2023 has been a huge year for the music industry, especially the pop category. When looking through what songs have been topping the charts and flooding social media, three young guns are on the rise and don’t show signs of stopping anytime soon.
Olivia Rodrigo
Olivia Rodrigo is a 20-year-old singer-songwriter, who originally got her start acting on Disney Channel series such as “Bizaardvark” and “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series”. With her sophomore album “Guts” being released on Sept. 8, the album soared to the top of the charts with hit songs such as “vampire” and “get him back!” Rodrigo has seen great success with this album after a two-year silent period where she had no music released. She also announced she would have a world tour for the new album, hitting almost 77 shows in North America and traveling to other countries as well. “Guts” had a major switch in overall feel and tone from her original album “Sour”, which was stripped down and softer. Rodrigo told Variety her process in switching from a mellow to pop rock sound when she states, “you can never sit down at the piano and try to write something that everyone will like; that always results in a bad song. It taught me that I write songs that I want to hear.” Rodrigo also wrote and released “Can’t Catch Me Now” for “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes”. The song began trending on TikTok as the film performed exceptionally well in theaters. Rodrigo shows no sign of slowing down as 2023 was a huge year filled with successes.
Sabrina Carpenter
Starting her career playing Maya on the Disney Channel series “Girl Meets World”, Sabrina Carpenter broke into music in 2015 with her debut album “Eyes Wide Open”. Carpenter has stayed relevant these past few years, gaining a lot of negative attention for her relationship with Joshua Bassett, which blew up after Olivia Rodrigo released her debut single “driver’s license” to diss the couple. Carpenter got dragged by the media, and finally returned to music in 2022 with her album “Emails I Can’t Send”. The album received a lot of praise on social media, especially singles like “Because I Liked a Boy”, which again highlighted the media storm over her relationship with Bassett, and “Nonsense”, which was trending for the outro being switched for every performance on her tour. Fans could not get enough of “Emails I Can’t Send”, and pushed Carpenter to release her single “Feather” from the vault. Carpenter went on tour with the pop queen, Taylor Swift, on the Latin America leg of “The Eras Tour” and will be joining Swift on her Australia and Singapore leg of the tour in 2024. Carpenter closes out the year with the release of her Christmas album “Fruitcake”, releasing just in time for the holiday season.
Tate McRae
The third pop princess is none other than Tate McRae, a Canadian dancer turned pop star. McRae blew up in 2020 for her single “You Broke Me First”. McRae had an uptick in her social media presence in the past year, and so has her popularity on the Billboard Hot 100. Her hit song, “Greedy”, was all over TikTok throughout the summer and it wasn’t even released yet. Fans anxiously awaited more, until McRae announced her second studio album “Think Later” would drop on Dec. 8. The album features hits such as “Greedy”, “Exes”, and “Think Later”, which all gained a lot of traction from the snippets McRae released on her TikTok page. McRae proves she is the modern-day Britney Spears as she shows how talented she is as a performer in her music videos and live performances. McRae will be going on her first world tour starting in Dublin, Ireland on Apr. 17, 2024, and closing in Wellington, New Zealand on Nov. 21, 2024. It contains 53 stops throughout Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand, including a special performance in Calgary, Alberta, McRae’s hometown.
These three pop it-girls have had some of the greatest successes in the 2023 pop genre this year, and fans eagerly await what’s to come in 2024.
