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I love the word "heartthrob." It stops you whether you read it or let it pass through your own lips in a giddy, longing breath. It has too many "t"s and a stutter in the middle, just like the tha-wump that happens when you see somebody you simply must embrace. The word fits both the human magnets who've dominated popular music for most of its history and the effect they strive to maintain on us, their enchanted fans. Make my heart throb, we beg, as we lose ourselves inside a leaping voice, a sinuous guitar, an enrapturing beat. Remind me of how deeply I can feel.
This cultivation of the listener's capacity to swoon is arguably pop's main function, but is it still a priority in 2025? A survey of the new heartthrobs in town brings to mind a familiar, deflating phrase: it's complicated. Yes, the year's most popular song, Alex Warren's "Ordinary," is relentlessly romantic, an ode to marriage inspired, Warren has said, by worship music.
But unlike the greatest love songs that borrow from sacred music — I'm thinking of Aretha Franklin's "Dr. Feelgood" — Warren's pushes onward when it should move in joyful waves, its rhythms and tone shifting the way desire does. Its martial beat and relentlessly swelling dynamics come on more like the elements of a blitzkrieg. Obviously that's working for the millions who have embraced it, but compare it to Mariah Carey's tenderly exultant "Vision of Love" or The Bee Gees' gossamer "How Deep Is Your Love" or Al Green's incomparably persuasive "Let's Stay Together," and "Ordinary" feels not so much forceful as forced. It's just too much of the same overwhelming emotion.
At least "Ordinary" expresses a belief in love's potential — right now, that makes it an anomaly. The love songs of 2025, at least at the level of the hit single, tend to be far more unsettled, with artists mostly resisting the big ballad in favor of messy blends of nostalgia, weirdness and cool. From Morgan Wallen and Tate McRae's hook-up anti-anthem "What I Want" to the vampire mating call "Your Idol" from KPop Demon Hunters, right now love feels like it's on the rocks — a painful, confusing, alienating pursuit.
Let's take a listen, for example, to the work of 20-year-old LaGuardia High School dropout Shane Michael Boose, better known by his nom du rock, sombr. I've been a fan of this charismatic nerd for a while: After a lifetime of appreciating the Bowies and Ocaseks of the world, how could I resist a kid who looks like a lab-generated hybrid of a '70s glam god and a prehistoric bird, and makes music that puts The Cars through a processor labeled "Electric Feel?" That's my type — brainy, but probably trouble. Sombr's anxieties show through on the four singles that precede this week's release of his debut album, I Barely Know Her. "He makes music like no one's meant to listen to it," Douglas Greenwood wrote in the i-D magazine cover story that floated him as rock's new savior, "which means that millions of people do."
Unrequited or half-realized love is sombr's obsession and selling point, as it's been for so many teen idols before. In songs like "back to friends," "undressed" and "we never dated," he gazes across a crowded dance floor or empty stretch of pavement at a woman he may or may not have impressed at some point, but whose memory or projection overwhelms him. He sees her looking down from the ceiling in his bedroom or (perhaps mistakenly) on the subway with another man. He's driven to distraction, to anger, to regret. The music couches his violent feelings in cloudy synthesizer lines. Sombr's yelpy, still-developing falsetto gains resonance but not heft through multi-tracking that's light as air, like the music that surrounds it — even the drum tracks feel translucent in his songs.
This is definitely seductive, adding an aura of mystery to what's essentially a bid for the inheritance offered by every white potential male model who's dipped his toe into the authenticating waters of R&B, from mid-1970s Bowie to 1980s Spandau Ballet to early 2000s MGMT. Sombr is certainly a heartthrob — and yet there's something about the mix of fury and ghostliness in his songs that makes me not want to call them love songs. They're disconnection songs, swiped-right-and-then-ghosted songs; preoccupied with obstacles and misunderstandings.
I think of Sombr's music as the antidote to "Ordinary," a reminder that heartbreak is rampant and sex may feel transcendent, but its aftermath is always complicated by human failings. For him, it has little to do with love; it's all about lessons being learned or, unfortunately maybe, avoided. A bit of callow sexism creeps in through lines like "you were too good for a man's confines." I'm looking forward to Mr. Boose growing up a bit and thinking beyond his own assumptions. He may say he doesn't want to, but he could learn something from the heartbreak he seems to court. "I don't wanna get undressed for a new person all over again," he moans, but he just might have to kiss a few Addison Raes before finding his ultimate companion.
