Music

For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard will be counting down our editorial staff picks for the 10 Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 all this week — you can see the artists we’ve already counted down, plus our Honorable Mentions, Comeback of the Year and our Rookie of the Year artists all right here. Now, at No. 5, we remember the year in Charli XCX — who released a career-defining masterpiece and ruled the summer (and autumn) in pop culture entirely on her own terms.

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“I’m famous but not quite.” 

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The “I Might Say Something Stupid” lyric captured the quintessential dilemma of Charli XCX’s career in the decade leading up to her 2024. After 2013 and 2014 brought the British pop purveyor a trio of ubiquitous hits, via her appearances on Icona Pop’s “I Love It” and Iggy Azealia’s “Fancy” and her own solo smash “Boom Clap,” it seemed like true superstardom was in the offing for her, and that shooting for anything less would’ve been selling her potential short. 

But after some more commercially minded, purposefully accessible releases met with underwhelming returns and edgier, more forward-thinking sets cemented her as both a critics’ darling and an icon for the true popheads – all without producing any crossover hits the size of her 2013-14 trio – the question lingered over Charli XCX’s whole career: Was trying for stardom and celebrity actually the thing that was selling her potential short? Would she be better off continually scrapping to be the coolest kid on top 40’s fringes, or simply reigning as the unquestioned queen of the pop underground?

In 2024, she answered that question with a third option, one that few – perhaps her least of all – would have previously believed available: She became one of the biggest stars in the world by just being herself, but like, way moreso. Brat saw Charli XCX condense everything fans had come to love about her in the prior decade, regardless of release – the colossal pop hooks, the hair-flipping (and occasionally bird-flipping) attitude, the self-referential winking, the melted-bubblegum production, the almost uncomfortably intimate moments of vulnerability or sensuality – and turned the volume on all of it up to 365, while also inviting the entirety of her social and professional circles to join in the party. The result was a year that proved that Charli never actually had to choose between her populist and her futurist impulses; she just needed to indulge all of it at once on the biggest scale possible, and the rest of the globe would be powerless to resist the brightness of her supernova. 

Easier said than done, of course, and Charli needed to spend the early parts of 2024 lighting the fuse for that kind of ignition. She DJ’ed a much-hyped Boiler Room set in February that signaled that her new project was going to be a reconnection with her club roots – following the self-consciously radio-oriented jams of her 2022 LP Crash, which failed to establish her as a leading pop hitmaker but did get her into the top 10 of the Billboard 200 (and No. 1 on her home country’s Official Charts) for the first time. The filmed open set also introduced fans to the cast of characters who would play big supporting roles both in her increasingly extended universe – including longtime producer and co-writer A. G. Cook, newer collaborator (and recently confirmed fiancé) George Daniel of The 1975, film star and fellow It GIrl Julia Fox, and TikTok phenom turned pop aspirant (and Charli muse) Addison Rae – all of whom were raving (and sometimes taking turns spinning) in the not-quite-booth with her. 

Then, a slow trickle of singles and videos, starting with the zooming synths and strutting vocals of “Von Dutch.” The song was a chest-puffer and a s–t-talker from its opening seconds: “It’s OK to just admit that you’re jealous of me… It’s so obvious, I’m your number one.” It was a clear statement of intent – though the actual intent maybe wasn’t totally clear yet, the statement part was what was important, as the purposefulness of it as an era kickoff was unignorable. Second single “360” doubled down with a timeless bubbling synth-pop riff and insidious vocal hooks that saw her further positioning herself as the super-strength Charli the Dancefloor Slayer: “I’m everywhere, I’m so Julia,” “Legacy is undebated/ You gon’ jump if A. G. made it.” (That’s Fox and Cook in the lyrics there, respectively; you’d know if you’d been following along.) 

