Hey, I'm Brian Hyatt, and this is Rolling Stone, music now.

Have another packed episode for you today.

We're going to start out by talking about the best pop music of 2022 so far.

To do that, I'll be joined by one of Rolling Stones pop experts,

Thomas Meer, who's joining me for the first time on this show. And then I'll be joined

by Rolling Stones Corey Grow to talk about the very metal aspects of this season of

stranger things from Metallica to the real life satanic panics that actually

inspired a lot of this season's plot.

And of course one of the very best pop albums of the year was Harry's house by Harry Stiles.

And if you wanted to hear us talk about that, we had an entire episode about that just a few weeks ago.

So, Thomas and I will be skipping that one, but here's what we had to say about a lot of the other great pop music of 2022, so far that is. So Thomas thanks so much for joining me.

Of course thank you for having me. Absolutely. I wanted to start by asking you about just to take a picture of the overall trends.

I mean one thing that seems significant to me is we are in the sort of post

Olivia Rodrigo moment and we see that in various places.

We see that in more guitars and some albums.

We see that in her friend Conan Gray's album.

Are you seeing that effect and what other sort of overall movements, trends changes are you seeing so far this year in pop.

And pop is, as we'll see from the kind of music we talk about is so broad that it's almost impossible to generalize?

No, it totally is too hard to generalize,

but I think the impact of Olivia Rodrigo is definitely there

and I want to say also the impact of Machine Gun Kelly

and his punk rock resurgence is definitely in a lot of the music

...