"This is my dancefloor, I fought for," Lady Gaga sings euphorically on Free Woman, a track from her new album, Chromatica.
She's not alone. The charts are suddenly crammed with pop songs that celebrate joy and sensuality and precipitous thrill: Dua Lipa's Physical, Doja Cat's Say So, Harry Styles' Watermelon Sugar and Gaga's own Stupid Love.
At the same time, music is getting faster.
The average tempo of 2020's top 20 best-selling songs is a pulse-quickening 122 beats per minute. That's the highest it's been since 2009.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education
Average tempo of a hit song
Based on the Top 20 best-sellers each yearThe outbreak of euphoria is as sudden as it is unexpected.
For the last few years, pop has been getting slower, as artists like Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish incorporate the leisurely cadences and rhythms of southern hip-hop and trap music into their songs.
Lyrics have taken a darker turn, too, with expressions of loneliness, fear and anxiety becoming increasingly common.
In 2017, a Californian mathematician called Natalia Komarova was so shocked by the negativity of the songs her daughter listened to, she decided to investigate.
The rise of the 'sad banger'
Using the research database AcousticBrainz - which allows you to examine musical properties like tempo, key and mood - she and her colleagues at the University of California Irvine examined half a million songs released in the UK between 1985 and 2015.
They found a significant downturn in the positivity of pop songs. Where 1985 saw upbeat tracks like Wham's Freedom, 2015 favoured more sombre music by Sam Smith and Adele.
"'Happiness' is going down, 'brightness' is going down, 'sadness' is going up," said Komarova of her results, "and at the same time, the songs are becoming more 'danceable' and more 'party-like'."
"So it looks like, while the overall mood is becoming less happy, people seem to want to forget it all and dance."
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In other words, Komorvoa had identified the rise of the "sad banger", a song whose instrumental sets you up for good times, only to sucker punch your heart with lyrics of Biblical sadness.
For that, we can thank Swedish pop star Robyn, whose hit single Dancing On My Own influenced a generation of songwriters.
Released in 2010, it documented the brutal moment you see your ex kissing their new partner on a night out, and your world falls apart while everyone around you is having fun.
Lorde called it "perfect", Christine & The Queens said she could "only marvel" at the song's emotional impact, Sam Smith observed that it made Robyn "a huge part of the LGBTQ community because we get to dance our pain away".
Turning heartbreak into a fist-pumping emotion was Robyn's masterstroke - and as the 2010s progressed, her fingerprints were all over hits like Rihanna's We Found Love, Taylor Swift's Out Of The Woods and Dua Lipa's New Rules.
At the same time, however, pop was decelerating.
By 2017, the average tempo of a hit single in the UK was 104 beats per minute, down from a high of 124bpm in 2009. In the US, where hip-hop is more prevalent on the charts, it fell as low as 90.5 bpm.
"People were burnt out on uptempo, super poppy stuff like they were with hair-metal bands back in the day," songwriter Bonnie McKee told Rolling Stone magazine in 2017.
"Then as the sociopolitical climate got darker, people just weren't in the mood to hear some upbeat bop."
Just three years later, the trend is in reverse.
Permission to feel joy
"I'm looking at the top 20 now and, if you were to play the chart in order, you wouldn't think the world is going through a crisis," says pop star Raye, who has written for the likes of Beyonce, Little Mix and Stormzy alongside her solo hits.
"You would expect political or emotional music matching the aura of the time to be more prevalent, but it's actually the opposite - which shows how we're coping in the UK especially.
"Tempo, pace, escapism: Music that draws you out of the reality of what is going on right now; and transports you to somewhere more positive and uplifting."
Music journalist Charlie Harding, who hosts the Switched On Pop podcast, agrees there's been "an important psychological change" in people's listening habits.
"During moments of great distress, music provides hope. A pop song gives us permission to access joy, even when the world is burning.
"But music is more than just escapism. It can help us imagine a different way of life. Protest anthems motivate us to keep marching in the streets even when our feet are tired. Dance songs help us blow off steam at home, especially when we can't go dancing out on the town.
"This upbeat shift happened during the great depression and during World War Two. Once again we need sounds that help us forge a path to the world we want to live in, not the one we're inhabiting today."
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