Why do modern pop duets sound so bad?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that where there is a deluxe album release, there must be a reworking of an original track as a duet. The sheer agony of these offerings cannot be overstated, in my opinion. Who among us has not cringed through Dua Lipa and Elton John’s “Cold Heart” or Ariana Grande’s lackluster vocal runs on The Weeknd’s “Save Your Tears” remix? And that’s without having to tolerate the other abominations cropping up on radio stations: the “Señorita”s, the “APT.”s, the “I Had Some Help”s. The astonishingly successful duet between Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars, “Die with a Smile,” receives a temporary stay of judgment, but only because it features some attempts at melodic variation. Even then, the novelty of occasionally singing at a sixth apart as opposed to a third wears off pretty quickly (in non-musical terms, it’s predictable as hell). 

Such is the state of our modern music landscape. We are suffering through a world of rugged individualism in music, where artists would prefer to harmonize with themselves in the studio and no one seems capable of holding down a basic interval in live performance. Gone are those halcyon days where duets, far from being the afterthought of an album, were enshrined in song as demonstrations of connection and artistry. Once upon a time, it wasn’t out of the ordinary to create a genuine banger of a duet that was just as interested in the interplay of voices as creating a hit single. 

Vocal duets are not merely shows of harmonic prowess or even variations on a theme (for example: the version of Sam Fender’s “Rein Me In” featuring Olivia Dean, a truly boring rework of one of 2025’s best songs). In the hands of our best musicians—or, more accurately, our best-suited musicians, as it’s very possible for two excellent artists to make a terrible duet—the duet form can be a myriad of things: an expression of artistic connection, a display of virtuoso songwriting, a demonstration of the weird and wonderful things that harmony and tonality can do. In essence, it is that elusive, magical thing: form going beyond mere function and complementing content. 

Consider, for example, the duets on 1964’s Getz/Gilberto, the collaboration between Stan Getz and João Gilberto that took bossa nova out of Rio de Janeiro and launched it into the stratosphere. “The Girl from Ipanema,” its famous opening track, features Gilberto and his then-wife Astrud singing alternately; Gilberto opens in Portuguese, before handing over to Astrud, who sings in English. It features none of the harmonic intricacies of other vocal duets—in fact, the two do not sing together at any point. But it still offers that thing so essential to duets: the sense of a conversation, a give-and-take between the singers. When Astrud offers up her own English version of the lyrics, it is the cue for Getz’s saxophone and the piano of Antonio Carlos Jobim; in other words, she opens the track up and lets it flourish. The shifts in singer, language, and vocal pitch all contribute to the music blooming overall. When João sings in Portuguese, he’s sorry for himself, wondering why he’s alone (“Ah, por que tudo é tão sozinho?”). When Astrud sings in English, she does so with sympathy (“How can he tell her he loves her?”). The movement from singer to singer is a change in perspective. And so, the lyrics open out just as the musical arrangement does. 

Duets in the strict definition must feature two performers who have equal importance to the piece. This sounds obvious, but there are vanishingly few duets that feel like a real interplay between two performers. Of course there are certain exceptions (we can discuss whether or not Sam Smith and Kim Petras’s “Unholy” is a good song another time, but I’m happy to concede that in it, both singers have equal significance). But look at some duets in our recent pop landscape: “Girl, so confusing (remix)”; “Perfect (Duet)”; “Kiss Me More”. Or Taylor Swift’s “Snow on the Beach,” which in fact featured so little of Lana Del Rey that Swift released a deluxe track entitled “Snow on the Beach (feat. More Lana Del Rey).” 

Some of these are great songs, but they lack a true back and forth between the artists on the track, in part because one of them might be hopping onto a new version of it rather than properly baking into its synthesis. Sometimes this works very well—the remix of “Girl, so confusing” is superior to the original—but often it cannot help but feel like merely a money-grabbing exercise. By all means, take my money, but at least give me a good song out of it. In the 1960s, for example, entire albums of duets were being produced, and to great commercial success. Motown scored no less than seven Top 40 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 off the partnership of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell alone. Elsewhere, Columbia was cashing in on Johnny Cash and June Carter’s pairing, throwing together an album of their duets and getting a country hit in the process with “Jackson.” Their collaboration set a clear precedent for the riotously successful duo of Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra. 

