This year the music scene seems to be changing! With those 3 men that deliver 3 powerful No.1 singles , radio sounds uplifting again. And Pop music makes a turn on what’s been sounding almost the same, the last 3-4 years.
Maybe Taylor Swift has huge sales, Beyonce a new country-sounding album, Ariana Grande a new pop sound and Dua Lipa trying to keep up to her fame but it seems that we’re coming to the end of the era of those powerful ladies. Concept albums are always nice, but the world needs sing-along tunes that they can sing their guts out and we might have missed some years from that. In Pop music (in general terms) the melodic lines sounded all the same the last couple of years. And with Taylor Swift rising to the top of the game, after some time it became too boring as it is the same sound on repeat. Then came too many artists that copied that, so it was absolutely a mid range tempo of songs that maybe told some nice stories but had a lack of strong feelings in them and certainly a lack of good verses and refrains.
On the other hand, dance music is on a loop. And I mean it for real. It is the same fucking loop playing over and over again and just some phrases repeating several times within the loop. And these should be called hits? I mean , there are so many DJs trying to making hits, they put out songs that might be going well to the DJ sets or some festivals, but they all sound the same. Look at the clips on social media! The most tunes from well known DJs that get posted are Dance Classics (with new beats added on them, or should we call them remixes, but they aren’t really!). The industry is stuck on the same loop, do you know why? Because the industry doesn’t seem to care about talent anymore, they care about the likes, the reposts and the millions of views on TikTok. That IS NOT MUSIC! And techno and rave may have found their way to the gigs again, but they will never be mainstream ’cause they can’t be mainstream, never were (since their birth) and never will, this sound is too strong, too hard if it’s not played on a huge soundsystem with some hundreds (or thousands) of people being on drugs around them.
So , to sum this up, within the first 4 months of 2024, we had 3 No.1 singles that change the game. They’re good old-fashioned sing-along tunes. But good! Great rhythm, great melodies, very good lyrics and most of all memorable. Those 3 artists are Hozier , Teddy Swims and Benson Boone. It’s really great to see Hozier having another No.1 single after the huge success of “Take Me To Church”. It’s so catchy, it’s so cool, it’s a great tune! What’s even greater is to see Teddy Swims (that was trying too hard the last years to make himself known in the mainstream public) to finally receive this love and not only this; this whole try he made with all those live sessions with the covers, make him just awesome at this point, like he was rehearsing all this time. Now, he is a superstar! As Benson Boone is concerned, he really made his way to the top just by singing his guts out. And we followed him singing our guts out! That’s real energy here.
So it seems that 2024 might be a game changer after all for the whole music industry. Because do you know what radio stations were missing this whole time? Great No.1 tunes from men. There was a luck of male voices singing strong choruses. Now we got them, now we play them and we like them too much!
The Sound * with Nick Zois 