- The pop-music trends of 2023 bear a striking resemblance to 2013, both sonically and aesthetically.
- Today, Tumblr-era artists like The 1975 and Lana Del Rey are as popular as ever.
Around this time last December, just as the winter chill began to creep in, I made a playlist titled "I'm 18 years old again."
My nostalgia was triggered by then-recent releases like The 1975's "Being Funny in a Foreign Language" and Arctic Monkeys' "The Car." Those bands delivered two formative albums of my adolescence: "The 1975" and "AM," both released in September 2013, the same month I began my freshman year of college.
When I made the playlist, I was working off a hunch. But something in the air — or, more accurately, something on my phone screen — carried the peculiar suspense of homecoming. My indie-sleaze spidey senses, honed over many years as an active Tumblr user, were tingling.
This year — a full decade after I reblogged a photo of Matty Healy for the first time — that faint whisper of reprise seemed to solidify. From a pop-music lover's perspective, 2023 looks a lot like a 2013 doppelgänger.
It's often said that trends are cyclical, so this isn't exactly a revelation. New generations make old fads cool again. Low-rise jeans and ballet flats are back, somehow.
But it's hard to deny the parallel appeal of these two sister years — or the sheer volume of mirror images that have dominated my feeds for the past 12 months, familiar to anyone who once considered David Karp a personal hero.
The 1975's current tour, aptly titled "Still… At Their Very Best," has been extended into 2024 after igniting a surge of critical praise and an explosion of interest on TikTok. (I know it's been a long year, but don't tell me you've already forgotten the "don't like menthols" phase.) The elusive Frank Ocean, who once used Tumblr to help create his mythology, headlined Coachella in April. Lana Del Rey's latest offering "Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd," which continues to paint the singer as a tragic Americana icon, is a frontrunner for album of the year at the upcoming Grammy Awards.
It's true that Ocean and Del Rey never really went out of style. But the 2013 revival goes deeper than certain artists being as popular as ever.
Many artists who released music that year were grappling with a strange, transitional vibe. Words like "selfie" and "emoji" had just been added to the Oxford dictionary. The term "catfish" entered the mainstream lexicon. The constant presence of smartphones was starting to feel sinister. It's not an exaggeration to say that in 2013, we were on the cusp of a whole new world.
Consider albums like Lorde's "Pure Heroine," Sky Ferreria's "Night Time, My Time," and Vampire Weekend's "Modern Vampires of the City," which stand out as emblematic of that time. Themes of defiance, isolation, mortality, and suburban malaise were filtered through a particular lens: sleek yet informal; carefully spare; often monochromatic.
These albums didn't only shape sonic trends, but aesthetic ones. The language of 2013 was emphatically visual, as young people spent an ever-increasing amount of time online.
Even major stars understood this. Miley Cyrus overhauled her brand in 2013 with "Bangerz," a neon-lit dreamscape that used giant teddy bears to obscure growing pains. Meanwhile, Beyoncé changed the game with that digital drop; "Beyoncé" was her first visual album, a practice in mood-building as much as storytelling. It opened with "Pretty Hurts," a boldfaced critique of modernity. (To continue the line of symmetry, Cyrus and Beyoncé both had banner years in 2023 with "Endless Summer Vacation" and the Renaissance World Tour, respectively.)
Though distinct and different in many ways, the albums and songs of 2013 shared a self-conscious quality — hyper-aware of perception and pageantry — that felt, at least to my teenage brain, novel and era-defining.
Over the past 10 years, the power of the digital, visual space has swelled beyond hyperbole. These days, particularly with the dominance of TikTok, it can feel like real life is nothing but a staging ground for social media — and the ominous uncertainty of the world we've created is more pronounced than ever.
There's an appetite for art that understands the plight of the online era, the simultaneous desire to hide and be seen. For my demographic, of course, the appeal is both angsty and sentimental. "Watching 'Teenage Diary of a Girl,' wondering what went wrong," Del Rey laments on her latest album, while Healy puts it even more bluntly: "I'm sorry if you're living and you're 17."
Pop music has always been a useful tool to gauge the taste and tolerance of a given time period.
There are many different ways to interpret the trends of 2023, but my read is simple, if inadequate: It's a bit of a surreal nightmare out here. It makes sense for the sensitive, cynical vibe of 2013 to reemerge with a vengeance.