After dabbling in melodramatic bedroom-pop, Tate McRae steers straight into the early-2000s lane with her latest single “Sports Car”. It was a time when hip-hop met glossy pop and everything sparkled (including the diamanté flip phones). From the opening stuttering beat, it’s a love letter to an era of Tamagotchis, Juicy Couture, and mainstream club tracks you could really dance to.
But with whispered vocals layered over revving motor sounds, the pop star conveys an ode to lust without pushing the boundaries like fellow pop princesses Britney and Christina did, respectively, with songs like “I’m a Slave 4 U” and “Dirrty”. “Sports Car” has no intention of being dirty or bold; it is meant to be a bit of beige fun.
Fans and critics alike drew immediate comparisons with The Pussycat Dolls, and “Sports Car” mashups with “Buttons”, the group’s sultry 2006 single, complete with glossy beats, began surfacing online. “Nasty pop girls are so back and I’m so here for it,” one fan wrote under McRae’s music video, which features her performing at a peep show.
Once dismissed as shallow, the slick, bass-heavy pop of the 2000s is now being re-evaluated, especially by Gen Z. Where critics once decried “Buttons” as “style over substance” and dismissed its parent album PCD as vapid, today’s listeners hear something else: simple escapism.
And maybe that’s the point. Gen Z – those born from the late 1990s through to the early 2010s – are reclaiming music once labelled as “guilty pleasure” and ditching the guilt. Artists like Hilary Duff, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Heidi Montag, who once embodied the height of the tacky manufactured pop star, are now celebrated as icons of a nostalgic sound and aesthetic that feels oddly comforting in 2025.
McRae is part of a new cohort of Gen Z artists reworking Y2K influences into something fresh. “It makes sense,” says pop critic Michael Cragg, “that kids who loved those acts have grown into artists themselves and are now referencing them. ‘Sports Car’ sounds so much like ‘Buttons’ that it’s clearly not accidental.”
Cragg points to a broader shift in critical thinking: “The mid-to-late 2000s saw the emergence of ‘poptimism’, which was about viewing pop music with the same critical eye as was afforded to rock. A new generation of writers, who’d grown up on the pure pop of the late Nineties, were starting to view things differently to the older generation.”
According to streaming data from Deezer, 75 per cent of Addison Rae’s listeners – and 69 per cent of Tate McRae’s – are aged between 26 and 35, suggesting that older Gen-Zers and younger millennials are drawn to music that echoes their tween years. But intriguingly, many Gen Z fans weren’t even around for 00s pop. This is where anemoia comes in: a term that means nostalgia for a time you didn’t live through. “Gen Z can build an emotional connection to the past through digital archives and internet culture,” says existential psychotherapist Eloise Skinner.
Emerging stars like McRae and Addison Rae don’t aim to be ‘the first’, they want to be ‘the next’
It was only a matter of time before Gen Z gravitated towards superficial pop, because our world today is “extremely referential”, offering “archive-level access to pretty much anything in any industry all the time”, says Anna Pompilio, a cultural strategist at the brand design agency Marks, who is on the cusp between Gen Z and millennial.
“Pair that access with recent tendencies to churn and burn through ‘micro-trends’ and you create a whirlpool that’s pretty easy to drown in. When we’re inundated with so much, nostalgia begins to feel like something we can wrap our arms around.”
Even McRae herself has leaned into comparisons with Britney Spears, calling them “flattering and scary”. Pompilio argues that many emerging stars, like McRae and Addison Rae, don’t aim to be “the first” – they want to be “the next”, paying tribute to a long lineage of pop archetypes. Rae’s “Diet Pepsi” and “Aquamarine” thrive on a “lexicon of references”.
But when does homage become lazy? James Kirkham, branding expert and founder of the consultancy firm Iconic, warns that endless recycling of past aesthetics – what theorist Mark Fisher dubbed “hauntology” – can dilute originality. Especially when artists face the daunting task of releasing music in an environment where a staggering 100,000 new tracks hit Spotify daily.
