The Grammy Recording Academy created the Best Dance Pop Recording category in 2024. The reason, whether the Academy articulated it this way or not, is that the border between EDM and pop had dissolved so completely by the mid-2020s that trying to adjudicate which side a given record belonged on had become genuinely impossible. Lady Gaga’s “Abracadabra” — with its bass-driven beat, pulsing synths, industrial production fingerprints, and Gesaffelstein involvement — could be nominated for Record of the Year and Best Dance Pop Recording in the same year, and neither nomination would feel like a category error.
That’s the defining reality of pop music in 2026. The artists taking over are pop artists whose entire sonic vocabulary is rooted in EDM production: the four-on-the-floor structure, the build-drop-release architecture, the synthesizer palette, the dancefloor instinct embedded in every arrangement decision. They don’t cross over into electronic music for individual tracks. Electronic music is their native territory. What follows is a guide to the pop artists building their careers there — with the chart data, Grammy nominations, production genealogies, and release details that prove it.
Quick Reference: EDM-Influenced Pop Artists Taking Over 2026
| Artist | Key 2025–2026 Release | Grammy Connection | EDM Root |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lady Gaga | “Abracadabra” (MAYHEM) | 🏆 Best Dance Pop Recording WINNER | Industrial / Synth-Pop / Club |
| PinkPantheress | “Illegal” (Fancy That) | Nominated — Best Dance Pop Recording | UK Garage / Trip-Hop / DnB |
| Selena Gomez & benny blanco | “Bluest Flame” (I Said I Love You First) | Nominated — Best Dance Pop Recording | Hyperpop / Club / Electronic |
| Zara Larsson | “Midnight Sun” (album) | Nominated — Best Dance Pop Recording | DnB / Hyperpop / Scandi-Pop Electronic |
| Tate McRae | “Just Keep Watching” (F1: The Movie) | Nominated — Best Dance Pop Recording | Dance-Pop / Club Electronic |
| JENNIE | Ruby / “Dracula (JENNIE Remix)” | TikTok viral — 187K videos | K-Pop / Electronic-Pop Crossover |
| Ellie Goulding | “Hypnotized” (with Anyma) | 2026 EDMA nominated | Melodic Techno / Electronic Pop |
| Jennifer Lopez | Save Me Tonight” (with David Guetta) | Las Vegas residency | Dance-Pop / Progressive House |
| Becky Hill | Surrender” (with Alesso) | 2026 EDMA nominated | UK House / Electronic-Pop |
| Daya | “Dreamin’” (with Dom Dolla) | 2026 EDMA nominated | Tech House / Dance-Pop |
The Grammy Bracket: Five Pop Artists Who Defined the Category
1. Lady Gaga — MAYHEM / “Abracadabra”
Label: Interscope | Grammy: 🏆 Best Dance Pop Recording WINNER | Chart: #13 Hot 100; MAYHEM spent 37 weeks at #1 on Top Dance Albums
The moment the Grammy Recording Academy needed to understand is this: MAYHEM is not a pop album with electronic influences. It is a club album constructed according to pop album rules. Lady Gaga’s sixth solo record was a homecoming to the aesthetic of The Fame and Born This Way — bass-driven beats, pulsing synths, theatrical vocal delivery — executed with 2025 production standards and Gesaffelstein’s industrial fingerprints running through the DNA.
Abracadabra,” produced by Gaga, Andrew Watt, and Cirkut (with songwriting credits from members of Siouxsie and the Banshees via interpolation), opens with a bass-driven beat decorated by pulsing synths before the hypnotic chorus dissolves structure entirely. The Recording Academy’s own review notes the track’s “bass-driven beat, decorated by pulsing synths” as a direct callback to Gaga’s earliest work — but what they’re describing is a club production instinct that predates pop’s incorporation of it and will outlast its current mainstream moment.
The Grammy win tells the full story: beating out Selena Gomez, Zara Larsson, Tate McRae, and PinkPantheress to take Best Dance Pop Recording is a peer recognition that the Recording Academy had rarely been willing to give dance pop before this category existed. Cirkut won Producer of the Year at the same ceremony. Gesaffelstein’s remix won Best Remixed Recording. MAYHEM was nominated for Album of the Year. “Abracadabra” was nominated for Record and Song of the Year. Lady Gaga’s seven total 2026 Grammy nominations were a single-year record for her, and every one of them was rooted in a sound she helped define in the late 2000s and that has now become the mainstream.
