#14 on the 2025 Bacon Top 31 — Lorde

January 18, 2026 by Royal Stuart in 2025, Top 31

Virgin by Lorde

It’s been 12 years (and two non-charting albums) since we saw Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor, aka Lorde, grace us with her presence on the Top 31. With Virgin, her fourth LP, the 29-year-old singer/songwriter has given us what I would call her best album yet.

Lorde has been through quite a bit since her 2013 debut, Pure Heroine, was at #28 that year. After the success of that platinum-selling, #3 in the US album, her sophomore album, the Jack Antonoff-co-produced Melodrama, full of synths and beats made for moving your body, went all the way to #1. Her third album, Solar Power, also co-produced by Antonoff, abandoned the beats for acoustic indie pop, and consequently fared the worst, “only” charting at #5 in the US.

In the years that ensued after Solar Power, which came out in 2021, Lorde had a bit of an identity crisis. She set out and succeeded in overcoming the crippling stage fright she’d been experiencing up to that point, but then turned that critical eye towards her weight in an unhealthy way, which she sang about on a Charli xcx track that was released as part of the Brat remix project called Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat, on a song called “Girl, so confusing,” released summer 2024. “And scared to be in your pictures / ‘Cause for the last couple years / I’ve been at war with my body / I tried to starve myself thinner / And then I gained all the weight back.”

In an interview with Rolling Stone released around the time Virgin was released, Lorde spoke of how her healing from the stage fright involved MDMA and psilocybin therapy (successfully). But she was not only treating that and the eating disorder. She was also reconciling a life (between the ages of 13 and 27) of relying on (and sometimes dating) boys and men significantly older than her, and the inherent power-dynamic problems that creates. Ultimately, Virgin is the outcome of that personal growth. Not only does she now feel she’s got a grip on her life, but she’s better understanding what it means to be Lorde — who she is, what she needs, and what life will look like going forward as a near-30-year-old megastar.

As part of this new understanding, gender identity has come to the fore. The Lorde we see in the videos from this new album still exude the overt sex appeal that comes with being a pop icon, the shift in how she represents herself has become less girly-girl femme all the time, in her words more “masc.” Take a look at the video for opening track “Hammer” (featured above). Lorde seductively lies in the grass in a bikini and suspended in a warehouse completely naked while singing about the themes for the rest of the album. “I burn, and I sing, and I scheme, and I dance. Some days, I’m a woman, some days, I’m a man.”

She goes even harder on the gender fluidity on “Man of the Year,” a video where she duct tapes her chest flat and sings “Gliding through / Like new from my recent ego death” and “Take my knife and I cut the cord / My babe can‘t believe I‘ve become someone else / Someone more like myself / Who’s got’ love me like this? … Let’s hear it for the man of the year.” There’s a definite masculinity rooted in her psyche that has finally started to show itself, and she wants the world to know it.

Musically, there’s a good reason this album hits different. On Virgin, Lorde parted ways with Jack Antonoff and the acoustic folkiness of her last record. Instead, she co-wrote and co-produced the album with producer Jim-E Stack, who also happens to have co-written and co-produced Top 31 favorite Bon Iver’s¹ latest, the amazing SABLE, fABLE. Together, they brought the Melodrama beats back, too. Check out “What Was That”, a dancey, get-your-body moving song about the fallout from the aforementioned relationships with unnamed older men.

I’ve loved Lorde’s sultry delivery since her debut, and I’m glad she’s coming out of her third decade on Earth stronger, more self-aware, and in control of her situation. We’re all better off for it, and I can’t wait to hear what she does in her 30s.

^{1. All of Bon Iver’s albums that have come out in the duration have been featured on the Top 31 since I started it in 2009: #17 in 2009, #6 in 2011, #1 in 2016, and #9 in 2019. And that’s not to mention lead singer Justin Vernon’s other collaborations that have been on the Top 31, such as Big Red Machine and his work with Taylor Swift.↩}

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#10 on the 2024 Bacon Top 31 — Billie Eilish

January 22, 2025 by Royal Stuart in Top 31, 2024

Hit Me Hard and Soft by Billie Eilish

Welcome to the Top 10 of 2024! This is the point in the Top 31 where the decisions I’ve made about what albums to include and where they sit in the Top 10 can really be contentious with the small group of you who are paying close attention. A lot goes into my thought process of where to put an album that I enjoyed greatly throughout the year. There’s the quantitative side – literally how much did I listen to a given artist, but that plays only a small part in my decision. A Top X of anything as derived by a single individual is always a qualitative, gut-feeling endeavor. The Bacon Top 31 is no different. It’s a blend of: How much do I enjoy an album? How often did I listen to it in certain scenarios of my life? How much was the album loved / requested by one of my children?

