Top Pop Stars 2024

The Tortured Poets Department arrived in April 2024 and swallowed the charts whole. The Eras Tour played its final night in December. Between those bookends sits the catch: a thirty-one-track anthology that even devoted fans skim, and a summer when Charli XCX and Chappell Roan drove the conversations she usually owns.

Cowboy Carter picked a fight with Nashville's gatekeepers in March 2024 and won the argument. No tour followed that year, though; the album's only 2024 stage was a Christmas Day NFL halftime show, and by fall the record had drifted out of the daily conversation while Sabrina Carpenter's singles were still everywhere.

Eternal Sunshine gave her the spring and Wicked gave her the winter, the same album-plus-blockbuster double Lady Gaga attempted, except both of her halves landed. Still, she spent the back half of 2024 as Glinda rather than as a pop act, skipped touring the album, and let its afterlife play out on TikTok without her.

Radical Optimism landed in May 2024 with a Glastonbury headline set to match, and the awkward truth of her year is that the show was better than the record. While Sabrina Carpenter kept three singles running at once, the Radical Optimism singles faded inside a season.

Her 2024 was the Guts World Tour and some deluxe-edition spillover, not a new era. The arenas were full and the shows were ferocious, but in a year when Charli XCX and Chappell Roan rewired pop's conversation, touring last year's album only holds your place.

Beautiful Things opened 2024 in January and never really left, one of those songs strangers hum without knowing whose it is. That is also the problem. Where Chappell Roan arrived with a whole world attached, he arrived with one ballad and a backflip, and the rest of Fireworks & Rollerblades barely got played.

Hit Me Hard and Soft arrived in May 2024 with no advance singles and still produced the year's most inescapable slow song in Birds of a Feather. The gamble cost her the spring, her tour only began that fall, and her one detour was crashing Brat summer on Charli XCX's Guess remix.

He spent 2024 as pop's most reliable plus-one, with Die With A Smile alongside Lady Gaga in August and APT. with Rosé of Blackpink in October, two duets that refused to leave global playlists. What is missing is a solo era; his last one is old enough that younger listeners mostly know him as a guest.

Nobody's 2024 moved faster, Sabrina Carpenter's included. Good Luck, Babe! hit in April, and by summer festival fields could not physically hold the crowds that showed up for her. The velocity had a price: canceled sets, uneasy interviews, and a fall spent fighting with the same culture that had just crowned her.

Brat turned a shade of green into a season and pulled Lorde, Billie Eilish, and Ariana Grande onto its remix album. As a cultural event, nobody on this list matched her 2024. As pure pop commerce she still trailed Sabrina Carpenter, because memes move slower than radio.

The Secret of Us in June, a Taylor Swift duet on it, Eras Tour opening slots, and then That's So True detonating in the fall as a bonus track that outgrew its album. The nepo-baby chatter followed her all year and the whisper-soft sound can blur, but the ascent was real.

Her 2024 ran hot and cold in the same season: Die With A Smile with Bruno Mars became one of the year's biggest duets while Joker: Folie à Deux cratered and dragged the Harlequin companion album down with it. Disease showed up in October to promise a real pop comeback, but that promise mostly cashed in later.

Espresso, Please Please Please, and Taste ran through 2024 like a relay team that never dropped the baton. Short n' Sweet backed the singles up in August. If anything counts against her, it is that the year felt expertly engineered where Chappell Roan's felt like an eruption.

She headlined Glastonbury in June 2024 to a thinner crowd than the slot deserved, then made everyone wait until the final weeks of December for Lana. In between, Saturn and her verses on Kendrick Lamar's GNX did the heavy lifting. A great year assembled from fragments, where Charli XCX built hers into one long season.