The Hottest Women In Music Are Breaking All The Rules

The old way of making it in music is over.

By VÉRONIQUE HYLAND, Erica Gonzales and MADISON FELLER

Published: May 23, 2025

Start a YouTube channel. Catch fire on JazzTok. Drop a divorce EP. Defy genres. The old way of making it in music is over. As these musicians-gone-viral show, the rule breakers will reap the rewards.

KELSEA BALLERINI

NEW COUNTRY

There’s a saying in the music industry: “You have your whole life to make your first record and then two days in-between tour dates to make your second.” As she quotes this to me, Kelsea Ballerini is on tour herself. Backstage, she’s wrapped up in a grey tour hoodie, a rack of clothes and a white guitar behind her. It’s Valentine’s Day, and after polishing off a pink-sprinkled doughnut, she takes a break to talk to me on the anniversary of the day that changed her career.

Exactly two years before, she had released Rolling Up the Welcome Mat, a spiky six-song EP that chronicled her divorce from fellow country singer Morgan Evans in unsparing detail. For Ballerini, who grew up religious in Tennessee, the idea of divorce felt taboo, and dropping an album about it even more so. “I remember being like, ‘Oh man, I’m terrified.’ I went to sleep, and the next morning, I was like, ‘Oh, it’s okay. People are finding this and connecting with this.’ But it was definitely a scary feeling.” It also marked a watershed moment for Ballerini: Between the explicitly autobiographical terrain she was mining, and the exploding market for country music in general, it introduced her to a whole new audience.

Now she has fans come to her concerts with signs reading, “Just got a divorce.” She cautions that “I try to never celebrate it until I know if it’s a good thing. I don’t ever want to be a poster child for divorce. It’s been three years now. It’s simply not in the forefront of my life anymore.”

These days, Ballerini is in a completely different headspace. Her personal life, she says, is “unrecognisable from how it was a couple of years ago, and thank God.” She’s been in a relationship with Outer Banks actor Chase Stokes for over two years. Her most recent album, Patterns, is a more settled affair, one that she did indeed write parts of while on tour. Tracks like “Sorry Mom,” a mature apology to her mother, and “We Broke Up,” a resigned non-kiss-off, are new territory for her, informed by the journey she’s been on in therapy.

This summer, she will finally have some downtime. Future album plans haven’t yet coalesced, but, she says, “I intend to do more genre blending. That excites me.” She would “die” to work with SZA, for one. Over the holidays a few years back, Ballerini says, she had dinner with her manager and asked, “‘What’s my blind spot? Where can I be better?’ And he said, ‘You need to stop acting like you’re new here.’ So I’ve been trying to stand in my success more and not make myself smaller. I think that’s a lesson for all women—to be really proud about our wins.”

— VÉRONIQUE HYLAND

LAUFEY

CLASSICAL CROSSOVER

When Laufey looks out at her fans from the stage, she sees an audience full of “direct reflections” of herself. They’re funny; they’re kind; they’re making friends with fellow fans; some even look and dress like her. “Growing up, I really struggled with finding a group of people that I really understood and that understood me,” Laufey says. “The fact that I’ve kind of summoned an audience of exactly that—it just makes my younger self really, really happy.” She’s aware that fan bases—hers are called Lauvers—can exhibit some over-the-top behaviour, but she says, even though her fans are “definitely, in a way, a cult, it’s a really positive, happy, cute one.”

The Icelandic-Chinese musician, born Laufey Lín Jónsdóttir (pronounced “lay-vay” in English), is a Berklee grad who plays piano, guitar, violin, and cello, using her jazz and classical training to create a charming spin on pop. She’s attracted Gen Z fans, who edit fancams of her and her twin sister and creative director, Junia, and flock to see her at the symphony. “I always hope that my music is a gateway for people to get to know jazz,” she says.

