Greatest Pop Stars of 2025: Full Updating List

ADDISON RAE

Their Year in Pop: In 2025, Addison Rae solidified herself as force in the pop world. After kicking off the year with “High Fashion” and an appearance during Arca’s Coachella set, the former TikTok star released her eponymous debut studio album on June 6. The acclaimed album reached No. 4 on the Billboard 200 and spawned the Hot 100 hits “Headphones On” (No. 87) and “Fame Is a Gun” (No. 73), the latter of which recently re-entered the chart several months post-release. She supported the album with a Billboard cover and a 44-date headlining tour, following that up with an appearance in Monster: The Ed Gein Story, the third installment of Ryan Murphy’s Emmy-winning Netflix true crime anthology. By the end of the year, Addison officially became a Grammy-nominated artist, picking up a nod for best new artist.

Why Not Top 10? Addison made impressive inroads, but she’s still lacking a true breakthrough hit.

ARIANA GRANDE

Their Year in Pop: Though she came up short at the 2025 Academy Awards, where she was nominated for best supporting actress for Wicked, Ariana Grande returned to the top of the Billboard 200 after releasing the Brighter Days Ahead deluxe edition of her 2024 Eternal Sunshine LP in February which arrived alongside a short film that took home video of the year at September’s MTV Video Music Awards. Brighter Days Ahead added six new tracks to the Grammy-nominated album, including the Global 200 No. 7 hit “Twilight Zone.” Grande also announced her upcoming Eternal Sunshine Tour, which will visit arenas across Europe and North America in 2026. By Thanksgiving, Wicked: For Good earned the highest global and domestic opening weekends for a Broadway adaptation, and secured back-to-back supporting actress nominations for Grande at the Critics’ Choice Awards, Golden Globes and Actor Awards. The accompanying soundtrack reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200, tying the peak of its predecessor — which also earned Grande two 2026 Grammy nods, including best pop duo/group performance for her and Cynthia Erivo’s “Defying Gravity.”

Why Not Top 10? It was a close call, but Ariana felt more musically dominant during the first part of the Eternal Sunshine and Wicked cycles in 2024.

Read about all 10 of our Honorable Mention picks for 2024 here.

Listen to our podcast about all 10 Honorable Mention picks here with YouTuber Todd in the Shadows.

It was fitting, perhaps, that Olivia Dean’s 2025 would kick off with an original song for the Renée Zellweger-starring romcom Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. The London-born BRIT School graduate’s 2023 debut album Messy was about the chaos – and liberating freedom – of rebuilding your life after romantic misadventures, something the film’s titular character knows a thing or two about. Released in February, “It Isn’t Perfect But It Might Be” wasn’t a runaway success, topping out at No. 36 on the U.K.’s Official Singles Chart (Mad About the Boy, however, was the largest-grossing British film of 2025). But it bridged the gap between eras, and proved the first of many smart maneuvers in an electrifying breakout campaign.

The success of Olivia Dean’s 2025 was not about chance, but careful placement of an artist with cross-generational appeal. Savvy decisions, stellar songs and a unique artist persona put Dean in prime position to succeed. Released in late September, The Art of Loving became an immediate mainstay on the Billboard 200 albums chart, and a viral moment for “Man I Need” propelled it to global smash status.

Read our full Olivia Dean Rookie of the Year essay here, written by Billboard UK’s Thomas Smith.

Listen to our podcast about Olivia Dean’s rookie year here, with Billboard UK‘s Sophie Williams.

Sixteen years is an eternity in rap. That’s how long the Clipse went between 2009’s Til the Casket Drops and the Thornton brothers’ resurrection album Let God Sort Em Out, which landed in July. Malice left the group to pursue his faith, and Pusha T enjoyed a dominant solo run in the 2010s. But all roads led back to Virginia Beach for a fruitful 2025 reunion — one that not just re-confirmed the duo as all-time marksmen, but showed they could still be leaders in the contemporary landscape, even as 25-year veterans.  

Let God Sort Em Out was released on July 11, crystallizing the rap album of the year hype surrounding the LP. Push and Malice proved to be sharper than Valyrian steel in the booth, even at 48 and 53 years old, respectively. Of course, there was plenty of luxury coke raps with “kilos in my Maybach” and Push scoffing at driving an Audi à la Jay-Z with BMW X5s on “Show You How,” but the killer mentality was complemented by growth, evolved perspective and maturity. “If you listen to a Clipse record and you don’t feel like going to buy a coupe, we failed you,” Pharrell told Billboard.

