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This year was largely defined by pop stars who rewrote the rules, genre outlaws who succeeded in new territory and a rap beef that gave us a unifying anthem. But throughout the year, a handful of artists were enjoying their own major milestones — ones that not only defined their year, but their career.
From award recognition to chart firsts to major synchs and more, artists including Victoria Monét, Gracie Abrams, Natasha Bedingfield, A. G. Cook, Carín León, and Tems reflect on their defining moments of the year.
Gracie Abrams
Gracie Abrams
Abby Waisler
Last year, every single time I watched The Eras Tour — which was every time I opened — never once did it feel like there was going to be an end. When we were asked to come back, knowing that it would be to close it out, I immediately felt so nostalgic for the experience. Over the past few challenging, strange, scary years, Taylor has been a source of light for people who desperately needed it, and for developing artists, the tour has been an unimaginably significant springboard. For my career, it’s been undeniable. It’s hard to make sense of streaming numbers on your phone — I’m not someone who’s ever really been super tapped into that data — so to track the difference in audience reception quite literally in front of my eyes on The Eras Tour has been mind-blowing. I thought I was hallucinating when I first heard [Swifties] singing my lyrics back.
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What was most exciting about my own headlining tour was that I had made [2024 second album] The Secret of Us with my live show in mind. I’ve had the most fun performing “us.” in particular because on the days I’m not singing it with Taylor, it becomes this duet between all of us onstage and everybody in the crowd. And it was nominated for a Grammy! The whole reason Taylor and I wrote it in the first place was we’d just come off a dinner where she’d very sweetly said we needed to celebrate my first Grammy nomination [for best new artist in 2023]. The full circle of it all is hard for me to wrap my head around.
The Secret of Us has had the most traction out of any of the projects I’ve put out before, and there are milestones that are fun to acknowledge. When “I Love You, I’m Sorry” ended up being the song that took off the most, I felt like it was — not that we needed it — permission to allow acoustic guitar to remain the driving force behind “That’s So True,” which came from the feeling of living with a burning, fiery rage of jealousy. Seeing the life that song is having right now is psychotic to me. The audience’s engagement has only felt stronger as these rooms have continued to, by some miracle, expand. But what I clock as my metric for success is how it feels to create a thing and then sing it with a group of people who resonate with it. I just can’t believe any of it is real.
Natasha Bedingfield
Natasha Bedingfield
Cameron Jordan
Last year, my publisher reached out and I recognized the name [in his pitch]. I was like, “Ah, [filmmaker] Will Gluck! I remember him.” My song “Pocketful of Sunshine” was a big part of his [2010] movie, Easy A. He seems to use my songs in things and they resonate. So when I wrote back [about using “Unwritten” in his new film], I said, “A hundred percent yes.”
I went to the premiere [of Anyone but You], and the actors were like, “They just kept making us sing your song!” I think he made them sing it in every scene. I remember my publisher being like, “They’re really using it a lot.” And they even came back after they edited the movie and said, “We actually want to give you a bit more money because we ended up using the song even more.” We were really blown away by how it was used and how funny it was. There’s a moment where Sydney [Sweeney] is looking up at [Glen Powell’s] butt, singing, “Reaching for something in the distance.” I mean, that’s the kind of humor that I love.
People watched the movie and they left singing the song, and then they filmed themselves singing it and put that up on TikTok. And I got a call from Will saying, “Because the song is trending on TikTok, it’s making more people go see the movie.” So it was this really amazing thing that kind of served each other.
It feels like “Unwritten” has been one of the songs of the year. I feel really touched by this, and I couldn’t have anticipated it. Last year, I was thinking, “We need to do something for the [20th] anniversary! Let’s celebrate. Let’s put music out.” And then this happened without me. It was outside of my control, and it’s just been wilder than I could have imagined.
I think it’s everyone’s song, but nobody knew that until Anyone but You. What’s so poetic about this is that “Unwritten” itself is a song that’s changing and growing, and the story about it is evolving. When I was writing it, we imagined the arenas and the stadiums and the crowd singing it. And when we were producing it, I remember being like, “How do we pick sounds that aren’t going to be dated?” “Unwritten” is like my baby, and I hope it keeps shape-shifting.
A. G. Cook
A.G. Cook
Henry Redcliffe
Charli and I were talking about doing remixes almost from the beginning. I was really pushing this notion that I have about music in general in the post-streaming era. I like that music doesn’t have to completely end at the album release; the masters that get uploaded to streaming aren’t necessarily the final version.
What’s been so nice about brat is that even the way it was rolled out, the Boiler Room set happening early on and so forth, it’s holistically been about there being different versions. We’d sometimes even talk about remixes while working on the tracks themselves. There was always this notion that at some point, there would be a high-effort extension of the album. Thematically, brat is so interesting in how it is pure Charli, not using features. But obviously there’s all that energy building up for actual collaborations to happen. We knew while making it that if we wanted to collaborate, that would go on the remix album, but we’d also give collaborators agency to make songs even more in their image.
The original tracks were operating in real time, so it was no surprise that the remix album just continued that experience [by reflecting on] those months [after brat’s release]. The confessional nature of brat also provoked a lot of the remix collaborators to match that. Especially the [“Girl, so confusing” remix with Lorde], because it was conceived right as the album came out. That set the tone for the remixes to be actual conversations.
For [the “Mean girls” remix with Julian Casablancas], we wanted to make sure he could really make it his own, that it wasn’t just “Julian’s going to jump on for a verse.” That would have felt wrong for everyone. Charli and I wanted to demonstrate, like, “We’re not precious. We’re fine to dismantle it.” There are some remixes that didn’t happen simply because we sent it to people and they didn’t know where to start or were uncomfortable making a completely different genre. But the “Mean girls” remix is a good example of making sure it didn’t just feel like a feature, but an amalgamation that would then challenge Charli and I to also put ourselves on it.
The original songs are as clubby as DJs want to make them, or not. There’s so much ammo in brat, so many intriguing moments that could be looped, taken apart. I’ve already heard people do so many of their own remixes. There are funny ones where Charli is interviewed and is like, “Yeah, I love dance music, but I don’t really like drum’n’bass.” Then there’ll be like 10 drum’n’bass remixes, almost as like a “f–k you.” I think that’s the most fun part.
Carín León
Carin León
Carlos Ruiz
Being at the Grand Ole Opry was culturally very significant. As a Latino, as a Mexican, as a fan of country music, to go to the capital of country and play inside the temple of country music meant a lot to me. I think we made our mark.
I’ve always been close to country music, listening to Johnny Cash, George Strait and the newer generation of artists who are so good and are breaking parameters and doing things differently, just as we are with Mexican music. I love what artists like Luke Combs and Post Malone are doing, but if I had to choose a single country act, it would be the great Chris Stapleton. He’s given us a lot of love.
In fact, the last time we performed in the South, we sang “Tennessee Whiskey,” and I said, “Respectfully, for me, the best country singer, technically and artistically speaking, is Chris Stapleton.” Then we realized his wife was there, and she got up and came to the stage to see us. It made me realize music really has no borders. We have a country project set for next year, mostly in English, with a lot of collaborations.
We’ve been making other inroads with country music this year, and one day my manager, Jorge Juárez, and I were on a flight and he said, “We’ve just been confirmed for the Grand Ole Opry.” As if this was normal. My first words were “You’re kidding me!” Because I know how hard it is to play there. Many American artists never get to do it. It felt like confirming the biggest stadium ever.
It was the culmination of all those dreams I had as a kid of playing in a mythical and legendary space. Playing there allowed me to be me and to be that person that since childhood has loved country music, especially because our Mexican music is so influenced by country. I think it’s the only place where I’ve cried onstage. It’s something money can’t buy — and a memory I’ll take with me till the day I die.
Victoria Monét
Victoria Monét
Dalvin Adams
I really liked the process of getting into the Grammys. I was doing a lot of prep physically, like watching my food intake, lots of workouts. A really special moment happened where I took [my daughter] Hazel with me to a fitting with Versace. It was my daughter’s first time on a red carpet, and she [was going to] be matching with me. Versace allowed us to pick a specific brown and bring that theme of [my album] Jaguar to life.
[Winning the best new artist Grammy] was one of the biggest goals that I had for the year. You know how much it takes to get recognition in this industry or bring a vision to life and what kind of marketing it took to get there, what kind of focus and dedication and sacrifice. [But I have this] yin-yang mentality like, although this means the world to me and I appreciate it, I can’t make it my be-all and end-all to determine whether or not I’m good — because the other [nominees] were also amazing and they didn’t get it, and they’re going on with their lives and doing amazing, incredible things.
I have [my Grammys] on a banister upstairs; it’s kind of become an awards banister. There are a few plaques there and a framed tweet about the Grammys that I tweeted in 2015, almost like a manifestation. It puts a pep in your step to know that you did the right thing, but also you have so much more work to do, so just keep going and remain grounded and know that all of these things are a blessing.
You want to continue to do what you love even if the accolades don’t ever come again. There were many years where I thought I was great and I didn’t have those awards on my banister. It was just knowing, because of my work ethic, greatness comes that way. And when the recognition and attention come, you want to make sure that doesn’t become your driving force. Those are extras, but it does feel really nice.
Tems
Tems
Adrienne Raquel
Once I have a vision, I’m always trying to do everything to put my vision in place. But that can also sometimes turn into perfectionism, which I learned to let go of while [making my debut album, Born in the Wild]. You [have to] be as authentic as possible and allow yourself to flow in the music — letting go of anything that you think you’re supposed to do, be or show.
I’m not thinking too much about genres or rules: “Oh, you have to make Afrobeats.” My “why” is different. My “why” is to release my thoughts. It’s an honor to be able to make music that you want to make and for people to be able to connect to it — and for someone to recognize that is also really great.
[At Coachella], Wizkid was around and we asked him if he’d come out [to perform “Essence”], and he was really down. Justin [Bieber] happened to also be around. He hit me up that morning and said he’s down to come out if I needed him. And I was like, “Yes!” It was amazing. Everybody was going crazy. The crowd was screaming, the floor was shaking. It was a vibe, like a huge party.
[In November], we had just arrived at midnight in Melbourne, Australia, so I wasn’t thinking too much about the Grammys. I was extremely tired, so I went to bed hoping to get a little bit of rest before my show the next day. Around 5 a.m., my phone started vibrating on my bed. It’s calls and people shouting, “Oh, my God. Congrats!” I’m like, “Bro, what’s going on?” They’re like, “Bro, three Grammy nominations!” It was worth being woken up for, especially for the people that have worked on this album — not just me, but my friend and my producer [GuiltyBeatz], [and] Spax, [who] also engineered it.
There are so many people that worked sleepless nights and really did their best to help me out, and it’s beautiful to see them have the recognition. All it takes is a Grammy-nominated project that you were a part of for your life to change. That’s what I really care about the most.
This story appears in the Dec. 14, 2024, issue of Billboard.