Last year, Laufey won her first Grammy—Traditional Pop Vocal Album—for 2023’s Bewitched. But she’s also received criticism from jazz purists who claim that her work isn’t true to the genre. “That just couldn’t be further from the truth,” she says. She struggled with the “ill-researched” comments at first, but she’s learned to move on. “I know what I know, and I know what I’m good at, so that’s enough for me,” she says. “At the end of the day, what are genres? I’ve spent my whole life trying to fit into some sort of box. Am I a classical musician, a jazz musician? Am I Icelandic? Am I Chinese? Am I American? I’ve never been able to fit into a box. So I’m trying to distance myself from that. I think that’s quite old-fashioned.”

Laufey’s fans have helped her feel a sense of belonging. “All I see is just a community of people that I wish I’d had when I was a little younger,” she says. Many of them are Asian like her, which is no coincidence. “It’s a loud sign that everyone needs representation. We love to see ourselves reflected in the artists we look up to.” Her next record, expected this year, is a concept album about “a young woman unravelling.” It’ll explore Laufey’s messier side, one that’s hidden behind the frilly Rodarte dresses and Sandy Liang bows. That’s clear on her romantic lead single, “Silver Lining,” in which she sings, “When you go to hell, I’ll go there with you, too.”

There’ll still be jazz and classical elements, but with bigger “pop sounds” and a “more extroverted” feel. After a childhood of performing classical music for “old people,” Laufey was surprised to play at concert halls and hear young voices sing back at her. Now she wants to earn it: “I want to make music worthy of singing along to.”

— ERICA GONZALES

MADISON BEER

DANCE HITS

Madison Beer is ready to make some bangers. The 26-year-old pop singer and social media star spent the past few years setting the record straight, releasing diaristic tracks to share what happened behind the scenes of her rocket-fuelled ascent to fame. Now, with the past exorcised and well documented, she’s eager to have a little fun.

Beer was just a 13-year-old girl from Long Island, New York, when Justin Bieber tweeted out her YouTube cover of Etta James’s “At Last.” Soon after, she was signed to Island Records and began working with Bieber’s then manager, Scooter Braun. But the life-changing turn of events also thrust her into a harsh and unforgiving spotlight. Beer’s overnight celebrity, and the attention that came from being connected to several high-profile male musicians, made her a target for cyberbullying. When she was 15, an intimate video she’d sent to a friend was posted online; instead of defending her right to privacy, internet trolls shamed her for making the video in the first place. At 16, she was dropped by her label and management. “I was always being tried as an adult,” Beer says now. “I was trying to navigate how to be a person, and I’d have the whole internet to report to.”

She told her side of the story in her 2023 memoir, The Half of It, and in her sophomore album, Silence Between Songs, released the same year, detailing how her mental health plummeted, that she contemplated suicide, and how she ultimately recovered. “There were things I wanted to say that were important to me,” she reflects. “I feel like I really did achieve that.” She embarked on a 63-stop world tour, selling out venues including Radio City Music Hall.

These days, having wrested control of her narrative, the vocal powerhouse seems freer. Her pair of 2024 singles, “Make You Mine” and “15 Minutes,” are club-ready earworms, the former earning her a Grammy nomination for Best Dance Pop Recording. Beer has been in the studio nearly every day working on her next album, one she says is still taking shape but is “feeling really good.” She’s been inspired, in part, by one of her favourite hobbies: Video games. “I want my album to have a lot of really interesting noises that maybe you haven’t heard a lot in music.”

The new record could help Beer tick off the remaining boxes on her career bucket list (headlining a show at Madison Square Garden, winning a Grammy), but she says her goals don’t keep her up at night. “I’m really proud of where I am,” she explains. “If my younger self met me right now, she’d be like, ‘You’re the coolest girl on earth. I get to be you one day? That’s so sick'.”

— MADISON FELLER

Photographer ADRIENNE RAQUEL
Stylist JAN-MICHAEL QUAMMIE
Make-up Artist ALEXANDRA FRENCH/Forward Artists
Hairstylist LACY REDWAY using Tresemmé
Manicurists NATALIE MINERVA/Forward Artists, GINGER LOPEZ/Opus Beauty
Producer PETTY CASH PRODUCTION