The album at #10, the fantastic Hit Me Hard and Soft from global powerhouse Billie Eilish hits just the right notes of all of those questions. I enjoy it greatly, I listened to it often around the house and in the car, and the album was VERY MUCH loved by one of my children. But it should be said just because an album is loved by my children doesn’t mean it will show up in the Top 31. You don’t see a Bluey album in here, do you?

Billie Eilish has been making music for 10 years now, and yet she was born in the current century. She is a month into being 23 years old (born December 18, 2001), and yet each of the three full-length albums she’s released have sold more than 2 million copies each. You rarely see that kind of success from anyone, and you never see it from someone who has only been alive for just over two decades. Hit Me Hard and Soft is a VERY good album, and I can’t help but compare it to other releases by global, white, female, megapop stars in 2024. This album is much better than Taylor Swift’s 2024 album The Tortured Poet’s Department, released a month before Eilish’s album. It’s also way better than Sabrina Carpenter’s Short N’ Sweet and Ariana Grande’s Eternal Sunshine. It may be on par with Charli XCX’s Brat, and I’m sorry to say I can’t really give an opinion there, because I simply did not give Brat much attention (but I still hope to). To me, Hit Me Hard and Soft is the best of that bunch.

I’ve been enjoying Eilish’s growth in fame and musicality over the years.¹ I was enamored with her EP Don’t Smile at Me but it did not appear on the Top 31 because I used to have stupid requirements about what qualified as an “album.” Her debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? showed up at #12 in 2019. Unfortunately, I didn’t give her sophomore album Happier Than Ever its due, but if I were to rejigger that list from 3 years ago I’m sure there would be some changes now. All that said, Hit Me Hard and Soft is truly her best yet.

“Birds of a Feather” (featured in the video above) is a great song about love and connection, and the video is fun to watch in an Everything, Everywhere, All At Once kind of way. (Watch the short behind the scenes video about the making of, too.) “Chihiro” is my second favorite track on the album, and its quieter tone goes well in an otherwise high-energy album. “Lunch,” the lead single from the album, is catchy but a bit vapid in its lack of complexity. It feels as though it’s seen popularity due to the nature of a young woman singing “I could eat that girl for lunch” evoking thoughts of a still-inexplicably-scandalous lesbian nature. The behind the scenes on this one is less interesting, but it’s neat she also released three of the complete one-take lip syncs of the song for fans to enjoy: (One Take T002), T004, and T009.

If you only give the music a quick pass, and don’t think too much about what you’re hearing, it may be easy to write off Eilish and her producing partner, cowriter, and brother Finneas as merely being in the right place at the right time. But once you start to dig, you really see how much effort these two put into making something the best it can be. A good example of this effort can be seen in the “NPR Tiny Desk Concert” the two of them performed on, “unplugged” style, with a backing band. Eilish doesn’t come off as her only 22-years-of-age, but she is still very endearing as far as global megastars go.

As I mentioned in my Tyler, The Creator review at #12, I do my best to encourage the positive ends of my children’s music listening. They are often stuck listening to my personal favorites while I drive them around to various activities, but I also give them a window into being able to request things. I try to not just shoot their requests down because it’s not something I would traditionally want to listen to. This mentality has brought a lot more good music into my world. In the case of Billie Eilish, I was already well into her world prior to my youngest’s own love of Eilish’s music. But it‘s because of my youngest that my “well into” turned into a “love” of Eilish’s music in 2024. I look forward to other music turning into loves for me as she grows up.

^{1. I’ve also avidly watched the annual interview that Vanity Fair magazine has been creating with Eilish for the past eight years. Watch for yourself if you’ve not seen them before. ↩}

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#12 on the 2024 Bacon Top 31 — Tyler, The Creator

January 20, 2025 by Royal Stuart in Top 31, 2024

Chromakopia by Tyler, The Creator

At the end of 2023, many music-related news outlets started declaring that hip-hop was dying or perhaps even dead. The genre had experienced a major surge throughout the 2010s, so great that it beat out rock-n-roll to become the #1 listened-to genre in music in 2018. It’s been able to maintain that ranking every year since, just as streaming music has become the only game in town, but the sizable lead it built up over the other genres has been declining in recent years. The number of chart topping hip-hop songs had dropped significantly while the genre became a reflection of the results of streaming on the whole: there’s less concentration on two or three huge artists while everyone finds and follows their own lane. Popular music on the whole was becoming homogenized.