“For ‘A Bar Song’ to still be doing what it’s doing is insane,” an awestruck Shaboozey told Billboard in November about his breakout song’s then-16-week-long run atop the Billboard Hot 100. “[It’s] crazy how much the song carried on its own. We don’t even do anything and it’s like, ‘Hey, you’re aiming for a 17th week now!’ ”
Of course, monthslong No. 1 smashes don’t just happen on their own — but “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” which has achieved 19 weeks at No. 1, wasn’t the only country single to reach the peak this year. Between Post Malone’s Morgan Wallen-assisted “I Had Some Help,” Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ’Em” and Wallen’s own “Love Somebody,” country has topped Billboard’s all-genre singles chart more than any other genre this year. Shaboozey’s and Post Malone’s smashes are the only 2024 releases to log more than three weeks atop the chart — a notable feat, considering that the former is a country newcomer and the latter is a pop/hip-hop crossover star.
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“I Had Some Help,” which arrived in April and debuted atop the Hot 100, marked the first major release of Post Malone’s country music foray, which Grammy Award-nominated producer Louis Bell describes as a “natural transition” from the singer-songwriter space of the artist’s 2023 Austin album. “We want each project to flow into the next,” he tells Billboard.
Posty’s pop-country jam started with massive streams and sales, perfectly setting the stage for the arrival of the album F-1 Trillion, which opened in the penthouse of the Billboard 200 (dated Aug. 31) with 250,000 units, according to Luminate. All 18 songs from the album’s standard edition reached the Hot 100, including 15 collaborations with country powerhouses like Dolly Parton, Brad Paisley and Chris Stapleton — a testament to the Nashville goodwill that the Grammy-nominated pop star had accrued during his formal entry into the country space.
Historically, country music has been vigilant about newcomers immersing themselves in the genre’s roots, and Post got his boots dirty to prove his bona fides. He and Bell, who co-produced every track on F-1 Trillion, began working on it in November 2023 in Nashville right before the Country Music Association (CMA) Awards — foreshadowing the four nods that “I Had Some Help” would earn at the awards show the following year.
The two collaborators worked on the first few songs of the F-1 Trillion sessions with country superstar Luke Combs. “Post started saying that it [made] sense to collaborate on a lot of these records because he wanted to show Nashville how much he loves country and shine a light on the people who are in the city that inspired him,” Bell explains. “That was always the vision from the top down.” By inviting Nashville heavyweights such as Tim McGraw to collaborate in person, Post made sure that “word spread pretty quickly of how legitimate [he] was and how much he knew about the genre.”
To fully transition into the new style, he and Bell also implemented a new approach to their creative process: mulling over stories and concepts at the onset of a session instead of building out beats and melodies they had already been tinkering with.
The month before “I Had Some Help,” Post covered Hank Williams at Nashville’s iconic Ryman Auditorium, and in the months following the song’s release, he performed his first songwriter’s round at the Bluebird Cafe, played a set of classic country covers at Stagecoach 2024, made his Grand Ole Opry debut and brought out Blake Shelton as a surprise guest at his first-ever stadium show.
While Posty had to overcome his pop profile in his quest for crossover success, Shaboozey, a newcomer to the mainstream, had to establish who he was. “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” served as the fourth single — but was the first to get a radio push — from his third studio album, Where I’ve Been Isn’t Where I’m Going, which topped the Folk Albums and Independent Albums charts. With no major country collaborators, Shaboozey’s project didn’t come with the overt approval of the Nashville establishment — but it did arrive on the back of two appearances on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter in March, helping to spur eye-popping early consumption for “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” now nominated three times over at the 2025 Grammys ceremony.
“It was a bit of a fast and furious [situation],” says Heather Vassar, EMPIRE senior vp of operations, Nashville. Country radio programmers “were already familiar with Shaboozey’s name, but we had a very global, multiformat approach. When we decided to launch at country radio, we made sure they understood him and the whole project. The more authentic conversations we had, the more receptive they’ve become, and they’ve been incredible.”
Harnessing the power of his interpolation of J-Kwon’s 2004 Hot 100 No. 2 hip-hop smash, “Tipsy,” Shaboozey was able to expand the reach of “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” and tap into more diverse segments of country’s listenership. The track’s whistling instrumentation kept it squarely in the country genre, while its rap-sung flow and Birkin name-check kept it accessible for hip-hop and top 40 audiences — and those who had been newly corralled into the post-Cowboy Carter country wave. Shaboozey also made his Nashville rounds, playing The Nashville East and Spotify House at CMA Fest.
“The beauty of our country ecosystem — outside of select playlists — is that genre lines have been less of a concern,” Spotify country editor Claire Heinichen says. “Pop-country was the dominant subgenre for most of the 2010s. We knew the audience would really resonate with [these] songs. The data spoke for itself.”
It will be difficult for country songs to replicate the Hot 100 dominance of “I Had Some Help” and “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” without the boost of 2024’s larger paradigm shift. Yet Posty’s emphasis on adhering to country traditionalism and Shaboozey’s plays to more underserved country music listeners provide equally strong blueprints for future crossover hits.
This story appears in the Dec. 14, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Prior to 2024, Sabrina Carpenter had spent most of her career trying to score a crossover pop hit. Following her years as a Disney Channel star and recording artist on the Disney-owned Hollywood Records in the 2010s, she transitioned from younger-skewing tunes to pop that targeted adult listeners; her 2022 album, Emails I Can’t Send, didn’t produce any hits upon its release, but the album’s “Nonsense” belatedly turned into a viral smash, and “Feather,” from its deluxe edition, became Carpenter’s first top 40 entry on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at No. 21.
Those singles hinted at a breakthrough moment for Carpenter — and in 2024, the floodgates opened. She earned her first No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with her sixth album, Short n’ Sweet; headlined her first arena shows; and earned her first Grammy nominations, including in album, record and song of the year and best new artist. Yet the songs that became her sought-after smashes weren’t just her first Hot 100 top 10s — they remained in the upper tier for long enough to make chart history.
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From the Hot 100 charts dated Sept. 7 through Oct. 26, Carpenter boasted three songs — “Espresso,” “Please Please Please” and “Taste” — in the top 10, making her the first artist this decade to score a run of as many as eight weeks with at least three simultaneous top 10s on the chart. Although a few artists, including 50 Cent and Drake, have juggled three songs in the top 10 for more than eight weeks, only Carpenter, The Beatles and Justin Bieber have done so as solo-billed acts. And Carpenter now owns the longest such streak among women, surpassing Cardi B, who had three concurrent top 10s for four weeks in 2018.
Alex Tear, vp of music programming at SiriusXM and Pandora, says that, between a significant longtime fan base and the momentum leading up to 2024, Carpenter was always primed for a major year. “The audience appetite is amazing,” he says. “She really came into focus with the masses, but she had her Disney audience. When she was on Hollywood Records 10 years ago, she was grinding, she had a loyal following, she had a great presence and she was strong onstage.”
While songs like “Nonsense” and “Feather” didn’t become inescapable, both turned into slow-growing hits that introduced Carpenter’s melodic instincts and tongue-in-cheek wordplay to radio listeners and swelling audiences. Before “Espresso” made its live debut at Coachella, for instance, fans flocked to see how Carpenter was going to end “Nonsense” during her set, since she had been flooding TikTok feeds with her customized, often R-rated outros in concert.
“Her musicality and personality blow me away every time that we work together,” Amy Allen, who co-wrote every song on Short n’ Sweet (and is now nominated for the songwriter of the year, non-classical Grammy), told Billboard in August. Island Records vp of A&R Jackie Winkler told Billboard earlier this year, “At the core, the music Sabrina makes is perfectly reflective of who she is as a person, and all the quirks and character are what give her such a strong musical identity.”
That identity was on full display with “Espresso,” which zoomed into the top 10 upon its April release and peaked at No. 3, and continued with “Please Please Please,” which became Carpenter’s first Hot 100 chart-topper in June. When Short n’ Sweet arrived in August, opener “Taste” was positioned as an immediate standout (with a music video co-starring Jenna Ortega) and has climbed to No. 2.
Tear notes that the timing of those releases helped let each one breathe as a focus track and gave listeners time to latch onto their hooks before Carpenter presented another mainstream offering. And as the songs lingered in the top 10 for weeks, their respective sounds — with “Espresso” as her summer-ready synth-pop confection, “Please Please Please” her glittery alt-country riff and “Taste” her guitar-heavy ’80s pop anthem — were different enough to help her avoid oversaturation on streaming playlists and in radio blocks.
“Espresso” and “Please Please Please” have both topped the Pop Airplay chart, while “Taste” is still climbing, peaking at No. 3 so far. “Pop channels can kill a song by playing it over and over again,” Tear says. “I really like the fact that we have multiple choices that are very popular with our audience, that we can alternate with, therefore diminishing burn [and] giving a better variety of Sabrina.”
The trio of singles settled into the top 10 of the Hot 100 just as Carpenter kicked off her Short n’ Sweet tour in September, performing all three hits to arena audiences and reposting fan videos from the shows. And multiple hits were highlighted when the Grammy nominations were announced Nov. 8: “Espresso” scored a record of the year nod while “Please Please Please” will compete for song of the year.
The 2025 Grammys ceremony will showcase Carpenter’s immense 2024, but don’t expect her run of hits to dry up as the calendar flips. As the Short n’ Sweet tour is set to continue in Europe in March, “Bed Chem,” a sensual rhythmic pop track from the album, may also reach a new Hot 100 peak, as the song has climbed to No. 30 on the chart.
“I don’t know how many albums come out where you can go, ‘OK, this is five or six [hits] deep,’ ” Tear says. “It’s not going anywhere.”
This story appears in the Dec. 14, 2024, issue of Billboard.
A 67-year-old billionaire adopting a pop culture catchphrase should be cringe-worthy — but for Drake, it was a reminder of the ubiquity of Kendrick Lamar.
After Drake disparaged NBA star DeMar DeRozan, who had previously played for his beloved Toronto Raptors, Vivek Ranadivé (the owner of DeRozan’s current team, the Sacramento Kings) fired back at Drake in defense of his forward. While sitting courtside for a November contest between the Kings and the Raptors, Ranadivé donned a black T-shirt with four words emblazoned across his chest: “They Not Like Us.”
Count Ranadivé among the Lamar fans who have puffed out their chests since the Compton, Calif., rapper served up “Not Like Us,” the game-winning shot in his feud with Drake, on May 6. And while hip-hop purists would’ve bet on Drake as the one to walk away from a battle with a hit record, it was K. Dot who flipped the script on the Toronto rap deity.
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The OVO honcho attempted to land a direct hit of his own with the three-part blitz “Family Matters,” but Lamar didn’t even give the track a chance to breathe as he followed up 30 minutes later with the diabolical “Meet the Grahams.” Smothering “Family Matters” shrewdly allowed K. Dot to clear the lane and counter with “Not Like Us.” On the latter track, Lamar used producer Mustard’s Cali bounce to peel back the layers of Drake’s cultural identity while repeatedly accusing him of pedophilia.
