The pop supergirls who rule Primavera Sound

BarcelonaPrimavera Sound 2025 takes place from June 5th to 7th at Parc del Fòrum, and season tickets and day tickets have been sold out for months. Not only capable of generating musical buzz, but also of creating stylistic trends and even social discourse. Supergirls For the three singers, a reference to the children's series in which three heroines – one green, one blue, and one red, three colors that also identify each of the artists – save the world.

Charlie XCX, from underground clubs to stages around the world

Charli XCX appears on stage and it's clear she's the person you'd want by your side on a night out. Her music and her attitude, somewhere between farewell and snide, are those of someone who has a master's degree in the world of nightlife. Her career began in underground clubs. "When I started making music, I played in radishes illegal works that were carried out in industrial warehouses in Hackney, London. For me, this is home," he explained to Vogue. And he has named his latest album with the title of Brato, a term used in English to describe children who behave badly but, filtered through its filter, refers to "people who like to party and are honest, forceful and somewhat volatile." Charlie XCX's philosophy has made the leap into popular culture and in the summer of 2024 – the year he released the album – he was named brave summer. Fashion and trend magazines from all over the world wondered what it took to be considered a brat girl And the fluorescent green of the album cover became the color of the moment. As if that weren't enough, the Collins dictionary chose the term popularized by the singer as its word of the year. In the ARA we choose Brato as the second best album of 2024.

Charlotte Emma Aitchison, Charli XCX's real name, was born in 1992 in Cambridge, the daughter of a British father and an Indian mother born in Uganda. She says that the duality of her origins made her feel divided in two during her childhood: when she visited her family she lived as an Indian girl, with everyone around her speaking Gujarati and watching Bollywood movies, while when she returned home her existence was that of a white girl. The one who is now surely one of the women with the greatest personality in the music world was an unpopular teenager at school. At 14, she asked her parents for a loan to record her first album, from which she began to post songs on her MySpace page. It was her passport into the world of radishesA promoter discovered her online and invited her to perform at some of the parties he was hosting in East London.

Brato has been Charlie XCX's leap to the mainstream, but his previous album, Crash (2022), already showed promise. With an aesthetic inspired by David Cronenberg's 1996 film of the same name and themes such as Good waves and New shapes, was her first major commercial success and achieved great echo in the United States. Based for some time in Los Angeles, the singer is clear when she talks about the creation process of the American music industry: "Doing an initial therapy session, talking about what's happening in your life and then turning a phrase or two into a song for me is the worst way to compose. In my opinion, it only serves to produce fcc songs"

However, she also uses songs to exorcise some of her traumas, such as the envy she had towards the New Zealander Lorde and which she poured into Girl, sound confusing. Aware that she was one of the internet's favorite washbasins, Charlie XCX jumped on the bandwagon by inviting Lorde to participate in the remix of the track and do a joint therapy exercise. The song not only served to seal the deal between the two, but Lorde, now resurgent, has appeared in some of Charli XCX's most high-profile performances, such as at Coachella.

Sabrina Carpenter, between Marilyn Monroe, Barbie and Brigitte Bardot

After years in which everything that smelled of normativity was viewed with suspicion, the American Sabrina Carpenter (Quakertown, Pennsylvania, 1999) has recovered hyperfemininity, the aesthetic vintage and the flirtation of candid gaze and mile-long eyelashes. In Short'n'sweet (2024), her sixth album, metamorphoses into a bombshell A 1950s classic that's a cross between Marilyn Monroe, Barbie, and, at one point, Brigitte Bardot (it must help that half the album was written during an eleven-day stay in the French village of Chailland).

At just 26, Carpenter has had quite a career. As a good Disney girl, precocity is part of her biography: at 9 years old she posted videos on YouTube doing covers of her favorite songs and at 11 she had her first audition as an actress. The sticky single Espresso, song of the summer of 2024, has propelled her from generational singer – followed by those who had grown up with her through the Disney series Girl meets world– a global crossover phenomenon. “It’s a song about being unashamedly confident, and I think for years this was a narrative that people didn’t accept as easily as it is now. Confidence was considered corny or artificial,” she explained in an interview with producer Zane Lowe for Apple Music. Carpenter says she knows a lot about appearing confident, as it’s the price any child star accustomed to moving among adults pays. Now, however, self-confidence is no longer a mask, but a reality: she’s clear about the sound she wants to make: playful and sexy pop.

Once established as a global star, Carpenter has seen interest in her private life grow exponentially. Rumors about her alleged feud with Olivia Rodrigo (theoretically she is "the blonde" that appears in the lyrics of the song Drivers license and who steals the heart of Rodrigo's ex-boyfriend); intensive monitoring of her now-defunct relationship with actor Barry Keoghan, and fascination with her friendship with Jenna Ortega, another young woman at the height of her popularity. Carpenter says that what anyone might say about her matters little to her: the comments trolls left on her childhood YouTube videos served as shock therapy for her future.

Chappell Roan, the princess of deep America who is not intimidated

Of the three artists headlining this year's Primavera Sound, the one who has experienced the most meteoric rise is American Chappell Roan, the stage name of Kayleigh Rose Amstutz (Willard, Missouri, 1998). The success of the singer, who was a complete unknown almost two years ago, was born out of failure and many obstacles. As a true exponent of Generation Z, she began posting videos on YouTube until she caught the attention of Atlantic Records, who signed her in 2015, when she was 17 (in fact, she skipped school in her last year). The partnership with the label didn't bear the fruit she had hoped for: the songs she released didn't achieve enough recognition, and proposals that later became true achievements, such as Pink Pony Club, were rejected by the record label. "I submitted it to the label and they said 'No.' For a year they rejected it and I believed they were right. I felt very defeated," Roan explained about the song that she considers to have marked a change in her sound.

In August 2020, Atlantic Records decided to dispense with her and, after a few months of trying to make independent music in Los Angeles, Roan returned to Missouri, a state that is part of the Bible Belt of the United States. The return to the family farm was not easy for someone who defines herself as queer and who admits that she doesn't fit the norm for women in the country's most conservative states. While working at a roadside diner, Roan continued writing songs in the notes app on her iPhone. "I felt like I needed to get out of Missouri to finish the rest of the songs I needed to write. I couldn't write pop songs when I was depressed on a farm. I just needed to get out of there," the singer said in a recent interview with Vanity Fair.Roan returned to Los Angeles, and while working different jobs to pay bills, he finished writing the songs that have made him a pop star and LGBTQ+ icon. The result of his musical reinvention is The Risk and Failure of Midwest Princess, a debut album that also functions as a journey through the process of accepting her lesbianism. single of Good luck, babe! became a viral hit. The song is a compendium of the themes Roan touches best: resentment in love, in this case towards a woman who refuses to accept being a lesbian and prefers to continue the fiction of a heterosexual relationship.

Roan has elements of David Bowie: from the album title, which seems like a tribute to Laugh and fall of Ziggy Stardust, to aesthetics glam and the ability to continually transform, closely linked to the universe drag queenBut she also draws on Cyndi Lauper and Kate Bush. Like these three role models, the singer exhibits a fierce independence that she made clear when she demanded a photographer apologize for calling her during the Grammys. Roan seems to fear no one, not even her most extreme fans, to whom she's made it very clear that her artist persona is one thing and her private self is another. Her opinion is forceful, like her shows: "I don't give a shit if you think it's selfish of me to say no to a photo, to spending time with you, or to give you a hug. This is not normal. This is weird. It's weird that people think they know a person just because they see them online or listen to them—music, you know?"