Just as important a part of the pre-album rollout was Charli’s second takes on “Von Dutch” and “360.” The single redos each welcomed big-name guests – the previously mentioned Rae on “Von Dutch,” dismissing the haters who still end up adding to her view counts, and the cult-pop queen Robyn and cloud-rap paragon Yung Lean on “360,” both following Charli’s “I’m your favorite reference” lead with sung-spoken lyrics bigging up their own legacies (“Started so young, I didn’t even have email/ Now my lyrics on your booby”). Everything about the remixes, from their guests to their content to their matter-of-fact titling (e.g. “360 Featuring Robyn & Yung Lean”), clearly projected: Pay attention to what I’m doing here, because I’m going to be returning to it later. 

First, though, it was time for the curtain to go up on Brat. Even before the album’s June release, Brat had already become a minor pop culture phenomenon, just by virtue of its title and artwork, unveiled in April. The simplicity of the album title, its value-ambiguity as a self-applied label, and (most importantly) its adaptability as both a noun and adjective all made it the year’s most naturally conversational LP title. Similarly, the set’s monochromatic, near-fluorescently-bright-green cover – blank, except for the centered, all-lowercase and slightly out-of-focus album title – proved divisive among fans, but quickly internet-iconic, and a magnetic jumping-off point for assorted memery. All the while, a frequently repainted wall in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood – ultimately known as the “Brat Wall” – would provide an informal weather forecast for Charli’s next moves on the pre-album campaign, electrifying social media on a semi-weekly basis with its new art developments.

Henry Redcliffe

If there were any remaining doubts that the music could live up to the memes with Brat, the album put them to bed on first listen. Much of the LP followed in the hyperkinetic, living-that-life mold of “Von Dutch” and “360,” with the latter opening the set and even getting bookended with twin closer “365,” an even-more-explicit anthem of party-girl decadence. But fans were less prepared for the emotional depths the set would plumb, with Charli exploring her own professional insecurities (“Sympathy Is a Knife,” “Rewind”), her major life decisions (“I Think About It All the Time”) and even her fraught relationship with close collaborator SOPHIE in the years before her death (“So I”), all with disorienting honesty and directness. These songs went for the heart and the gut, but without sacrificing the ass – aside from “So I,” the lone mid-album ballad breather, even the record’s most brutal cuts were still delivered in service of the dancefloor, making Brat endlessly re-bumpable.

Brat became consumed by pop culture so quickly following its release that it can be easy – though maybe not that easy, given how many year-end critics’ lists it ultimately topped, including the Billboard staff’s own – to lose track of what a tremendous artistic accomplishment it really was. It’s easy to make an album for the club, but it’s exceptionally difficult to make an album that feels like it itself is the club: the venue, the DJ, the dancefloor and the entire guest list. And while Brat obviously lets any number of Charli’s fabulous famous friends past the velvet rope for its 41 minutes of id-stroking self-celebration, it remembers that any true club night also includes the girl hiding in the back because she’s convinced herself she’s worn the totally wrong outfit, and the friends busy gossiping and scrolling Instagram while waiting in line for the bathroom, and the couple preoccupied with dreading the ride home, because they realize they can’t avoid that conversation they’ve been avoiding any longer. It all made for an impossibly rich and immersive LP experience, one that stayed challenging and unpredictable and still thoroughly, peerlessly exciting and satisfying throughout. 

And as it turns out, it was just the beginning. Brat was an immediate success, debuting at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 – Charli’s first top-five showing on the chart – and vaulting “360” onto the Hot 100 for the first time, at a modest No. 73. Given those early returns, the rave reviews the album received and the continued internet embrace of all things Brat – with the phrase “Brat Summer” already picking up steam in the media as an official epoch designation  – Charli very easily could have declared victory with her album cycle, switched her focus to touring and just let Pop Twitter take it from there. Instead, she did something that no one – not even Charli herself weeks earlier – could have seen coming. 

