The talent of Olivia Dean, the return of Robbie Williams and the live performances of Iron Maiden, Bruno Mars and Ultimo
In recent years iThe present and future of pop music have been imagined as a technological race: algorithms, short formats, speed of consumption. A frenzy that has projected, especially the younger artists, into a sort of perpetually accelerated present: rapid-fire songs, obsessive social presence, live performances always and at all costs even without the minimum preparation to face a stage decently.
A deluge of notes and voices that has gradually transformed streaming platforms into gigantic containers of clones and amateurs in disarray. Precisely for this reason there is a shared awareness among artists, managers and majors: overproduction no longer generates value. Publishing constantly is not the same as existing. The center of gravity is shifting from continuous presence to the construction of cycles: albums conceived as chapters, tours conceived as narration, returns planned as events.
This is why 2026 could be the year of change and the end of production anxiety. In this scenario, figures emerge who do not embody a genre, but a method. Olivia Dean and Adéla belong to two apparently irreconcilable poles, intimacy and provocation, yet they talk about the same need: to give pop back a recognizable, non-replicable identity. To these trajectories is added a third movement, only apparently retrospective: the return of Robbie Williams, which illuminates the present more than it celebrates the past.
Olivia Dean, 26 years old, English, nominated for the Grammy Awards next February in the Best New Artist category, she’s not a star built on urgency. Its trajectory is slow, deliberately anti-spectacular, and it is precisely this that makes it central to understanding the pop of the future. Her importance lies not so much in her pop-tinged soul sound, clearly present in her second album, The Art Of Loving, but in her positioning: Olivia Dean is an example of how success can once again become a consequence and not a narrative objective.
On a side opposite to Dean’s reassuring one, Adéla embodies the aesthetic fracture. Slovenian but raised artistically in Los Angeles, Adéla is the author of electronic pop (see The Provocateur) which uses excess as grammar: explicit sexuality, digital imagery, references to club music and cyber-pop. His objectives are not to scandalize just for the sake of it but to show how pop itself has become a trite permanent staging. In 2026 there will be a lot of talk about her. The real challenge for Adéla will then be the translation from digital to real: the live show, the band, the duration of her project beyond the online attention cycle.
If she manages to consolidate this transition, Adéla could represent one of the most influential pop models of the next decade. In this forward-looking panorama, the return of Robbie Williams (the Britpop album comes out on February 6) might seem like an oddity. In reality, this is not the case: Williams does not return as a saint from the past, but as one of the last artists capable of embodying the idea of the total pop star: songs, charisma, media narrative, control of the stage. His return intercepts a real demand from the public: not so much nostalgia, but rather a desire for an event. In this sense, Robbie Williams does not represent antiquity returning, but a possible way out of the hyper-dispersed present of pop and demonstrates that, even in the era of compulsive streaming, there is still an audience willing to wait, as long as what arrives has weight, a form, a voice.
It is not difficult to predict even in 2026 the boom in the streaming charts of pieces created by artificial intelligence such as Velvet Sundown’s songs (one million plays per month on Spotify), a vintage psychedelic rock band entirely generated by artificial intelligence: music, lyrics, images and biography were in fact produced with AI tools such as Suno (a platform that generates musical content).
Returning to “human” music, the centrality of live music in the music business ecosystem is photographed by two apparently distant, almost irreconcilable events: the record-breaking concert of Last one in Tor Vergata (July 4th, 250 thousand tickets sold in three hours) e the first time of Iron Maiden at the San Siro stadium (17 June, already sold out). They are two collective rites that speak to different generations, with diametrically opposed languages, but through a surprisingly similar dynamic: the need to recognize oneself within a large, physically present community. Ultimo does not represent spectacularity in the classic sense: his strength is not scenic excess, but the construction of a direct, almost confidential relationship with an audience that fully recognizes itself in the stories of his songs.
Iron Maiden instead represents one of the last great coherent narratives of rock music: a stable imagination, an intergenerational audience, a relationship built on loyalty and continuity. Their debut at San Siro is the formal recognition of something that has existed for decades: heavy metal as structured popular culture. And then, the return of Bruno Mars with a new album, The Romantic, after ten years (at the end of February) and the concert at San Siro on 14 July.
For the coming year there will be a lot of talk about the decline of rap. In recent weeks the news has caused a sensation that for the first time in 35 years there was no rap song in the Top 40 of the American charts. Hence a series of considerations: for over a decade rap has been the dominant language of music, not just a genre, but a system: aesthetic, linguistic, industrial.
Except that when it comes to musical trends, nothing lasts forever, least of all a genre that has reiterated the same stereotypes for too long: economic success, personal revenge, luxury aesthetics, superficial antagonism. And so, rather than decline, it is correct to talk about saturationof the end of the illusion that heating the same soup was the way to remain forever at the center of the music system. This is not the case and has never been the case for any popular language.
