Welcome to Pop Pantheon, the podcast where we completely overanalyze all of your favorite pop stars and then rank them in the official Pop Pantheon.

This is your host, DJ Louis X.

Reminding you to please rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast wherever you're listening to it now. Follow us on social media at

Pop Pantheon Pod.com. Buy our merch at Poppantheonpod.com and subscribe to our Patreon

channel. Pop Pantheon All Access, where we do weekly bonus episodes of this show. You can also

subscribe for the audio only directly in the Apple Podcast app. All right,

I am here with a venerated panel of Pop Pantheon All-Stars. I have Rihanna Cruz here. Rianna,

welcome to the show. So happy to be here. Thanks for having me. So glad to see you, of course.

And we also have Shad DeSouza here. Shad, welcome. Thank you. All right, so we're here

to do an incredibly fun, but also somewhat thankless task, as I was saying to both of you off

mic just now, which is to talk about our favorite pop albums of the last 25 years. Now,

whenever I'm conceiving of these episodes, wherever Russ and I are conceiving of these episodes, I always have this dual feeling where I'm like, this is going to be so fun because I love to look back. I love to take stock. I actually love making lists. I think it forces me to sort of like think about what I've liked, think about what has stood the test of time, think about what's stuck with me, think about

what's kind of fallen off over time, think about what remains relevant even over the course

of the last 20 years. And then I always find that making the long list of these is kind of like

a great exercise, but then like picking my top five feels almost like silly at a certain point where I'm kind of like,

this could be any of these. I could make a case for 30 of these albums being in the top five,

and then it becomes kind of like an excruciating task of like extracting five that like

maybe try to tell a story or try to present some variance or try to represent

different facets of my taste or you know but it starts to feel almost arbitrary and then

ranking those five starts to feel crazy too so I did do it I ultimately feel good about where

I landed but I definitely want to kick this off by hearing about how you all went about making your list.

So, Shad, let me start with you. What was the process of making this list like for you?

...