You know what I mean — his princess. Problematic stereotype! As it happens, the breakout star who's had the most fun exploring and challenging the princess role – one with as healthy an imagination as sombr's (duet, maybe?) — also has a new album out this week. Laufey, the 26-year-old singer and songwriter who's gained a major following by adapting those Disney dreams to the realities of the dating-app world. On her third album, A Matter of Time, which follows her breakthrough with 2023's Bewitched, she ramps up the romanticism of her American Songbook-style arrangements while doubling down on the acerbic wit that's always saved her from being insipid.
Like sombr, Laufey (or the character she inhabits in her songs) spends a lot of time in her head. While he's ruminating, she's processing: Stepping back from the rapture of romance in "Lover Girl" and "A Cautionary Tale," she regains confidence by recognizing her own irrationality and moving on, while in "Tough Luck" and "Mr. Eclectic," she schools her exes on exactly why their shortcomings made it possible to do so. ("Twist my hair around your finger, oh grandiose thinker of mine," she sneers in the latter song. Burn.)
Laufey modulates her heartache with the skill of someone who revels in analyzing the roles people play in relationships — the most interesting songs here consider less frequently examined kinds of love, like the life-defining but unsustainable friendship with another woman in "Castle in Hollywood" and the longed-for self-acceptance in her lament about beauty's pressures, "Snow White."
Throughout Time, she and her main producer Spencer Stewart expand her mission of updating mid-century musical styles for Gen Z, adding bossa nova and k.d. lang-style torch and twang to her blend of light classical and jazzified pop. (For one song, "A Cautionary Tale," she brings in Swift whisperer Aaron Dessner to test out more contemporary waters.) Dedicated to these formal explorations, Laufey attempts to move through them toward more direct emotional expression. Lang herself did this powerfully on classic albums like Shadowland, as did Chris Isaak in one of the greatest damaged-love songs of all time, "Wicked Game." Laufey gets closer to the goal in songs like "Tale," but can still get stuck in a costume drama when the listener just wants her to let it go.
She's finding her way beyond cuteness, though, sometimes by indulging in brightly colored melodrama, as on the wedding-bell blues "Too Little, Too Late" (intriguingly, written from a male perspective) and at other times by making space within her lush environments, as in the album's most exquisite song, "Forget-Me-Not." That song, which Laufey has said is an ode to her home country of Iceland and is partly sung in that tongue, is rhapsodic, but in a gentle, watery way. Stretching out within the melody's languid lines, Laufey finds something unnameable, unpredictable, in this particular heartache. That the song is about displacement and nostalgia, not romance, reinforces the impression that Laufey is growing toward maturity by expanding her survey of love to include family, the land and herself.
Laufey and sombr are each, in their different ways, exploring what love's poses offer, and what they cost. They're cerebral artists perfect for a world that encourages people to overthink every gesture, even the most personal ones. The rock and cocktail-jazz poses they've adopted provide a sheen that increases their allure while also blurring the raw edge of vulnerability that could unbalance their carefully constructed music.
This tension between stylistic containment and the human desire to be messy and break free, I think, is typical of the love song today; it's there in a top-shelf ballad like Chappell Roan's "The Subway," which is emotionally effusive but also meticulously built, tapping into a lineage that extends from the 1960s girl groups through 1980s Madonna ballads and 21st century weepers from Adele, absorbing and shaping every influence into something singular. And conversely, it's there in the fragmented R&B of Dijon and Nourished By Time, who both decompose and reassemble the genre, that most technically proficient purveyor of romance, to emphasize the complexities of even trying to maintain human connection when the demands of productivity culture and alienating technologies constantly undermine it. Maybe that's why "Ordinary" seems like such a strange anomaly: Its aggressiveness feels, to me at least, like a denial of the actual rhythms of love and especially of romantic love, which are complicated, idiosyncratic, at once intensely compelling and fragile.
But if you need a little grandiosity in your romance, let me suggest one global hit that ripples with warmth and human feeling. Though it hasn't broken through to an American audience, "Saiyaara" is a smash in South Asia and the Middle East and was the first Hindi song to reach Spotify's Global Top 10. The title track from a Bollywood film about star-crossed lovers (who also happen to be musicians) that's brought romance back to that action movie-packed industry, "Saiyaara" is a classic big ballad, the kind Celine Dion would have owned 30 years ago. What makes it special is the singing of the Kashmiri songwriter and poet Faheem Abdullah, who brings a devotional intensity to the lament that's tempered by a gorgeous clarity, as if he's giving in completely to his feelings while also remaining determined to comprehend them fully and communicate them well. Hopelessly romantic? Sure. Unrealistic? Likely. But it's fun to let a song like "Sairaaya" take you into its arms and sweep you away.
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