EVERY GENRE PROJECT - December 29 - Alt-Pop
Genre of the Day - Alt-Pop
Album of the Day - Desire, I Want to Turn Into You by Caroline Polachek (2023)
It feels fitting that today’s genre sneaks in as one of the last three of 2024, as it’s one of the load-bearing genres of my generation’s popular musical consciousness, and one of the most notable (from the standpoint of the last century of English-language popular music) musical developments of my lifetime. Within its hallowed halls sit some of the cultural titans of the past couple of decades, figures who’ve blended the melancholia of the 21st-century with an embrace of “poptimism”—an appreciation for pop music that recognizes the mechanisms behind its appeal and plays with them and pays honor to its theatrics without sacrificing musical ingenuity.
Alt-pop is one of the more broad genre monikers, that more loosely captures the progression in overlapping ethos between pop and indie beginning in the late 2000s. As the rise of iTunes and subsequently streaming platforms blurred the lines of genre divisions, artists had more freedom to artistically draw from musical regions that had once lay far-flung from each other due to boundaries drawn by radio and labels. Another catalyst for the rise of alt-pop was the rise of electronica-infused popular music throughout the 2000s, drawing a link between left-field, underground sounds and wider pop appeal. Other artists took more inspiration from chamber pop, downtempo, and decades of art pop.
I sometimes struggle to include and define big names in these little articles, mostly because I end up focusing on the artist who produced the album of the day. However, to contextualize alt-pop’s story, doing so is of particular necessity. Gotye’s flash-in-the-pan 2011 hit “Somebody That I Used To Know” represented a watershed moment for the meeting of sonic oddities with pop immediacy; The XX, Imogen Heap, and Lorde brought dreamy, minimalist electronica coolness to mainstream palettes; Lana Del Rey’s chamber pop and trip-hop Born to Die completely reshuffled pop perspectives for years to come. Throughout the 2010s, stars emerged from an alt-pop vein, like Billie Eilish whose electronic pop productions with brother FINNEAS are cut from an experimental cloth, yet hit with streaming-era rushes of dopamine. The bedroom pop of artists like Clairo in the first arc of her career or the Marías also expanded the mood and tone of pop by producing it in a more intimate, DIY setting. The stars of alt-pop also often break with the prim-and-proper gloss expected of a ‘popstar’, displaying a refreshing candor and expressive, if beautifully imperfect and raw, performances: think Lorde’s romp around the VMAs stage to “Homemade Dynamite” in 2017, or PinkPantheress often pulling up to stage with her purse as if she’s just dropping by to say hi and chat.
I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t yet gotten around to today’s album, one of the most acclaimed of 2023 by Kate Bush’s daughter who spawned in Brooklyn, Caroline Polachek. I’d listened to Pang, but I did so when I was delirious and not-all-there on a 12-hour flight, and unfortunately just didn’t quite absorb it in that state. This listen, I got it the first time. The big power-pop chords and her mile-wide voice, malleable as oil paint with just as much range of colors, is a pop statement for the ages in the opener “Welcome to My Island.” And you’ll want to linger as long as can afford to, from the 1998-flamenco-infused-pop throwback “Sunset,” miraculously achieving faithful homage and earnest emotion, to “Bunny is a Rider” and its avant-garde take on tropi-house that lands halfway between Kygo and Tom Tom Club. To borrow a turn of phrase all over twitter, she bites a bit of Enya’s nachos on the whimsical “Hopedrunk Everlasting.” Escapism suffuses the whole set, both in the themes of songs like “I Believe” and “Fly to You” and the implications of their UK-indebted garage and drum’n’bass influences that melt like the smoothest sunscreen for this sunny, hope-filled journey. Everything really is romantic; sometimes it just takes the union of pop joy and alternative taste to properly show us.