What is 'recession pop' — and why is it making a comeback? New music from Kesha, Lady Gaga signals return to 'escapist pop bangers.'

Yahoo

28-03-2025

The year is 2008, and the Great Recession has settled in. With the bursting of the housing bubble, the collapse of major investment banks like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, as well as the rise in unemployment and poverty rates, economic turmoil is at a high.
As the economy cratered, pop music thrived. Recession woes coincided with the release of infectious dance-pop tracks that topped charts and dominated radio stations. Katy Perry's 2010 album, Teenage Dream, is one example of what Joe Bennett, a forensic musicologist at Berklee College of Music, refers to as the 'quintessential recession pop sound.' Notable party records of the time, per Bennett, also include Lady Gaga's 'Just Dance,' Kesha's 'Tik Tok,' the Black Eyed Peas' 'I Gotta Feeling' and Miley Cyrus's 'Party in the U.S.A.'
Now, this sound is making a comeback.
''Recession pop' is a relatively recent label that people have been using in the 2020s to refer to escapist pop bangers that came out between 2009 and 2012,' Bennett told Yahoo Entertainment. 'That coincided with the credit crunch that led to the Great Recession of 2009 and beyond.'
'These songs are very explicitly about dancing, they're about partying,' Paula Harper, a musicologist at the University of Chicago, told Yahoo. 'This music is kind of an overcompensating counterpoint to [the recession]. 'What are we going to do? Well, we can't solve this, but we can get on the dance floor and put our hands up. We can scream along with these incredibly catchy songs.''
The stars of recession pop are also making new music with hallmarks of their late aughts-early 2010s sound. Kesha and Lady Gaga are among the artists with new singles that fans believe call back to their recession pop roots.
For Kesha, 'Yippee-Ki-Yay,' her new single featuring T-Pain released on March 27, represents a return to form. Her emergence in the music industry coincided with the Great Recession, and her debut studio album, Animal, exuded this unkempt party girl energy. It all felt apt for the moment.
'It's almost like she's come full circle now,' Bennett said. 'It's sort of understandable that she's going to be tapping into [this] cultural trend. She was there at the start.'
Gaga, like Kesha, has also been described as signaling a return to recession pop. Her newest album, Mayhem, which features the single 'Abracadabra,' has been described as recalling distinct dance-pop qualities of her debut album, The Fame, which was released in 2008.
It's difficult, however, to determine whether these songs that are now categorized as recession pop were actually released in response to the Great Recession.
'Was it caused by the recession? Or does it just correlate with the timing of the recession? Maybe it doesn't really matter,' Bennett said. 'Because I think we can all say with some certainty that there were some great pop bangers around in 2010. It was a very cheerful time in popular music.'
There's an escapist quality to these hits. Their subject matter is more concerned with what Harper calls the 'phenomenon of the dance floor,' the inclination to lose yourself to dance and 'sonic bodily pleasure.'
In 'Party in the U.S.A.,' Cyrus recalls how hearing a Jay-Z song when she's homesick in Los Angeles puts her at ease by encouraging her to dance, as she sings, 'So I put my hands up/ They're playin' my song, the butterflies fly away/ I'm noddin' my head like, yeah/ Movin' my hips like, yeah.'
Gaga, on her debut single 'Just Dance,' sings about how everything's going to be OK if she just dances her heart out at the club: 'What's goin' on, on the floor?/ I love this record, baby, but I can't see straight anymore' and 'Just dance/ Gonna be OK, da-da-doo-doot!' driving this point home.
Perry's 'Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)' shares a similar sentiment: Partying is fun! The song is an attempted recollection of the events from a given Friday night, as she sings of maxing out credit cards and getting kicked out of bars. Lyrics like 'Yeah, we danced on tabletops, and we took too many shots/ Think we kissed, but I forgot last Friday night' and 'Always say we're gonna stop-op, oh-whoa/ But this Friday night/ Do it all again' speak to this dedication to keeping the party going and the body moving.
'We can say, with certainty, that these dance floor bangers were very big hits in these postrecession years,' added Bennett. 'We can reasonably make the inference that at least a significant proportion of the population [is] not being put off going out dancing by the global economic circumstances.'
The term itself is somewhat of a 're-historicizing' of music in an era of streaming, Harper said. Recession pop, as a term, is more of a 'genre marker' than a hard-set genre of music. Many of these albums categorized as recession pop were likely works in progress before the Great Recession happened.
'It's not like Lady Gaga put together her album [The Fame] with the recession in mind,' she said. 'I think there's almost a way in which people now are doing a kind of re-historicizing of those albums [and] that kind of era and moment in music as a way of thinking about and coping with the current moment.'
With the escalation of trade tensions, recession fears are continuing to rise in the U.S., CNBC reported. Recession indicators, the outlet notes, include higher unemployment rates, prolonged stock market slumps, more businesses declaring bankruptcy and a decline in consumer spending.
So why, exactly, is recession pop making a comeback? Bennett attributes the growing popularity of the genre label, which has been used primarily in 2024 and 2025, to the cyclical nature of nostalgia. A recession isn't necessarily required for recession pop to trend again. Pop music nostalgia, Bennett said, is like any other form of nostalgia.
'Psychology research suggests [nostalgia] works in 15-to-20-year cycles for pop culture. So if you think about any music or movie or anything that you liked 15 years ago, you probably think, 'Yeah, that's pretty cool,' as your younger self was enjoying it,' he said. 'I think we all have our version of that story, where you've sort of forgotten how good those bangers were. And the 15-year nostalgia cycle is about the right length of time to allow that forgetting and rediscovery.'
Harper hopes the genre label's sudden virality spotlights a new generation of dance-pop artists. She also sees dance-pop bangers taking on more nihilistic themes or undertones.
'I would love to see the kind of rise and more mainstreaming of lesser-known artists or new emergent artists who are able to lasso the moment for recession pop,' she said. 'I would expect to see, I think, a little bit more of just a nihilistic bend. It's not just a kind of like, 'I'm having fun and I don't care,' but 'The world is ending and I can't care.''
Like pop music in general, recession pop serves a societal function. It harnesses the 'power of nostalgia,' Bennett explained.
'Pop music, I think, is very good at amplifying those good things in our memory,' he said. ''Cause what are we doing when we listen to pop music? We're usually having a good time.'