Splash Pop

ISSUE #148

From the lab: another microgenre discovered in the field. Pop songs that cruise around 150 bpm with a kick-kick-snare-kick that could snap off your heel. We left the ground with ”Footloose," but Ronson & Winehouse crowned “Valerie” queen.

It’s a high school summer camp type of sound—class bells ringing, bare ankles shaking, duffels in the back of a beat-up Wrangler. It’s all in the drum kit, pop’s secret weapon, our anxious energy given permission to move. It ripples like water broken by a dive, evaporates on the cooled glass of chlorine skin.

The songs have constant movement, born from necessity in small backroom venues for people with no space to dance. When we can't move along one axis, we take to another—where we can’t dive, we run; where we can’t run, we jump in place.

In the six years straddling the turn of the ‘10s, there was one written about every other week. The Wombats, The Postelles, that kind of thing. “Lisztomania,” “No Waves,” “Radar Detector,” “After Hours.” Plenty of evidence, all we need is a name.

So let’s call it Splash Pop for our vaccine summer. The oceans in all of us are churning with waves just begging to finally break—may this tempo be our tide.