In response, Drake could only muster up an addition to Lamar’s “The Heart” song series with “The Heart Pt. 6,” which found him losing his footing and backpedaling to the defensive. And when the dust settled, the consensus was clear: Lamar had emerged as the champ. Not only was “Not Like Us” a knockout blow, but a pro-Black Los Angeles anthem that is now cemented into rap battle lore alongside classic West Coast dis tracks like Ice Cube’s “No Vaseline” and 2Pac’s “Hit Em Up.”
“When I was growing up, I watched 2Pac, ‘California Love,’ Dr. Dre, Snoop [Dogg], the Death Row days,” Mustard told Billboard in October. “It’s like being a part of that again, but in this day and age.”
While Drake has been one of pop music’s architects — collecting 338 Billboard Hot 100 entries to Lamar’s 87 — K. Dot won the rap charts battle when “Euphoria” (No. 3) and “Not Like Us” (No. 1) became the only dis tracks in the feud to reach the Hot 100’s top five. “Not Like Us” not only debuted atop the chart but also set a record on Hot Rap Songs: 25 weeks at No. 1 through Nov. 23.
“That’s hard to ignore, especially when you’re evaluating an artist who’s taken pride in being so much bigger than everyone else based on his numbers,” Spotify head of urban music/creative director Carl Chery says of Lamar besting Drake. “There were moments where it felt like Drake had the advantage, but in hindsight, Kendrick was ahead every step of the way and his win feels more decisive every day.”
In retrospect, March 29, 2024, was a seminal date in rap history. Lamar chose violence with a show-stealing assist on “Like That,” the centerpiece of Future and Metro Boomin’s collaborative album We Don’t Trust You. On the track, Lamar responds to a line from J. Cole and Drake’s 2023 collaboration, “First Person Shooter,” on which Cole questions who’s leading rap’s “Big Three”: “Is it K. Dot? Is it Aubrey? Or me?” On “Like That,” Lamar defiantly replies: “Motherf–k the Big Three, n—a, it’s just big me.”
“Like That” launched at No. 1 on the Hot 100, and Lamar’s guest verse shook the tectonic plates of hip-hop. Cole dipped his toes into the feud before bowing out with a public apology onstage at his Dreamville Festival in May — leaving Drake to fight for himself.
Far before Lamar and Drake were ever dubbed part of rap’s Big Three, their paths were intertwined near the start of their careers. The titans traded verses on each other’s Take Care and good kid, m.A.A.d city albums, and Drizzy brought Lamar on the road as an opener on his 2012 Club Paradise Tour. Things turned icy the next year when Lamar put the entire rap game on blast with his maniacal verse on Big Sean’s “Control.” And while their feud was mostly dormant ever since, “First Person Shooter” poked the bear — and Lamar returned battle-ready.
Through the first weekend of May alone, Drake and Lamar exchanged haymakers at a relentless pace, dropping a collective eight dis tracks in total — all of which highlight their opposite backgrounds. Drake, who is biracial and from Toronto, was a child actor before becoming rap’s pop-leaning hit-maker. K. Dot, a Compton native with a Dr. Dre co-sign, quickly emerged as one of rap’s storytelling savants, with a penchant for illustrating the distressing Black experience in America.
“A lot of fans assumed that Kendrick is a slow writer because he took a five-year break between [2017 album] DAMN. and [2022’s] Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, so I think people were shocked to see him release four songs in five days,” Chery says. “I don’t think we’ll ever see such a high-stakes battle unfold this way ever again.”
50 Cent, an artist well-versed in rap beef, thinks the back-and-forth was “good for hip-hop” by forcing both artists to become more prolific. “It was about the lyrics, but that s–t was on a different level,” he said in an October Billboard interview. “The f–king [good kid, m.A.A.d city] car in the [“Family Matters”] video — that shit was a mystery. Everything was tied to something.”
Chery also credits Lamar’s shrewd strategy and instincts as what got the better of Drake. “I think Kendrick won because his strategy was arguably better than his music,” he says. “[Lamar] predicted the way the battle was going to play out on ‘Euphoria’ and ‘6:16 in L.A.’ He also gave Drake a taste of his own medicine [by releasing] back-to-back dis songs twice.”
And not only was his strategy better, but it was built to last. Lamar’s music zeitgeist has carried momentum all year long: In September, it was announced that he would headline the Super Bowl LIX halftime show in February 2025. By November, “Not Like Us” had yet to depart the Hot 100’s top 20 since its release, Lamar scored five Grammy nominations for the upcoming 67th annual awards ceremony and he capped off his banner campaign with the surprise release of his GNX album on Nov. 22. Just days later, Billboard reported that Drake filed legal documents alleging Universal Music Group and Spotify had conspired to “artificially inflate the popularity” of “Not Like Us.”
But consumption aside, “Not Like Us” has transcended traditional popularity: Snoop credited Lamar with unifying the West Coast during Lamar’s The Pop Out: Ken & Friends concert on Juneteenth at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, Calif. The hit even permeated different alleys of pop culture, adopted by the Los Angeles Dodgers on their journey to winning the 2024 World Series.
“The song took on a life of its own beyond the battle,” Chery says. “You saw viral clips of kids dancing to it at bat mitzvahs. The U.S. basketball team played it after every win during the Summer Olympics. It’s weirdly become universal. Almost everyone can identify with representing a specific idea and feeling like someone else represents the antithesis of who they are.”
This story appears in the Dec. 14, 2024, issue of Billboard.
At the start of 2024, Chappell Roan was a rising pop singer-songwriter with a core but mighty following. She had released her debut solo album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, in September 2023 to critical appreciation but not much commercial fanfare. By February, she kicked off Olivia Rodrigo’s North American arena tour as its opening act and soon after booked a few appearances at the biggest U.S. music festivals including Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza, mostly on afternoon side stages.
Yet the April release of her stand-alone single, “Good Luck, Babe!,” coincided with Roan’s album flying into the top 10 of the Billboard 200 as her back catalog quickly populated the Billboard Hot 100. By the time of her previously booked festival gigs, her name had become synonymous with pop stardom — and she used each set to prove why, showcasing her undeniable stage presence and audacious wardrobe at every stop.
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Apparently, behind the scenes, Roan was just as astonished. “In the moment, it was all so fast that we didn’t even get a chance to talk about what the f–k was going on,” says Roan’s stylist, Genesis Webb, with a laugh. “We were so focused on moving to the next thing that we didn’t have a moment to process.”
Chappell Roan’s “Eat Me” outfit at Coachella in April.
Dania Maxwell/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
By July, when the organizers for Chicago’s Lollapalooza witnessed her outsize crowds at festivals like Governors Ball and Boston Calling, they met to hastily figure out how to accommodate the throng of fans Roan would inevitably assemble at their own event. “It became a safety concern more than anything else,” says Huston Powell, a promoter at C3 Presents, the company responsible for booking the iconic Chicago festival. “There’s an egress-ingress point to the left of the stage that she was going to be playing, and we knew that the number of people wanting to see her could cause a massive traffic jam on that hill. On the main stages, we had a layout that could handle more people with more barricading, so we decided to move her set.”
Ultimately, Roan’s Lollapalooza performance broke an attendance record for the largest day crowd ever seen in the event’s 30-plus-year history — without a headline billing. And while Powell can’t offer a specific number of people in the audience for the star’s headline-making set, he can confirm what he saw with his own eyes. “There were at least three or four other acts playing at the same time, and the crowd is usually somewhat evenly split between the stages. But just by the sheer appearance, looking around at the number of people in the park and the people you could eyeball at other stages, the vast majority were watching Chappell’s set. We anticipated it would be big, but this completely exceeded expectations.”
Dan Nigro, Roan’s producer-collaborator, explained to Billboard in June that her path to the center of the cultural zeitgeist proved that nothing is more powerful in the industry than good buzz.
“The fact that she’s so phenomenal live means people are finally able to see in real time how good she is. That then becomes this word-of-mouth thing, and it’s wonderful to see her have such old-school success,” he said. “She’s so good at what she does that the system is working again. It really is that simple.”
Her wrestling outfit at Lollapalooza.
Erika Goldring/WireImage
Roan herself told Billboard in 2022 that her career lives and dies by the success of her live performances. “If I’ve learned anything, it’s that the live show is where the heartbeat of the project is,” she said. “Luckily, it’s my favorite part of what I do.”
Part of her runaway success on the festival circuit came largely thanks to Roan’s maximalist costuming, a running feature along her path to pop stardom. When she started headlining her own tours in 2023 — following the release of her now-Grammy-nominated debut album — Roan decided to create themes for every show, encouraging fans to dress up along with her. Webb says they kept that trend going for Roan’s festival performances, commissioning eye-catching, distinct costumes for every gig. “I think we did 16 different looks all told for these festivals,” she says.
Whether Roan was dressed as a giant pink butterfly at Coachella (in a loving tribute to Deee-Lite’s Lady Miss Kier), the Statue of Liberty at Governors Ball or a professional wrestler at Lollapalooza, she thrived when embracing the outsize nature of her job, creating headlines around her phenomenal costuming and anticipation for what would come next. Webb points out that it’s a tried-and-true method for pop stars, with artists like Lady Gaga and Katy Perry building their own fame with dazzling outfits at the outset of their careers.
“I think it’s the zeitgeist of it all — it’s knowing that this is supposed to be fun,” she says. “It felt like there hadn’t been a pop star in a really long time to have people wanting to see a live-performance look as much as they do with her.”
Her Statue of Liberty costume at Governors Ball in June.
Astrida Valigorsky/Getty Images
With that anticipation came unprecedented crowds. Powell saw the numbers Roan drew at Boston Calling and Coachella, which helped his team plan ahead. When an act dropped out the weekend before Austin City Limits in September, C3 Presents promoter Amy Corbin says the festival seized the opportunity to place Roan’s performance on its main stage as well. “When it happens, we look at ways to adjust programming to ensure we are delivering the best fan and artist experience,” Corbin tells Billboard. For the second time this year, Roan’s set drew “the largest crowds in the sunset slot in ACL Fest history,” she says.
Roan’s festival season has since ignited conversations in the live industry about how to recapture the energy that she — and her fans — brought. “We’re all trying to find the next Chappell Roan,” Powell says. “I think sometimes bands worry about what time of day they play and where they play — but if anything, this showed that if you’re hot enough, audiences will come no matter what.”
This story appears in the Dec. 14, 2024, issue of Billboard.
“The reason I love electronic music and clubs and DJs so much is that everything is endless,” Charli xcx told Billboard in her July cover story. Fittingly, the veteran pop artist got her start in London’s rave scene over a decade ago and, across five albums, developed a faithful cult following. But it was her sixth album, brat, and its yearlong rollout, that shifted perception — and expanded her fandom.