“Today’s Y2K revival isn’t just referencing the 2000s,” he says. “It’s referencing a TikTok interpretation of the 2000s – already twice removed from the source. We’re entering an era where nostalgia feeds on nostalgia, creating a Russian doll of references increasingly distanced from their source material.”
Of course, nostalgia loops are nothing new. Cultural sociologist Dr Richard Courtney notes that a 20-year nostalgia cycle has long existed. By 2003 – the year that Tate McRae was born – young people were fascinated with the futuristic synthesisers and cheesiness of songs from the 1980s.
Having grown up in that decade, Courtney remembers seeing a sudden surge in appreciation for music that was not considered “cutting edge”, but instead basic pop: tunes like “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” by Dead or Alive, or anything by Spandau Ballet. This shift in perception was thanks to older millennials. “Nostalgia is where we’re constantly walking into the future with our backs turned towards it, looking at the past,” he says.
But streaming’s new democratisation of taste has further blurred the lines between “real” and “manufactured” music. “There’s less embarrassment about what you like,” says Pompilio. “Young listeners today can enjoy Depeche Mode and The Pussycat Dolls side by side.”
Kirkham agrees: Gen Z care more about “vibe” than traditional ideas of artistry. They weren’t part of the discourse that tried to label The Pussycat Dolls as empowering or exploitative. Instead, they experience it all through a post-irony lens, where sincerity and superficiality can coexist.
This sense of freedom makes the bubblegum pop of the 2000s feel almost revolutionary. In a world of crisis and discourse overload, its simplicity is a form of release. “The straightforward hedonism of a Pussycat Dolls track feels almost revolutionary now,” Kirkham says.
For emerging girl group Sweet Love – whose 1.3 million TikTok followers enjoy their upbeat, Y2K-infused sound – fun is the point. “Creating something catchy and memorable is an art,” they say. “If it’s about getting ready with your girls to go out, we’re all for it.”
Even ironic detachment has become part of the charm. Hilary Duff’s “With Love” choreography – once panned for its blankness – is now adored for being exactly that: so unserious it’s iconic. TikTok trends, including revivals of songs like Heidi Montag’s “I’ll Do It”, have pushed nostalgia into charitable territory: following the destruction of Montag’s home in the LA fires, fans bought her album Superficial en masse, pushing it to No 54 in the Billboard 200.
Maeve from Leeds pop duo Lucky Iris grew up loving The Pussycat Dolls, thanks to the Pop Princess CD she owned, as well as Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift. She sees this era of pop as playful and lighthearted above all else. “Heidi Montag making a comeback is incredible,” she says. “It’s that crossover of reality TV and pop. She knows how people see her, and she’s leaned in – and we love it.”
In times of uncertainty – whether it’s down to economic stress, climate anxiety, or political unrest – the appetite for lighthearted, maximalist music increases. The result is known as “recession pop”, a term born during the late 2000s financial crisis, when Lady Gaga urged us to “Just Dance”. Today, as inflation bites, the housing crisis continues, and Donald Trump introduces new tariffs, “Abracadabra” is casting spells on the dancefloor, while fans scroll TikTok for ever-more-nothingy throwbacks.
For many fans, last summer marked a new golden age of pop-girl supremacy. The recognition of Charli XCX with brat, the stratospheric rise of Sabrina Carpenter, and Chappell Roan’s breakthrough all coincided with a newfound love for Y2K pop icons. “Gen Z and millennials are revisiting this music because it reminds them of a time that felt simpler,” says 23-year-old Tate McRae fan Ciara Allen.
Unsigned pop artist Amelie Jat, who released her debut album for the plot in 2023, is savvy to this Gen Z trend. She’s now pivoting from “sad girl songs with metaphors” to what she calls “nonchalant pop”: carefree, girly, and fun. “People want escapism,” she says. “This kind of pop wasn’t appreciated before because it wasn’t seen as deep.”
To older ears, these charting tracks might sound tired – or even AI-generated. But to Gen Z, they are thrillingly empty. And, as Jat puts it, it works because “our generation constantly feels the need to discover new and exciting things”.
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