If you want to feel old, consider that U2 is celebrating its 45th anniversary this year. During that span, they’ve released 14 albums and sold nearly 200 million copies worldwide. They are among the most revered and successful bands in popular music history.
And yet, they feel almost completely irrelevant these days. It’s been four years since their last release, the unmemorable Songs of Experience, and 15 years since their last bona fide hit, 2004’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.
Normani might be my favorite former member of Fifth Harmony to watch, but Camila Cabello is the one I most like to hear.
Her 2018 debut album, Camila, was a real gem, featuring the hit ‘Havana’ and a bunch of mellow pop songs that never got the radio play they deserved. Her follow-up, 2019’s Romance, didn’t live up to its predecessor but nevertheless suggested she wouldn’t be a one-hit wonder.
Brandi Carlile’s seventh studio album, In These Silent Days, is due this October. The record is dropping three years after her previous album, the much-loved and multiple Grammy-winning By the Way, I Forgive You.
Interestingly, the sales for that album weren’t much higher than her previous efforts, and it climbed only a few notches higher on the Billboard chart, and yet it feels like it marked a sea change in her career.
The four-year wait for Lorde’s followup to the excellent 2017 album Melodrama is nearly done, with Solar Power due out on August 20.
I found the album’s first single, and title song, a bit underwhelming after such a long wait. But I enjoyed its breeziness, and I think it’s just fine if she doesn’t try to redefine the sound of modern pop music every time she drops a record.
When Lil Nas X set a record by placing 2018’s ‘Old Town Road’ atop the Billboard Hot 100 for 19 consecutive weeks, many people (myself included) figured he was the very definition of a one-hit wonder.
A few years later, I’m happy to have been proven so wrong, as he has churned out one hit banger after another, all in advance of a debut album that doesn’t even have a release date yet.
