Despite its cheeky self-deprecating title, Tristen’s fifth studio album Unpopular Music is a testament to the career she’s built out of making criminally underrated, perfect pop music. If the goal of great pop music is to bring people together in collective earworm joy under a big top, Tristen has long been ensuring that outcome as a quiet ringleader with her crystalline vocal harmonies and mastery of melody.
Unpopular Music finds her deep in domesticity, reckoning with the fascinating juxtaposition of it in relation to creative ambition and desire. Fittingly recorded in her home studio alongside her longtime collaborator and husband Buddy Hughen, Unpopular Music is a gem in the canon of Tristen, as sparkling and hooky as ever, but with the lived-in warmth of a self-assured artist so present in her craft.