Beginning with her record-breaking Boiler Room warehouse set in February, Charli let demand slowly build before the June release of brat, which was met with critical acclaim and became her highest-charting title on the Billboard 200, entering at No. 3 and collecting 82,000 equivalent album units in its first week, according to Luminate. In the following months, the internet deemed the season “Brat Summer” as Charli became even more omnipresent and brat started to shape-shift.
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Soon after brat’s release, Charli dropped a surprise remix of standout song “Girl, so confusing” featuring its subject: Lorde. The drop hinted at more to come, and in August the “Guess” remix featuring Billie Eilish arrived — and soon became the highest-charting song from brat, peaking at No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100. Brat Summer soon turned into Brat Fall with the September kickoff of her co-headlining Sweat Tour with Troye Sivan, during which Charli released a full-fledged remix album titled Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat.
Every song was reimagined and featured at least one special guest, including Robyn and Yung Lean (“360”), Ariana Grande (“Sympathy Is a Knife”), Bon Iver (“I Think About It All the Time”) and Sivan on “Talk Talk,” which closed each night of their tour. To celebrate the release of the remix album, a larger-than-life “sonic sculpture” was unveiled at New York’s open-air Storm King Art Center, juxtaposing its lime green walls against the browning colors of the surrounding grass and trees.
By November, brat earned Charli seven Grammy nominations — including for album and record of the year (“360”) — and she ended the month by pulling double duty as host and musical guest on Saturday Night Live. She closed the year by announcing a few 2025 solo arena dates, as well as a headlining set at Primavera Sound in Barcelona and a main-stage booking at Coachella. The word “brat” was even named word of the year by the Collins English Dictionary.
As for what’s still ahead, her management team reveals that all of 2025 is already planned out. For an artist like Charli, who has “always operated three steps ahead,” as Twiggy Rowley, a member of her management team, previously told Billboard, the blueprints for Brat Winter and Brat Spring have indeed been laid — and will lead right back to where it all began, with no end in sight. Just as Charli always wanted.
And yet, as Charli said while speaking to the audience at a May screening of her “360” music video, “It’s hard being ahead.” Her longtime creative director, Imogene Strauss, agrees, telling Billboard in June: “I think this is very true. Doing things first almost never means you’re going to be the biggest or most famous. Being the reference means you have to make choices that go against the status quo.”
Still, Charli and her team have managed to sustain the momentum surrounding brat for months — and make it look easy. And while her previous output has earned critical love, she and her team’s lockstep moves in 2024 have actually helped her become both one of the biggest and most famous pop stars of the year.
“Going into this album, Charli had written a 20-page manifesto for the core team,” recalls Brandon Davis, executive vp/co-head of pop A&R at Atlantic. “So much of what you saw throughout the campaign was conceptualized many months prior by her. She’s a genius. The look, the feel, the sound, the art, the fashion — it was all there and all Charli.”
Because of that precision, her team was able to build “key campaign moments” based on her vision. “Where things got a bit spontaneous,” Davis continues, “was what happened next.”
He cites the “brat wall” as the best example of inspiring “massive cultural moments” that the team then had the challenge of amplifying. Over the summer, a wall in Brooklyn was painted brat green and communicated different messages and updates about the album, all of which were written and broadcast live for fans gathering in person and watching on social media. Soon enough, cities around the world from San Francisco to Brisbane, Australia, enacted walls of their own.
Davis also mentions the “brat generator,” an online tool that lets users customize their own brat album cover-inspired images, as helping boost the album’s cultural cachet. Once the team realized how widely the tool was being used, they mobilized to create multiple versions of the generator for each version of brat and, eventually, for the Sweat Tour as well.
As expected, the tour had brattiness coursing through it, with Strauss previously telling Billboard it was “an interesting morphing, shifting thing” because of how the album itself evolved throughout the trek. The list of potential surprise guests grew, too: At Madison Square Garden, Lorde joined Charli for their “Girl, so confusing” remix, and at Los Angeles’ Kia Forum, Kesha performed her version of “Spring breakers” (off the deluxe Brat and it’s the same but there’s three more songs so it’s not), which arrived as a surprise release days after Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat.
“So much of this rollout was planned, but sometimes it was not,” Charli previously told Billboard, speaking of her “Girl, so confusing” remix with Lorde, which took just three days to arrange. As Davis reveals, “There was a moment where we weren’t even sure if the song would make it out on all [digital service providers] in time.”
Charli’s management team, led by Brandon Creed with Rowley and Sam Pringle, say the brat remixes are a perfect example of how quickly she moved following the release of the original album. While Charli always planned on releasing a remix set, no one anticipated how much momentum her collaboration with Lorde, which charted at No. 63 on the Hot 100, would inject into the campaign. And ever since, Charli has kept illustrating how being nimble is crucial to the “endless” release cycle she always wanted.
“It was a total balancing act of strategy and real-time decisions,” Charli’s management team shared in a joint statement to Billboard. “The entire brat campaign exemplifies perfectly when an artist and their team are locked in and able to amplify, magnify and pivot with all decisions.”
“I think the key fundamental was to always be watching, always be nimble and always stay close to Charli,” Davis adds. “She knows herself, and her fans, best.”
As for what will come next, that’s for Charli to know and fans to find out. How very brat.
This story appears in the Dec. 14, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Dua Lipa’s list of 2024 musical accomplishments is comically long. In this year alone she’s done — deep breath — the following: released her third studio album, Radical Optimism; kicked off her biggest global tour yet; played a coveted Glastonbury Festival headline slot, the first British woman to do so since 2016; filmed a TV special at London’s Royal Albert Hall; performed onstage with Cher, Elton John and Chris Stapleton; and made a playful cameo on Charli xcx’s remixed version of brat.
“It’s honestly been the best year of my life. I’ve done things that I’ve wanted to do for so long,” Lipa tells Billboard U.K. with a laugh on a video call. She’s in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, when we speak, where she’s playing two nights at the city’s Axiata Arena. The run of dates in Asia, which has included stops in Tokyo, Singapore, Seoul and Bangkok, is her first in the region in six years. The crowds have been so “loud and fun,” she says, and she’s been “blown away” by their enthusiasm.
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“There came a point in the year where I was thinking, ‘I’ve got to sit down and write some new dreams and new plans and other things I wanted to do,’ ” she says. “I feel like I ticked so many of my boxes this year. It’s amazing.”
In May, the British Albanian artist released Radical Optimism (Warner), which peaked at No. 1 on the United Kingdom’s Official Albums Chart upon release and had the biggest opening week by a British female artist since Adele’s 30 in 2021. The record went to No. 1 throughout mainland Europe in Spain, France, The Netherlands and more, and hit No. 2 on the Billboard 200, her highest debut on the U.S. charts to date. Lead single “Houdini,” meanwhile, enjoyed a 17-week reign on Billboard’s Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart.
The 29-year-old is a fitting entry for Billboard U.K. in Billboard’s inaugural Global No. 1s series celebrating the biggest and most successful artists internationally over the past year.
Seven months after the album’s release, Lipa looks back fondly on recording it with the stellar house band that included Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, hyperpop hero Danny L Harle, superproducer Andrew Wyatt and star songwriter Tobias Jesso Jr., along with her accomplished previous collaborators Caroline Ailin and Ian Kirkpatrick. Lipa has said it was inspired by Parker’s Tame Impala work and, speaking to Rolling Stone in February, dubbed it a “psychedelic-pop-infused tribute to U.K. rave culture.” A noticeable shimmy away from her disco-infused single “Dance the Night,” which appeared in the 2023 blockbuster Barbie film, Radical Optimism showed flashes of the turn-of-the-millennium French touch scene (“End of an Era”) and Parker’s signature psych-pop (“Training Season”).
Lipa sketched the blueprint for Radical Optimism following the success of her monster second album, 2020’s Future Nostalgia, which later spawned several hits, including “Levitating,” which was named the biggest song of 2021 on Billboard’s year-end Hot 100 chart. The set, which found an enthusiastic worldwide audience with its playful disco sheen during the COVID-19 lockdown, won best pop vocal album at the Grammys in 2021.
“Future Nostalgia doing what it did allowed me to grow as an artist, to push boundaries and change. It allowed me to have the confidence to make Radical Optimism,” Lipa tells Billboard U.K. “It gave me the freedom and confidence to be like, ‘You know who I really want to make an album with? Kevin Parker. And I want to do something a bit different; I want to work with Danny L Harle and experiment with my sound, do a different vocal performance and make pop music but allow that to live in another sonic world.’ It’s been fun to shape-shift.”
Dua Lipa backstage at the Axiata Arena in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Nov. 24.
Elizabeth Miranda
In October, the songs received the ultimate stress test with a performance at London’s Royal Albert Hall, where she enlisted the 53-piece Heritage Orchestra, conducted by Ben Foster; 14 choristers; and her regular touring band for a bombastic, glitzy night at the capital’s most iconic music venue. She performed Radical Optimism in full, utilizing the brass section to give new heft to songs like “Houdini,” while elegant strings added another dimension to “French Exit” and “These Walls.” The in-the-round performance was captured for a TV special, An Evening With Dua Lipa (which aired Dec. 8 on ITV in the United Kingdom and will air Dec. 15 on CBS in the United States), and a live album, Dua Lipa Live at the Royal Albert Hall (out now).
“When we were in rehearsals, there was nothing quite like it: Those orchestral instrumentations just shook me to the core,” Lipa recalls. “Feeling my music in such a way that was so moving, it made me fall in love with music all over again.”
During the concert’s encore, John joined Lipa — the first time they performed live together — to sing their collaboration, “Cold Heart,” which topped charts globally upon release in 2021 (in its PNAU remix) and interpolates multiple John songs.
“Obviously Elton is no stranger to the Albert Hall himself and it felt like such a chic and elegant night, so I needed my most chic and fabulous friend to come and join me. He immediately said yes,” she says. “One thing about Elton is that he always shows up for his friends. He’s super loyal… he’s just always been there, lending his ear and being so supportive.”
Dua Lipa backstage at the Philippine Arena in Santa Maria, Philippines, on Nov. 13.
Elizabeth Miranda
The defining Dua Lipa performance of 2024, however, was not in the austere, lavish Albert Hall but in a Somerset field in southwest England. Worthy Farm, where Glastonbury Festival is held, is usually full of dairy cows gently grazing in the lush greenery, but on June 28, they were replaced with a sea of sequined spectators for Lipa’s headlining slot on the festival’s Pyramid Stage. The impassioned, fun, formidable set (during which Parker joined Lipa onstage) aired live on BBC One and globally on the broadcaster’s website.
The show marked her second Glastonbury appearance, following a 2017 mid-afternoon performance that attracted one of that weekend’s biggest crowds — and, following on the heels of her self-titled debut album’s release, helped catalyze her star turn.
