Podcast Episodes

Summer Bummer (with Commotion’s Elamin Abdelmahmoud)

Every music critic seems to agree: 2025 has no true song of summer. Last August, Teddy Swims’s “Lose Control” dominated the charts. This year…Teddy Swims’s “Lose Control” dominates the charts. What’s…

Published on 1 month, 4 weeks ago

Justin Bieber's Lo-fi Bedroom Swag

Justin Bieber is back with his seventh studio album: the aptly-titled SWAG. The lo-fi, reverb-laden record is a remarkably candid look inside the world of Bieber, using the palette of both undergroun…

Published on 2 months ago

How podcasting got its sound ft. Breakmaster Cylinder

What if the entire sound of modern podcasting can be traced back to a single Grateful Dead song uploaded in 2001? We uncover the musical lineage that connects NPR's classical gravitas to dubstep wobb…

Published on 2 months, 1 week ago

Is that new song you like AI? Here’s how you can tell

The robots have arrived, and they're making protest songs about boots on the ground. When an AI band called The Velvet Sundown fooled over a million Spotify listeners with their psychedelic folk anth…

Published on 2 months, 2 weeks ago

The Benson Boone-Doggle

In which we explore the unlikely rise, and surprising backlash against, one Benson Boone.

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Published on 2 months, 3 weeks ago

Can Recession Pop predict the market?

Why does the economy look great on paper but feel terrible in your wallet? There might be a more revealing economic indicator hiding in your Spotify queue. "Recession Pop" first emerged during the Gr…

Published on 3 months ago

How Americana helped mainstream country find its soul

 As we've been examining over the course of Country Week, country music has found a larger audience, in part by widening its sonic palette. For the final episode of this series, we take a look at a g…

Published on 3 months ago

Country music is Mexican (Fuerza Regida and Grupo Frontera)

More often than not, country music is seen as an "American" genre – meaning that the music is seen as strictly from the United States. In some ways, that's true; but the genre's iconography, sound, a…

Published on 3 months, 1 week ago

The Ballad of Lainey Wilson and Jessie Murph

There's often an unspoken (and deeply misogynistic) rule on country music radio: never play two female artists back to back. In this episode of Switched On Pop's country week, we aim to do just that.…

Published on 3 months, 1 week ago

The hick hop renaissance (BigXthaPlug and Bailey Zimmerman)

One of the biggest country hits of the year has been "All The Way," by Texas rapper BigXthaPlug and country rocker Bailey Zimmerman, which peaked at #4 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song is a perfect…

Published on 3 months, 1 week ago