Staff List: The 25 Best Pride Songs of 2024

Call her Nostradamus, because JoJo Siwa foresaw this: 2024 was, in fact, the year of “gay pop.”

While Siwa certainly didn’t create the sub-genre (as she herself readily admitted), she did reap its benefits at the exact right time this year. In a year that was filled to the brim with massive, world-dominating pop songs, the LGBTQ+ experience was more well-reflected than ever, specifically when it came from queer women.

Chappell Roan dwarfed her own breakout success from 2023, charting a whopping 7 songs on the Hot 100 and slowly bringing her year-old album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess to the second-highest slot on the Billboard 200. Billie Eilish managed to earn a quartet of top 40 entries on the chart, two of which directly talked about her sexuality. As rising LGBTQ+ acts like Doechii, Reneé Rapp and dozens of others began to take up space in music’s mainstream, media outlets hailed our current musical era as a sapphic pop renaissance.

While dozens of column inches have pointed to why this surge in music focused on WLW happened — some point to greater societal acceptance, others to the groundwork laid by artists like Tegan and Sara or even Tracy Chapman — one simple answer has eluded the headlines: these songs are just great. Both from queer women and other members of the LGBTQ+ community, queer music has been steadily gaining steam over the last few years, which has only emboldened more LGBTQ+ artists to find their own voice and knock their tracks out of the park in 2024.

In a year so heavily defined by musical success for queer people, Billboard is picking our 25 favorite songs from LGBTQ+ artists. See who made the list below: