Progressive pop is pop music that tries to break the genre’s usual formula: richer arrangements, more personal lyrics and unexpected structures, inside songs that still work as songs. The term goes back to the mid-1960s, and for a while it was simply what people called the music that became progressive rock.

Where the term comes from

The movement grew in the mid-1960s, when record labels began to give artists some control over their own records. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966) and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) are named among its earliest models, and Melody Maker adverts in 1966 billed Pet Sounds as “The Most Progressive Pop Album Ever!” The musicologist Walter Everett points even earlier, to Rubber Soul (1965), as music made to be thought about rather than danced to.

What it actually means

At first, “progressive pop” was the usual name for what we now call progressive rock. In the years after Sgt. Pepper, the adjective “progressive” was increasingly applied to bands like King Crimson and Jethro Tull. In the 1970s and 1980s the term settled on a lighter strand that was common on the radio: songs with prog’s ambition and arranging skill, built for a wider audience.

Writers on the genre cite Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”, Roxy Music’s “Love Is the Drug”, 10cc, Al Stewart’s “Year of the Cat”, Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill”, The Alan Parsons Project, Electric Light Orchestra with “Telephone Line” and “Mr. Blue Sky”, Supertramp, Kate Bush and Tears for Fears.

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Hear it for yourself

Three records, three angles: Pet Sounds (1966) by the Beach Boys, from the first wave; Out of the Blue (1977) by Electric Light Orchestra, home of “Mr. Blue Sky”; and Breakfast in America (1979) by Supertramp. If Supertramp are your way in, I wrote a whole book about them: Supertramp: The Story of the Band Two Songwriters Built.

Common confusions

Progressive pop overlaps with art rock but is not the same thing; what is art rock and prog rock vs art rock draw the lines. Crossover prog, a label for bands that sit between progressive rock and more accessible rock, is explained in what is crossover prog.

Go deeper

For more terms like this one, browse the progressive rock glossary, and for the bigger picture, read what is progressive rock or browse my A to Z of progressive rock bands.

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