In truth, it wasn’t like “Girl, So Confusing Feat. Lorde” came out of nowhere. The original “Girl,” a Brat highlight, was already widely speculated to be about the New Zealand singer-songwriter – with its racing-inner-monologue lyrics about an industry maybe-peer, maybe-rival – and even included a line addressing the possibility of a someday-collaboration (“The internet would go crazy”). But that didn’t make it any less jaw-dropping when, two weeks after Brat, the “Girl” remix dropped with a brand new verse from Lorde responding to Charli’s recounting of their frenemyship, inspired by a voice note the latter had left the former just hours before Brat was formally released (though it was already out in Lorde’s home country by that point). 

Rather than muddying or overstuffing the original’s narrative, Lorde’s empathizing with Charli’s anxieties (and even addressing her own insecurities and body-image issues in the process) felt like it rounded out the song, like that was the way it was always meant to be heard. What could have amounted to a quick gossip-bait headline instead became a profound and mold-breaking statement about rising above the music industry’s inherent competitiveness and gender double-standards, in the name of simply celebrating greatness in a fellow traveler. Everything about the “Girl” redo was stunning, but no part more than the fact that it existed in the first place: a microscopically improbable connection of radical honesty and compassion between two pivotal longtime music-world fixtures, which felt like it broke the fourth wall of pop music (along with countless unspoken rules of pop star collaboration), and in doing so healed an entire generation of fans. 

Needless to say, the internet did go crazy. “Girl” enraptured social media, who made quick meme work out of Lorde’s instantly catchphrase-spawning “Let’s work it out on the remix” declaration, and sent the song onto the Hot 100 for the first time the following week. Even Kyle MacLachlan, 65-year-old acting alum of Twin Peaks and Sex and the City, posted a video of himself in a Brat-green shirt singing (and acting) along to Lorde’s verse. And as Brat Summer kicked into high gear in July – with the album’s “Apple” taking off as a dance challenge on TikTok, about to push the song onto the Hot 100 to join “360” and “Girl” – another unlikely event was about to push Charli’s year in an entirely new direction. 

On July 21, the world was stunned by the announcement that President Joe Biden, under pressure from the democratic party following a disconcerting debate performance, had officially decided not to pursue re-election that November. With Biden out of the race, the likely democratic frontrunner for the position was now vice president Kamala Harris, and Charli – a concerned onlooker if not herself a U.S. citizen – offered her support for the presumed candidate the best way she knew how: with the three-word tweet “kamala IS brat.” The message may not have been delivered with grand intentions, but the combination of excitement over Harris’ freshening up what had been a moribund campaign season and of continued Brat Summer delirium turned it into one of the week’s primary news talking points, as FOX News and CNBC anchors attempted to wrap their heads around the full implications of “Brat” as a descriptor.

Two months after Brat’s release, the album was still only gaining momentum – and it would get another injection at the top of August. Charli had begun hinting at a new remix, which fans quickly determined was to feature alt-pop superstar Billie Eilish, still hot off her own glowingly received Hit Me Hard and Soft album. Despite being easily the biggest artist Charli had yet recruited for a Brat second-spin, Eilish was tabbed not for one of the album’s streaming hits, but for “Guess,” a flirty bonus cut from the Brat and It’s the Same But There’s Three More Songs So It’s Not deluxe edition. The choice ended up making sense, as Eilish – who had recently begun to embrace a more forward and explicit queerness in her own music – was posited as the leering responder to Charli’s underwear-based teasing, taking the song to a new level of sapphic, conspiratorial fun. Helped by a music video which featured the pair scaling a mountain of discarded panties, “Guess Featuring Billie Eilish” became the biggest chart hit of Charli’s 2024, hitting No. 13 on the Hot 100. 

As Brat Summer was coming to an end – at least by official calendar designation – Charli maintained her grip on the culture, scoring another Hot 100 hit alongside longtime collaborator Troye Sivan on a redo of “Talk Talk.” The timing of the song’s release was undoubtedly also in part to trumpet the beginning of the pair’s co-headlining Sweat Tour, which brought the Brat experience to arenas throughout the country. While pre-Brat, the tour was speculated to have been a low seller in many markets, by the time of the autumn trek, the dates were all sold out – with Charli quote-tweeting one of the early viral tweets about its initial underperformance in a post about the tour’s final show. That September, Charli was even deemed pop culture presence enough to be given her own fake SNL “Talk Talk Show,” with a perfectly accented and coiffed Bowen Yang playing Charli (and Sarah Sherman playing her DJ sidekick Sivan). 

