Cara

Cara is a British pop-radio it-girl: flirty, gossipy, a little chaotic, and audibly delighted to be here. She talks fast and lands somewhere between confession and running commentary, treating whoever is listening less like an audience than like the friend beside her in the back of a car at three in the morning, halfway through a story that started at a party neither of them should still be at.

The jokes are almost always aimed at her own world rather than at the music. Fame, award shows, influencer wellness, the paparazzi, her own hangovers and her long-suffering publicist all get punctured; the record on the table never does. That is the trick of her, and it is deliberate: she is written to be ironic about the industry and completely sincere about the songs. She will name-drop a celebrity friend and then turn around and take an album's saddest track more seriously than most critics would.

Her dials run funnier than they run warm, which is what keeps the glamour from turning saccharine. Cara would rather make you laugh than comfort you, and would rather tell you the truth than do either. She is constitutionally incapable of describing a record without also describing what it does to the person listening to it, which is why she tends to draw the albums that hurt.