The rise of the pop girlie: Marketing mediocrity or feminism in action?  

“GIRLS INVENTED PUNK ROCK, NOT ENGLAND”: so reads the iconic green T-shirt of Sonic Youth legend Kim Gordon. The slogan stands in defiance of an unfortunate truth in the music industry: femininity and credibility often exist in contention with one another. Patti Smith, discussing her impact as a woman in the male-dominated 1970s punk scene, has expressed her resentment of the term ‘female artist’: “To me, I was an artist. We don’t use the expression ‘male artist’”. I share Smith’s reservations about the term ‘pop girlie’. The now well-established term, born from the boom in popularity of young female pop artists, feels to me somewhat belittling of women’s artistry. But my own gripes with the term aside, it’s worth exploring what it means for women in music, and for pop culture more broadly.   

It’s not unusual for glamorous women and their young, largely female audiences to dominate the charts: Madonna, for instance, is listed as the fourth best-selling artist of all time. The pop girlie explosion, though, has captured the zeitgeist with an era-defining ferocity previously reserved for men. The music we historically afford this label of ‘era-defining’ to is overwhelmingly male: The Beatles as the faces of peace, love, and LSD; the Sex Pistols as the ugly (and co-opted) face of punk; Nirvana as the begrudging kings of grunge; and so on. The year 2024, however, was to the pop girlies what 1976 was to punk. With the Eras Tour in full swing, the year was marked by several huge releases by female artists, notably Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet, Gracie Abrams’ The Secret of Us and, of course, Charli XCX’s cultural behemoth, Brat. Admittedly, Brat aside, these releases are not to my personal taste, but my self-indulgent distrust of the mainstream doesn’t blind me to the significance of women becoming front and centre in an industry so historically hostile to us. 

The trend kept its momentum in 2025, diversifying as Olivia Dean’s R&B-infused The Art of Loving became a global phenomenon, and Slayyyter’s Crank introduced a hedonistic edge. Songs are becoming shorter and snappier, with the influence of alt-pop icon PinkPantheress evident in the increasing rarity of albums exceeding 30 minutes. Brevity, though, can entail a lack of depth. Internet music critic and self-important bald man Anthony Fantano said of Addison Rae’s debut Addison, for example, that beyond “its pleasant, gently danceable beats, and moody ennui… this record really contains no thrills or appeal or depth or excitement or substance”. Fantano speaks to a shallowness that is the product of a need for songs to be clippable and suitable as potentially viral soundbites for TikTok – a trade-off of artistry for marketability. Young female artists like Rae face ridicule for supposedly ruining music for everyone, whilst the profit-driven record executives who are actually to blame largely escape backlash. 

Dismissing music made by young, attractive women as unserious and shallow, though, isn’t a new phenomenon; it is a long-established tradition. Courtney Love once remarked that “proletariat male rock critics” had “a real problem… with denim boomer issues” when it came to accepting the credibility of glamorous women. The cultural ecosystem of which she spoke has since all but disappeared: music magazines which could once make or break careers are now reduced to niche online publications, unimportant to all but a particular group of vinyl-collecting, band-tee-adorning nostalgists. Her point stands, though: people who care about music can’t seem to help but revel in tearing apart the artistry of successful women.  

This is not to dismiss criticisms about the quality of music coming from the current pop girlie boom. To be honest, I find some of it to be absolute drivel (see Taylor Swift’s laughable latest single, ‘Cleveland!’). But I wouldn’t dare equate my own boredom with a lack of artistry. The three-minute pop song, for all its clichéd lyricism and its intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus unoriginality, is a sacred thing. The nature of pop music is that it is formulated to be popular. Not everything needs to be ‘boundary-breaking’, ‘ethereal’, or whichever other buzzwords Rolling Stone likes to throw around. Simplicity isn’t a crime; it’s the backbone of the music industry. 

I do wonder, though, whether a label such as pop girlie can be reductive. The tendency of audiences to place the artists we adore into neatly labelled boxes can be detrimental, as Charli XCX expresses in ‘Camera’, the fourth track on her newest album, Music, Fashion, Film: “Am I being fuckin’ stupid if I try to be a girl on the screen when I’m turning thirty-four?” 

Reaching new levels of fame with Brat seemingly came at a cost for the singer, who, after spending her career developing a complex, varied sound, suddenly found herself the caricatured face of a cultural movement beyond her control. Artists are fragile beings: if we try to reduce them to a two-dimensional label, they will retaliate with a mediocre swerve to grunge-pop.  

Some, though, have embraced grouping female artists. Olivia Rodrigo’s recent Daisy Chain Fields festival, which raised $20 million for organisations supporting women and girls, is a testament to this. The festival boasted a stacked line-up, bringing together some of the biggest female pop acts in recent years, including Chappell Roan, Mitski, and, of course, Rodrigo herself. A range of alternative acts also performed, including alt-rock veterans The Breeders and riot grrrls Bikini Kill. The festival’s marketing, shrouded in flowers and pastel tones, did not shy away from girlish motifs. Such a wholehearted embrace of the feminine aesthetics that our misogynistic popular culture has traditionally mocked creates the impression of a group of artists carving out a safe space for themselves in an industry that has long abused, mocked, and ignored them.  

With this sentiment in mind, I can see why the pop girlie phenomenon could be important for women’s place in our culture. Perhaps its flippancy is the whole point: embracing the artistry found in simple pop melodies and fun, girly aesthetics and demanding they be taken seriously. For all it may be a marketing ploy in plain sight, there is something to be said for the proliferation of music made by women and the wider impact it could have on the industry. If today our biggest pop stars are mostly young women, perhaps in ten years’ time indie and alternative scenes that currently struggle with seemingly constant scandals involving male musicians’ predatory behaviour will also become more welcoming spaces for women. Even if I were to be cynical and refuse to see this pop girlie influx as anything but a marketing ploy, this fact remains: anything Noah Kahan, Sombr, or Harry Styles can do, the pop girlies can do backwards and in heels.