Returning as a Pyramid Stage headliner (on Friday, so she could party the rest of the weekend at the festival with her partner, actor Callum Turner, and some pals) had been on her agenda ever since. “I try not to let these moments pass me by so I made sure that when I was standing up there I took as many mental pictures as I could,” she says. At one point, she headed out toward the crowd and turned to face the stage, focusing on its apex: a shining white tip sending a beam of light into the starry night sky.
Prior to the performance, Lipa had switched off her phone to get in the zone. When she got back to her dressing room afterward, she had a deluge of texts.
“It was so beautiful. I had so many messages from previous headliners,” she says. “You sort of earn this badge of honor in that moment, and it felt like I joined the coolest club in the world.” One came from Adele, the last female British act before Lipa to top the bill in 2016. “She said, ‘I’ve been thinking about you all day and just wanted to wish you luck for tonight. Don’t forget to soak it all in.’ Looking back at that Pyramid was me trying to do that.”
Dua Lipa backstage at MMRDA Grounds in Mumbai, India, on Nov. 30.
Elizabeth Miranda
Radical Optimism is the first album Lipa has released since striking a deal with TaP Music, her former management and publishing group, to acquire ownership of her songs, music, masters and publishing rights. The move dovetailed with news that Lipa would now be managed by her father, Dukagjin Lipa, and in 2024, she expanded her nonmusic offerings: Her company Radical22 produced the Disney+ documentary Camden, about the north London borough and its music scene; she starred in the action-comedy Argylle; and her Service95 newsletter — which compiles recommendations for food, literature and more — grew in stature. No surprise, then, that The Sunday Times featured her on its annual Rich List, estimating a $113 million (90 million pounds) net worth.
“This is really me stepping into my role not just as a creator but as a businesswoman,” she says. “It comes with the understanding that as much as I want to stay on the creative side, I have to be knowledgeable about all aspects of my career if I want to have longevity.
“I think for every artist that’s really important — and as much as we might not want to, as the easiest thing is to go into the studio and write the songs and whatever happens, happens — it just can’t be that way,” she continues. “Every artist should be educated on that. It’s really important for us to be in control or at least know what’s happening with our careers and not turn a blind eye.”
Elsewhere, she’s consistently voiced support of Gaza during the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, and she was also named a champion for the Trevor Project, the suicide prevention charity that supports LGBTQ+ youth. “Anything I can do as a supporter to help out in any way with the platform that I have, I’m fully willing and open to all of that,” she says.
But, despite her many achievements, something noteworthy eluded Lipa on this cycle: Radical Optimism did not receive any nominations for the upcoming Grammys, a surprise given her 10 career nominations in years past (including a win for best new artist in 2019) and the fact that her performance kicked off the 2024 ceremony.
“I’m so proud of Radical Optimism and where it’s brought me. I love that album and I’m having the time of my life performing it live, and I’ve been able to do things that I thought I could only dream of this year, so I’m really grateful,” she confidently says of the record’s impact on her career. “Although it would have been nice to be recognized by your industry, especially as a woman, I’m so proud seeing so many incredible female artists nominated at the Grammys this year.”
Dua Lipa backstage at the Singapore Indoor Stadium on Nov. 6.
Elizabeth Miranda
Lipa has particular love for Charli xcx, a longtime pal who received several Grammy nods for brat. She had a cameo on the remix of Charli’s “Talk talk” alongside Troye Sivan, with Lipa speaking in French and Spanish on the track.
“I love her so much and she’s always been a really good friend of mine and been so supportive from day one. She deserves all the flowers,” Lipa says of Charli. “She’s worked her arse off, and it’s so beautiful to see her get the recognition she deserves. She’s really stuck to her guns and allowed herself to be creative in her own way, and it’s paid off. That’s the best thing that can ever happen to an artist. She’s so deserving of every moment.”
As for where her own career is, “Overall I’m really happy with where I am,” Lipa says. “I don’t think it really matters in the grand scheme of things where I am, where I want to be and where I’m going. It doesn’t change the way I feel about the record at all.”
Now, as 2024 comes to a close, Lipa is enjoying some well-earned rest before her biggest tour yet. In March 2025, her Radical Optimism tour kicks off its next leg in Australia and New Zealand before heading to Europe and the United Kingdom, which includes two sold-out nights at London’s 90,000-capacity Wembley Stadium and Liverpool’s historic Anfield Stadium. Then in September, she’s off to North America with 24 arena dates including a whopping four nights at New York’s Madison Square Garden and another four at L.A.’s Kia Forum.
She speaks about manifestation, the idea that she must imagine her biggest goals and achievements for them to become a reality. In fact, Lipa’s use of the word contributed to the Cambridge Dictionary naming “manifest” its word of the year. She remains coy, however, of what’s next on the agenda. “I can’t really tell you, as they have to be a secret to come true…” she says. If her past year is anything to go by, we’ll know it when we see it.
A full 10 years ago, global audiences got to know Andrew Hozier-Byrne — the Irish singer-songwriter known to most simply as Hozier — with his smash “Take Me to Church.” Written and released while he was still an independent artist playing Dublin open mics, the howling alt-folk ballad decried religious institutional hypocrisy and turned into enough of a surprise hit to get licensed to Columbia Records. It became omnipresent and climbed to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100; Hozier, in turn, became one of 2014’s biggest breakout stars.
But over the next decade, he never matched its crossover success. That is, until this year: with “Too Sweet,” a slinky pop-soul ode to responsible decadence that once again made Hozier’s haunting wail unavoidable across multiple radio formats. The song (from his now ironically titled Unheard EP) became a runaway prerelease success in snippet form on TikTok, then on streaming services once the full song dropped in March, and then on the Hot 100 in April as it debuted at No. 5 and eventually did “Church” one better by topping the chart three weeks later, as well as the Pop Airplay and Rock & Alternative Airplay lists. For most artists who have gone 10 years without a major pop hit, its success would have been an absolute godsend — a comeback-marking, career-defining moment of validation.
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For Hozier? Eh, it was a nice bonus.
Which isn’t to say that he’s not thankful for the song’s streaming virality or for its subsequent pop radio crossover — the unassuming (and strikingly modest) artist projects only gratitude and humility when talking about his 2024 wins. It’s just that… well, the song’s chart takeover hasn’t really changed his career much yet.
“Ten years into your career, you know there’s going to be busy cycles, you know there’s going to be quiet cycles,” Hozier explains with a shrug.
This year obviously wasn’t one of the latter. He’s speaking to Billboard from Perth, Australia, on election night in America — which, with his jet-lagged sleep schedule, means he woke up in the “dark cloud” of Donald Trump’s electoral map takeover. “It feels like the world is controlled by gray-haired old men,” he says, then adds with a bit of mordant humor: “But in a few years… we can’t dodge coffins forever, you know?”
He has just had some rare time off — about three weeks, during which he recharged with friends and family in the countryside of Wicklow, Ireland, that he calls home — and is now between his two dates in Perth, part of a 12-show run Down Under that will take his total gigs for 2024 into the triple digits.Still, he says that when it comes to “Too Sweet,” 2024 hardly compares with his first turn in the pop spotlight. “When it was ‘Take Me to Church,’ that was the first song that I ever put out. So I was learning everything about everything all at once, also while trying to keep pace with this train that was moving,” he explains. “That was my whole life, was catching up with that song.”
Hozier photographed September 19, 2024 at Black Rabbit Rose in Los Angeles.
Austin Hargrave
“Too Sweet,” on the other hand? “It kind of just put wind in the sails of a ship that was already sort of moving,” he says, still sounding unsure of how to best quantify the effect. “It was just like this thing that happened, and it’s been like a cherry on the cake.”
And while Hozier has never seemed one to puff up his own wins, this time his entire team also appears to view the boost from his recent striking success in relatively low-key terms. Caroline Downey, his longtime manager, sums up the impact of “Too Sweet” even more succinctly than the artist himself.
“It was just lovely,” she says. “A lovely surprise.”
Most artists with a single major hit follow a similar trajectory. Hozier, for the last decade, has not.
For one thing, though his lone visit to the Hot 100 in the 2010s was with “Take Me to Church,” he found greater success on other charts. He established a home base on Adult Alternative Airplay, where he scored six top five hits before the end of the decade — including a second No. 1 after “Take Me to Church” with 2018’s Mavis Staples-featuring “Nina Cried Power” — and he topped the Billboard 200 in 2019 with Wasteland, Baby!, which features the latter track.
More importantly, though, he developed a major live following. Hozier has spent his entire career as a road warrior, gradually leveling up in terms of venue size — and earning lifelong fans with his live combination of low-key charisma and soaring singalongs, elevated by his piercing baritone — but making sure not to skip steps, or markets. “I’ve been doing this 25 years, and I don’t know if there’s another artist at the agency that’s played as many markets as Andrew has played,” says WME senior partner/global co-head of music Kirk Sommer, who oversees his North American touring. “He’s just completely and utterly dedicated to his craft and plays each show as if it’s his last. And he’s really put in the work.”
On his 2023 tour in support of new album Unreal Unearth — his third top three entry on the Billboard 200 in as many tries — Hozier started to really see the fruits of that labor with some of his highest-profile venue plays to date, including his first headlining show at New York’s Madison Square Garden. While he has maintained his Adult Alternative audience from the prior decade, he also picked up a new, younger one on TikTok during the global coronavirus shutdown; they fell for the rock star’s modest Irish countryside lifestyle as much as his poetic lyrics and spirit-lifting anthems.
“The fans seem to really enjoy that… I guess, like, domestic, sort of silly side of me?” he offers, somewhat incredulously. “During the pandemic, we’d do these kind of live readings on Instagram — I’d maybe read a few poems, or we’d do these Instagram Lives, play a few songs. I think maybe there’s a sort of lasting relationship that [makes it feel] like there’s an element of domesticity to me? And that’s why people are like, ‘Hey, talk to us about the bees that you’re keeping in your garden.’ ”
Hozier photographed September 19, 2024 at Black Rabbit Rose in Los Angeles.
Austin Hargrave
While Hozier grew to an arena-level headliner and a TikTok sensation, his mainstream profile remained relatively low. Pop crossover was not a priority of his — “I was always wary of attempting to write hits for the sake of writing hits,” he says — and he has never been much of a critics’ darling or a Grammy favorite. (“Take Me to Church” scored a song of the year nod, but he hasn’t been nominated since; “Too Sweet” was snubbed for the 2025 awards.) Consequently, his sustained level of success escaped the notice of some less-plugged-in fans and media.
“We did have one interview he was doing at [a festival] where the interviewer said — I think [Hozier] nearly choked on his coffee — ‘Where have you been for 10 years?’ ” Downey recalls. “You’re going, “He’s about to close the festival tonight. He’s kind of been around…’ ”
Even before “Too Sweet,” though, Hozier’s rising success was increasingly evident — and his influence on a new generation of rootsy, big-voiced singer-songwriters equally hard to miss. In late 2023, he appeared on a new version of Noah Kahan’s Stick Season opener “Northern Attitude” — which not only returned Hozier to the Hot 100’s top 40 (at No. 37) for the first time since 2014, but contextualized him as a key influence on Kahan’s brand of alt-folk and as one of the artists who had laid the groundwork for the latter’s crossover success. And just days before the release of “Too Sweet,” Lollapalooza announced that Hozier would headline the August festival — his highest-profile bill-topping appearance to that point.
