Women in pop have a lot to scream about

Cook grins and Charli dances along in the studio. Brat Summer, the pop cultural phenomenon inspired by the album, was off to a screeching start.Rae is part of a bellowing chorus of women screaming in pop music over the last couple of years. 

Prominent artists are bringing screams to mass-market pop—a style once associated with male-dominated genres like screamo and punk. By pushing their vocal cords to the limit, artists like Olivia Rodrigo, Phoebe Bridgers, Taylor Swift and others are striking a chord with listeners.

The pop artist Caroline Polachek sampled a viral video of her screaming at geese for her song “Dang." Supergroup Boygenius ends their hit “$20" with a soul-cleansing howl into the void. Grimes, who has been screaming on her electro-pop tracks for over a decade, went viral this year for yelling with rage onstage during technical difficulties at Coachella. 

Last month, Swift let out a glass-shattering shriek during “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me" onstage in Munich, and the 2019 song “Cruel Summer," one of her shoutiest, was Spotify’s No. 6 most streamed song globally last year.

“Screaming loudly in a world that, at every turn, has told you that no one is listening to you and you’re only meant to look pretty and shut up, is incredibly empowering," said Missy Dabice, frontwoman of the band Mannequin Pussy.

Spotify’s playlist “Pop Songs We Can All Scream" has had a 230% increase in followers over the past 18 months, with Gen Z forming a substantial portion of that audience. And a March 2024 study from the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports shows that across all genres, music has become angrier, with pop music having a steady decrease in positive emotions.

Rodrigo has experimented with this anger. On “All-American B—," from her sophomore album, “Guts," she sings, “I scream inside to deal with it" before yelling over a punky guitar riff.

“When we came up with that line, we both jokingly said, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if you just started to scream like you were losing your mind?’" said producer Daniel Nigro, who worked on Rodrigo’s album. From there, they layered the vocalizations, and “then all of a sudden, it was a sea of screams," Nigro said.

Nigro also produced “Bad Idea Right?" in which he turned Rodrigo’s screams into a synth hook, producing a sound impossible to make in one breath. “It was Olivia’s idea," he said.

Other artists have hired scream coaches for maximum impact and minimal injury. The Irish musician Bambie Thug, who uses they as a pronoun and identifies as nonbinary, has recently worked with the Copenhagen-based teacher Cornelia Schmitt.

“Cornelia unlocked a whole new level of power and ease in my screams," said Bambie Thug.

Schmitt, who studied “extreme vocals" in 2016 at the Complete Vocal Institute, a singing school in Copenhagen, now runs her own company, Vocals Rock, to teach musicians how to scream safely. Screaming is an “advanced vocal technique," she said, which involves vibrating multiple parts of the vocal tract. She said that she had noticed an uptick in women and nonbinary artists seeking coaching.

“It’s exciting to see vocal distortions becoming more prevalent in pop," Schmitt said.

Fans are joining in. Nick Palmai, who has garnered over 250,000 TikTok followers posting videos of himself screaming pop songs in his car, said he had met Rodrigo at her concert after a video of him screaming to “Drivers License" went viral. When she encouraged fans at the show to scream along, “it really made the crowd feel so alive and genuinely did feel therapeutic," he said.

Scream-singing as a form of empowerment goes back to at least the 1990s, when Riot Grrrl, a feminist movement which combined punk and politics and coined the term “girl power," galvanized more female artists to express anger and political dissent through music.

“We’re a conduit for all their rage and anguish to pass through. I tell them, ‘Give it to me, send me your rage and I’ll help you hold it tonight,’" said Dabice, the Mannequin Pussy frontwoman.

Other times, the audience is screaming of its own discordant accord. Last year, The Atlantic charted the rise of the “demon scream"—the phenomenon of fans losing it at shows, leading some concertgoers to complain about them ruining the experience of live music.

But when artists give permission to fans to scream, “it creates a different kind of energy," said the writer and broadcaster Kate Hutchinson, who this year collaborated with the artist Bishi Bhattacharya to perform Yoko Ono’s composition “Voice Piece for Soprano"—which encourages audiences to scream on cue—at Glastonbury and the Tate Modern.“To be part of a communion and a ritual in a contained space felt amazing," Bhattacharya said.

Hutchinson agrees: “After all, there’s a lot to scream about in the world at the moment, isn’t there?"