Switched on Pop
Detalls del Canal
Switched on Pop
Listen closer to pop music — hear how it moves us. Hosted by musicologist Nate Sloan & songwriter Charlie Harding. From Vulture and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Episodis Recents
538 episodis
The new wave of pop is here, and it’s feral
What would it sound like if pop music was reverted to its most wild state of being? It would sound hyper-digital, influenced by the electronic vanguar...
Olivia Rodrigo has The Cure for sadness
Olivia Rodrigo is back with her third studio album, you seem pretty sad for a girl in love. As the title might suggest, it’s a deeply personal affair,...
Paul McCartney went back to Liverpool for something new to say
Boys of Dungeon Lane, McCartney's collaboration with producer Andrew Watt, arrived when McCartney was 83 and and he came out swinging: the opening tra...
How a sci-fi dystopia became a personal utopia (ft. Arc Iris)
A sci-fi ballet imagined a 2080 where AI strips people of purpose, and the day before its New York premiere, an actual dystopia arrived.
...
Why bands give us purpose (ft. MUNA)
A culture that rewards easily consumable individual identities produces plenty of pop stars and almost no bands. A significant exception: MUNA, the tr...
Drake's Slop Era
Canada’s favorite export Drake is back! This month, the Toronto singer-rapper extraordinaire released three albums simultaneously: the long-anticipate...
Kacey Musgraves walks country’s borderlands
Kacey Musgraves' album Middle of Nowhere finds the country outlaw taking a break from exploring her inner life to look outward, back to her roots: the...
Two countries at war. Rostam’s 'American Stories' belongs to both.
The pedal steel and the saz both live in the spaces between equal-tempered notes, and that gap is where Rostam built American Stories.
Ro...
Eurovision is back – but not without controversy
The flowers are blooming and the calendar says May. That can only mean one thing: the Eurovision Song Contest is upon us once again. This year, thirty...
Samara Cyn is rap's best new writer
How do you write a rap verse that's clever without saying so? Samara Cyn, one of the sharpest young writers in hip-hop, joins us to talk about Detour,...
Olivia Rodrigo and the second verse massacre
Olivia Rodrigo's chart-topping new single "drop dead," the lead single from her forthcoming third album you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, bre...
Hrishikesh Hirway made an album “the old-fashioned way.” He nearly exploded.
Hrishikesh Hirway, host of Song Exploder, returns with his first album in fifteen years, In the Last Hour of Light, made under a premise that's almost...
BTS is back. But K Pop is not the same.
BTS is back. The best selling K Pop group of all time has been on hiatus for four years. They haven’t released an album in six. They were once the big...
Ten years of "Alaska": Maggie Rogers on going viral and singing for 200,000 protestors
Ten years ago, Maggie Rogers was a senior at NYU, scrambling to finish a song for a music production class she was close to failing. The guest critic...
Learning to Love Train: "Drops of Jupiter" is back in the atmosphere
Train is the kind of band that some people love to hate. Songs like "Meet Virginia" and "Hey Soul Sister" gave the band huge hits, and no small amoun...
Slayyyter might actually be the 'Worst Girl in America'
Going for broke turned out to be the most honest thing Slayyyter ever made. After financial losses and a depressive episode that left her ready to qui...
How Charlie Puth honored Whitney Houston for 125 million people (live at Berklee NYC)
Charlie Puth joins Switched On Pop in Studio A at Power Station at Berklee NYC, live before a room of current students, ten days after performing the...
RAYE’s maximalist masterpiece is the hope we need
RAYE names Amy Winehouse and Edith Piaf as her artistic predecessors on the opening tracks of new album This Music May Contain Hope. Both died young,...
Where have all the white rappers gone?
On a recent podcast interview, Kentucky rapper Jack Harlow said that, to craft his new album Monica, he “got blacker.” The problem is… Jack Harlow is...
