@tong chen

In-your-face pop gold from the Midwestern princess and queer icon.

A career-spanning set from one of the 21st century's most captivating pop stars.

The songs you love. The more you use Apple Music, the better the mix. Refreshed every Tuesday.

Whether it’s a weekday morning or Saturday night, get going with this personalized mix of upbeat music. Refreshed every Monday.

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Discover new music from artists we think you'll like. Refreshed every Friday.

The tracks you can’t get enough of lately, all in one place. Updated as you listen.

Whether it’s a weekday morning or Saturday night, get going with this personalized mix of upbeat music. Refreshed every Monday.

Camp-pop singer-songwriter Chappell Roan emerged fully formed, unapologetic and larger than life in the late 2010s. The Missouri-born artist’s extroverted anthems combine modern Top 40 chops with a retro synth-pop palette, amplified by a generous dose of theatrical charisma. Her fans come from a diverse set of backgrounds: there are jams perfect for lovers of millennial <i>TRL</i> electro-pop (“Femininomenon”), ’80s New Romantic bangers (“Good Luck, Babe!”), and drag-show-ready attitude songs (“My Kink is Karma”). Her creative partnership with early-2020s hitmaker Dan Nigro—a regular collaborator of Roan’s onetime tourmate Olivia Rodrigo—has yielded several streaming favorites, chock-full of clever references, risqué bravado and sassy one-liners: see the clubby barnburner “Naked In Manhattan.”

Olivia Rodrigo’s star began its ascent long before <i>SOUR</i>’s release in 2021: She grew up in Temecula, California, taking piano and voice lessons, and she drew on both her acting and musical chops in her first big gigs, the Disney Channel’s series <i>Bizaardvark</i> and then the leading role in Disney+’s <i>High School Musical: The Musical: The Series</i>. Behind the scenes of her budding small-screen career, she wrote, wrote, and wrote some more—in her journals and at the piano, too.</br> “I guess I’d been writing songs forever, like since I could talk, before I could actually write them down on paper,” she tells Apple Music. “But I learned how to play piano when I was nine, and so I started writing songs on piano then. That kind of made it like a real song, I suppose. I think songwriting’s always been my first love, and that’s the thing that I identify the most with and take the most seriously in my life.”</br> By the time she went through a terrible breakup at 17, her notebook and piano were waiting for her. “drivers license,” her debut single, arrived on January 8, 2021, and listeners immediately found themselves rapt in the passenger seat of her post-heartbreak journey. “drivers license” managed to telegraph exactly how Rodrigo felt while tapping into something bigger than her own hurt. When she sings of driving through familiar neighborhoods and reminisces about the plans for the future she made with her ex before he moved on to the next girl, we feel the blinking signals and turns on our own familiar rides home, the accelerations past the memories too raw to revisit. And devastating though it may be, “drivers license” broke hearts and the charts at the same time: It was an immediate No. 1, and soon the world was sobbing along to Rodrigo’s not-so-inner monologue far from the familiar streets of her past.</br> From “drivers license” to pop-punk kiss-off anthem “good 4 u” and the folk-tinged closer, “hope ur ok,” each track on <i>SOUR</i> touched on a different memory or emotion as she stitched her heart back together, verse by verse, earning her 2021 Apple Music Awards for Top Album, Top Song, and Breakthrough Artist. Considering how trauma, grief, loss, fear, anger, and uncertainty weighed heavily on the minds of, well, everyone in 2020 and 2021, it’s no wonder that Rodrigo’s words tapped into something universal and raw that resonated beyond her age group at exactly the right time. It didn’t matter if you were old enough to teach driver’s ed instead of taking it: Everyone could picture themselves sobbing in the car, screaming into a hairbrush in front of a mirror, or releasing the tension of a love gone bad with <i>SOUR</i> blasting through the speakers, and the catharsis that came from that was one she was eager to share.</br> “Even going throughout my daily life, I’ll get a coffee, and some girl’s like, ‘I’m going through a breakup and your records are really, really helping me!’ That means, like, so much more than any number on a screen could ever mean.”