If you asked a social media executive to design a pop star with maximum virality in mind, they might show you someone like Benson Boone.
The 23-year-old Utah native satisfies at least four different internet niches: He is a belter, and has mastered the pained expression of singers dramatically straining for the high notes. He flips — you already know this, of course — often enough that he has his own acrobatic video compilations. He is patriotic in a vague, pseudo-apolitical way; his second album, released last week, is called “American Heart,” and its cover features Boone holding an American flag while covered in soot and grime, as if recently returned from the battlefield. And he is a sexual showboat, donning revealing outfits and grabbing his crotch onstage; he also possesses what British GQ described last year as a “sexy little dirtbag mustache,” the facial hair du jour for Gen Z celebrities.
But Boone is also something rare in 2025: a successful white male pop star. Pop music has been a woman’s game for much of the 21st century, but the disparity has been even more stark during the 2020s. The male stars on the charts right now who aren’t named Bruno Mars either come from the worlds of country (Morgan Wallen, Shaboozey) or rap (Drake, Kendrick Lamar) or both (Post Malone). Aside from Harry Styles, who hasn’t released new music in over three years, very few male stars — artists who can sell out arenas or stadiums like their female counterparts — are playing in the pure pop space. (The TikTok prankster-turned-Christian rocker Alex Warren, whose execrable wedding song “Ordinary” tops the Hot 100 right now, feels like the product of every media ecosystem other than the pop industry.)
Toying with gender and sexuality has been a big part of Styles’s performance and appeal: He’s both explicitly embraced femininity — wearing a dress on the cover of Vogue, painting his nails — and tapped into hoary rock star tropes with songs like “Kiwi,” about the fear that you’ve gotten a fan pregnant. Boone has done his own version of blurring the lines. While he dates the actress and social media personality Maggie Thurmon and acknowledges that most of his fans are young women, he saves his sweetest, most intense love songs for the men in his life (like his father and his best friend, Eric). And in terms of presentation and stage panache, he explicitly nods to a queer forebear: the Queen frontman Freddie Mercury. The two share a penchant for cat suits, mustaches, even an imperious stage presence. But where Mercury covertly gestured at gay subculture, Boone seems to imagine an alternate history.
Boone was born in a small town in Washington and raised Mormon. A competitive diver from a young age, he only began singing in his late teens, then started posting videos of himself on TikTok. He had grown up a voracious fan of acts like One Direction and Justin Bieber — he and his pal Eric, he has said, would watch their videos for hours. At 18, he auditioned for “American Idol” and wowed a panel of judges including Katy Perry, who predicted the world would “swoon over Benson Boone.”
Although Boone ended up quitting “Idol” early, the chain of influence that runs through his slick, sappy music still sounds, unmistakably, like it begins with made-on-TV acts like the Styles-spawning One Direction and the British “X-Factor” contestant Aidan Martin (Boone used his song “Punchline” for his “Idol” audition). “Ghost Town,” Boone’s 2021 debut single, is a poreless ballad designed to show off his husky, nominally soulful voice, and doesn’t suggest any particular flair for anything other than showing off online.
But Boone’s calling card arrived in January 2024. “Beautiful Things,” a single from his debut album, “Fireworks & Rollerblades,” became one of last year’s inescapable hits, thanks in part to its contrast between a pained arena-rock chorus and God-fearing lyrics about being grateful. And, of course, it has a built-in flip moment that Boone took full advantage of at the Grammys in February: Clad in a sparkly blue jumpsuit, he launched himself off a grand piano as the song reached its apex.
“Fireworks & Rollerblades” mostly contained sweet, simple songs about late adolescence: having a crush on the girl at church, going for drives with a girl from church, and so on. “American Heart” is slightly more complicated. Boone, who no longer identifies as religious but still adheres to certain Mormon principles, is singing less about God. Instead, if there’s a theme that runs through “American Heart,” it’s masculinity: its power, its necessity, its sheer value.
The peppy, E.L.O.-referencing “Mr Electric Blue,” one of the most impassioned songs here, is written about Boone’s father, but its lyrics occasionally slip over the line between hero worship and unnerving homoeroticism: “They made him out of fire and roses / With an attitude / But he’s sweet enough to put him on your tongue,” he sings.
Other songs, like “Man in Me” and “Mystical Magical,” imply that women are fundamentally a distraction, and at worst detrimental to men. (“Where is the man in me?” he wonders dolefully on the first track, singing about a partner who doesn’t notice he’s fading.) On “Young American Heart,” Boone ostensibly shoots for the Killers — when the Killers are doing Springsteen — while singing about surviving a car crash with Eric in his teens: “If I’m gonna die a young American / And this was the final night we’d ever have again,” he sings on the chorus, “I’d be just fine as long as I’m wherever you are / ’Cause you stole my young American heart.”
Boone’s closest analogues in contemporary pop are female Gen Z pop stars: Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan both write their most trenchant songs about other women, whether socially or romantically. They are also, like Boone, classicists, preferring to reference pop’s 20th-century golden eras, and load their songs with big choruses and key changes. Boone writes the least distinct music of the three, but in many ways he is the most suited to today’s higgledy-piggledy cultural landscape: political and apolitical at the same time, flamboyant but God-fearing, wildly successful and, somehow, pretty unremarkable.
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