As the days get rainier, windier, and colder, autumn brings with it an air of melancholy. It is once again the season of yearning through ballads on the radio, on your record player, or in your earphones. In the meantime, late summer nights are spent listening to ‘Sad Girl Pop’: light-hearted, if not upbeat chords, accompanied by painfully self-aware lyrics. The feverish heat comes down and the scalding stories of summer suddenly feel real; it is time to reflect, mourn, and deal with the consequences.
‘Sad Girl Pop’ isn’t exactly the most recent phenomenon: an article by Ilana Kaplan pinpoints the concrete beginnings of the subgenre around 2016 when Billie Eilish’s career took off. Self-expression, vulnerability and especially melancholy are key descriptors of this musical genre. From its Greek roots melan- and kholē, “black bile”, melancholy permeates languages through an array of expressions: mono no aware in Japanese, ressasser in French, saudade in Portuguese… Beyond mere sadness, melancholy implies regret, self-reflection and, more often than not, an inability to move on.
Some artists have made melancholy a main feature of their discography: Lorde did it in her sophomore album, Melodrama, released in 2017. In the first song on the track list, Green Light, Lorde clearly sets the scene for an album that seeks to deal with a particularly painful breakup that she struggles to move on from: “Oh, I wish I could get my things and just let go / I'm waiting for it, that green light, I want it”. She goes from bittersweet to accusatory in the span of one song (Hard Feelings/Loveless), to self-deprecating in her duo Liability and Liability (Reprise) – and herein lies a new development, where Lorde touches upon the possibility of her being at fault. The introspection is short-lived, however, as the album moves forward with the final celebratory anthem Perfect Places.
Escapism, back then, was the key to problem-solving. When given the opportunity to drown your sorrows in deafening music and/or alcohol, it was obvious that the numbing brightness of the spotlights was easier on the eyes than looking within yourself. Sure, we were sad, but at least we were crying in the club. Then, COVID hit – and suddenly, the problems were locked inside with us.
In 2020, Taylor Swift, affectionately dubbed “the music industry” and usually known for her catchy pop hits, released her ‘sister albums’ folklore and evermore (hailed as the epitome of Sad Girl Autumn). As the artist explained it herself, the duology is the result of musical exploration during lockdown. Though the most striking innovation to Swift’s usual genre is her (successful) attempt at fictional storytelling, the albums also feature a new approach to vulnerability that can only come with being forced to spend time with yourself. Songs like champagne problems, mirrorball, this is me trying, or right where you left me paint the troubled image of a character that might resemble the author. The albums do not shy away from Swift’s melancholy, and they do so by starting a dialogue about flaws.
From there, self-awareness emerges as a new aspect of music made by pop stars; but not of pop music just yet. The trend of emotional vulnerability central to ‘Sad Girl Pop’ gradually starts to incorporate an element of introspection, self-doubt and potentially even self-blame.
Swift’s next original album, Midnights, hit the charts in 2023. The album is evidently more pop than its 2020 counterparts, but the lyrics have retained their vulnerability. In Anti-Hero, she flat-out acknowledges that she is the problem, even going as far as recognising that she weaponises her qualities, against the backdrop of a lively pop rhythm. There is no beating around the bush: the conclusion to her quarantine introspection is that, sometimes, she’s the one to blame. The end result is a peppy lamentation that we enjoy relating and singing along to – and it allows us to vocalise our flaws before anyone else can use them against us.
Taking after Swift (as her protégé and now close friend), 23-year-old Gracie Abrams released her first album, Good Riddance in 2023, as testimony to dwelling on the past and her feelings towards it. The intros to most of her songs would not presage their deep-rooted sadness: in Difficult, she sings “Oh, I hope I wake up invisible / I'd be someone no one knows / I guess I'm just difficult” in a similar upbeat fashion. In her second album, The Secret of Us (2024), which propelled her onto the mainstream pop scene, Abrams goes even further than Swift and normalises making mistakes throughout the record: in her song I Love You, I’m Sorry, her fixation on a past relationship concludes with the realisation that she “was a dick, it is what it is, a habit to kick, the age-old curse”.
All of this pent-up and lingering melancholy ended up having a point: pop lyrics have become a therapy session that the artist engages in with themselves. What used to be dramatic tales of love, revenge and empowerment turned into personal diaries bursting with vulnerability and self-blame. In a way, pop music has become the best vehicle for introspection: dancing to the metre of your own drama, because blasting music in your apartment and singing along is cheaper than professional therapy. Additionally, at a time when pop culture is heavily marked by accountability for both public and private deeds, artists acknowledging their mistakes not only feels like the “right” thing to do: it also breaks the perfect façade that comes with being a role model. Swift and Abrams show that they are three-dimensional, imperfect and yet, still well-liked – and this is reassuring for the fans, especially female fans, who cannot easily get away with being perceived as flawed.
The remaining issue, and arguably the hardest one, is change. Though the public gets to see the cracks, it can never be privy to how the pieces are put back together and how relationships are mended. Some of us stick to listening on loop, thinking that knowing our faults is good enough, and we embark on a journey of selfish sadness. In this case, the cycle never breaks and all of it is just noise. So I guess we are all still crying in the club, ‘laying on the horn to prove that it haunts us’ as Abrams puts it; but this time around, we know why we ended up there again.
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