Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan Saw a Gap in Pop, and Filled It

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May 22, 2024Updated 2:19 p.m. ET

The caffeinated drink of the summer isn’t cold brew or iced matcha — it’s “me espresso,” a weird and strangely brilliant neologism coined by the pop singer Sabrina Carpenter in her ascendant hit “Espresso.” The track — sugary sweet, fiendishly catchy and meme-ready — has been out for only a month and change, but it is already one of the defining songs of 2024.

It’s also one of the defining songs of Carpenter’s career so far. Last year, I described her as a member of “pop’s middle class”: a group of internet-beloved artists creating music that makes winking reference to pop history, whose celebrity vastly outmatches their commercial success. Although she is a new star in the minds of many, Carpenter, 25, is by no means a fresh arrival: “Espresso” was released almost 10 years to the day after her debut EP, “Can’t Blame a Girl for Trying.” Carpenter was 14 years old then; four more full-length albums have followed.

Her career has been unusually slow-burning in the context of the well-oiled pop machine, and “Espresso” is a bullish breakthrough after a string of songs, including the Billboard-charting “Nonsense” and “Feather,” that had some radio and TikTok success but failed to permeate pop’s center. (“Espresso” reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and is still in the Top 10.)

She’s not the only middle-class pop star having a brush with more tangible success. Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” has quickly become her first hit on the Billboard Hot 100. Roan, 26, loosely fits a similar mold: Her music is funny and oftentimes covertly acerbic, and on her 2023 debut album, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” as Carpenter did with her 2022 breakthrough “Emails I Can’t Send,” Roan tried on a variety of styles that each seemed to pay tribute to a different era of pop, sometimes even a specific diva.

Roan first signed to a major label at 17 and was dropped five years later, a setback that compelled her to move back to her Missouri hometown and work as a barista to fund her career. She has since signed to Island Records and Amusement, an imprint started by the producer Daniel Nigro specifically to release Roan’s music. “Good Luck, Babe!,” a kiss-off to an ex with a queer twist, has been streamed over 106 million times on Spotify since its early April release; for context, that’s far more than any song on Beyoncé’s splashy “Cowboy Carter,” which arrived a week earlier, with the exception of its lead single, “Texas Hold ’Em.”

Dozens of other pure pop stars — that is, artists not drawing from, say, hip-hop, Latin or country — including Madison Beer and Reneé Rapp, have tried, and failed, to achieve this kind of mainstream success. So why are Carpenter and Roan suddenly breaking through?

At their core, both “Espresso” and “Good Luck, Babe!” are simply great songs: tightly written, hook-driven tracks with direct melodies that eschew the vaporous, sometimes meandering style that’s permeated pop in the wake of more ambient melodicists like Billie Eilish and, even further back, Lorde.

“Espresso” is intoxicatingly breezy, built on the kind of gentle disco groove that Doja Cat and Dua Lipa have ridden to recent success. Carpenter employs a common pop trope — being so hot that someone can’t help but fall in love at first sight — but underplays it, making it seem as if being desired is as easy and effortless as getting a pedicure. “Good Luck, Babe!,” on the other hand, is all effort: Even as Roan’s lyrics telegraph aloofness, every vocal trill and almighty wail reveals an unchecked, confrontational bitterness. Beyond its ’80s gloss, the song feels incredibly old-fashioned; there are shades of Belinda Carlisle, or even Liza Minnelli, in the way that Roan delivers her lines as if she’s in the middle of a blowout fight with an ex. And its theater-kid earnestness and sharp-tongued lyrics are reminiscent of another pop upstart who works with Nigro: Olivia Rodrigo.

Both Roan and Carpenter have taken relatively patient approaches to their careers. Carpenter, in particular, has shown a remarkable flexibility when it comes to self-promotion: She has been a constant presence on TikTok for nearly two years, adjusting her promotional strategies to the whims of the platform. She has toured basically nonstop since the release of “Emails,” generating fresh viral moments in ad-libbed live outros to “Nonsense” that are often irreverently bawdy and, in the style of “Espresso,” self-consciously stupid. (It didn’t hurt that one of her tour mates was Taylor Swift.) And “Espresso” has been inescapable on streaming, where it seems to have wormed its way into the algorithm.

Roan, like Carpenter, leveraged the spectacle of her live shows to make herself omnipresent on short-form video platforms over the past year. Her tour in support of “Midwest Princess” was filled with moments for fans to share online: dress-up themes in each city; a choreographed dance to the song “Hot to Go!”; a rousing call-and-response during the cabaret-on-crack empowerment anthem “Femininomenon.” While many members of pop’s middle class share Roan’s over-the-top aesthetics, few can approximate her powerful, operatic voice, which she’s trained to uncannily recall, at various turns, Lady Gaga, Patsy Cline and Kate Bush, giving her music an unsubtle edge over her compatriots.

Roan also fits squarely into a broad, hazily defined canon of what TikTok often refers to as “gay yearning” music, alongside artists like boygenius and Muna. Many of her songs feature lyrics about embracing her own queerness or feeling spurned by women ashamed of theirs. “Good Luck, Babe!” juices all these elements, tapping into a Cyndi Lauper-esque ’80s bounce and ending with cathartic, Bush-style wailing. The “Babe” of the song’s title is a former lover who leaves the song’s female narrator to be with a man; in writing an explicitly queer narrative and casting it as an ’80s-style diva ballad, Roan nods to the way L.G.B.T.Q. people have often read deeply into classic pop music in search of queer meaning.

Both songs are endearing, idiosyncratic pop breakouts during a time in which such a thing is increasingly rare. With the exception of Swift, who has commanded a good chunk of the Hot 100 for multiple weeks now, pop by women has been failing to crack through: Singles from Dua Lipa’s “Radical Optimism,” an album it was initially thought might dominate the summer, have fizzled; Ariana Grande released her seventh album, “Eternal Sunshine,” in March and then seemingly dived straight back into promoting her big project of the year, an adaptation of the musical “Wicked.”

As they’ve made clear over the past year, Roan and Carpenter seem poised to fill the void.

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