Jacob Collier can make anyone sing
Jacob Collier is a rare musician: an expert in so many musical languages (western harmony, negative harmony, microtonalism) and a phenomenal communica...
Harry Styles loses himself to dance
The dance floor is where Harry Styles does his therapy, and this album is the session notes. Four years after Harry's House, Styles returns with Kiss...
Can Bruno Mars counterprogram his way to another hit album?
Bruno Mars is back with a new album called The Romantic, his first solo release since 2016’s 24k Magic. At first listen, the lead single, “I Just Migh...
Charli XCX’s "Wuthering Heights" fever dream
Emerald Fennell's new adaptation of Emily Brontë's 1847 gothic romance "Wuthering Heights" is the most talked-about film of the year. But for pop love...
Will Sinners do for blues what O Brother did for bluegrass?
It's the middle of award season, and Ryan Coogler's ode to the Black music canon Sinners has emerged as the Oscars frontrunner and the most nominated...
Jazz is A$AP Rocky’s secret weapon
A$AP Rocky’s latest album, Don’t Be Dumb, is a wild ride through a cacophony of sounds — punk, industrial, drum ‘n’ bass, indie rock, and of course, h...
Does humor belong in music?
What makes Weird Al songs so indelible? Why is Bo Burnham more than just a comic? How do the biggest pop hits make us crack up in the middle of a somb...
And the Grammy goes to…
The ultimate gauntlet of popular music is upon us once again: it's Grammy season, and this year, the competition is pretty tight across the board. Big...
Robyn’s new songs bring “drum 'n' grace” to the dance floor
Swedish pop star Robyn emerged as a phenomenon in the mid 1990s, an ingenue whose work with Max Martin presaged the R&B crossover hits of acts like Br...
Audrey Hobert says the quiet part out loud
Two years ago, Audrey Hobert had never written a song. She was a staff writer on a Nickelodeon series and had recently moved in with her childhood fri...
2026 Pop Predictions: big beat, animated avatars, and Bruno Mars
It’s a brand new year, and what better way to ring it in than with the second annual Switched On Pop bingo? Like last year, Charlie, Nate, and Reanna...
The Sound of Silence from Unexplainable
A scientist asked people to sit in a silent room for 15 minutes. Almost half of them decided to give themselves a painful electric shock instead. What...
Naughty or nice? The 2025 holiday music round up
Every Christmas season, pop stars far and wide throw their Santa hats into the ring to see who has the next "All I Want for Christmas Is You," and thi...
The year that killed music
From big-ticket albums by Taylor and Gaga, to a revival of the stomp-clap revival – 2025 had it all, for better and for worse. Now that the year has c...
Why pop songwriters break the rules ft. Amy Allen
Grammy-winning songwriter Amy Allen joins NYU Steinhardt students live to trace her path from early pitch songs to co-writing some of the decade's def...
How Sombr’s bedroom recordings became his biggest hits
Sombr went from crafting raw, reverb soaked songs alone in his Lower East Side bedroom to finding his life shifting in ways he never could have predic...
"It’s a Hail Mary every time" (with Marc Rebillet)
When it comes to improvisational loop jams, few have gone as viral as Marc Rebillet. From his 2020 lockdown-era video “How to Funk in Two Minutes,” wh...
Quitting Spotify (ft Deerhoof)
In June 2025, indie veterans Deerhoof scrubbed their entire catalog from the world’s dominant streaming platform. The catalyst wasn't low royalties, b...
Is there a Disney curse?: Demi, Selena, and Miley
This year, there were a few records that delivered less-than-optimal returns on either the Hot 100 or the Billboard 200 – and they all came from forme...
Rosalía's 'LUX' brings the symphony to the club
Spanish pop star Rosalía is back with her new album, Lux. Over eighteen tracks, she trades in the dembow beats that filled her last record Motomami fo...
Lily Allen and Tate McRae revive the revenge anthem
They say the best revenge is living well, but if you’re a pop star going through a break up, that’s false. The best revenge is releasing a searing sco...