Those who like interpreting lyrics have faced disappointment in recent years. You turn on the radio and what do you hear? Lyrics that you can take quite literally. You no longer need to surf over to Genius, or scour internet forums where fans argue over the meaning of an ambiguous verse. Saying exactly what it means: that is how you could summarize the principle behind many recent pop lyrics.
It became particularly clear to me somewhere in 2025, when I put on Haim’s new album. On track five, ‘Take Me Back’, Danielle Haim first lists a series of random memories: ‘Daddy took a message, didn’t have a phone’ or ‘Molly took a shit in the back of the truck’. And then, in the chorus, she explicitly spells out the nostalgic longing that all those memories would otherwise implicitly evoke. ‘Take me back’, a backing voice repeats, while Danielle begins to explain the meaning of nostalgia: ‘I want it / Like I remember / Just thinking about it / Makes me emotional’. As if she had crumpled up the familiar ‘show, don’t tell’ advice for beginning writers and thrown it away.
The song ‘Baby’ on MEROL’s latest album (Leve de feeks, 2026) follows the same procedure. In an almost blatantly businesslike way, its chorus also specifies the emotional heart of the entire song. MEROL ‘wonders’—the word occurs several times—whether she wants children. So in the chorus we hear: ‘Sometimes I do want it / Sometimes I really don’t / Sometimes I maybe do’. In case anyone missed it, MEROL then repeats what the object of this doubt is: ‘Baby, baby, baby, baby / Baby, baby, baby, baby’. The effect is a kind of infantilization of the listener, who is placed in the baby-like position of someone to whom it is explained again and again that someone who is uncertain sometimes does want something, sometimes does not, and sometimes simply does not know.
The effect is a kind of infantilization of the listener.
What is going on here? In an article for The New Yorker, American writer Namwali Serpell last year complained about ‘the new literalism’ plaguing a range of films, including Gladiator II, Anora, The Substance and The Brutalist. According to her, all of them ‘emphasize the obvious’ once again. They are plagued by unnecessary repetitions, dialogue that recaps the action, and loud, unambiguous messages. In de Volkskrant, Joost de Vries recognized the same ‘almost rush toward meaning’ in recent television series and autofictional novels. As a possible explanation, he pointed to our fragmented, overstretched attention. To capture the audience’s attention, cultural products are looking for ‘a way to cut off the route to meaning’, De Vries argued. Everything has to be immediately clear. A cultural pessimist might also detect a certain kind of ‘dumbing down’ (Serpell’s words) in the choruses of Haim and MEROL: a symptom that our interpretive abilities are weakening, that our linguistic skills are deteriorating, that we no longer have patience for metaphors, symbolism, or suggestion. ‘Everyone is twelve now,’ critic Sophie Gilbert recently summarized the pop-cultural landscape in The Atlantic.
Yet those interpretations are not sufficient. Because, of course, we can still find literary imagery in pop music—only among artists whose music, image, and performances we would consider less groundbreaking or ‘alternative’ than, say, those of MEROL. Take Taylor Swift’s latest single, from the soundtrack of Toy Story 5. It begins with the kind of verses that have by now made Swift part of university curricula: ‘I knew you through the daze of the blades of the grass in summer / Parachutes for the free fall of being younger’. Or take ‘Atlas’ (2025) by Pommelien Thijs: the longest-running number-one hit in the Flemish Ultratop 50 is also an extended allusion to the mythological figure. ‘I have sand in my pockets and wind in my hair,’ Thijs sings, portraying the relational burden she carries, ‘I have to move mountains, my coat is heavy with them.’
“The more conventional and ‘flatter’ the artist, the more layered and poetic the lyrics”
We therefore encounter a counterintuitive phenomenon. The more conventional and ‘flatter’ the artist, the more layered and poetic the lyrics. At the more innovative end of the genre spectrum, by contrast, something is emerging that you might call ‘prosaic pop’, as with Haim, MEROL, and also Charli xcx. Their plain language responds to a need that more figurative language apparently can no longer convincingly fulfil: a sense of reality. You may consider that desire misplaced or inadequate, but you cannot, like Gilbert, simply dismiss it as a form of regression.
This is the peculiar thing about prosaic pop: to some extent, it distances itself from the techniques of lyric poetry—imagery, rhyme, rhythm, vocal expression—that for a long time found a home in pop melodies. One of the driving forces behind this is Charli xcx. On her latest album, Music, Fashion, Film (2026), she takes the deconstruction of pop even further, perhaps most clearly in the opening of ‘Wink Wink’:
‘I used to lick cream off strawberries in the summer / And maybe I fucked your dad / Just kidding, I’m only saying that for effect / But my point is I think people can change.’