“I was like, ‘Well, how is this gonna go?’ ” Sommer says of checking out his client’s ultimately successful headliner turn in Chicago. “How’s it gonna go? There are gonna be people for as far as the eye can see!”
Meanwhile, Hozier was (perhaps unwittingly) developing an increasingly devoted corner of his fan base. The affection held for him in the lesbian community has already been a source of internet incredulity for years — “Why Do Lesbians Love Hozier?” blog explorations date back to the turn of the 2020s — though the conversation went overground this year when Lucy Dacus told The New York Times: “Lesbians love Hozier.” (Hozier, an outspoken LGBTQ+ ally, calls his support in the community “really, really wonderful, really sweet… there’s a lot of humor in it, too, and a lot of self-awareness.”)
Because Hozier’s career momentum was already trending in a positive direction, the success of “Too Sweet” can be interpreted as not just an effect, but also a cause of his recent revival. “The song, I think, is very special — it really connected with people on a lot of levels — so that is a part of [its success],” says Erika Alfredson, head of marketing at Columbia. “But it’s also a little bit of the market [being more open to him] and also a lot of the work that Andrew has done. And I think it very well could have happened with another song of his. This just happened to be the one.”
This helps explain why Hozier and his team are reserved about the impact “Too Sweet” has had on his career. Before the song’s March release, his 2024 tour dates (announced in January) had already sold out — even with its ambitious 100-plus-date routing that included three nights at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, Calif., and an unprecedented four nights at New York’s Forest Hills Stadium.
All of this adds up to “Too Sweet,” one of 2024’s biggest hits by just about any metric, essentially amounting to a nonessential luxury for Hozier. While the song’s success — which it achieved much quicker than the slow-burning smash that was “Take Me to Church” — has bowled over Hozier and his team, they’re hard-pressed to cite significant doors the song has opened for the already massive star.
Hozier does point to recent appearances on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and at the iHeart Radio Festival as two particular opportunities that “Too Sweet” may have made possible. But anyway, he says, his calendar was so packed this year that it might have been difficult for him to take advantage of more than that: “Because the tour schedule was already in place when that song blew up, [you’re still] fulfilling everything that you were planning on doing anyway. Your routing is done. So even when you get those invites, it can be a challenge.”
“Does it change [anything]?” Downey wonders aloud when reflecting on the song’s impact. “I guess it just reminds people that he’s there.”
Since it has worked so well for him so far, could Hozier just follow this career path indefinitely — plugging away as a live favorite, coming back with one gigantic pop smash every 10 years and then returning to business as usual?
“I mean, it’d be fun to be 44 and have a No. 1 hit! It’d be fun to be 54, to be 64… Can you guarantee me the No. 1 when I’m in my 80s?” he asks excitedly in response to the idea. “I’m going to be doing whatever I can to stay alive, man. I’m going to be hiring people to be doing all the weird blood transfusions, [to] hook me up to whatever machine.”
Regardless of whether he can still top the Hot 100 when he’s of retirement age, the plan from day one — which his team has enacted brilliantly over the past decade — was to have Hozier achieve the kind of long-term career stability where he could still be performing at a high level as a sexagenarian.
“ ‘We see you as a Bruce Springsteen — we see you as an artist who’ll still be releasing albums long after I’m gone,’ ” Downey remembers telling Hozier very early in his career. “He’s 34 years of age. We want to see him still working like U2 and Bruce Springsteen and a whole lot of other acts at 64. And the only way that I feel that he can do that is by pacing it. And actually not making decisions based on money and making decisions that are right for his long-term career, not his short-term.”
Hozier photographed September 19, 2024 at Black Rabbit Rose in Los Angeles.
Austin Hargrave
And while “Too Sweet” might not have had much calculable immediate career impact for 2024 Hozier, it might very well move him closer to that long-term goal. Sommer has noted how Hozier’s social media and streaming stats have spiked since his “Too Sweet” success: between 1 million and 2 million new followers each on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, as well as an additional 30 million followers on Spotify. Those numbers indicated increased fan demand that could turbo-charge Hozier’s already-scorching live success.
“All those [2024] shows sold out instantly,” Sommer emphasizes. “So how much demand was there? How many people were unable to buy tickets at the time? And we really didn’t get carried away anywhere. We didn’t try to exhaust demand anywhere. So I would say that there was still pent-up demand after the March on-sale. And now we have this song…”
All of this has led Sommer to a conclusion that might stun any remaining listeners unaware of Hozier’s recent level-up — and maybe even a few who are: “I’m incredibly confident [that] he’s a stadium-level headliner.”
That may seem like a big leap for Hozier, who has never played a full arena tour in the United States — but Sommer doesn’t see it that way. “A lot of these amphitheaters are bigger than a lot of these indoor buildings,” he says. “You look at the [four nights at] Forest Hills… what’s that, 60,000 tickets? And it could’ve been more? We chose to play some select arenas in places just because we felt that it might be a better fan experience, and [Hozier is] very mindful of the fan experience. So by no means would this be skipping steps in any way.”
Downey says that the current live plan for Hozier (following his Dec. 21 appearance as musical guest on Saturday Night Live, his first since 2014) is to go back on the road next year, “kind of maybe May to October,” including some major festival headlining gigs, with dates to be announced soon. His own upcoming dates aren’t likely to be stadiums, but Downey agrees those are in his future. “I think that stadiums will definitely be on album four,” she says. “And I do think he’s ready… the slow burn, with the 10 years of him touring, has been from starting him small and gradually building and building and building, that he is perfectly comfortable now in arenas, and he’s perfectly comfortable playing to 40, 50,000 people in a field. So a stadium would be just the next step, I think. With ease.”
Hozier allows himself another rare moment of being pumped about his success when discussing this recent run of momentum — capped, if not created, by “Too Sweet” — and “the ambitious feeling of opportunity” that comes with following it up with all eyes once again upon him. “I can do whatever I want. I can do something totally different, I can respond to [“Too Sweet”] with something else, or something different… it’s nice,” he says. “It just feels like the sky is open, and ‘Off you go.’ ”
This story appears in the Dec. 14, 2024, issue of Billboard.
“We bet our lives on it a long time ago,” says Christian Clancy. He’s seated on a couch in a cozy corner of his Los Angeles home next to his wife and business partner, Kelly Clancy, surrounded by plants. Getting into artist management “was never something we talked about,” Kelly says. But nearly 15 years after starting their small firm, 4 Strikes, it has continued to punch above its class, becoming one of the mightiest forces in management today. And Tyler, The Creator has been there from the start.
Before founding 4 Strikes in 2010, Christian and Kelly worked at Interscope Records in the early 2000s (most recently as head of marketing and marketing manager, respectively) alongside the label’s roster of hip-hop greats, including 50 Cent, Eminem, G-Unit and Dr. Dre. “There was no better place and time to learn the business,” Christian says. But by 2010, they’d decided to strike out on their own. Kelly departed the label first, in 2005, and she admits, “I didn’t really know what I wanted to do next.” Christian “burned out” on the music business and, five years later, left, too.
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That same year, a former Interscope colleague, David Airaudi, introduced the pair to a young, charismatic and carefree (almost to a fault) rapper who changed the course of their careers — and lives. Christian and Airaudi started managing Tyler’s collective, Odd Future, with Kelly joining soon after. “Tyler reinvigorated what was inside of us,” Christian says. A year after marrying in 2006, the Clancys welcomed their daughter, Chloe, and just a few years later launched their management company from their home. When Odd Future split in the mid-2010s, the couple started managing Tyler on their own. “We put our whole lives on it,” Kelly says. “It felt like a family from day one.”
The 4 Strikes roster has just four full-time staffers (including the Clancys) and has remained trim from the start, currently boasting five artists: Kevin Abstract, Romil and Matt Champion, who together comprise what Christian calls “the Brockhampton sector” (referencing the trio’s former group); the estate of Mac Miller, whom the Clancys managed before his untimely death in 2018; and, of course, Tyler — “and Tyler’s 147 businesses,” Christian jokes.
“We trusted and believed in [Tyler] along the way,” he continues. “I can’t tell you how many times I’m like, ‘Bro, you’re tripping.’ Turns out, he wasn’t tripping. But I always say, ‘I’ll listen, and if I disagree with something, I’m going to say, “I think you’re crazy” ’ — And then after I say that, I’ll jump off a bridge with him.”
What do you remember from when you first met Tyler?
Christian Clancy: [He was] staying on his grandma’s couch, eating Wendy’s.
Kelly Clancy: Three dollars in his pocket.
Christian: He’s still the same dude.
Kelly: He’s still that kid who’s full of wonderment. He gets excited about the smallest things and then can look at something, like a 10-year anniversary [of his own Camp Flog Gnaw festival in November] and stand onstage and go, “Holy s–t.”
Christian: He’s self-aware. As he’s gotten bigger, he realizes he knows less — and respectfully, that’s rare in a business when you’re typically surrounded by yes men, which he isn’t. And then your ego takes over. And the beauty of him is he’s open to new ideas, thoughts, discussion, perspectives. Doesn’t mean he’s not confident as f–k. He’s wildly confident, but there’s a big difference between confidence and ego based on fear.
Christian, you said early in your career that your job is to give artists the best opportunity to succeed without compromising. How have you done that?
Christian: Well, that has a lot to do with the people you work with. When you surround yourself with people who know who they are, that becomes easier. Tyler had a great ability to seemingly know and believe that he’s going to get to the top of the mountain. If you remove fear, you’re free. You’re not going, “Well, what are they going to think?” Like, f–k all of that and be true to yourself. I actually learned that from Rick Rubin. If you’re honest and confident, it’s pretty hard to lose. You may not win big, but you will for f–k sure have respect.
What are some key decisions you two have made to help Tyler climb that mountain?
Christian: The decision to [sign] with Sony, who gave us the freedom and full creative control and [ability for Tyler to own his] masters and all the things that were imperative to ever doing anything like that. We’re huge [Sony Music Entertainment CEO] Rob Stringer fans. He gets it. Betting on ourselves with [Tyler’s clothing brand] Golf Wang. Betting on ourselves with the festival that was supposed to just be a zipper ride in the middle of Fairfax Avenue and the city was like, “Oh, hell no.” And [us saying], “Well, let’s go figure it out ourselves.” All the way down to [lifestyle brand] Le Fleur now, most of those answers are going to be betting on ourselves. If you don’t know something, that’s OK. Go find the people that do and question everything and build your own house in whatever shape you want. It might not work. But so what?