And there was still one major moment to go in the Brat cycle. October saw the much-anticipated release of the Brat and It’s Completely Different But Also Still Brat companion album – which collected the five Brat redos Charli had already released, and added new versions of the album’s 11 previously unremixed tracks, each with at least one recognizable collaborator. Once again, rather than coasting on the buzz from the pre-existing remixes – or simply collecting as many big-name guests as she could – Charli scripted every remix to not only expand the meaning and resonance of her own set, but also add new shading to our pre-existing perceptions of the guests involved. “B2b” invited fellow should-be-bigger pop vet Tinashe (in the midst of her own 2024 comeback moment) to flex about the work it takes to still be so fabulous, “I Might Say Something Stupid” gave a post-Taylor Swift Matty Healy free reign to ruminate on cancellation (and/or erectile dysfunction?) for four minutes, and “Sympathy Is a Knife” lent Ariana Grande a platform to voice her frustrations about the ownership fans and the media try to claim over her. The entire set was so thick with drama and character development that it felt less like a remix album and more like a Bratverse theatrical production. 

It was all incredibly powerful stuff, not the least of all because Charli never let novelty overshadow emotional impact on the set. While the biggest names on Completely Different understandably made for the biggest headlines, the most rewarding cuts were the most unexpected – like Caroline Polacheck moaning about the “f–king foxes” and sharing a moment of late-night panic with Charli on the new “Everything Is Romantic,” or mutual collaborator A. G.  Cook helping Charli turn the mournful original “So I” into an uptempo tribute to “all the good times” with SOPHIE, with the vivid details of their many shared experiences popping like fireworks of bittersweet nostalgia. Unlike 99% of pop and dance remix albums throughout history – which are more often than not both delivered and received as near-afterthoughts – Completely Different stood up in every way to the original, not only complementing Brat but enriching it, making it feel deeper and more vital by extension. 

Charli ended the year by essentially sweeping list season, and scoring seven Grammy nominations for 2025 – including album of the year for Brat and record of the year for “360” – while also pulling double-duty as both host and performer on SNL in November. All of it confirmed that after a decade of tenuous flirtation with the American mainstream, she was now officially at the very center of both the music industry and of general pop culture in this country. She did not reach the commercial heights of other artists on this list in 2024: Brat never bettered its No. 3 debut on the Billboard 200, and no song from any of its incarnations ever touched the Hot 100’s top 10 — none from the original album ever even reached the top 40. But in terms of sheer cultural ubiquity, impact and reach, Charli could rival absolutely anyone; even former President Obama was bumpin’ that this summer. 

And perhaps more importantly, Charli taught the entire pop world an extremely valuable lesson this year: It is indeed possible to achieve all of your loftiest ambitions as an artist without compromising a single thing about what really makes your artistry so singular. It takes a f–king whole lot of work and intention and focus and ingenuity – and maybe it also takes a solid decade of tinkering with your own sound and image and collaborators first until you finally get everything to align. But if you have the patience, and if you have the vision – and most critically, if you have the drive to not let any possible opportunities to be great pass you by — then you really can get the pop world to come meet you where you are. And then, like the Brat Wall, you will always be famous. 

Check back tomorrow for our Nos. 4 and 3 Greatest Pop Stars — and then come back for the announcement of our top two Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 on Monday, Dec. 23!

For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard will be counting down our editorial staff picks for the 10 Greatest Pop Stars from 2024 all this week — you can see the artists we’ve already counted down, plus our Honorable Mentions, Comeback of the Year and our Rookie of the Year artists all right here. Now, at No. 6, we remember the year in Ariana Grande — who made major impact in the worlds of music, television and film in 2024, not to mention across the whole internet.