Why It Matters: The Sphere generation of electronic music audiences — the ones who found the genre through Anyma, Afterlife, and the melodic techno space — were already listening. The Grammys confirmed that the rest of the world had finally caught up.
2. PinkPantheress — Fancy That / “Illegal”
Label: Warner Records | Grammy: Nominated — Best Dance Pop Recording | TikTok: 841,000+ videos (handshake trend)
Victoria Walker is 24 years old, born in Bath, Somerset, and she produces her own music in a style that samples Underworld’s 1994 ambient-techno landmark “Dark & Long (Dark Train)” and calls it a “weed diss track.” She was the lead vocalist in a My Chemical Romance cover band at 14. She was uploading UK garage and drum and bass-influenced bedroom productions to SoundCloud by the time she was at university, studying film before dropping out to focus on music. She has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Kent for her contributions to music in the digital age. By any standard measure, the arc from MCR cover band to Grammy-nominated experimental electronic pop artist is one of the stranger career trajectories in recent music history.
“Illegal” — the song that generated 841,000 TikTok videos, three individual videos with 20+ million views each, and PinkPantheress’s own participation in the handshake trend she inspired — is built on a UK garage sample that requires knowing your electronic music history to fully appreciate. The Underworld connection, the gritty trip-hop texture, the late-night garage energy she explicitly describes as “going home, it’s garage, gritty, and takes me right back to where I started with music” — these aren’t nods to a passing trend. They’re the actual foundation of her creative practice.
The Grammy nomination for Best Dance Pop Recording, alongside a Best Dance/Electronic Album nomination for Fancy That, is the Recording Academy formally acknowledging what the underground electronic community had been saying since her first SoundCloud uploads: that PinkPantheress’s music is pop because of the reach it achieves, not because of how it was made. Her Charli XCX collaboration (“Illegal” is the third project linking the two of them), her Two Shell collaboration, her FKA Twigs Eusexua Afterglow feature — every creative association she chooses is rooted in the same forward-facing electronic tradition she started from.
The quote that explains everything: “People are less willing to listen to electronic music made by a Black woman. That’s just a fact,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in summer 2025. “There’s some considerations I would like to get as an artist which I might not be getting right now, since maybe it’s harder to put me into a genre.”
3. Selena Gomez & benny blanco — “Bluest Flame” (I Said I Love You First)
Label: Interscope | Grammy: Nominated — Best Dance Pop Recording | Chart: I Said I Love You First debuted at #2 Billboard 200; first album by a real-life couple to top the Vinyl Albums chart in history
The production credits on “Bluest Flame” tell you everything you need to know about where pop’s electronic vocabulary is sourced in 2026. The track was produced by benny blanco, Cashmere Cat (the Norwegian producer behind years of hyperpop and experimental electronic pop), and Dylan Brady — one half of 100 gecs, the hyperpop duo whose productions sit at the intersection of electronic noise music, PC music aesthetics, and dancefloor function. Charli XCX wrote the song with them. The result interpolates Charli’s own “Pink Diamond.”
This is not one pop artist borrowing electronic music’s texture. This is a track where every key creative decision — production philosophy, sonic palette, structural choices — comes from producers whose careers are rooted in the experimental wing of electronic music. Blanco described the track to Spotify as wanting “the first half to be this sweet euphoric, almost melancholy tone, and then all of a sudden it switches and you’re like, ‘Oh, where’s my drink? I’m in the club.’” He added: “It’s one of those songs where you immediately feel like you’re in a basement, the walls are sweating, it’s 4:30 in the morning, somehow you’re kind of sad but you’re happy, it’s euphoric.
That’s a precise description of what a certain tradition of experimental electronic music has been trying to achieve for twenty years. The vehicle here is a pop album from two of the world’s most famous artists. The Grammy nomination for Best Dance Pop Recording — Selena’s third career nomination, benny’s twelfth — represents the Recording Academy placing this tradition inside the pop conversation rather than outside it. I Said I Love You First debuted at #2 on the Billboard 200 with 120,000 album-equivalent units and 64 million on-demand streams in its first week.