Tyler is still hitting new peaks in his career: Following its October release, Chromakopia became his longest-running No. 1 album with three weeks atop the Billboard 200. How does that mentality of betting on yourself help drive his continued success?
Christian: Well, he’s got the best trajectory in music as far as I can tell, from [2011’s] Goblin to now. No. 5, No. 4, No. 3, No. 2, No. 1 — and then a [two-week] No. 1 [with 2021’s Grammy Award-winning Call Me If You Get Lost] and then three weeks at No. 1. He doesn’t lose fans. He grabs the next generation.
Kelly: Also in a world where you have access to everything immediately with the emergence of TikTok and the way that our brains are constantly receiving information and we’re just like in this swiping generation … to create a world which you can step into and you know exactly [what it is] when you see a color palette or the silhouette of his hair, I think it cuts through. And he’s been doing that [with] every album. Like when the guy came out in a blond bob wig, a suit and loafers [for 2019’s IGOR]. When he sent us the photo first, I think we looked at each other like, “All right…” In the genre he’s in, you don’t do that without utter confidence.
Christian: Even if you didn’t get it, you respected it because we all want to be that confident. It’s interesting because Mac [Miller] was a lot like [that]. Mac had a way of reinventing himself in subtle ways in his trajectory of albums. And his was a vulnerable confidence, and there’s a similarity there, which is, again, rare where you have artists that have the gall to f–k it and not worry about the results. Trust in it.
Kelly, you posted on Instagram that “most people just will never know” what Tyler went through to get Chromakopia out. What did he go through?
Kelly: There was a lot of pressure — this is not him, this is just me speaking — from the last album. His trajectory has always gone [upward]. Looking at the landscape of music and things that were really successful and knowing that he doesn’t fit in these metrics or a lot of the tentpoles that artists look at as validation for what they’re doing in their career … Tyler never creates from that place of trying to match those. So a lot of times, he’s left off a lot of lists that I believe … I get frustrated because I know he should be on all of them. Obviously, I’m protective, too.
Christian: That’s starting to happen now.
Kelly: But it’s felt like it’s always been this upward battle, which I wouldn’t change at all, but all that said, now that he’s becoming much more of a household name… I just think the process of him getting this done, truly no one will really understand. Tyler’s a unicorn in that he literally does everything — like, everything. That guy is producing everything. When he has an artist come in to be a part of the song, he already knows the cadence of how he wants them [to rap or sing]. He’ll take what he thinks is their superpower and weave it into what he’s doing. He’s instructing the horn players. Thinking of the visuals, being in the edit room, this dude touches everything. So I do want him to have that recognition. He’s never going to be the guy to ask for it.
From left: Christian Clancy, Tyler, The Creator and Kelly Clancy photographed November 20, 2024 at Quixote Studios in Los Angeles.
Luis Perez
Kelly, you once said that your mother being a teacher helped shape your management style. How so?
Kelly: Being a woman in the industry at the time when I started, it was a much different landscape than it is now.
Christian: It was a f–king boys club.
Kelly: It still exists in different forms now. But her being essentially a single mom and a kindergarten teacher and never feeling like my brother and I were without gave me such a strong foundation. And then when I became a mom, it was incredibly valuable. I’m incredibly protective of my squad and that showed itself in so many ways over the years. I think it’s why it’s always been important for us to maintain a small company, because it allows us to serve in a way that’s not transactional. Like, we’re a part of some of them having their first kids, we’re in the hospital. Buying their first homes, renting their first apartments, these huge life milestones and being able to [be there] for them. Tyler, he’ll joke to Chris and I every now and again like, “Man, if you guys ever got divorced, I don’t know what the f–k I would do.” It’s like, yes, we’re partners in a business, but I feel like we’re also representative of a relationship. What does a relationship look like? Those things are really impactful, especially when you’re meeting [artists when they’re] at a younger age.
On the 2012 Odd Future song “Oldie,” Tyler calls you, Christian, a father figure. Is a familial touch necessary to be a successful manager?
Christian: I don’t take that for granted. Some of the people we work with don’t have an immediate father. And so you also take on whatever they think of their father, for better or worse. Is it necessary? No. Is it maybe helpful? I don’t know. We learn just as much from them. Tyler taught us so much about the metrics that weren’t being monitored by record labels. There were no cultural metrics. There were just [Broadcast Data Systems] and SoundScan and these things that sort of missed this whole thing that was happening. We learn so incredibly much from the people we work with. Mac, the way he looked at life. It’s an amazing two-way street.
What’s the key to maintaining an artist-management partnership?
Christian: I was fortunate enough to learn from Eminem and Paul Rosenberg. That’s who I came up with. I’m not a big fan of the word “manager.” I’ve always preferred “partners” because that’s what I really look at it as. The artists who change managers all the time, I mean, maybe it’s necessary. Although I do know, many times, it’s hard to look at yourself and it’s easier to point the other way. So the manager is right in the line of fire if something doesn’t work. And they may have just been carrying out what your vision was. For us, the family thing is what works. It’s up, it’s down. It’s good, it’s bad. It’s thick and thin. Once it feels transactional, it’s lost that bond — then you’re just the manager.
What are you two most proud of in your own careers?
Kelly: I’m really proud that we’ve managed to, by design, keep a small company. Not folding into a larger company. That becomes convoluted because it’s hard to superserve artists like Tyler, with like-minded goals, when you’re in a bigger company. [When] we started, it was just Chris and I working out of our home. So to be able to maintain that feeling that resonates with Tyler and all the artists we work with, I’m really proud of that.
Christian: We could have the opportunity to work with somebody [else] that would hypothetically bring a bunch of money, but at what cost? I don’t want the headaches and hospital visits from stress. We’ve really managed to surround ourselves with like-minded people and to Kelly’s point, there was never this drive to be some big company. That sounds exhausting. And the fact that we don’t hate each other. We’re married, for f–k’s sake. This isn’t supposed to work, not for that long.
What grounds you?
Christian: Can I tell you one fun fact? I can’t remember the last time I missed an Eagles game. We [once] watched a meaningless Eagles-Giants game in a tent in the Serengeti at four in the morning. No joke. We got Wi-Fi, there’s a lion roaring and I’m locked into an Eagles-Giants game that meant nothing.
Kelly: We try to go every year to Lincoln Financial Field [home of the Philadelphia Eagles], but this year we couldn’t because…
Christian: F–king Tyler.
Has it gotten easier or harder to carve out personal time over the years?
Kelly: Harder.
Christian: Definitely harder. This year? Impossible.
Kelly: This is the first year — and Tyler and I joked about it — we didn’t go f–king anywhere. Everyone was doing s–t in the summer and all of us were just in L.A. like, “F–k.”
Christian: Waiting on this f–king dude.
Kelly: We’re planning our vacations around artists. We’re planning our personal lives around our work lives.
Christian: Well, you try [to plan]. It’s a year-to-year question. This year’s a f–king mess — a beautiful mess.
This story appears in the Dec. 14, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Bro, everything I thought I knew was gone. I thought I had a grasp on s–t. The songs that’s been out three weeks went up more than the classic records.”
It’s an early Tuesday afternoon in mid-November and Tyler, The Creator is still in disbelief. Just a few weeks earlier, he’d released his new album, Chromakopia, and the response was unlike any in his entire career. “It’s been a f–king crack in my reality, for this album where I’m just crying about being 33 like a b–ch.”
Three days before our conversation, he’d performed a set largely dedicated to the album at Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival, a two-day music festival in Los Angeles that he started in 2012 and continues to curate. This year was the 10th edition, a triumphant moment for an event that began with seven acts and now feels like a smaller, more walkable Coachella for locals — complete with music and food and rides and merch and fashionable selections from Tyler’s line GOLF — in the Dodger Stadium parking lot.
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At Flog Gnaw, Tyler took the stage atop a shipping container, wearing a green suit fit for a bellhop in a slightly bizarro Emerald City, a bust-like mask with cutout holes for his eyes and an Afro with two peaks and a valley between them — an ensemble with hints of Janet Jackson circa Rhythm Nation (at least from the neck down), and which Tyler described to me as both “Captain Crunch” and “a gay dictator.” It’s the uniform of the character he takes on for his new album, both haunting and militant, the latest alter ego the Hawthorne, Calif., native has assumed. After performing the first four tracks, he paused to thank those in the audience for their love — and let them know that Chromakopia was No. 1 on the Billboard 200 for a third straight week. Only Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter did three straight weeks in 2024. “To do that, at my 10th carnival, in my f–king city, what are we talking about?” The crowd cheered for him and themselves: Together, they did it.
Tyler released his album on a Monday instead of the standard Friday; he wanted people to start their week with Chromakopia instead of in the middle of the night as their weekend began. The decision reflected three distinct sides of his personality — putting the music over everything, rejecting industry norms and a confidence that, regardless of the day of the week, his fans will show up. “The hope was that people listened actively, not alongside thousands of other things that come out every Friday,” says Jen Mallory, president of Columbia Records, which has been releasing Tyler’s music since 2017’s Flower Boy. “Of course, shortening the release week is not an instinctive idea in today’s market, but when you deliver the creative T did alongside the album — visual trailers, touring announcements, live events and more — it was undeniable. And the absolutely massive response indicates that his hypothesis was more than correct.”
“I kept telling n—as for a year-and-a-half, ‘Whatever I put out next, I’m putting that b–ch out on a Monday,’ ” Tyler says. “I’m not doing that stupid Friday s–t. We’re putting that s–t out on Monday and everyone’s going to know about it.” The plan worked, with Tyler hitting the top spot that week, even while handicapping himself with a shortened sales week. Only Beyoncé, Swift, Carpenter, Travis Scott, Billie Eilish and Kendrick Lamar had bigger first weeks in 2024. “I knew people would be interested,” he says with a confusion that he’s embracing. “But I didn’t expect this.”
Luis Perez
Following his short Flog Gnaw speech, he transitioned into songs from his catalog. But even as fans enjoyed his earlier material — belting every word of “Dogtooth,” moshing to “Lumberjack” — there was a palpable eagerness for Tyler to get back to the new album. The opposite is typically true at festivals; an artist’s faithful primarily in attendance to see their favorite bring the hits to life. But that Saturday night, Tyler was performing for people who hadn’t turned off Chromakopia since its release 20 days prior. And as he marched through his eighth studio album, the crowd was right with him, screaming along to every lyric, ad-lib, chant — even Tyler’s recordings of his mother that appear throughout the album and rang out as if she was the voice of the nighttime California sky.
Tyler and Sexyy Red traded verses and threw ass at the crowd during “Sticky,” a big fun song built around horns and whistles and beating on the cafeteria table. “I wanted something for the drill team at the f–king pep rallies,” Tyler told me, “something for the band to play at halftime.” His wish came true before his performance; Jackson State University’s Sonic Boom of the South broke it out earlier in the day in its matchup against Alabama State. He brought out ScHoolboy Q — whom Tyler describes as one of his few real friends in the music industry — for “Thought I Was Dead,” and, 10 minutes later, he performed “Balloon” with Doechii and Daniel Caesar, fueling a “Doechii, Doechii” chant and thanking Caesar for his help in finishing Chromakopia. The love and appreciation was at an all-time high, both in the crowd and onstage.