Read our full Clipse Comeback of the Year essay here, written by Michael Saponara.

Listen to our podcast about Clipse’s comeback year here, also with Michael Saponara.

About 15 years ago, in February 2011, a menacing group of young adults set the internet ablaze with its anarchic musical performance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. The rabble-rousers of Odd Future took their off-color, Tumblr-coded rap music to network television – and their appearance marked their introduction to the mainstream. 

But at the time, and for years after, Odd Future’s ringleader and breakout talent, Tyler, The Creator, seemed an unlikely candidate to ever transcend cult status. Odd Future’s left-field aesthetic and at-times nauseating lyrical content was a non-starter for many. Later that year, GLAAD denounced Odd Future’s homophobic and misogynistic subject matter; as late as 2015, the U.K. banned Tyler from entry due to his lyrics. All par for the course for an artist whose signature lyric up to that point was “KILL PEOPLE BURN S—T F—K SCHOOL.” 

A decade later, however, Tyler is an integral part of the pop cultural fabric, both domestically and abroad. Today, his high-concept hip-hop has placed him in rarefied air with rap superstars like Kendrick Lamar and Drake, with Grammy wins, lucrative world tours and impressive chart success — a position he cemented with his massive 2025. 

Read our full Tyler, The Creator No. 10 essay here, written by Eric Renner Brown.

Listen to our podcast about Tyler’s Greatest Pop Star year here, with Kyle Denis.

Leveraging the momentum she garnered in the final months of 2024, Doechii solidified herself as a bonafide pop star in 2025.  

After dropping her Alligator Bites Never Heal mixtape in August ‘24, Doechii stole the show on several late-year collaborations, including Tyler, the Creator’s Chromakpoia standout “Balloon,” which arrived just days before the Swamp Princess earned three nods at the 2025 Grammys. Her infectious verse and Recording Academy co-sign, as well as a pair of viral live performances, spurred even greater interest in her music, resulting in the breakthrough success of “Denial Is a River.”

If Doechii left fans with any disappointments from her year, it’s that her official debut studio album — whose 2025 arrival she had guaranteed in late 2024 — never materialized. All that means, however, is that Doechii could be in for an even more dominant 2026 if and when her debut LP finally arrives.

Read our full Doechii No. 9 essay here, written by Kyle Denis.

Listen to our podcast about Doechii’s Greatest Pop Star year here, with AJ Marks of r/Popheads.

In 2025, country superstar Morgan Wallen furthered his ascent into the top tier of music’s zeitgeist, continuing to cement his status as a musical powerhouse both within his genre and far beyond, hitting new career high marks both on the charts and on the road.

In January, Wallen signaled that 2025 would be another banner year, by revealing his fourth studio album, I’m the Problem, and releasing the hit title track. He’d already primed fans for a juggernaut album with Hot 100-topping “Love Somebody” in 2024, but the title track shaped the tone for some of the moodier moments on the album, detailing a hazardous, spiteful relationship and laying the groundwork for an expansive album brimming with songs that are steeped in heartbreak and relational tension.

Read our full Morgan Wallen No. 8 essay here, written by Jessica Nicholson.

Listen to our podcast about Wallen’s Greatest Pop Star year here, with Melinda Newman.

In the mid-2020s, a lot of the defaults of pop stardom seemed to be reversed from where they were 20 years earlier. Breakout artists are more adult than teen or college-age, more diaristic than danceable, more relatable than aspirational. We praise pop stars for showing us who they really are, not simply showing us what they can really do. Enter Tate McRae. 

In 2024, McRae rode the momentum of “Greedy” to further hit singles (“It’s OK I’m OK,” “2 Hands”), with an increased emphasis on music videos and a growing prowess as a live performer, as her Think Later World Tour brought her all over Europe and America and even took her to New York’s Madison Square Garden for the first time. She ended that year an Honorable Mention in our Greatest Pop Stars list, with us writing that she had “yet to quite equal that [‘Greedy’] ubiquity with her subsequent releases — though with a new album scheduled for February (and another world tour starting the next month), she certainly seems like a strong bet for 2025.”

That bet would have paid handsomely. McRae leveled up like few other pop artists in 2025, realizing her full star potential in spellbinding fashion across various singles, albums and performances — and proving pop still had a place in its center for the daughters of Britney and Xtina. By year’s end, comparing Tate to those legends didn’t even feel that far-fetched.

Read our full Tate McRae No. 7 essay here, written by Andrew Unterberger.

Listen to our podcast about McRae’s Greatest Pop Star year here, with Kristen Wisneski and Michael Saponara.

