With every passing year, Miley Cyrus’s 2009 single “Party in the U.S.A.” comes to feel more like an artifact of an empire before its fall. When the Disney Channel star sang about hopping off the plane at LAX with a dream and a cardigan—on the way to turn her country-girl ambitions of fame into Hollywood reality—she projected an image of a nation that still believed in its own myths, trusted its power centers, and grooved together to the same songs. The guitars fizzed like a fresh can of Coke, and Cyrus advertised to the world’s strivers that making it in America is a breeze.Released less than a year after the 2008 financial crash, “Party in the U.S.A.” was part of a crop of songs that have, in recent years, been labeled “recession pop.” It’s an affectionate term for happy, uncomplicated anthems—think Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” or the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling”—that once distracted from headlines about bailouts and foreclosures. The optimism of those songs now seems rarer in American life, but over the past few years, TikTok pundits and media commentators have theorized that a new wave of recession pop might come “back” to suit the economic weirdness of the mid-2020s.[Read: Is this the worst-ever era of American pop culture?]I’ve never really bought that argument, for a few reasons. Perky pop largely faded from the charts in the mid-2010s not because of the national mood but because of changes in how people listen: Streaming eroded the top-down distribution channels, such as radio and network TV, that loved to broadcast sugary, universally appealing sing-alongs. More audience-segmented styles—country, hip-hop, confessional bedroom songwriters—now rule the charts. So-called pure pop has become a subculture, almost akin to indie rock.And what’s been happening lately in that subculture is more interesting than a mere revival of carefree times. This summer has served up a slate of great party songs that are full of twisted nostalgia and tarnished glamour. Pop is dancing in the ruins of the American dream—or at least in the ruins of the traditional record business.“Party in the U.S.A.” came to mind while I was listening to “Ain’t in LA,” a tasty new single by the rising star Adéla. She is a 22-year-old Slovakian musician who learned English by watching Hannah Montana, and the song is an obvious Cyrus homage. It revisits the trap-pop sound of Cyrus’s 2013 hit “We Can’t Stop” and features that song’s deep-voiced rapper, Theron Thomas. The breezy, yelled chorus seems designed to, as Cyrus put it in ’09, make the butterflies fly away. But the track has a naggingly wistful undercurrent—and its lyrics flip “Party in the U.S.A.” on its head.The verses describe the yearnings of a young girl with Madonna and Destiny’s Child posters pinned to her wall. She wants to be a star—but watching American media taught her that “her dreams don’t live at home.” Then the chorus booms a corrective: “It’s all a lie / The baddest bitches ain’t in LA.” In the music video, Adéla balls out in stereotypical ways—twerking, joyriding, writhing on top of a pile of gold trophies—in her hometown of Bratislava, alongside kid dancers in Slovakian folk garb. She has a message for “girls in them unknown cities”: It’s hot to stay put.Adéla would know. As a teenager, she traveled to Hollywood in hope of a big break on the 2023 reality show The Debut: Dream Academy. A co-production of Geffen Records and the Korean firm Hybe, the series recruited young women from around the world to audition to be part of a girl group subjected to the rigorous management style of K-pop. A trained ballerina with a fierce pout, Adéla performed strongly—but after she was criticized for not perfectly gelling with the other performers, she became one of the first girls cut from the running.Dream Academy represented the response of the U.S.’s faltering star-making machine to international competition. Over the past decade or so, K-pop has become the premiere global source of the sort of polished dance-pop that homegrown stars such as Beyoncé and Backstreet Boys once specialized in. Dream Academy sought to repurpose the K-pop model for performers who sing mostly in English and come from all over. The resulting band, the sextet Katseye, has put out a string of hyperactive, utterly frivolous songs—full of L.A. references to $20 smoothies and trysts in Bel Air—that have performed decently on the U.S. charts. But the continuing viability of this carefully stage-managed project is an open question: Two Katseye members are on hiatus for health-related reasons.Adéla, meanwhile, has embarked on a solo career that’s made her the connoisseur’s choice for girlish bangers. Although “Ain’t in LA” sounds clean and sleek, her earlier singles were a bit edgier, pairing dark electronica elements with lyrics about surviving the record industry’s manipulations. Her penchant for minor chords and meta-commentary recalls early Lady Gaga, but whereas that star subsumed her personal identity into operatic symbolism, Adéla’s music remains human-scale—bruised by rejection and panting with yearning. “Staring at a TV screen ’til I got bloody eyes / Just a little European girl, was plotting on my rise,” she squeals in “KGB,” sounding like someone whose childhood dreams have begun to smolder into a hunger for vengeance.An even grimier sense of desperation powers the most astonishing pop song of the year: “BEAT UP CHANEL$,” by the 29-year-old singer-songwriter Slayyyter. On paper, it could be part of the Broadway tradition of “I want” songs— this one sung by a character who covets MTV-typical treasures such as money, drugs, and handbags. But Hamilton this isn’t: Amid a clanging guitar and bass, Slayyyter screeches those desires like a caged fox. The track cycles between wild accelerations and gliding comedowns, gaining tornadic intensity. When a cheerful melody pops up at the end of the song, the effect is as life-affirming as stepping onto the platform after a terrifying roller-coaster ride. “I want something for real,” goes the final refrain.This gonzo song represents a culminating