“I have friends that’s been to about every show,” Tyler says after Flog Gnaw is over, “and they were like, ‘That’s the loudest crowd I’ve ever heard.’ ”
I was prepared for the adoration Tyler gets in his city because I saw him in June at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, up the street from where he grew up. It wasn’t even his show — this was The Pop Out: Ken & Friends, Lamar’s first concert since his beef began in the spring with Drake. “I wasn’t even supposed to go — I was in Atlanta working on this album,” Tyler explains. “But I landed that morning and couldn’t miss this s–t. And I don’t even get FOMO at all, n—a — I’ll go to sleep. But I’m cool with Kenny and Dave [Free] and Tim [Hinshaw] from Free Lunch. So I went home, showered and ran straight there.”
He performed two songs, including “Earfquake” from his 2019 album, IGOR. Seemingly everyone at the Forum knew every word. “I genuinely think I’m better at my R&B singing s–t as a whole than my rap s–t,” he tells me. “And those are usually my biggest records.” And when Tyler screamed “Say what!,” the capacity crowd turned into the Southern California Community Choir, belting, “Don’t leeeeeeeeeeeeeeave, it’s my fault.”
Tyler, The Creator photographed November 20, 2024 at Quixote Studios in Los Angeles.
Luis Perez
For years, Tyler has continued to complicate what a pop star can embody. He’s taken on different personas, different looks, rapped about different things and keeps getting bigger and bigger. But as he’s become one of popular music’s most reliable and admired mavericks, he’s existed outside of the L.A. hip-hop zeitgeist. The city wasn’t a leading identifier for him, at least compared with a Lamar, a YG, a Vince Staples. But he’s central to the current historic run of Los Angeles music, as well as the community that makes L.A. one of the special hubs for hip-hop.
“I’m really from the city,” he says. As he continues to talk about home, his accent gets thicker and thicker. That love for Los Angeles is why he started Flog Gnaw in the first place: “Outside of sports stuff, it felt like L.A. didn’t have something that was its own thing.” With this year’s fantasy lineup — including Staples, Kaytranada, Playboi Carti, André 3000, Erykah Badu, Denzel Curry, Faye Webster, Blood Orange and Syd — Tyler’s wish to at least somewhat correct this came true. “I’m happy that Flog Gnaw has folks from the city feeling like this is theirs,” he says a bit coyly. “At least that’s what it feels like every year.”
“I’m not who they were introduced to at 20. I’m not even who I was a year ago,” Tyler says, sounding a bit annoyed at the notion that he possibly could be. “When they’re like, ‘I want the old version,’ I know it’s because they’re still there. But I’m not. And I’m OK with it because my identity doesn’t rest in a version of myself.”
I first saw Tyler, The Creator perform in 2012 at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Midtown Manhattan. His rap collective, Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (OFWGKTA), had become an online sensation over the last few years — not just for its transgressive music, but also for antics that felt like the Black evolution of Jackass — and there was a level of buzz around the show, both from the rap-fan concertgoers and the young music bloggers eager to see if the phenomenon would translate offline.
While some in the audience anticipated possible appearances by erstwhile members Earl Sweatshirt and Frank Ocean, it was Tyler, the gang’s de facto leader and chief provocateur, who defined the show. He’d mostly been known for his 2009 debut album, Bastard, and the Odd Future mixtape Radical that came the following year, both notable for their distinctive production and shocking lyrics. But Tyler’s true star turn came in 2011 on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, Odd Future’s first nationally televised appearance. Beforehand, Tyler tweeted, “I want to scare the f–k out of old white people that live in middle f–king America.”
He kept his word, as he and fellow Odd Future rapper Hodgy Beats performed “Sandwitches” from Tyler’s second album, 2011’s Goblin, backed by The Roots. They wore ski masks and raced around the stage like it was a hardcore show as the camera occasionally panned to scattered garden gnomes and this one creepy white girl floating around the band, her long dark hair covering her face like she was in The Ring. Tyler eventually left the stage, ran to Fallon’s desk and finished the episode on the host’s back. It was a cultural reset — an undeniable TV moment.
Like many at that 2012 Hammerstein show, I wanted to feel that Fallon energy in real life. And while Tyler did replicate it there, my own takeaway was very different: Yes, he was the leader, a true frontman, but even more so, he was head cheerleader for every Odd Future member. When Frank sat at the piano and sang “White,” Tyler went to the side, pulled out a Polaroid camera and started taking photos. As Earl, in his first performance in two years, pushed through his verse on “Oldie,” Tyler brought their entire crew onstage to back him — a wall of support, a visualization of a musical and cultural movement that deserved attention.
Luis Perez
Tyler, The Creator loves to love things. He’s a fan of the highest order, a quality that often gets lost during a climb to the top and a trait of his that hasn’t wavered to this day. When I arrived for our first of two conversations for this story, a couple of days before his Flog Gnaw performance, Tyler was standing with his longtime managers, Christian and Kelly Clancy, obsessing over something on his phone. Someone had sent Tyler a Pharrell Williams performance clip, one he’d been hunting for for the last decade, and his mood was a mix of Christmas morning, winning the lottery and discovering buried treasure. His enthusiasm was entrancing: a star whose inspirations still made him feel like a little kid.
“The ones who were the North Star for me, if you generalize it, they were always left of center,” Tyler says. So it’s no shock that he decided to musically and aesthetically follow suit. “If I’m 12 and folks at school are like, ‘That’s weird, that’s wack,’ I’m like, ‘But the n—as on my walls will think it’s cool. And y’all can’t compare to them. So f–k y’all.’ ”
That mentality is part of what makes him a singular artist. He isn’t shackled by the fear of failure, the driving force that stifles creativity. The other driving force comes from his mother, Bonita Smith. “I got hugs at home,” Tyler proudly says. “I’m very lucky and grateful to have grown up in a house full of love, with a cheerleader that was like, ‘Be yourself,’ ‘Do what you want,’ ‘F–k what they think,’ ‘I’m your friend.’ ” On Chromakopia’s first track, “St. Chroma,” she says, “Don’t you ever, in your motherf–king life, dim your light for nobody.” The combination of her influence, teenage rebellion and the blueprints left by his favorite artists gave him a confidence that became foundational. “I have no choice but to be opinionated and don’t care if I look dumb as f–k. Even if I change my mind the next day.”
Chromakopia, like most of Tyler’s discography, tells the story of his life in the present. “Everything is self-indulgent to me,” he says about making songs, because he’s not doing it to be relatable or appease an audience or some former version of his fandom. Few artists have as honest and combative of a relationship with listeners as Tyler. He’s constantly vacillating between inspiration and frustration. He loves watching people respond to his tweets about favorite lyrics and songs, what grew on them, what they hated at first. Because it’s not about whether you like his music or not — it’s that he craves true engagement. “Expound on that f–king thought, b–ch,” Tyler says of the opinions, the comments, the takes, the lack of articulation about why you like or dislike something. “If I was president, the first thing I would do is take podcast mics away from n—as.”
It can be risky for artists to abandon the sound or subject matter that gave them initial fame, a decision that some fans treat as a betrayal. But this album, much like 2017’s Flower Boy, 2019’s IGOR and 2021’s Call Me If You Get Lost, is a time capsule, a front-row seat to the life and mind and current creative headspace of Tyler Okonma. On Chromakopia, he explores themes ranging from monogamy (“Darling, I”) to unplanned pregnancies and fatherhood (“Hey Jane”) to the trappings of fame that run throughout the album. “It’s people saying that they can’t relate to the song,” Tyler says of “Noid,” the first single. “Of course you can’t. That’s why I made the song, because you don’t know what it’s like not to go outside and not own yourself, people stealing from you, voice-recording you, following n—as home, people trying to trap you — nobody trying to trap y’all n—as. I’m a catch.”
The album is deeply personal. “I’m a super extrovert, but I’m a very private person with my life,” Tyler says, “so putting some of this stuff on wax was a lot for me.” The day after Chromakopia’s release at a show in Atlanta, he went further: “It’s so honest that I think I had to wear a mask on my own face to get that s–t out.” He faces those fears on the album’s aptly titled emotional high point, “Take Your Mask Off,” and when he performed it at Flog Gnaw, by the song’s conclusion, his mask was gone.
Tyler does have a level of maturity that can come from growing up in public, which, as he points out, he did: “I’ve been famous and financially stable since I was 19, on my own since 16.” And now, at 33, he’s a veteran, making music about getting older and what it feels like. “I told my homie, ‘This is the 30s album,’ ” Tyler says. “This album is probably s–t that folks go through at 24, but I’ve lived a different life. N—as around me are having kids and families and really being adults and I’m over here like, ‘I think I’m going to paint my car pink.’ That feels crazy, but it’s all I know.”
Tyler, The Creator photographed November 20, 2024 at Quixote Studios in Los Angeles.
Luis Perez
And the reception to Chromakopia makes it clear that plenty of Tyler’s listeners do share his worries, anxieties, dilemmas. “People are connecting with the words in a way that feels bigger than me,” he says. “I’ve never hit people at this level.”
When I ask him about the album’s closer, “I Hope You Find Your Way Home,” he lights up. “I think the way you end an album is so important!” he exclaims. From Kevin Kendricks’ neck-tingling synthesizer to Tyler’s own background vocals alongside Daniel Caesar and Solange Knowles to his grand finale of a rap verse, it’s a reflection and a resolution, one filled with hope for our respective journeys ahead. “I knew that’s how I wanted to end it, with the synth, just letting n—as sit there and think about whatever the f–k just happened,” he says, clearly thrilled with the way he landed the plane.
But for Tyler, uncertainty about the future is also a source of joy. He’s currently dipping his toe back into acting, with his first feature film, the Josh Safdie-directed, Timothée Chalamet-starring Marty Supreme, on the horizon. “This is where I am at 33; who knows what I’ll be making at 36,” he says. “My 30s have been so much iller than my 20s. I’m excited for us to be 43 years old and see where we’ve taken it. I don’t know what the f–k I’m doing at that point, maybe bald — with one braid and a dangling earring, making gospel, telling everyone about the zucchinis.”
Whatever it is, he’s excited, as always, by the unknown. “I’ve never not stuck to my guns. Any version y’all see me in is the most honest version at that time,” Tyler says. He’s brash and bold and uncompromising about his art, but it’s also clear how grateful he feels. “I’m so blessed and fortunate. Thirteen years in and my latest s–t is my biggest. Sometimes it’s like, ‘What the f–k, this can’t be real.’ But then it’s also like, ‘I told y’all.’ It’s beautiful.”
This story appears in the Dec. 14, 2024, issue of Billboard.