When the KPop Demon Hunters trailer dropped in May, could anyone have predicted the runaway success it would enjoy for the entire back half of 2025? Certainly its soundtrack creators didn’t, nor did perhaps the greatest beneficiaries of that album’s command of the charts: Korean American singer-songwriters EJAE, Audrey Nuna and REI AMI, who provide the singing voices for the animated film’s demon slaying good guys, HUNTR/X. 

Released in June, the film slowly climbed to become Netflix’s most streamed title of all time, while the soundtrack — with songs consciously crafted to stand alone as well as they work within a narrative — made a similar trek to the top of the charts; after debuting on the Billboard 200 at No. 8 in July, it continued to go up, up, up for 12 weeks, before finally reaching No. 1 on the chart dated Sept. 20. On the Billboard Hot 100, meanwhile, it became the first soundtrack with four simultaneous top 10 hits in the history of the ranking. K-pop superstars TWICE even got a boost for their single “Strategy,” which appears on the soundtrack: originally released in 2024, it peaked at No. 51 on the chart in September after debuting in August.

Read our full KPop Demon Hunters Cast No. 6 essay here, written by Abby Webster.

Listen to our podcast about the KPDH cast’s year here, with Meghan Mahar.

As she’lll tell you herself, Sabrina Carpenter is a “Busy Woman” — and if there was any doubt remaining to her superstar-level productivity, she squashed it in 2025. After dominating the headlines and charts with songs from her 2024 LP Short n’ Sweet (she was our No. 2 Greatest Pop Star of that year) it seemed like she had done everything fans could possibly want. But in 2025, she defied all expectations, nearly matching the dominance of her breakout year across the globe. 

The year started off slowly by Sabrina’s (extremely high) standards. After concluding the U.S. leg of the Short n’ Sweet Tour in November of 2024, Carpenter took some much needed “down” time. Or so we thought: In reality, she was gearing up for two massive moments: the Grammy Awards and the announcement of Short n’ Sweet (Deluxe). The former came to fruition on Feb. 2, where Carpenter dazzled the audience with a show-stopping mashup of “Espresso” and “Please Please Please” before taking home two awards for best pop solo performance and best pop vocal album; and the announcement of the latter came “as a thank you for giving [this album] 2 Grammy’s” just two days later.

Read our full Sabrina Carpenter No. 5 essay here, written by Meghan Mahar.

Listen to our podcast about Carpenter’s year here, with Lina Morgan of the Song vs. Song podcast.

How do you follow up one of the best years of any artist in hip-hop history? You just let off the first shot in the most significant rap battle since The Battle of New York City in 2001 when Jay-Z got on that Summer Jam stage, stood in front of that crowd, and said, “Ask Nas, he don’t want it with Hov.” You then meticulously picked your opponent apart with clever and maniacal diss records effectively mimicking what Drake did to Meek Mill when he answered “Charged Up” with a hit record in “Back to Back” back in 2015. The knockout punch then goes viral, hits No. 1 on the only chart that matters, and gets nominated for multiple Grammys. 

And while rumors of an album swirl, as fans and the industry alike assume you’d capitalize some way from all the attention the battle has garnered, you get tapped to headline the Super Bowl Halftime show. Finally, you do drop that sixth studio album, which debuts at No. 1 and takes over the entire top five of the Billboard Hot 100, and announce a stadium tour that would touch 18 countries the following year. That’s how Kendrick Lamar answered his critics after wrestling the crown away from his peers Drake and J. Cole, effectively turning the trio once affectionately known as “The Big 3” into officially just “Big Me.”

Lamar’s 2024 — which ended with him being named our staff’s No. 1 Greatest Pop Star of that year — effectively set up 2025 to be his victory lap. He started the year off with GNX still in the Billboard 200 top five and had an absolutely absurd February. He then took home five Grammys while having an audience of his peers scream “A-minor” in unison, needing extra arms to carry the best music video, best rap song, best rap performance, song of the year and record of the year trophies — all for “Not Like Us” — back to Compton. He then turned around and delivered the most watched Super Bowl Halftime Show to date, in which he ran up the score on Drake worse than the Eagles torching the Chiefs, by performing a song at the center of a preposterous and frivolous lawsuit — getting a sold-out stadium filled with people from all walks of life rapping along at the top of their lungs, while Drake’s ex tennis superstar Serena Williams Crip Walked on his proverbial grave. 

Read our full Kendrick Lamar No. 4 essay here, written by Angel Diaz.

Listen to our podcast discussion about Lamar’s year here, with Carl Lamarre.