ArticleWhat will be the soundtrack to 2026?
If you’re a doomscroller, the first month of this year has provided plenty of fodder for your sense that the world is falling apart. In a time of anxiety, natural disasters, geopolitical instability, and economic uncertainty, the music we’re streaming may seem trivial. But these trends reveal a lot about how we’re feeling and responding in an increasingly troubled world.
Recently I was sharing an Uber with a few colleagues. One of them asked me what I thought of Taylor Swift’s latest album The Life of a Showgirl.
Much to my surprise, I’ve become something of an expert in Taylor Swift. I didn’t set out to be one; I just wrote one article for a website, then there was a call for chapters for a book about Swift, and it kind of went from there. Now I seem to have authoritative knowledge of her as a performer and strong opinions about what her popularity says about culture. My Spotify wrapped revealed that I’m in the top 2% of her listeners, somewhat to my chagrin. I am, as another Swifty shamelessly declared on their Instagram, “The most basic person in the world”.
I start to yammer. “Ughhh, well, some of the tracks are good, but she’s trying to keep the poetry of earlier albums and marry it to the frothy pop resurgence. I don’t know if it works.”
I try to explain further. “I like sad music, that’s why I liked Taylor Swift. Maybe she’s too happy now.”
“I like sad music too,” our Uber driver says suddenly, catching my eye and smiling.
“I have so many playlists,” I blurt excitedly. “Relaxing sad music, nostalgic sad music …”
My colleagues laugh uproariously at me, but the driver catches my eye again.
“Sometimes the music feels sad because it makes me happy remembering,” she says.
“Where are you from?” someone asks.
“Iran, I’m Persian,” she replies. She’s a pastry chef, building her business and family in Australia.
“Do you miss Iran?”
“Yes.” We all go silent for a few moments.
“Sometimes the happiest music makes me cry and the saddest music makes me happy,” I say, imagining her grief at leaving her own country.
She nods vigorously and smiles again.
So I’m not the only sadness junkie. But what does that tell us about ourselves?
The Two-track Mood: Sticky Pop or Diary-Entry Confessionals
In 2024, the most played album on Spotify was Swift’s lengthy The Tortured Poets Department. Though full of bangers, it also spoke the language of heartbreak, betrayal, and disappointment. The 2023-2024 Eras tour broke revenue records, making $2 billion (double the previous record by Coldplay). The cultural juggernaut that is Swifty fandom, and the consumption of the product that is Taylor Swift, has in many ways defined pop music over the last decade.
Prestigious institutions such as Harvard offer courses in Taylor Swift, and there are researchers in a range of disciplines writing about her lyrics, persona, fandom, and economic clout. A Washington Post journalist attending an academic conference on Taylor Swift described the impact Swift has on her fans perfectly: “Her lyrics describe love and loss and life in such a specific yet universal way that it feels like she’s singing about you.”
Taylor Swift is the biggest representative of the pop girl and while she’s associated with sequins and friendship bracelets, her last three albums before Life of a Showgirl were not happy, but rather miserable confessionals. Did she capture the mood of our times? Or did she set the mood?
But things are changing. Have we seen peak Taylor? Are we reaching peak Pop Girl after Charlie XCX’s Brat Summer? Where are the rock bands?
Looking at the Grammy nominations for 2026, I see my moment with the Persian pastry chef as a summary of the state of pop music. The confessional Pop Girl Summer is over; the line-up includes a lot more urban Latin pop like Bad Bunny, electro-pop like Lady Gaga, and hybrid R&B-style pop from Sabrina Carpenter.
Streaming trends reveal a two-track mood. The market is split between a voracious appetite for happy dance music for TikTok reels (like Lady Gaga’s “Abracadabra” or the KPop Demon Hunters banger “Golden”) on the one hand, and on the other a lingering thirst for confessional, diary-entry tracks that express complex melancholy (Billy Eilish’s “Wildflower”; Lola Young’s “Messy”; or West End Girl, Lily Allen’s devastating divorce album).
There have been other Pop Girls rising as Swift has plateaued: Charlie XCX, Sabrina Carpenter, Gracie Abrams. But people are leaning towards happier, dare I say “shallower” pop. Not just new songs, but songs dating back to the Global Financial Crisis in 2008: Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga, and other “dance your cares away” tunes.
Fun, frothy music has always done well during times of recession and economic downturn, but platforms like Spotify and TikTok make disseminating and sharing it much easier.
Streamers can increase music consumption by millions – and they’re choosing tracks that are nearly 20 years old.
Pop culture writer Taylor Crumpton believes our thirst for “fun” pop speaks to a desire to escape the stress and uncertainty of our current economic climate and the relentless anxiety of war(s):
The Great Depression gave birth to blues and swing music. Disco was used as a form of escape from the perils of the Vietnam War. The hip-hop generation used music to express themselves, as Black and Brown youth, living on the margins of society and deep economic disfranchisement. Young people have used music as a way to snapshot their reality and speak life into the tensions and frustrations of being sidelined by those in positions of power.
Crying when we feel like dancing and dancing when we feel like crying
In tough times, there is a part of us that wants to weep, and a part of us that wants to dance and forget our troubles. If we’re honest, we probably need to do both. If early 2026 is anything to go on, we may need to keep dancing and crying over the course of the year. Even if our own family lives, work, friends, and social worlds are good right now (a big if), we can’t (and shouldn’t) help but be affected by ongoing wars, famines, genocides and earthly tragedies across the world.
I’m noticing my mood is much better when I skip my morning doomscroll and go for a walk instead. Still, I’m troubled more than I can remember being before about problems across the world. I’m not sure if our current geopolitical situation is particularly bad, or I’m just more aware of it these days. But just as hard times have always been with us, so has music – thank God.
Music has always been a site for both facing up to, and providing relief from, hard times throughout history.
Some of Mozart’s operas, for example, were written to explore class tension and provide joy and escape in the lead-up to the French Revolution.
If we go all the way back to the ancient world, we find poetry, psalms, and laments about the trouble and sorrows of the Israelites, who were exiled from their land and found themselves captured and working as slaves in Babylon. Growing up in an agnostic home, I didn’t know much about the Bible or the story of these laments. I had heard the Boney M song “By the Rivers of Babylon” on an infomercial – yes, I was a nineties kid – and recognised it as an upbeat dance tune.
If you’re not familiar with it, it’s deceptively happy, considering the words are:
By the rivers of Babylon,
There we sat down
Yeah, we wept
When we remembered Zion
When I finally read those words for myself years later in the Bible, I realised it was a painful lament, longing for a better time in their homeland. Ironically, the Israelite lament, “How can we sing the song of the Lord, when we are in a foreign land?” was turned into the kind of song that people forgot their troubles on the dance floor to.
Sometimes the only thing we can do when we feel like weeping is dance and give thanks for being among the living. As we move into 2026, with the stress of the cost of living and the emotional fatigue of wars and tragic events, we will need to both cry and dance. That will be a way to stay human in a broken world.
Dr Amy Isham is the Library Manager at The Catholic Theological College in Melbourne. Amy has a doctorate in Leadership and is on the Board of Publica. She is an Associate of CPX.
Photo by Stephen Mease on Unsplash.