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Ariana Grande began 2024 less like her bubbly Wicked character Galinda Upland and a bit more like her embattled counterpart, Elphaba Thropp. She might not have been Public Enemy No. 1 for everybody, but Grande was social media’s main course at the onset of her Eternal Sunshine era. 

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After the turbulent Positions rollout, Grande paused her habit of churning out new full-length in almost yearly fashion and prioritized auditioning for – and eventually filming – Wicked. In July 2023, news broke that Grande and her ex-husband Dalton Gomez had separated at the top of the year and were planning to legally end their two-year marriage. Days later, reports swirled that Grande had begun dating Ethan Slater, her Tony-winning Wicked co-star. Slater, in turn, filed for divorce from Lilly Jay, his wife of five years and mother of their son, less than ten years later. Though Grande and Slater began dating after their respective marriages were over — both divorces were legally finalized in time for the Wicked premiere – the chaotic timeline led social media to unfairly cast Grande as the mean girl homewrecker who’d destroyed a happy family. 

Grande, for her part, kept her lips sealed regarding her romantic life, which made her first musical statement 2024 all the more powerful. On Jan. 12, Grande her first solo single in four years: a sassy, house-rooted kiss-off called “Yes, And?” A direct response to the Internet noising marring her name (“Why do you care so much whose d—k I ride?”), the song brought Grande back to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 – a spot she did visit twice in the time between Positions and Eternal Sunshine, but only as a special remix guest of star collaborator The Weeknd – with the first new No. 1 single of 2024. Culturally, the song had a much softer presence in the lexicon in comparison to past Grande smashes like “Thank U, Next” or “Problem,” but even before its eventual Mariah Carey remix and Grammy nomination (best dance pop recording), “Yes, And?” did what Grande needed it to: effectively shift the conversation away from her personal life and to her music. 

Inspired by her marriage and its dissolution, as well as Michael Gondry’s 2004 Oscar-winning film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Grande’s seventh studio album finds her delivering some of the sharpest and most poignant songwriting of her career. Crafted alongside longtime collaborators Max Martin and Ilya with Grande writing music and lyrics on each track, Eternal Sunshine uses Gondry’s film and the astrological concept of the Saturn Return (the period of a person’s late 20s and early 30s, during which they face real adult challenges for the first time) to help Grande make peace with the perceived failure of love. The record blends pop, R&B, house and slight dashes of wistful acoustic guitar, which beautifully complement the depth of Grande’s post-Wicked voice. 

On March 23, Eternal Sunshine debuted atop the Billboard 200, earning the largest U.S. opening-week total of 2024 at the time (227,000 units) and setting the record for the most-streamed album in a single day in 2024 on Spotify at the time (58.1 million). All 12 chart-eligible songs debuted on the Hot 100, including “We Can’t Be Friends (Wait For Your Love),” an evocative, dancefloor tearjerker that led the way as the album’s focus track, becoming Grande’s ninth Hot 100 chart-topper. Thanks to Eternal Sunshine, Grande became just the second woman in Billboard history (after Taylor Swift) to simultaneously top the Artist 100, Hot 100, Billboard 200, Hot 100 Songwriters, and Hot 100 Producers charts. 

Two months after the album’s release, Grande performed a private set for MET Gala attendees. In addition to renditions of her biggest hits, she also invited Wicked co-star Cynthia Erivo onstage to cover Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey’s “When You Believe” — a smart bookend to the pair’s matching Super Bowl fits (where they debuted the film’s first trailer) and a peek at the rousing phenomenon the film would become. 

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In addition to “We Can’t Be Friends,” which earned a VMAs win for best cinematography, Grande found further single success in “The Boy Is Mine.” After originally peaking at No. 18 after the album’s release, “Boy” returned to the Hot 100 following its Catwoman-inspired music video and Brandy and Monica assisted remix, which earned the ladies a Grammy nod for best pop duo/group performance. Even though Eternal Sunshine is the only 2024 album to launch two Hot 100 No. 1 hits, neither of those songs dominated the culture like other songs that barely sniffed the top 40. There was so much else going on in the pop world that listeners moved on from Eternal Sunshine very quickly, but the album did what Grande need it to do: put the focus back on her work and off her dating life. 

