| December 20, 2025 
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Looking back at the year in pop, Lindsay Zoladz noticed three Gen Z performers had something in common: an inspiration in Britney Spears, an elder millennial who put out her earliest music before any of them was even born. In a great notebook, Lindsay traces Spears’s spiritual and aesthetic influence on Sabrina Carpenter, Tate McRae and Addison Rae — as well as the fact that while all three young singers didn’t live through Spears’s rise, they did witness the end of the conservatorship that controlled her life for over a decade, as well as the cultural reassessment of how she (and other female stars) had been treated. Lindsay also made a 90-song, five-hour playlist of her and Jon Caramanica’s best albums and songs of the year in the latest Amplifier newsletter. And the crew waded through the latest crop of holiday albums for a rundown of what’s worth checking out. (Tyra Banks, somehow, is on this list.) Plus: Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli spoke with Romeo Santos and Prince Royce, who have a lot to say about how bachata has been left behind in Latin music’s latest boom. RM Clark told me something I did not know: that the infamous Pentridge Prison in Australia had a radio station — and that now, its collection of 1,600 records has a new home. And Jessica M. Goldstein went behind the scenes of the online show “Track Star,” where celebs and civilians play a version of Name That Tune that inspires them to open up about their lives. |