Amazingly, that wasn’t the end of the story. In 2024, hip-hop saw popularity coalesce around a handful of artists (see Doechii at #18). With that focusing of excitement came the artists driving #1 songs and albums throughout the year, reinvigorating the genre. Tyler Okonma, otherwise known as Tyler, the Creator, was one of this artists that caused the turnaround of events with his phenomenal eighth studio album Chromakopia, coming in at #12.

I’ve been sleeping on Tyler for pretty much his entire career. I mean, I’ve known about him for a long time, but I’ve had very little bandwidth for hip hop on the whole, so I hadn’t paid him much attention. In past years when I’ve latched on to acts like Run the Jewels (#6 in 2020, #28 in 2014), they essentially fulfilled my hip-hop allotment for the year (I’m not proud, it’s just the truth). Not so in 2024 — I listened to more hip hop this year than I have since I first dabbled in the genre as a high school freshman trying to figure out his particular flavor of rebellion by listening to NWA and The Geto Boys in the late 80s.

There’s a few reasons I’ve listened to more hip hop in 2024 than in any previous year, and “the music just got better!” can’t be one of them, no matter how much it may feel like it’s true to me. The simple truth is I seem to have unintentionally allowed hip hop to have a bigger presence in my life. 2024 started with a birthday surprise from my wife, taking me to a listening party centered around Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange. (I’d loved his Blonde album, (#4 in 2016) but hadn’t been able to give the earlier album much love, so I re-listened to it a lot in January of 2024.)

Secondarily, the beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar leapt over the cultural divide and became a minor obsession for me. There were other smaller beefs (Charlie XCX and Lorde, Tyler and Childish Gambino), but the rift that grew between Drake and Kendrick that began in March of 2024, or back in 2011 depending on where you draw the line, slowly filled every bit of idle time I had, with me reading articles and podcasts (such as the always wonderful Dissect) and other non-music related content. Not only was I listening to more hip hop as a result, I was reading and learning more about it, too.

And likely the biggest reason for there being more hip hop in my life in 2024: my 16-year-old child has found a new love of hip hop, and has been listening to a lot of it recently. Having your teenage child grow into their own musical tastes that are separate from (but hopefully influenced by) your own, and then feeling compelled to talk to you about what they’re finding and listening to — that’s where the magic is. As a proud father who loves music, I’ll fall over backwards to accommodate any music-related ambition from my children. If they love Tyler, the Creator, I’ll be damned if I don’t love Tyler, the Creator, too. If they love Tyler’s past albums, I’ll love those, too (I’m looking at you, IGOR, which is cued up in my earbuds to listen to next).

Thankfully, Tyler is easy to love. Chromakopia is a rich, leaning-forward-into-the-momentum album that is a compelling listen. The number of guest stars on this album is astounding, including Top 31 past favorites Childish Gambino, Thundercat, Doechii, and Inflo, as well as future favorites GloRilla, Lil Wayne, ScHoolboy Q, Santigold, Willow, Daniel Caesar, Sexxy Redd, Teezo Touchdown, and Solange, and at least 20 other people. The production on the album, done by Tyler himself, along with the songwriting and arranging, is all-encompassing.

Hit play on the video above, for the song “NOID,” and you’ll get a taste of what I mean. The song, autobiographically concerned with the paranoia Tyler feels as his fame grows ironically larger, prominently features a sample of the Nambian band Ngozi Family’s song "Nizakupanga Ngozi,” from their 1977 album 45,000 Volts to great effect. Watch closely and you’ll see Ayo Edebiri from FX’s The Bear acting disturbingly psychotic with a gun. “NOID” is my favorite song on the album, so it’s convenient that it’s the only song for which Tyler made a video. “Balloon” featuring Doechii (#18 this year) is my 2nd fave, specifically because of Doechii’s appearance. That girl can do anything.

Nearing the end of the year, on Christmas Day, Tyler released “THAT GUY” – a freestyle remix of “Hey Now” from Kendrick Lamar’s 2024 album GNX, which only itself came out on November 22. Tyler seems to me that he’s mimicking Kendrick’s delivery style on the song. Or maybe my untrained ears are adding something where it’s not needed. Either way, I really like that beat, and Tyler’s verse on top of it is fantastic.

Chromakopia is wonderful. It’s still full of swears, but it’s much less than you’ll find on the Doechii album, if for some reason you found that a bit off-putting in her album. I am looking forward to giving IGOR a chance to ascend my “greatest regrets” list, for having not appeared on the Top 31 of the 2019 list when it really should have. And as for you, if you’ve not heard this new album yet, you know what to do.

Hop to it.

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