The Character

Lady Gaga’s essentially out of the pop business now. After A Star is Born with Bradley Cooper, she made it clear she wanted to be a real person—complicated, sad, working through actual things—rather than a character, and that’s a fair choice. But pop music needs people willing to be characters, willing to be loud and strange and excessive without caring if they look ridiculous.

Ava Max filled that void with Sweet But Psycho. The song hit number one almost immediately. It’s catchy, made for dancing, built on the hook of a girl who’s beautiful and slightly unhinged—which is just a way of talking about female power without being apologetic about it.

What strikes me is that she doesn’t seem defensive about the whole thing. She wants to be a pop construction, a character, not an authentic artist with a real inner life. There’s something refreshing about that refusal to pretend there’s depth underneath. You commit to the character, you sell it, you move on. For years that’s how pop worked, before everyone decided authenticity was the only honest thing left to be, and the whole genre got thin and careful.

Whether Ava Max lasts is still open. Whether this is the start of something or just one good moment. But the song works. It’s catchy, it’s stuck in your head, and you can’t argue with that.