Paul Revere may have loudly warned, “The British are coming!” in the time of the American Revolution, but the British pop-girl invasion of 2025 came more quietly, one TikTok at a time.
Of course, all-American stars like Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter and Ariana Grande aren’t going anywhere — and they remain at the top of the charts — but up-and-comers like Olivia Dean, Raye and Lola Young are giving them a run for their money, infiltrating our playlists, mood boards and Instagram feeds — and we’re not mad about it!
The most recent wave of U.K.-based female talent can be traced back to last summer, when we were all describing things as “so Julia” thanks to Charli XCX’s Grammy-winning Brat. A few months later, you couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing Young’s earworm “Messy,” which had made the rounds on TikTok before going mainstream. (Her 2025 album later gave us another hit, “One Thing.”)
Raye’s 2024 collab with 070 Shake, “Escapism,” introduced many Americans to the London-based star, but she came back solo in a big way with 2025’s “Where Is My Husband!” And the latter months of 2025 saw Dean take off astronomically, surpassing Carpenter — for whom she opened on the Short n’ Sweet tour — with a staggering five songs on the Billboard Hot 100.
And that was all before the resurgence of Lily Allen, who stormed out of a seven-year hiatus with a no-holds-barred play-by-play of her separation from actor David Harbour in the form of the album West End Girl. So what is it about these Brit girls that resonates so much with Us these days?
“British artists are winning right now because they’re giving culture what it’s craving most: raw authenticity,” Shawn M. French, host of “The Determined Society” podcast, tells Us. “They’re unfiltered, emotionally honest and fearless in a way that cuts through the noise. Americans are drawn to them because they’re not following trends, they’re setting them. Their honesty, edge and originality are dominating charts, fashion and cultural conversation.”
Case in point: lyrics like Young’s “I pull a Britney every week” and many of Allen’s that we can’t write here.
The TikTok effect of cultural globalization has also played a role in the Brit Girl invasion.
“What I’ve noticed as someone who was covering acts like Raye, Olivia Dean and Lola Young while working at U.K. publications is that a lot of these artists were already ‘big’ acts, No. 1 artists, scooping up accolades [in Britain] before we took notice in the U.S.,” Erica Campbell, formerly music editor of Paper and features editor at NME, tells Us.
What TikTok and social media in general have done, she notes, is give us a more “global view of music. We don’t know that ‘Man I Need’ is sung by an artist from London or that ‘Messy’ is from an artist from Croydon — we just click on, listen to and repost what resonates.”
The trend is reminiscent of the Spice Girls’ rise in the ‘90s, she says, “when we didn’t feel forced by algorithms or U.S. charts to decide what to listen to. We just wandered into what sounded best.”
According to Campbell, “artists like Lily Allen and Charli XCX, who by all means have always been original, smart and groundbreaking, have been more appreciated by U.K. culture, which sees that honesty, wit and cheeky lyricism as intriguing.”
Meaning, the U.K. has appreciated clever pop stars for longer than we have.
“We’re just getting to a place in the U.S. where we allow pop artists to be smart and sexy and deeply intelligent in both their sound and lyrics,” she explains, “and still, when they do it, — cough, Sabrina, cough — we question whether they’re the mastermind behind it.”
However they got here, and whatever cultural trends are giving them staying power, Us feels lucky to live in a time when the loud, proud Brit girls have made their way across the pond.
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