"Recession pop": Why it's the sound of the summer again
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Illustration: Annelise Capossela/Axios
Artists like Rihanna, Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga kept us dancing through the 2000's economic downturn.
- And in July 2025, the "recession pop" Party in the U.S.A. lives on.
The big picture: Recession pop bangers — those upbeat, liberating jams that blasted on the radio against a bleak national backdrop — are making their comeback, according to social media users and music industry data alike.
Driving the news: Tracks released during and around the Great Recession are having another moment in the sun, according to Luminate's 2025 Midyear Report.
- Listeners thought Bruno Mars was amazing just the way he was back in 2010, making his hit song "Just the Way You Are" the No. 1 pop song that was released between '07-'12 in 2025, ranked by U.S. on-demand audio streams.
- Cyrus, Lady Gaga and Rihanna joined Mars in the top five.
Zoom out: It's not just the recession pop jams of the the 2000s and early 2010s that are blaring through headphones today. The escapist energy they bring also found a home in more modern tracks.
- One 2025 song that social media users say carries that familiar — and oh so danceable — vibe is Kesha's "YIPPEE-KI-YAY." featuring T-Pain (two recession pop icons in one tune).
- Kesha, herself, recognized the trend, appearing in a TikTok video reading the Los Angeles Times — with a visible headline about President Trump's tariffs — overlayed with the text, "heard there's a recession or something."
- One user, dancing along to Lady Gaga's "Abracadabra," wrote in February, "stock markets crashing but at least we got this banger."
Yes, but: Bill Werde, the director of the Bandier Program for Recording and Entertainment Industries at Syracuse University, tells Axios the trend is not unique to recent times.
- "People have been having a good time and trying to get away from politics and ... the tough times in their life, and music has been such a friend to that throughout history," he says.
- However, no one called the songs "recession pop" during Werde's time as Billboard's editorial director — the era that sound took over the airwaves.
Flashback: Joe Bennett, a forensic musicologist and a professor at Berklee College of Music, says there's a historic pattern of escapist music popping up amid economic downturns.
- Ginger Rogers' 1933 performance of "We're in the Money" — amid the Great Depression — was "about as escapist as you can get," he notes, and around the time of the 1953 recession, rock 'n' roll — and "Rock Around the Clock's" message of "literally partying all night" — were born.
- "You can find these escapist, dance friendly songs in every single recession that the U.S. has ever had," he says.
- While other downturn-era songs may carry a more clear social or political message, Bennett says recession pop jams are also a form of social commentary: one that says, "What the hell? Let your hair down!"
Yes, but: While there are fears of a recession in 2025, the U.S. is not currently in one.
- Another factor in the recession pop resurgence, Bennett explains, is pure nostalgia.
- Popular music, he says, is "particularly susceptible" to a 15-year nostalgia cycle.
- Werde similarly notes that the renaissance of late '90s and early 2000s sounds can be attributed to the "cyclical nature of trend."
The bottom line: 2024 brought brat summer. And in 2025, it's dance like we're broke summer.
- But music isn't a new escape, Werde notes. That's why it's "coexisted with humans from the earliest days of cave paintings and dancing around fire straight through the pop charts."
- Beyond the economic and political tumult of 2025, Bennett sees another reason people may turn to the Great Recession's repertoire: "They're really great songs."
Go deeper: Where Lady Gaga's "The Mayhem Ball" tour is headed
