How lore became pop’s hottest summer accessory

“The internet has broken the distance that a lot of artists used to have,” Charli xcx told The Observer ahead of the release of Brat. ​“What gets me interested in an artist is when they have – not really a backstory, it’s more like lore…”

In that moment, she defined the common thread between 2024’s biggest pop successes. From Brat summer to Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department, lore is what helps elevate new releases from a moment to cultural event.

Before it enters the pop world, lore is already a fluid thing. A traditional way of building and creating knowledge about subjects through storytelling, it becomes true through repetition, belief and enthusiasm, rather than more abstract notions of right and wrong.

So when lore collides with pop music, it has the potential to destabilise it entirely. It blurs distinctions between text and subtext, creator, fan and contributor, transforming the two-dimensional concept of backstory into something that listeners genuinely have a role in creating. The ​“Gay Rights!” poppers bottles and signed douches of early Charli meet-and-greets are exactly the sorts of fan-driven moments that are foundational in her lore as the ultimate party girl. But lore is also a good way of explaining other curious moments where control of a narrative shifts away from an artist – the widespread belief that Dua Lipa only had one dance move, for example, or the spurious yet unstoppable rumour that Jessie J owns an abattoir. No one really cares if you can fact check it or not; it’s ​“true” because fans want it to be.

“You’re DOA in pop right now without a wealth of lore,” Laura Snapes wrote in her five-star review of the Charli album. (Snapes has also written powerfully on pop’s ​“overreliance on gossip” of late.) She’s right. Though a triumphant Glastonbury headline slot and two instantly sold-out nights at Wembley Stadium might suggest a good summer for Dua Lipa, her new record Radical Optimism was accompanied by a media round that gave little away for fans seeking some kind of personal jump-off point. It’s not like Dua is inherently lore-less – the ​“girl, give us nothing” reaction to her dancing, or the shade on her Covid-era holidays are classic pieces of internet commentary. But her reaction to that lore has always been to distance herself, and Radical Optimism​’s short cultural afterlife shows it’s no longer enough to simply write a collection of bangers sans subtext.

By contrast, after a promo run that included the 360 music video – in which Charli rounded up practically every major internet It Girl – the slow-reveal Brat wall, a New York road block caused by her Lot Radio set, and even a Bratmobile, what’s been remarkable about Charli’s new lore is its inexhaustible self-perpetuation. And despite many media attempts to define what exactly a Brat summer might be, it seems resistant to reduction. Lore is more like something to be fed and, given the slightest nudge – like Charli saying a Brat summer means a strappy white top and a pack of cigs – imagination spreads like ink through water. The result is lore at its most abstract and imaginative: The G line of the New York subway is having a Brat summer? Sure. A cab-less articulated lorry with a Nine Inch Nails stamp has Brat energy? Marvellous. They’re playing football on the Brat pitch? Why not?

Confused? That’s kind of the point. The lore draws energy and appeal from its obscurity: outsiders are unable to understand what’s going on, insiders are unable to explain what’s going on – even if they’re a Chronically Online Person. And Charli’s indifferent way of framing all of it (“If you love it, if you hate it, I don’t fucking care what you think,” on Brat​’s second single 360) only encourages these madly imaginative extensions. (To its credit, the openness ushered in by this kind of lore-creation means that, when Brat snaps into very real-world concerns about jealousy and anxiety, beef between Charli and Lorde which could have become closed-off and snipey becomes a remarkably open-ended dialogue.)

Anyway, we’re in the lore era now. Era! Enter Taylor Swift, lore artist par excellence. This is a different form of lore, however, more concerned with Taylor herself than the wider culture. It’s a lore of theories, explanations and answers, built on discrete things like numbers and patterns. Spotters can trace things like the numbers 13 (her birthday and favourite number) and 1989 (her birth year) through Swift’s output, from the age of cars in her music videos (a 1989 Mercedes Benz S‑Class in the long play version of All Too Well) through to the time at which the vocals kicks in (regularly at 13 seconds, according to one exhaustive Reddit guide).

Having established the expectation of clear subtext, Swift keeps fans engaged by constantly fuelling more speculation: her short-lived relationship with The 1975’s Matty Healy is a headline reference on Taylor’s latest album The Tortured Poets Department, popping up in lightly coded lyrics on Fresh Out The Slammer, But Daddy I Love Him, and Down Bad. Olivia Horn, in her Pitchfork review of the album, noted that she’s leaning into lore more than ever before, ​“What’s changed is not the intimate writing; it’s the appetite for the minutiae of Swift’s life, and the sheer quantity of material she’s feeding it with,” Horn wrote. ​“If you know, you know; if you don’t, please choose from any of the hundreds of explainers.”

The energy given to the act of reading and explaining helps musical moments transition into cultural ones. Take Kendrick and Drake, a feud that escalated from jousting about reputation (on Kendrick’s verse on Future and Metro Boomin’s track Like That, and Drake’s retort Push Ups) to later trading allegations about domestic abuse (Drake’s Family Matters) and paedophilia (Kendrick’s Not Like Us), egged on by a culture with an appetite for subtext. The motivation behind this is the same as it ever was. ​“The exchange of private information, that is what drives our economy,” Malcom Tucker once said. But now, the challenge for artists is how to corral this into a bigger, more cohesive lore by tweaking things from the perimeter, rather than simply telling us all about it.

Have we reached peak lore, then? As it seeps into the way people consume culture and, on TikTok, even talk about themselves, it certainly feels that way. Perhaps it’s a trickle-down from trends in cinema. The franchise structure – embodied by the Marvel Cinematic Universe – prioritises the creation of a distinctive type of lore. Structurally, that means origin stories and sequels. Content-wise, it’s heavy on returning characters and Easter eggs: a Stan Lee cameo here, a return of an obscure character (with an extensive WikiFandom page) there. The lore here – familiar, recognisable and achievable, yet seemingly never-ending – becomes a way for large financial assets to keep reaping benefits from consumers, without risk. Today’s 16-year-olds have never known a world without the MCU. Is there any wonder that we’re beginning to expect the same worldbuilding from our pop stars?

As a tool for turning cultural products into ubiquitous cultural phenomena, lore is unmatched. But what it feels like is still characterised by its artists. Is lore a hyperreal world-building extension of backstory, keenly shaped by the artist as a way of keeping fans in touch with their intentions? Or is it fictional, left to be shaped by fans, with an eye to a world outside the artist? In the end, both forms of lore feed into fans’ desire to go deeper and further, whether they’re delving into the weeds of one world, or building another planet in a star’s orbit.