4. Zara Larsson — Midnight Sun
Label: Epic Records | Grammy: Nominated — Best Dance Pop Recording (“Midnight Sun” single) | Chart: #1 Sweden; Midnight Sun received universal acclaim on Metacritic (89/100)
The title track from Zara Larsson’s fifth studio album is described by Wikipedia as an “electropop and hyperpop track” blending “drum and bass, house, trance, and EDM, characterized by energetic breakbeats, atmospheric synths, and expansive pop production.” It peaked at #4 in Sweden, top 20 in the UK and Netherlands, and received a Grammy nomination for Best Dance Pop Recording — her first career Grammy nod.
What makes Larsson’s 2025–2026 moment significant is the scale of the artistic recalibration. Midnight Sun was executive-produced by MNEK — the British producer who has been one of dance music’s most important behind-the-scenes architects for over a decade — alongside Margo XS and Helena Gao. The album blends electronica, dance, Scandi-pop, and R&B in a way that DIY magazine described as showcasing “her versatility” while Rolling Stone called it “high-energy dance-pop joy” from start to finish. AllMusic praised its “bouncy bass, glittering synths, and sexy melodies.
Apple Music’s editorial review positions the album squarely in the electronic pop tradition, comparing Larsson’s approach to “fellow Swede Tove Lo, only instead of neon-lit clubs, the locale is the sweltering, sandy beach environ evoked in the indelible ‘Eurosummer.’” The Grammy nomination followed a North American touring run opening for Tate McRae’s “Miss Possessive” arena tour, and the Midnight Sun Tour itself launched in Europe in October 2025 and North America in February 2026. The deluxe edition — teased to feature multiple female collaborators including potentially Tyla and INNA — is due in March 2026.
5. Tate McRae — “Just Keep Watching” (from F1: The Movie)
Label: RCA / Atlantic | Grammy: Nominated — Best Dance Pop Recording | Chart: #1 US Hot Dance/Pop Songs; #8 Billboard Global 200; 500 million global streams; #1 US radio
The scale of Tate McRae’s 2025 is nearly impossible to summarize concisely. Her album So Close to What debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 in February. “Just Keep Watching” — her contribution to the F1: The Movie soundtrack, produced by Ryan Tedder and Tyler Spry — became her third #1 on the US Hot Dance/Pop Songs chart, reached #8 on the Billboard Global 200, opened with 11.4 million US streams in its first week, and accumulated 500 million global streams with certification approaching platinum. At the 2025 MTV VMAs, it won Song of the Summer and Best Editing. The F1 team submitted it for Oscar consideration alongside Ed Sheeran and Doja Cat’s tracks from the same film. The Sky Sports F1 coverage adopted it as their theme for the 2026 season.
Just Keep Watching” is described across reviews as a “fast-moving club track” with a “driving beat” and “quick-twitch percussion predestined for McRae’s signature kinetic choreography.” The Ryan Tedder / Tyler Spry production is built entirely from electronic pop architecture — the same framework that defines her catalog from “Stupid” forward but applied here to a specific brief (a film about Formula 1 racing) in a way that pushes the production’s intensity higher than her earlier work.
The Grammy nomination for Best Dance Pop Recording marks the Recording Academy formally placing McRae in the electronic pop canon at 21. The “Miss Possessive” arena tour, Zara Larsson’s opening run, TIME magazine’s Most Influential Rising Stars cover in October — 2025 was the year McRae confirmed she wasn’t a teen pop act growing up. She was already there.
Beyond the Grammy Bracket: Pop Stars in Electronic Territory
6. JENNIE — Ruby and the “Dracula (JENNIE Remix)” TikTok Wave
Label: Odd Atelier / Columbia | Release: March 7, 2025 | Chart: Top 10 in 19 countries; sold over 1 million copies first week; UK #3 (highest-charting female K-pop soloist in UK chart history)
JENNIE’s debut solo album Ruby — distributed through her own Odd Atelier label in partnership with Columbia, featuring Childish Gambino, Dua Lipa, Doechii, Dominic Fike, FKJ, and Kali Uchis — arrived in March 2025 as the fourth and final BLACKPINK solo project of that era. It entered the top 10 in 19 countries, made JENNIE the first K-pop solo artist to earn three RIAA certifications, and secured her the UK’s highest chart position for a female K-pop soloist. In January 2026, V Magazine confirmed that new solo music is in development for 2026.