It wasn’t just that these were good songs (though they were). They were duets in the truest sense of the word, in the most classical of contexts—by which, of course, I mean opera and musical theatre. In those settings, duets have a direct purpose: they express vengeance, confrontation, love, humor, reunion, reconciliation. The best pop duets of the past fifty years function similarly. They might show an argument (“The Girl is Mine,” for example, or its nineties equivalent, “The Boy is Mine”); a recounting of a shared memory (of course “Paradise By the Dashboard Light” being the best amongst these); a show of love or of separation. The duets in our current pop landscape are falling flat because they’re missing these core ideas, the question of a relationship and how it might be endangered or changing. 

Take, for example, the favorite of H&M changing rooms the world over, Jordin Sparks’s 2008 song “No Air” with Chris Brown. Since Brown’s first exposure as an all-around nasty character was in 2009, a year after the release of the single, we can excuse Sparks’s poor choice of collaborator. My issue with this song is that it is absolutely pointless as a duet. Lyrically, there is no shift of perspective or ideas that accompanies the switch between Sparks and Brown on the vocals. Such blandness is cleared up when we discover that the song was, in fact, written as a solo song for a male singer. Harvey Mason, Jr. agreed to give it to Sparks if she would make it a duet with Chris Brown. What a shame. Over the course of this song, there is one single line of harmony (they sing “Oh!” together just before we go into the final chorus). For the last minute, the pair caterwaul aimlessly, not trading riffs so much as fighting to be heard over each other. “Tell me how you gon’ be without me,” Brown sings near the end. Honestly, we wouldn’t have noticed the difference. 

Even if a duet does split its duties equally, the real problem is with how boring they sound, and how thoroughly they fail to take full advantage of the form. They’re missing the ambition and musical acumen to ask questions in a sonically interesting way; not simply harmony (though some thirds never hurt anyone), but tonality, lyricism. Simply adding a “new perspective” to an existing song is a reductive and thoroughly uninteresting way of approaching a duet: because the melody remains mostly unchanged, yes, but also because that “new” perspective often sounds just like the old one. The Chainsmokers’ “Closer” demonstrates this perfectly. Aside from totally ripping off a blink-182 song, the dialogue between them and featured artist Halsey is minimal: we have two verses that make some attempt at interacting (mirroring each other lyrically, but not really), and then launch into a mind-numbingly boring chorus that everyone sings octaves apart ad nauseam. The entire song is exhaustingly static: it doesn’t shift or change, and no one seems to reveal or learn anything about the other person. We don’t even really get a sense that these two people care very much about each other or their shoulder tattoos, their Rovers, etc. 

It is hard to imagine a hit duet now that could be as clever or exhilarating as the laugh-out loud drama of Ellen Foley asking Meat Loaf if he’ll love her forever and him saying he needs to “sleep on it,” the exquisite key change in “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” as Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell literally climb higher, trading vocal lines as they go, or the haunting nursery-rhyme timbre to Nancy Sinatra’s voice as she haunts Lee Hazlewood on “Some Velvet Morning.”

This is not so much about the age of a song or a period when duets were popular and good. Yes, they were particularly popular in the sixties and seventies, but there have been plenty of good pop duets since then. Why is the outlook particularly bleak right now? It could be any number of things, although I’m tempted to read into the way technology has evolved, and artists find more and more ways to work and harmonize with themselves, in a way that wasn’t possible before. In some ways, this is, of course, exciting and not totally new: artists have been constantly talking back to themselves since technology permitted them to loop tracks and sing their own harmonies. And it is also hard to overlook the commercial element that duets seem to still carry—a sort of “if you liked this song, you’ll love this version of it with this artist” that feels painfully hollow. As always, what we tend to be missing, and what we’re always looking for, is that spark of human connection. The best duets, and the best duet partners, are magnetic: they attract and repel, and we as listeners are helpless in their forcefield. Is there anywhere we can still find that buzz? I don’t know, but I’m not sure it’s on “I Had Some Help.” 

Mariam Abdel-Razek is a writer and critic based in London. Her writing has previously appeared in The Line of Best Fit, The Tonearm, and Varsity.

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