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We're going to be on the show.

Settle down, settle down.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

I'm songwriter Charlie Harding and I'm a musicologist Nate Sloan.

And from time to time, it is our constitutional duty to provide an update to the people on what is the current state of pop music.

What are the sounds? What are they singing about? Who's even singing? Tonight we'll be taking the musical temperature by consulting the charts, the platforms, and the people to figure out what is happening in popular music in 2021.

Charlie, it sounds like it's time for the annual state of the pop union address.

I love this idea, but I have to ask how do we get a picture of the contemporary pop landscape when it's so fractured and splintered?

Like how does one take the temperature of the pop nation?

It's not easy, and that's why we've assembled our best team of experts who've been feeding us daily briefings for the past year.

And I think the place that we have to begin is on the charts.

So let's take a minute to think about where our musical nation has been on the charts.

Since 2019, the artist, the weekend, has been blinding us with his lights full of 80s nostalgia, and he's not gone anywhere.

He's currently got six songs that are charting still today.

And writing that same future nostalgia wave is Duolipa, who's had a three-year reign of chart hits, and with a song called Heart, Her Recent Collaboration with Elton John, she's still hanging on.

And I think it's gonna be a long, long time. So touch down, brings me right again to fight.

I'm not the man I think I am at home. Oh, no, no, no.

Yeah, I was grooving to this song so hard in line at the pharmacy the other day.

I was getting some looks, but I didn't care, Charlie, because this Duolipa, Elton John collab, you know, similarly to the week-entracked listening to,

it's got this kind of throwback vibe that is just so listenable, so catchy, reaching back to the 80s, to this sense of nostalgia.

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