After closing out the summer with a 10th anniversary re-release of her blockbuster My Everything album, Grande put a few finishing touches on her pop stardom before fully returning her attention to Wicked. She dropped an expanded version of Eternal Sunshine featuring live versions of seven tracks on Oct. 1, with an appearance on Charli XCX’s Brat remix album arriving ten days later. Charli tapped Grande for a reimagining of “Sympathy Is a Knife,” a refreshingly honest look at fame and insecurity cast across a hyperpop soundscape. Ultimately, “Sympathy” became the second-highest charting Hot 100 entry from the Brat era and served as a low-key farewell from Ariana the Pop Star™. “’Cause it’s a knife when you’re finally on top/ ‘Cause logically the next step is they wanna see you fall to the bottom,” they harmonize in the pre-chorus. 

The day after “Sympathy” dropped, Grande hosted one of the best and most popular Saturday Night Live episodes of the year. She already served as musical guest while promoting Eternal Sunshine at the top of this year, but this was the first time she had hosted since 2016. Between her dazzling opening monologue, ace Jennifer Coolidge impression, and the hilarious Antonio and Domingo sketches, Grande’s Oct. 12 SNL episode earned the program its highest ratings in three years and became the most-watched SNL episode ever on Peacock in just two days. With her vocal virtuosity and acting chops – she even successfully played a bad singer in the viral Domingo sketch — at the forefront of the general public’s mind, Grande had perfectly positioned herself for Wicked to be her crowning moment of the year. And “Just Like Magic,” that’s exactly what happened. 

After a whirlwind global press tour that delivered gorgeous looks and memes galore — “Holding space,” anybody? Maybe the constant crying rings a bell? — Wicked, helmed by John M. Chu and also starring Michelle Yeoh, Jonathan Bailey and Jeff Goldblum – debuted atop both the domestic ($114 million) and global ($164.2 million) box offices, with the largest opening ever for a film based on a Broadway musical. Wicked, the first of a two-part film adaptation of the 2004 Tony winner, has made over $525 million worldwide, becoming one of the highest-grossing films in 2024. Grande earned rapturous reviews for her performance in the film, with her comedic timing, vocal tenacity and physical commitment to the character’s journey helping her win over the film industry the same way she captivated the music industry. In addition to several honors from critics groups, Grande has emerged as a formidable front-runner in the best supporting actress Oscar race in her first-ever major starring film role, earning nominations at both the Golden Globes and Critic’s Choice Awards for her turn as Glinda. 

Of course, Wicked’s success will always be tied to his music, and Grande also handily upheld that legacy. In December,  Wicked: The Soundtrack (billed to Grande, Erivo and Various Artists) debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, marking the highest debut for a soundtrack of a musical stage-to-film adaptation. The set also entered at the summit of Top Album Sales, Top Soundtracks and Vinyl Albums, and sent seven of its songs to the Hot 100, including Grande’s solo track “Popular” (No. 53)”- -making for a sweet full-circle moment after she interpolated the showtune on “Popular Song” (with MIKA) from her 2013 debut album. 

To end the year with a RIAA Platinum-certified and triple-Grammy-nominated No. 1 album in one hand a film that grossed half a billion dollars in the other – with an Oscar nomination also seemingly right at your fingertips — is wildly impressive. It’s even more extraordinary when you remember that 11 months ago it felt like practically nobody was on Grande’s side. But that’s the eternal challenge of pop stardom, and in 2024, Ariana Grande once again proved that she’s not only more than capable of conquering that challenge – she’s powerful enough to render her haters completely insignificant with a wave of her baby pink, crystal-encrusted wand. 

Check back later today for the reveal of our No. 5 Greatest Pop Star, and stay tuned all week as we roll out our top 10 — leading to the announcement of our top two Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 on Monday, Dec. 23!