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Pop music, be it on Spotify radio or radio radio, became a landmine in 2025. You're sitting there with your family - at the dinner table or in the car - enjoying the latest Taylor Swift album altogether, when suddenly you have to explain to your little children what Taylor means when she says that Travis Kelce's "redwood tree" was "the key that opened my thighs".

It's that, or you find yourself rushing to press skip on Tears by Sabrina Carpenter as she sings about getting "wet at the thought of you... tears run down my thighs". It's a catchy chorus, but I don't need my five-year-old singing that around daycare, you know?

Following the ridiculously bawdy Nonsense outros that marked her breakout last year, Carpenter has since cemented her status as pop's poet laureate of lewd, the Emily Dickinson of dick 'n' sons. On House Tour, my favourite song on her recent album Man's Best Friend, she spends almost three minutes offering a prospective lover a tour of her, uh, home: "I just want you to come inside/ But never enter through the back door," she sings, and I blush.

Thanks to Sabrina's influence, pop got filthy in 2025. It was Lorde talking about getting her "lips 'round your halo" (Clearblue); it was Lola Young yearning for "you to trickle right down my throat" (Post Sex Clarity); it was Addison Rae "with a cigarette pressed between my tits" (High Fashion); it was Lily Allen finding "butt plugs, lube inside, hundreds of Trojans" in (allegedly) David Harbour's dojo (Pussy Palace); it was budding icon Romy Mars singing "If you wanna know how hard it is to listen to you talk/ just look down at yourself when I take my clothes off" (Ego). Even PinkPantheress, pop's top purveyor of sweet introversion, got blunt: "You want sex with me? Come talk to me," she sang on Tonight.

The biggest shock - and one that drew the most controversy around many of her fans who've only ever thought of her as a fantasy princess - was that even Taylor Swift, one of pop's more romantically elevated songwriters, got down and dirty. As well as reflecting on her paramour's manhood (Wood), she also sings that being chastised as "boring Barbie" is "kind of making me wet" (Actually Romantic).