Recession pop is making a comeback

It’s July 2007. Timbaland drops “The Way I Are” featuring Keri Hilson and D.O.E. Grammar ticks aside, the track tops charts worldwide with its catchy confession of connection under financial stress: “If I have no money, no car, no card to buy you flowers – will you still like me, just the way I are?” An eerie foreshadowing of the Great Recession that was set to kick off later that year.

Fast forward to November 2014. The global economy is still under damage control. I had just graduated high school when Pitbull and Ne-Yo released “Time Of Our Lives”, the lead single from Mr. Worldwide’s eighth album, titled Globalization. Debuting on Billboard’s Hot 100, the duo describe scraping their last funds to party with the lyrics: “This is the last twenty dollars I got, but I’m going to have a good time ballin’ tonight.”

In June this year I stumbled upon a video by TikTok creator @goosefraud set to Charli XCX’s Club Classics. The caption read, “you can tell we’re spiralling into another recession because of how good pop music is getting again.” The video quickly amassed over 100k likes and 400k plays in a matter of days, sparking a viral debate. Creators like @.wonderli joined in, holding an eviction notice to the tune of Carly Rae Jepsen and Owl City’s “Good Time” and writing “when you’ve been craving another 2008-2012 recession pop song to distract yourself from the current economic state of the world right now.” Another TikTok video, which has amassed over 1.7 million views, reads: “accounts and economists quitting their jobs when they realise Charli XCX and Kesha are making summer bangers because a recession era is upon them”.

For TikTok creator Brooke Murray (@bonksbrain), it was Kesha’s recent single “Joyride”, released earlier this month, that led her to post. “Oh recession pop so ✨BACK✨” she wrote in early July. For Murray, “Joyride” brings “a new sensibility to the rough and rowdy tracks of the 00s and 10s” and believes this comeback “deserves an important place in our current culture, [one in need] of catharsis and distraction from reality.”

Between this, Charli XCX’s Brat summer, Chappell Roan’s infectious debut, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, Katy Perry’s return with the single “Woman’s World”, and a Lady Gaga album due in August, the question arises: is recession pop really making a comeback?

We are entering what some online commentators call a ‘Silent Depression’ – an age marked by an inability to call things as they are, despite truly dire financial circumstances, so it makes sense that we’re seeing this reflected in our music. Periods of recession have typically always been defined by music with faster, frenetic melodies and a hooky lyricism, colouring economic hardship with relentless optimism (think the Great Depression of the 1920s, which saw the popularisation of blues and swing, or the UK’s Winter of Discontent across the '70s and '80s, which ushered in punk and disco).

The recession pop (essentially, dance pop) of the 00s and 2010s is hyper-commercialised and distributed at internet speed – from Katy Perry’s “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F)” and Kesha’s “TikTok”, to The Black Eyed Pea’s “I Gotta Feeling” and LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem”, major record labels wanted you to forget about your money troubles by partying non-stop. It was the era of sharing your hot pink iPod Nano earbud playing “Like a G6” with your bestie on bus, trying on liquid leggings and gladiator sandals to the beat of “Just Dance”, and touching up your nude MAC lipstick in the club bathroom to “Sexy Bitch”. Every night was the night, and tomorrow always promised a clean slate. This campaign lulled us into a dissociative stupor – a perpetually peppy hangover – marking what Diane Negra, professor of culture studies and co-editor of Gendering the Recession, calls “a fulcrum moment after which many people rewrote the terms of their engagement with capitalism.”

Young people today are arguably more aware of inequitable structures than ever, yet they feel increasingly powerless, stuck in cycles of shame and outrage perpetuated by the media. Post-pandemic, this generation has moved into what Negra describes as “a new profile marked by extremely high rates of anxiety, despair, and despondency.” In short, many of us don't have enough money, time, or mental strength to bender away our blues in the carefree way most dance music requires.

As we navigate today’s financial challenges, the recession pop revival captures our collective longing for nostalgia, as well as signaling a desire to go deeper in our sonic storytelling. It’s “up-and-coming artists like Chappell Roan”, @bonksbrain adds, that are “bringing [this] element of capitalism’s hardships and discrimination [to dance music] by discussing its depressive symptoms rather than its roots”. “I hope you feel freedom and joy when you listen,” Roan wrote on Instagram during the release of her album, “I hope it gives you solace in the difficult times.”

When you consider the successful pop records of the past year, it’s this delicate balance between raging party hits and deeper emotional reflection that’s the winning formula. The album of the summer, Charli’s Brat does exactly this, combining club classics with emotional reckonings – such as her feud-repairing remix with Lorde on “Girl, so confusing” and explorations of family trauma on “For the Night”. As for the pop flops – think Katy Perry’s recent girlboss anthem “Woman’s World” – it’s music that repeats the old recession pop formula of ultra-glossy bangers without offering up anything new or remotely deep.

Perhaps it’s the dance music that confronts our jealousy, regrets, desires and despair by directly addressing the hardships, contradictions and systemic failures of our time is exactly what empowers us to dance through the chaos. Because even when life is so confusing, we can always work it out on the remix.