Why pop's slow-burn finally paid off this year for Charli xcx, Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter

Pop music is a marathon, not a sprint. 

It may not seem like it most of the time - so much is made, especially in online fan circles, of instant success as a marker of true greatness - but for any artist, longevity is the true name of the game.

This summer in particular saw a triumvirate of female acts - Charli xcx, Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan - finally break through into the commercial mainstream after years (and we do mean years, more than a decade in Charli's case, and creeping up on 10 years for both Sabrina and Chappell) of hard graft.

But why did this happen in 2024?

Well, for the last few years there's been a distinct sense that pop's old guard - Lady Gaga, Rihanna and Katy Perry among them - are in the midst of a transition phase. We haven't been blessed with a Rihanna album since 2016, while Gaga's next studio LP is due for release next year in between acting projects, and Perry's first album in four years, 2024's 143, failed to spark a single entry in the Top 40. 

Now, more than ever, the big pop girl scene was in need of new blood. Well, new would be a stretch, but the ideas, images and sound that Charli, Chappell and Sabrina brought to pop music in 2024 were undeniably exciting and fresh.

For Charli xcx, her sixth album BRAT was the moment that her entire career had been building up to; where her forward-thinking capabilities were finally allowed to catch up with her hit-making instincts. BRAT contains snapshots of Charli's entire career; from True Romance's gothic introspection over club beats, Sucker's brash nature, Pop 2 and Number 1 Angel's auteur-ish confidence, How I'm Feeling Now's chaos and Crash's unbridled ambition.

BRAT was an album made for the club, yes, but it also represented the moment Charli and her fans had been waiting for for more than 10 years; finally, people finally got it. BRAT's most accessible single and opening track, 360, sums up the intentions of the album well; 'I went my own way and I made it,' Charli says. 'I'm your favourite reference, baby.' 

Charli has long been seen as one of pop's perennial underdogs (her career, you could argue, has arguably always thrived on being perceived as just too ahead of the curve) but BRAT managed to connect with the widest audience possible. Part of this carried a heavy irony; there had been various instances of Charli diluting her auteur senses to access this kind of success, but it was only when she was given the time and space to trust her own instincts that she made the album her entire career had been building towards. 

BRAT summer became the cultural lexicon for a good time in 2024, and everyone was in on it, even US presidential candidate Kamala Harris! When both BRAT and remix track Guess featuring Billie Eilish reached Number 1 in the UK, it felt like a vindication 10 years in the making. 

There's a similar irony attached to the rise of Chappell Roan, that she - like Charli - always knew what was going to work, you just had to trust her to get there. 

Now famously dropped from her first record deal with Atlantic in 2020, Chappell had originally been discovered making Lorde-esque moody laments, but it was the wonky synth-pop of standalone singles like Pink Pony Club (which sounds like her attempt to re-make Lana Del Rey's grandiose on the road ballad Ride, except Chappell's go-go dancing at a gay club, not trekking cross-country) that she found her true path to pop superstardom.

It turns out, though, that path would be a little more truncated than most; after being dropped, moving back home and starting again as an independent artist, Chappell (now signed to Island via her producer Dan Nigro's own imprint) released her debut album to little fanfare outside of her immediate fanbase last September. Research by Official Charts showed that in The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess's first chart week, it sold less than 500 chart units in the UK. 

But oh, how that changed. Thanks to a starry support slot on Olivia Rodrigo's (another regular collaborator of Nigro's) GUTS tour across the US and a slowly building cult fanbase powered by her TikTok, Chappell finally met her moment when she released one-off single Good Luck, Babe! this past April. 

There is so much to say about Good Luck, Babe! but primarily, it's the kind of career-altering hit that comes along maybe just a couple of times in every pop generation. A sapphic lament powered by a morose vocal performance from Chappell (where she sounds like Kate Bush wandering the moors) backed by a Greek chorus of medieval renaissance fair players. 

It was the hit Chappell - and her fans - had been waiting almost a decade for, and the change was almost immediate. The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess hadn't charted in the UK or birthed a single UK Top 40 single by the end of 2023. By the end of 2024, not only as the LP topped the Official Albums Chart, but it also has three Top 40 hits; Red Wine Supernova (31), Pink Pony Club (13) and HOT TO GO! (4).

As for Good Luck, Babe!, Chappell's perfect pop lament landed at Number 2 in the UK and has now been subsumed as the lead track from her forthcoming sophomore LP. She's hard at work on the record now; which is expected to include the sombre ballad The Subway she's performed live all summer (it's giving gay Joni Mitchell) and kitschy queer country-pop banger The Giver (imagine Shania Twain writing a song about pegging), which she performed recently at Saturday Night Live, alongside a performance of Pink Pony Club where the entire audience sang along, unprompted, breaking through (SNL's very famously bad) the sound recording equipment.

And that is the power of the Midwest Princess. Long may she reign. 

The final point of our trifecta may be the shortest, but she's had the most potent chart success this year.

Before this year, the name Sabrina Carpenter may have been recognisable to you. The multi-hyphenate singer and actress has long been on the periphery of a commercial breakthrough, but never seemed to quite get there. 

Despite releasing music since 2015, Sab only claimed her first Top 40 single entry with 2020's pensive Skin, which many perceived as an answer-track to rumours swirling around the subject of Olivia Rodrigo's Drivers License. 

This could have easily just been a curio, but following Skin's commercial breakthrough Sabrina committed to a more mature and sonically versatile aesthetic, while finding that one thing that every possible superstar needs to stick out from the crowd - a schtick!

Sabrina's schtick? She's fun, she's flirty...and she's always on the right side of a double entendre. This new side to her was present throughout much of 2022's cohesive and sparky Emails I Can't Send, especially on breakout track Nonsense (where Sabrina's knack for improvising an ending to the song's outro tailor-made to each city she was performing in became an important 'bit' in her development). 

But that was foreplay compared to the mega-watt superstardom she embraced in 2024. Funky disco tune Espresso was the lean, mean shot of caffeine that helped alter the course of Sabrina's career; becoming, in quick succession, both her first Top 10 and then her first Number 1 single - spending no less than seven weeks at the top of the Official Singles Chart.

Short N' Sweet, Sabrina's sixth album, fizzes with the energy of someone finally having their long-sought moment in the sun. More indebted to 70s pop icons like the Mamas and the Papas and The Carpenters than, say, full-out disco, one of the big surprises of the year was just how varied Sabrina's skillset is. 

Just check out her other two chart-toppers from this year; Please Please Please sounds like Dolly Parton by way of the Beach Boys, while Taste's grungy 90s mall-rock production is the perfect meeting point between The Cranberries and Michelle Branch.

It seemed that this year, Sabrina just couldn't stop making UK chart history every other week. She became the female artist with the most weeks at Number 1 on the Official Singles Chart ever in a calendar year (21 weeks split between Espresso, Please Please Please and Taste), and only the second artist ever (after 50's crooner Frankie Laine) to spend 20 weeks or more at Number 1 in a single year. 

Taste ends 2024 as the year's longest-running Number 1 single (9 weeks in total), while Espresso was named the Official Song of the Summer for 2024 in the UK.

So, what can we learn from all this? Namely, do not give up. If either Charli, Chappell or Sabrina had decided to cash in their chips and walk away at any point in the last decade (and from being dropped from record deals to sure-fire hits petering out, we're sure they must have thought about it) they wouldn't have experienced this - the moment they had worked so hard for and fought for.

Above all else, pop music is belief. And you have to have belief in yourself before anything else.