From soft pop to hip-hop, here’s our spring playlist.

Current wisdom has it that we are all curators now, following playlists we have come to trust, creating our own, on a constant loop of discovery, archival housekeeping, click-throughs and word-of-mouth new pop crushes. That all requires time, of course, which many of us don’t have enough of. A remarkable feature of our modern, hyper-connected culture is that, no matter how ubiquitous pop music is, how saturated we are by it, it is still possible to come late to a song that has been viral for months. There is simply too much information, too many songs to process. Add to this the almost complete breakdown of musical tribalism, which once offered a flag to march under, a point of identification that, at school, would sort the goths from the hip-hop heads, the chart-poppers from the indie kids, and you have both a creatively enriching free for all and a bewildering cacophony of genres, influencers, pointers and trends.

The playlist below doesn’t pretend to offer predictions. It’s a snapshot of music in 2018 and is, appropriately, all over the place. The streaming and singles charts may be in the grip of hip-hop, R&B and tropical house, exemplified by Drake, The Weeknd, Rihanna and Ms Camila Cabello, with Mr Ed Sheeran an unlikely outlier, flying the flag for won’t-scare-the-horses acoustic balladry. But pop as a whole is simply too diverse, too mongrel, too promiscuous for us to be able get a handle on it, never mind arrive at a definitive reading as to where it’s going next.

The same goes for the artists we favour. They make pretty much anything now themselves. From California, the singers Børns, Ms Lana Del Rey and Mr Jonathan Wilson go back to the future, conjuring up the Golden State in its 1970s soft-pop heyday. The Philadelphia artist U.S. Girls summons the spirit of Blondie in their disco-pop pomp. Ms Janelle Monáe channels “Kiss”-era Prince. Homegrown artists Mahalia and Chrystal, from Leicester and Bolton respectively, marry Brit-hop beats to vocal and lyrical insouciance, to compelling effect.

Both the Australian-South African talent-show singer Mr Troye Sivan and Years & Years’ Mr Olly Alexander set glad-to-be-gay defiance and celebration to shimmering pop textures. The British newcomers Another Sky recall Radiohead and Mr Jon Hopkins on their stunning debut single. King Princess (aka Ms Mikaela Straus, the Brooklyn singer who is the first signing to Mr Mark Ronson’s new record label, Zelig) arrives as if fully formed with a song that is as impactful as “Video Games” by Ms Del Rey, and suggests that a new star is in our midst.

Stylistically, attempting to pin down and categorise any of the 20 tracks on this playlist would be like wrestling with blancmange. Far better, then, to just sit back and listen. Are they the future? Who knows? But they’re here and they’re now, and they demonstrate that pop, three months into 2018, is on fire.

**Listen to the playlist here **

Mr Dan Cairns is music critic for The Sunday Times

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