The 2026 moment that extended JENNIE’s electronic pop presence wasn’t from Ruby itself. It was the February 2026 release of the “Dracula (JENNIE Remix)” — her collaboration with Tame Impala on a track from Kevin Parker’s DEADBEAT album — and the viral TikTok strut trend it generated: 187,200 TikTok videos, streaming recovery from 7.2 million to 8.6 million US weekly on-demand streams between February and March 2026, the song re-entering the Billboard Hot 100 top 40 at #37 in mid-March driven entirely by TikTok momentum. JENNIE joining the trend herself at Paris Fashion Week during the Chanel show on March 9, 2026 — strutting in a sparkly netted top while lip-syncing her verse — was the moment that crystallized the Tame Impala/K-pop/electronic-pop crossover into a cultural fact.
Parker’s psychedelic-electronic aesthetic and JENNIE’s K-pop-trained vocal authority found each other in a track that belongs equally to both traditions. The “Dracula” JENNIE Remix is electronic pop arriving from the psych-rock direction rather than the club direction, which is precisely the kind of unexpected synthesis that defines where pop’s EDM influences are going in 2026.
7. Ellie Goulding — “Hypnotized” (feat. Anyma)
Label: Afterlife / Interscope | Released: January 10, 2025 | 2026 EDMA: Nominated — Best Collaboration
The origin story of “Hypnotized” is now well-documented: Anyma premiered the track at his Las Vegas Sphere residency on December 28, 2024, with Ellie Goulding appearing live and a gigantic digitally-altered render of her face filling the Sphere’s 100,000-square-foot wraparound LED screen. The footage went viral. The studio release followed on January 10, 2025.
What makes “Hypnotized” significant in the context of this list isn’t just that a pop artist collaborated with an electronic producer. It’s that Goulding — who has been building bridges between pop and electronic since her earliest work with Calvin Harris, and whose voice has been a defining presence in dance music for over a decade — found in Anyma’s melodic techno world the most technically demanding and creatively serious electronic context she had inhabited in years. EDM.com called it “far from your typical ‘featuring’ cash grab where a pop star phones in some vocals over a lazy beat. The marriage of Anyma’s brooding techno production and Goulding’s ethereal delivery creates something properly hypnotic.” Rolling Stone documented Anyma’s description of her as a “creative visionary” and Goulding’s characterization of the Sphere performance as “an immersive fever dream.”
Goulding told Rolling Stone: “He really understood the nuances of my vocals and how I wanted to approach the track.” For a pop artist, that’s the specific experience of working with a producer who has a genuinely coherent musical vision — not a production house adapting to what sells. The 2026 EDMA nomination for Best Collaboration is the electronic music community’s institutional confirmation that the track belongs in that ecosystem.
8. Jennifer Lopez — “Save Me Tonight” (feat. David Guetta)
Label: Warner Records | Released: March 6, 2026 | Live Debut: Las Vegas residency, The Colosseum at Caesars Palace
Jennifer Lopez has been in the electronic music crossover business for longer than most people remember — “Waiting for Tonight” (1999) was a legitimate progressive house track before it was a J-Lo pop hit, and the FISHER rework of that song in 2024 became one of the year’s defining DJ set tools. “Save Me Tonight,” officially released March 6, 2026 — the same day Lopez kicked off the next phase of her Las Vegas residency at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace — is the mature version of that relationship.
Guetta’s production opens with luminous house keys and a firm four-on-the-floor groove before building into a larger theatrical lane with trance-flirting melodic layers. The track’s EDM.com review notes he “doesn’t just dress it up for the dancefloor — he constructs an environment where J.Lo’s vocal finds its most dramatic possible context.” Lopez had been performing it live — at World Pride Music Festival 2025, then on her Up All Night: Live tour — before the official release, building anticipation in exactly the way that works best for electronic music: audience familiarity predating the streaming release.
The pairing also reflects Guetta’s current positioning. He closed 2025 by breaking his own record as the only artist with 20 #1 hits on Billboard’s Dance/Mix Show Airplay chart. His 2026 schedule includes Coachella, Tomorrowland Belgium, and two Ibiza residencies (the veteran “F* Me I’m Famous!” at Ushuaïa and the futuristic “Galactic Circus” at UNVRS). Lopez stepping into that world isn’t an outlier — it’s the natural conclusion of a career that has always understood pop and dance as the same conversation.
9. Becky Hill — “Surrender” (with Alesso)
Label: Polydor | 2026 EDMA: Nominated — Best Collaboration
Becky Hill has spent the better part of a decade defining what it means to be a British electronic-pop vocalist at the highest commercial level. Her collaborations with Sigala, Oliver Heldens, and Tiësto (most notably “Remember” and “I Could Get Used to This”) established her voice as one of UK dance music’s most reliable presences — not just as a featured vocalist but as a creative co-author of the tracks she appears on. Her instinct for house music’s emotional architecture — the build, the revelation, the moment of release — is hard-wired into how she writes.
