Lennon Stella Sharpens Her Knives

For the better part of a decade, Taylor Swift held the pop throne with a grip that looked effortless and wasn’t. Album cycles planned years in advance, feuds deployed with strategic timing, the long legs at the Victoria’s Secret shows, the smile that always reached the camera before it reached her eyes. Whatever else you want to say about her, she was a machine of controlled image-making. Then came Reputation—an attempt at edginess that landed as a stiff, overproduced record about being misunderstood—and suddenly the throne had a crack in it.

Lennon Stella has been circling from the underground. The Canadian grew up on screen: she and her younger sister Maisy became improbably lovable on the TV series Nashville, cast as the daughters of the lead characters and occasionally stealing scenes from actual adults with actual credits. What put them on the map was a YouTube cover of Robyn’s Call Your Girlfriend that hit around thirty million views and functioned as an audition tape for the whole industry. After Nashville ended, Lennon decided she was done with whiskey songs and open roads and wanted to try something sharper.

Her new single is called Bitch, which signals something. It has the directness of someone who knows exactly what she’s leaving behind and isn’t looking to be polite about it. Whether she genuinely threatens Taylor Swift’s position—the lawyers and marketing infrastructure are not nothing—is a question that takes years to answer. But Lennon Stella is clearly in the building, she clearly knows which room she wants, and she seems genuinely uninterested in asking nicely.