Charli does not sing these lines either; she simply says them, as if she were having a conversation with you. Already in the fourth line, she seems, like Haim or MEROL, to give away the ‘point’ of the song. But in fact, Charli is already experimenting with a kind of second-degree authenticity: she honestly confides in us (‘wink wink’) that everything she swears in the song (‘I’m being honest’) is actually feigned.
Charli is also prosaic in another sense. Like novelists such as Émile Zola, she shares a love of making a good inventory. Sometimes her songs take the form of lists of concrete objects and situations. In addition to ‘Bad tattoos on leather-tanned skin / Jesus Christ on a plastic sign’, the contents of ‘Everything is romantic’ (2024) also include ‘Sandals on the stirrups of the scooters / Neon orange drinks on the beach’. On Radio 1, they are now playing a song by the cabaret duo Grof Geschud, ‘En dan alles’ (2026), in which such a list almost becomes a caricature. It mentions ‘pasta pesto’, ‘twenty freckles, maybe more’, ‘an ashtray on the table’, your grandmother’s cabinet, which does not fit in ‘your Nissan’, and even ‘damage to the boiler’. Such descriptions go beyond setting the scene; they serve to generate a ‘reality effect’, as literary scholar Roland Barthes called it in 1968. The banal detail that the car is a ‘Nissan’ refers less to a car than to the concept of ‘reality’ itself: it brings the imagined world to life, creating the illusion that it is actually ‘real’.
Where does this thirst for reality come from? It is not particularly surprising when you consider that the average adult screen time has risen to almost seven hours a day. In contrast to the distance of the purely visual, this music longs for textures (‘leather-tanned skin’), the sensual (‘lick cream off strawberries’), the abject (‘shit’, ‘pasta pesto’). And even that residual material world seems increasingly precarious, threatened by the disaster scenarios that climate scientists, defence specialists, and AI experts continue to warn about. In the cracks of a virtual present and an increasingly apocalyptic-looking future, tangible reality—the feeling that ‘the real’ really exists—is already enough to inspire wonder. Prosaic pop does not want to poetically transcend or transform concrete things; it wants to hold on to them.
The feelings that torment artists today are not great emotions.
The same applies to emotional life. These artists express their feelings less than they name them, flatly, emotionlessly, almost in a parlando style, creating a gap between delivery and affect. ‘I feel down,’ Danielle Haim observes. ‘I’m afraid,’ says Charli xcx. MEROL’s songs are praised for their ‘radical honesty’. Were the passionate vocal runs of Céline Dion and Beyoncé therefore dishonest? Perhaps not, but such outbursts would now more quickly be perceived as unbelievable—not ‘authentic’. Not because affect is fading away. Quite the opposite. But because the feelings that torment artists today are not great emotions. They are small, low-status feelings: the monotony of depression, the uncertainty of anxiety, constant doubt—they drag on, remain undefined, and mingle with numbness. The function of a chorus then lies simply in making those feelings recognizable, not only to an audience but also to the speaker themselves. The artists insist that the feeling is real, sometimes in hypnotically repetitive fashion: ‘All I know is how it makes me feel / And it makes me feel how it makes me feel / Yeah, it makes you feel how it makes me feel’ (Charli xcx, ‘Camera’, 2026).
The new literalism also betrays a certain exhaustion: there is a lack of energy to keep meeting the demand to pour emotions into all kinds of original images, or even to put them into words at all. This results in a frustration with language as such, and therefore also with the entire concept of a pop song. ‘stupid song’ (2026), the penultimate single by Olivia Rodrigo, is tellingly written in lowercase (small feelings, small letters). Rodrigo’s powerful singing style still relies on the belief that she can express something, but the lyrics are doubtful. The chorus begins with metaphors—from mythical to concrete (‘I’m a heart made of wax and I’m melting in the sun / I’m a thread on your shirt that is coming undone’), switches to plain language (‘I feel right, I feel wrong, I feel totally insane’), and ends in helplessness: ‘And I want you more than any stupid song could ever say’. Every word falls short. If it follows through on that skepticism toward language, I suspect prosaic pop can take two paths. Both are self-undermining. It can consciously begin to play with reality effects and expose them as ‘for effect’, as Charli xcx already does. Or it can silence itself.