statement for an artist who’s been hustling for years. In the late 2010s, Slayyyter began to attract online attention for putting a deconstructed, sinister spin on Y2K pop. When I interviewed her in 2021, she told me about being a teen girl in suburban St. Louis who was radicalized by the media’s harsh treatment of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Chasing stardom in the early 2020s, she moved to L.A. and recorded two dance-pop albums, themed around the horrors of fame, that pleased fans but received little attention more broadly. She’s said that she went into the studio for her third studio album, this year’s WOR$ST GIRL IN AMERICA, with the assumption that it would be her last.She thus let herself indulge extreme impulses: scuzzy production inspired by obscure artists from her old iPod, feral lyrics delivered in what she’s called a “tweaker twang” tone of voice. Many tracks seem to be about her own failure as a celebrity—“I’M ACTUALLY KINDA FAMOUS” is a glorious parody of the D-list mindset—and the album’s music videos have shown her back in her native Missouri, partying in tattered jeans among trailer parks. But though the album documents a breakdown, it has turned out to be her breakthrough. Released in March, WOR$ST GIRL IN AMERICA debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Dance Albums chart, drew her some big festival audiences, and earned her the fandom of Courtney Love. The buzz seems to still be growing: This month, Slayyyter scored her first-ever entry on the Hot 100.The track to achieve that feat is a sister song to “BEAT UP CHANEL$,” titled “brand new chanel$.” It’s entirely different from its predecessor but nearly as good: a blurry reimagining of the crisp, uplifting pulse of circa-2010 electronic dance music and pop punk. As with “Ain’t in LA,” a surprising amount of vulnerability lies beneath the song’s spiky attitude. Slayyyter sounds heartbroken about a cheating ex whose new woman, she sighs, wants brand-new Chanels—a villainous desire in a cultural moment when destroyed seems better than new.The urge to defy a mainstream that’s corrupted and fake has long been, of course, one of music history’s great drivers of progress. In trying to contextualize the sound that Slayyyter and her internet-pop peers in the share, Pitchfork just coined the fun term hyperclash. The name suggests a hybrid of the subgenres hyperpop (2010s laptoppers, many of them queer, subverting formulaic catchiness with video-game-inspired chaos) and electroclash (a late-’90s and early-2000s scene of ironic techno with punk influences). The writer Anna Gaca theorizes that hyperclash artists are drawn to hedonistic noise “as a protective adaptation amid the endless horrorscroll.”But if a trend is unfolding, it also involves pop musicians reckoning with the death of pop itself. Just as fans have lately become obsessed with the concept of the “flop,” artists are treating the archetype of the world-conquering superstar as an unattainable myth from a not-so-distant past. Singers who once projected glitz are having a blast with the aesthetics of downward mobility.[Read: How Lizzo became one of pop culture’s great flops]The acclaimed but under-the-radar singer Tinashe, for example, is promoting an album called Popstar. Her latest single is a trippy house song, “Melatonin,” that accuses people of “sleeping on” her—ignoring her greatness—and whose video is set in what looks like a foreclosed mansion. (In another single, the slinkily paranoid “Crash Out,” she sings, “The American dream is outdated.”) An equally telling example: Kim Petras, a 33-year-old German who’s spent years making bright and bland pop with the notorious producer Dr. Luke, recently went independent and put out her most experimental—and best—album yet, Detour. Her persona used to be that of a Malibu socialite. Now, on the swooning “Jeep,” she fantasizes about driving around gas-station parking lots, drinking Four Loko, and doing “middle-American shit.”None of these artists is rejecting the race for riches; we aren’t back in 2013, when Lorde mocked the “Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your timepiece” she heard about on the radio. Rather, the mood is one of thwarted materialism, of wanting but not getting. And no one should mistake much of this wave for a meaningful rebellion against the industry. Adéla works with Capitol Records; Slayyyter joined Columbia Records to put out WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA. At a time when even the biggest stars seem a little niche, major-label backing doesn’t quite mean what it once did—but clearly, music’s power brokers have judged that a scuffed-up, striving sound might appeal to the public right now.It’s not difficult to see why. After a long pop-cultural swing away from Millennial do-goodery toward a redux of 1980s “greed is good” aesthetics, burnout with chasing the bag is finally setting in. Many influencers are starting to see their reach wane; luxury brands are facing flatlining sales. At the same time, anti-institutionalist sentiment—whether directed at political parties, Big Tech, or the entertainment business—is at a high. “Party in the U.S.A.” landed at a time when people still regarded Hollywood as a land of magic, not as a playground for sex traffickers.The most popular songs of late reflects these trends as well. Ella Langley’s record-setting charts run with “Choosin’ Texas” speaks to a demand for music that’s indifferent to the cosmopolitan hustle. The stateside appeal of non-English-language stars also represents shifting ideals of what success looks and sounds like. Just as Adéla advises that the baddest bitches ain’t in L.A., Bad Bunny scoffs at the idea that Puerto Ricans need to head to the mainland United States to make their dreams come true.In these conditions, it’s no wonder that pop, once the sound of the center, is finding glamour in marginality. Stars who might otherwise aspire to godhood are meeting listeners where they’ve always been: partying in their own backyard, with their own friends, and on their own terms—even while dreaming of something bigger.