2026 VMA Best Pop - You Vote
Seven nominees, one test, and you can vote the order into a different shape: does the video do the song's job? That means getting the hook and the star in front of you and sending you back to the record. Everything else, whether scale or plot or budget or couture, counts only where it serves that. Where two videos both do the job, the one that lands the hook harder goes higher; where a video is superb at something else instead, it sits below one that does the job at all. Applied straight, that reorders the ballot, because the tightest gag here beats the largest production, and the most beautiful piece of filmmaking on the list finishes in the bottom half. Public voting closes 25 September at vote.mtv.com, and the ordering below is an argument built to be pushed back on.
- 1
Sabrina Carpenter — House Tour
A pink van marked Pretty Girl Cleanup pulls up at a mansion and the record is explained before a word is sung. Margaret Qualley and Madelyn Cline ransack the place, a Grammy goes in the bag, and the last chorus lands over a hit-and-run nobody stops for. The Pretty Girl Cleanup van is the joke, the premise and the hook delivery all at once.
- 2
Olivia Rodrigo — drop dead
Petra Collins took the song into the royal apartments at Versailles and treated the place with zero reverence. Rodrigo bed-rots in Rococo frills wearing the wired headphones, jams on electric guitar in the Queen's Bedroom, runs past the Gallery of Great Battles. Grandest possible room, brattiest possible delivery, and the gap between them does the song's work: the hook arrives already framed.
- 3
Taylor Swift — The Fate of Ophelia
Nine looks and eight changes, running from a custom Alberta Ferretti gown to a 2022 Area archive mini, with Versace, Paolo Sebastian, Roberto Cavalli and Kelsey Randall in between. The red crystal bodysuit is the image doing the heaviest lifting, a showgirl poster in motion. Expected to win here. It sells the star about as hard as a video can and never quite puts the chorus in the room, so it sits behind two that do both.
- 4
Ariana Grande — hate that i made you love me
Every face in the room belongs to her. The diner where every person is Grande is the shot doing pop work rather than horror work: a star multiplied until she is the entire cast, which is what a chorus this size wants. Around it the gag takes over: a burial, a car crash, a fireplace mishap. Sharp filmmaking, and the song keeps stepping aside for it.
- 5
Tate McRae — Nobody's Girl
Thibaut Grevet shot it on a retro camera and put it out on 21 November 2025, McRae in white lace before the kaleidoscope of dancers arrives, (LA)HORDE bodies splitting her image into a repeating pattern. Angel wings, a cement basement, a forest. Dancing is her real argument for pop stardom and the effect keeps interrupting it. Hook arrives, picture wanders off.
- 6
LISA — DREAM feat. Kentaro Sakaguchi
Five minutes of grief, and the single is scoring it. Ojun Kwon directs LISA and actor Kentaro Sakaguchi through a casket, a road trip and a gas station, then the metallic urn in the car turns the whole drive into a memory. Lovely film. As pop machinery it hands the frame to the plot and the co-star, so the hook never gets a turn and LISA the singer stays behind LISA the lead.
- 7
Charli xcx — SS26
Torso open on Carine Roitfeld, and her opening line, "Fashion won't save us. But let's go on the runway and walk.", sets the register before the beat does. Saturated tableaux, backstage tension, blinding flashes, Charli walking runways in designer looks. Very sharp as satire. As a machine for selling a chorus it barely engages, which reads as intent rather than failure.