“Surrender” with Alesso is the international expansion of that instinct: pairing Hill’s UK-rooted vocal sensibility with Alesso’s Swedish progressive house production and the global EDM festival circuit he operates on. The EDMA nomination for Best Collaboration confirms it landed; the track’s presence in the 2026 EDMA shortlist alongside Anyma’s “Hypnotized” and Gryffin’s collaboration with Kaskade puts Hill in the same institutional category as the most serious electronic-pop crossover work of the year.
Hill’s trajectory — from The Voice UK contestant to one of the UK’s most Grammy-adjacent dance music vocalists — is one of the more complete examples of an artist whose pop ambitions and electronic music practice have never been in competition. They are, for her, the same thing.
10. Daya — “Dreamin’” (with Dom Dolla)
Label: Capitol | Grammy: Nominated — Best Dance/Electronic Recording | 2026 EDMA: Nominated — Best Track
Dom Dolla’s “Dreamin’” is technically a Dom Dolla track with Daya’s vocal. In practice, it functions as the crossover moment that positioned Daya — a pop artist who had been finding her footing since “Hide Away” broke in 2015 — inside the contemporary tech house conversation in a way that neither her pop work alone nor a straightforward collab would have achieved.
The Grammy nomination for Best Dance/Electronic Recording is the telling detail. Not Best Dance Pop Recording, where the other pop artists in this article appear, but Best Dance/Electronic Recording — the category for “No Cap,” “Victory Lap,” and “End of Summer.” The Recording Academy placed “Dreamin’” next to the most credible electronic music records of the year, which is a statement about the track’s sonic integrity rather than just its commercial positioning.
Dolla’s production instinct — the rolling groove, the infectious hook that doesn’t rely on drop mechanics, the sense of forward movement that never resolves into conventional pop structure — gives Daya’s vocal a framework that makes her sound fully at home in electronic music rather than visiting it. The track’s Party Favorz description as “bridging vocal emotion and club pressure without compromise” is precisely the achievement that separates the electronic-pop records that matter from the ones that are just pop with electronic sounds.
What These Artists Are Telling Us About Pop in 2026
The common thread across every entry on this list is not that pop music has moved toward electronic music. It’s that for a generation of artists and listeners, the distinction was never meaningful.
Lady Gaga’s founding aesthetic was always club music. PinkPantheress grew up making UK garage bedroom productions before she knew what a pop career was. Zara Larsson’s collaborator MNEK built his career inside UK house and garage before he became one of pop production’s most valued architects. Tate McRae built a fan base on dance-pop that never tried to be anything except what it was. JENNIE’s BLACKPINK foundation was always described, accurately, as “neon EDM and siren synth-pop.” Becky Hill came up through UK club music and arrived at pop through that route, not the reverse.
What the 2026 Grammy Best Dance Pop Recording category captures is not a crossover trend. It is a generation of artists for whom EDM is the language they think in, and pop is the size of the audience they’re speaking to.
The two things were always the same thing. 2026 is the year the infrastructure — the Grammy categories, the Billboard charts, the festival bookings — caught up to what had already been true for years.
- Quick Reference: EDM-Influenced Pop Artists Taking Over 2026
- The Grammy Bracket: Five Pop Artists Who Defined the Category
- 1. Lady Gaga — MAYHEM / “Abracadabra”
- 2. PinkPantheress — Fancy That / “Illegal”
- 3. Selena Gomez & benny blanco — “Bluest Flame” (I Said I Love You First)
- 4. Zara Larsson — Midnight Sun
- 5. Tate McRae — “Just Keep Watching” (from F1: The Movie)
- Beyond the Grammy Bracket: Pop Stars in Electronic Territory
- 6. JENNIE — Ruby and the “Dracula (JENNIE Remix)” TikTok Wave
- 7. Ellie Goulding — “Hypnotized” (feat. Anyma)
- 8. Jennifer Lopez — “Save Me Tonight” (feat. David Guetta)
- 9. Becky Hill — “Surrender” (with Alesso)
- 10. Daya — “Dreamin’” (with Dom Dolla)
- What These Artists Are Telling Us About Pop in 2026
