Mikael Wood

Mikael Wood treats pop music as a way to understand how artists, performances and the business of hits shape contemporary culture. He is pop music critic at the Los Angeles Times, where he writes about pop in all its ever-quickening splendor across reviews, features, interviews and appreciation pieces. His coverage moves easily between global superstars, cult favorites and rising talents, giving equal weight to spectacle, craft and career trajectory. He has covered music for the Los Angeles Times since 2012 and has held the pop music critic role there since 2016, following years of freelance work for major music and entertainment magazines.

Pop music in all its ever-quickening splendor

Wood’s core beat is pop music in its broad, modern sense, spanning R&B, rock, K-pop, country, soul and the hybrid sounds that sit between them.

Recent pieces range from a look at how culinary school shaped Victoria Monét’s return to music to a feature on L.A. native Beck revisiting the time he snuck into the Greek Theatre and his long relationship with local venues. He writes about pop stars such as Bruno Mars through the lens of meticulous professionalism, describing him as an “anti-slop machine” at SoFi Stadium to show how tight performance standards define his appeal.

His remit regularly includes veteran figures like Neil Young as well as newer names like Chappell Roan and Tommy Richman, placing them on the same continuum of pop history.

Across this work, Wood mixes close reporting with critical judgment. Concert reviews for acts such as BTS, Neil Young and Chappell Roan treat set lists, staging and crowd response as evidence for where each artist sits in the cultural moment.

Artist profiles and interviews with musicians including Billy Idol, Orville Peck and Tommy Richman dig into their processes, comeback strategies and self-mythology.

He also writes shorter, conversational formats with colleagues, such as Gen X–meets–Gen Z rundowns of new Taylor Swift releases, which capture fan discourse as part of the story of pop. The through-line is a critic who treats pop as serious work without losing sight of its pleasure and immediacy.

BTS’ run at SoFi Stadium is a test of K-pop’s lasting cultural penetration

Wood often uses major live events to gauge where a genre or superstar sits in the broader culture. In his review of BTS’ four-night stand at SoFi Stadium, he frames the shows explicitly as a test of K-pop’s lasting cultural penetration after the group’s military service hiatus and the release of their new studio album. The piece focuses not just on production scale and fan fervor but on what sustained demand says about pop’s global power structures and how K-pop interacts with English-language charts and live circuits.

Similar instincts appear when he writes about large-venue performances at the Hollywood Bowl and the Rose Bowl, where he tracks how staging choices and spoken interludes reflect artists’ anxieties, ambitions and political concerns.

This concert-centered reporting sits alongside coverage of landmark TV and award moments.

In an earlier analysis of Adele’s Grammys performance mishap, he reads what could be dismissed as a flub as a deliberate pop-star power move, teasing out how vulnerability and control function as intertwined parts of a superstar persona. His review of “Springsteen on Broadway” likewise treats the show as a hybrid form that uses theatrical convention to illuminate rather than simply celebrate its subject, focusing on how structure and scripting reshape the audience’s understanding of the artist’s job.

These pieces show a critic who treats live and televised performance as texts in themselves, rich with clues about authority, authenticity and the evolving expectations placed on pop figures.

Born to do this

Wood devotes significant space to artists in the process of “happening” - acts whose careers are turning from promise to mainstream recognition. His review titled “Chappell Roan was born to do this” frames her performance as proof of her readiness for larger stages, weaving musical detail with observations about stagecraft and persona. A long profile of Yungblud emphasizes how badly the artist wants to “happen in America,” unpacking his influences, aesthetic choices and relentless push for visibility.

His interview with Tommy Richman, described as an aspiring opera singer turned viral star, explores the tension between formal training and social-media-fueled success, connecting vocal technique, TikTok virality and long-term ambitions.

These career narratives often zoom out to show how ordinary routines and side interests shape the arc of a musician’s work. A piece on Pete Yorn’s idea of the best Sunday in L.A. uses the loose format of a day-off itinerary to sketch his creative habits, local haunts and relationship to the city’s music scene.

His backstage interview with Orville Peck on rehab, “simple dog energy” and the release of the album “Mule” compresses personal recovery, artistic reinvention and live debut into a tight, time-pressed conversation.

Even when Wood writes about Victoria Monét’s culinary education, he ties that seemingly non-musical chapter back to discipline, patience and attention to detail in the studio. Across these stories, he is drawn to inflection points, showing how artists make and remake themselves right before a wider audience catches up.

Soul music’s bard of devotion

Wood’s beat extends to deeply felt appreciation pieces and examinations of legacy. His essay on D’Angelo as soul music’s “bard of devotion” probes how the singer’s work embodies themes of faith, sensuality and commitment, treating the catalog as a coherent long-form statement rather than a string of hits. When he writes about Neil Young bringing his hits and his worries to a major venue, the focus falls on the entwining of environmental concern, political unease and fan expectations in a single night’s set.

A feature on Billy Idol stresses his refusal to be stopped, tracing his persistence through documentaries, festival appearances and industry recognition.

He gives similar treatment to band stories and scene histories. Coverage of Shudder to Think’s return looks at how an influential group comes back to life after years away, considering both the emotional charge for longtime fans and the logistical realities of reactivation.

Pieces on Beck and other long-running artists connect early scenes and youthful risk-taking to present-day career longevity, often anchored in specific memories and places. In his remembrance of Clive Davis, he writes about a record executive who turned hitmaking into an art form, explaining how taste, timing and business acumen combined to shape entire eras of pop.

Across these essays, Wood is attentive to devotion - to craft, to audience, to ideals - and to the ways that the people around artists, from executives to collaborators, help define what pop music becomes.