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Switched on Pop

Pop music for an internet-pilled generation

17 Jun 2026

Transcription

Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.

Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?

0.031 - 22.935 Noam Hassenfeld

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23.375 - 35.109 Noam Hassenfeld

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35.589 - 63.197 Jamie Dodd

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63.177 - 79.684 Jamie Dodd

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90.042 - 92.325 Rihanna Cruz

Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm producer Rihanna Cruz.

92.605 - 95.289 Charlie Harding

I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding.

95.65 - 111.731 Rihanna Cruz

This week, we're exploring the future of pop music and the sound bubbling up from the underground that I've come to label feral pop for its ability to be essentially undomesticated pop music. Pop that's reverted back to its most wild and primal instincts.

112.212 - 112.472

Yeah.

112.452 - 132.84 Rihanna Cruz

Today, we're going to zero in on the singer, songwriter, and producer underscores, and specifically her ability to blend genre and infuse a love for computerized digital sounds into her feral pop work. Let's take a quick listen to a highlight from her latest record, You, the track Music, to show what I'm talking about.

Chapter 2: What is feral pop and why is it significant?

481.908 - 486.672 Rihanna Cruz

Yeah, the sensitive pop punky world that we find ourselves in here.

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486.712 - 502.386

And I've been eating toothpaste. Cause you give me toothaches. And this could go two ways now. I think you drank my Kool-Aid. And I've been up for two days.

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502.788 - 535.697 Rihanna Cruz

But the kicker of your favorite sidekick that sums up the whole feral pop vibe and what she's going for is in this tag that keeps coming up throughout the album. It's the new wave of the future. It's prophetic. It's shop calling. Kind of a proclamation. We are making music here that is beyond what we know currently pop music to be.

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535.677 - 555.095 Nate Sloan

I feel like there's no better way to claim your place in pop music than to just say, here I am. I've arrived. I got to see Underscores a few weeks ago. I went to a Pink Panther show. It was like a 5,000 person warehouse. I swear the audience was there for Underscores. It was the hardest hitting music. The audience was losing their minds.

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555.115 - 562.022 Nate Sloan

This is two openers before the lead act and the place was packed. People are really getting onto the sound.

562.137 - 588.651 Rihanna Cruz

So Fishmonger was the debut record. Her second record, Wall Socket, leaned into darker, more emo sounds and textures. It was more focused on rock music. Conceptually, it was an album about a town in suburban Michigan and featured a whole internet component, including a fake municipal website and an alternate reality game designed to be poured over among fans on forums and social media.

588.631 - 629.593 Rihanna Cruz

Again, incorporating these internet sensibilities into her work. But her latest album, You, goes back to the electronic digital pop sounds that defined her first record and turns them up to 11 as we heard on music. As we move from the verse into the chorus, the song opens up. It radically expands. It feels like you hit maximize on a browser window.

629.653 - 649.553 Rihanna Cruz

You fell into the computer videodrome style and are surfing through cyberspace or something like it's going from this insular communication of emotion into these grand, big feelings. When I'm with you, it feels like music and the music grows and swells.

649.702 - 679.287 Charlie Harding

I find this idea that music itself can be this liberation and this freedom, very powerful and like very in line with some of the themes that I feel like are now developing in this genre of feral pop that we're identifying. This desire to sort of like escape or rise above the mundanity of life in the 2020s. You know, technology is a way to do that. Music itself is a way to do that.

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