Pop albums are drowning in 'narrative.' What happens when we go in cold?

Lizzo (left) and Imani Imani each released major albums the week of June 1. Lizzo by Jason Renaud / Imani Imani courtesy of pgLang hide caption

If you've spent any time with the music of the bedazzled pop star Lizzo , drop into " Too Nice ," from her new album Bitch , and it won't take you long to spot a difference. Her last big splash, the infectious, chart-topping 2022 single " About Damn Time ," was upbeat in the face of stressors: "Bitch, I might be better!" she whooped. "Too Nice," comparatively, is fed up and scorned, downbeat and reactive. "You said 'I love you and I miss you' last time we talked / Now you playin' on the internet like you forgot," goes one verse. "You'd still be workin' at the mall if it wasn't for mе / Sorry if I'm soundin' broken, but you tried to break mе." For much of her defining run, Lizzo was emblematic of an idyllic extramusical experiment, her songs a wellspring for yas queen enthusiasm. "Everyone looks to an artist for something more than just the music and that message of being comfortable in my own skin is number one for me," she told Billboard in 2015. But take Bitch 's music as a clear indication: She hasn't been truly comfortable for a while.

Lizzo was a benchmark of the 2010s zeitgeist, a rapper who emerged into a pop idol on the slow-burn conquest of the 2017 megahit " Truth Hurts ," which topped the Billboard Hot 100 and won a Grammy. In building a kind of self-care empire, she went from viral phenom to feel-good success story — a vivacious sex- and body-positive entertainer who sang and rapped, twerked while playing the flute, and did it all with gusto. She closed the decade with 2019's Cuz I Love You , her major-label debut and the key time capsule of her effervescent songcraft and tremendous cultural footprint. "An artist's identity and how it is narrativized are by necessity inextricable from their work, making the task of assessing an album's merit increasingly layered and complex," the critic Rawiya Kameir wrote in a Pitchfork review of that record, musing on its perceived genrelessness. "In fact, Lizzo does have a genre, something like empowerment-core, and she offers songs for an astonishing array of demographics: thick women, independent women, women in general, anyone struggling with body image, people who are single, people who wish to become single, etc. Lizzo's music performs an important social function."

As a result of speaking for her underserved coalition, Lizzo's principles sometimes came to lead her music. She got backlash for letting Oprah use her song in a Weight Watchers commercial, and was called out for ableism after using the word "spaz" in another. In August 2023, her "empowerment-core" and its social function were altogether tested, as some of Lizzo's former dancers sued the artist and her production company, alleging a hostile work environment that included weight-shaming, sexual harassment and assault. A similar suit from a clothing designer who worked on Lizzo's tours followed that September; Lizzo denied the claims in each case. She lost weight in the aftermath of that episode, writing in a 2025 Substack post on the rise of GLP-1s and the resurgence of skinny culture, "I had been the subject of a vicious scandal, and it felt like the whole world turned its back on me."

It would be unfair to retroactively treat Lizzo's early career as virtue-signaling in the wake of these events, though some have. Yet it does also feel like some air has been let out of the balloon since her last album, 2022's Special . She came to power at a defining juncture for millennial feminism, embodying that era's intersectional girlboss ideal. It is understandably harder for her whole thing to resonate as intensely today, as the rah-rah, all-caps energy of the '10s has given way to a lowercase, post-COVID reticence.

Even Lizzo has conceded losing ground, presenting a two-pronged explanation in response to a since-deleted post on X asking where all her fans went. " the industry changed so much in the last 3 yrs. streaming replaced radio & I was a radio darling ," she wrote. " That's how my fans discovered my music. Not to mention the very obvious & public attack on my career changed things. " It's only natural for an artist to plumb her life experiences for her art, even more so when facing career-threatening adversity. But the atmosphere around Lizzo has changed dramatically, the accusations have dented her image and artistic standing no matter whom you believe, and anyone familiar with even the broad contours of her story must reckon with that in her songs.

Listening to Bitch , I could not escape all the history, of which even the title is a not-so-subtle acknowledgement. "So here's a toast to wasted time / And all the energy I put into these people," Lizzo sings over a sad piano rumble on the opener . "I'm letting go, just to free my mind / 'Cause I'm finally who I said I'd be for the first time / It took some hard times." Those hard times are never named outright, but the album exists in their shadow. As someone who has followed Lizzo closely over the years, I couldn't shake the outside noise, everything I was bringing into the record with me: The old self-affirmation now felt like self-defense, a defiant reassertion of control. She called the title track a "WOMANIFESTO," dedicated to those who "get called a Bitch for having boundaries, for being sexual, for speaking up for themselves," or are seen as "mean" for running "a strict program" — all of which creates friction with the surrounding context. As a creator, Lizzo cannot enter into this music without bumping up against the figure she once cut in her songs, and how our understanding of that figure has changed. As a listener, I cannot enter into this music without doing the same.

It should be noted: This phenomenon is as much about the marketplace as the artists. Bitch is the kind of event album that the streaming model celebrates — a record slotted into the Friday-morning carousels of online platforms, to be treated as appointment listening. In order to set that appointment with an increasingly fickle and flighty audience, artists must usually have some story for it. There is a pervasive tendency of late to front-load narrative, baggage and personality when pushing new music, so that a uniform brand identity is preserved and prospective fans quickly indoctrinated. But as an artist accumulates experiences, the attentive listener starts to carry that baggage with them, particularly as artists spend more and more time selling the self than the art.