to the suffering celebrity can inflict. And in the gloves-off era of Trump 2.0, it’s cool to be rich, famous and scandalous again. And chasing success on the broadest possible terms entertains a powerful individualist fantasy: while stardom may have crushed weaker mortals, bridling it just takes savvier hands. Always simultaneously operating as cultural theorist and pop star, Charli xcx said in a recent TikTok that despite being conscious of overexposure, she was “also interested in the tension of staying too long”, in stretching the limits of public tolerance.
The controversial cover for Sabrina Carpenter’s forthcoming album Man’s Best Friend has a tang of Trumpian political infamy: the flashed-out photo looks like a pap shot; the suit on the faceless man pulling Carpenter’s hair implies some status. On her knees, she’s either the exploited Lewinsky-ish innocent or a woman happily enjoying sexual power play. It’s a private interaction that’s about to become everyone’s business, and Carpenter knows the woman loses either way. But as an image-maker, she wins, understanding that it’s better to be talked about than to cry off attention as invasive. (Even if she did eventually release a more PG-friendly alternative cover “approved by God”.)
When the president’s intentionally dissonant agenda and systemic dysfunction has left people questioning reality, uncomplicated pop stars offer a glowy-skinned port in a storm. Notably, it’s only white pop acts who always have the option to default back to escapism. It’s easy to see this moment as innately conservative, aspiring to conventional beauty standards and success markers in order to make bank; the Not That Deep vibe defying fan demand for pop stars to be nuanced spokespeople in the wake of #MeToo and reckonings with racial injustice.
Creatively baiting attention is at least more interesting than releasing consolidation efforts harking back to past glories, a plague on recent pop. Drake conscripted PartyNextDoor to make $ome $exy $ongs 4 U to remind fans why they liked him after he was eviscerated by Kendrick Lamar. The Weeknd’s business-as-usual Hurry Up Tomorrow failed to produce the sort of year-defining single Abel Tesfaye can usually expect. Katy Perry’s 143 tanked. Never shy of a bold statement, Lady Gaga said that her album Mayhem “started as me facing my fear of returning to the pop music my earliest fans loved” and compared its creation to “reassembling a shattered mirror”. Which is one way to say: giving fans what they want after some sizeable flops. The artist who once made an artform of fame rued “you love to hate me” on the Mayhem song Perfect Celebrity.
The sentiment feels a little yeah, duh. Especially in 2025, when the perfect pop celebrity is a satirist who also revels in the privilege that people love to hate. Romy Mars is the 18-year-old daughter of director Sofia Coppola and Phoenix frontman Thomas Mars. She went viral in 2023 for a museum-worthy TikTok in which she admitted she had been grounded for trying to charter a helicopter to visit her camp friend using her dad’s credit card, didn’t know the difference between garlic and an onion while trying to make pasta sauce, and aired her parents for being perpetually out of town and not allowing her to have social media because “they don’t want me to be a nepotism kid”.
The nepo baby concerns didn’t seem to last long: last year, Mars launched her debut single, passable songwriterly synth-pop that only garnered any notice because of her family. But this year, she has a potential song of the summer: the earwormy A-lister comes with a video directed by Coppola and perfectly judged lyrics about the allure and ennui of celebrity. When Mars meets a hot actor who claims he “hates the spotlight”, she knows he’s full of it because she knows exactly how delicious the spotlight is. Her newly minted TikTok account overspills with it: footage of her flying on private jets with Adam Driver; joining her mum and younger sister Cosima at the Chanel couture fall/winter show in Paris last week; quipping that she only respects her grandpa – Francis Ford Coppola – because Lana Del Rey is a fan.
Mars seems to be building her nascent career on the awareness that regular people both hate celebrities and can’t look away from them. You wonder about the level of strategy involved: she posts with the unfettered urgency of a teenager who still remembers how it felt to have her phone confiscated. But she’s also shameless about the spoils of being a nepo baby life, an accusation that makes her fellow scions defensive or apologetic. In A-lister, Mars’s crush’s apathetic pose does nothing to deter her: she’s still obsessed with him and this “golden sunny west coast sceney plastic world” that has taught her to want him. She knows she can bank on us being similarly powerless to resist her.
