Rachel Aroesti

Rachel Aroesti writes about pop culture for the Guardian, connecting music, television, film, comedy and digital media in tightly focused criticism and essays. Her work foregrounds how taste, identity and power play out through entertainment, whether she is reviewing an album or unpacking a long-running sitcom. She treats cultural products as part of wider social and technological currents, returning to questions of representation, humour, influence and oversharing across formats.

Pop culture critic across formats

Aroesti is described in the Guardian’s own pages as a writer specialising in pop culture, and her output reflects that breadth.

She contributes pieces to different strands of the masthead, moving between star-driven features, broader cultural essays and focused criticism. Her articles range from close readings of TV comedies to reported features on contemporary film releases and the dynamics of online culture.

Across these assignments she keeps the focus on how characters, narratives and aesthetics embody changing attitudes to gender, fame, morality and everyday life. She regularly ties the specifics of a show, film or artist to bigger shifts in how audiences consume and discuss culture, showing how entertainment sits inside social media, campus life and the attention economy.

Album reviews and contemporary music

As a music writer at the Guardian, Aroesti reviews albums with an emphasis on sound, mood and cultural framing rather than simple verdicts.

Her review of Ibeyi’s album “Offering” highlights how the duo balance mysticism and edge, using that tension to describe both the record’s atmosphere and its place in contemporary pop and R&B. Across her album work she writes about new releases as artistic statements embedded in current conversations about identity, spirituality, politics and fandom.

The writing is concise but attentive to production details, recurring motifs and how songs relate to an artist’s previous output or scene. She tends to draw out the emotional stakes of a record as much as its genre markers, making her reviews useful for understanding how a release might resonate beyond its immediate audience.

Television and comedy features

Aroesti has a substantial body of work on television comedy, often framed through individual series that illuminate larger trends. She has written about shows such as “Him & Her”, “Psychobitches”, “Friday Night Dinner” and “Ambassadors”, using these titles to explore tone, character dynamics and the evolution of British sitcoms.

Pieces like “How we made Him & Her” indicate a behind-the-scenes approach, drawing on creatives’ accounts to show how production choices and comic set-pieces are built. On her own site she collects essays on “free speech comedy” and “the evolution of the sitcom wife”, continuing the same interest in how humour intersects with changing norms, gender roles and audience expectations.

This strand of her work treats comedy as a testing ground for social boundaries, assessing when transgression lands as insight and when it curdles into cruelty or cliché.

Essays on taste, sharing and digital culture

Beyond individual shows or records, Aroesti writes essays about how people form and display their tastes in an era of platforms and constant connectivity. In one widely circulated piece she asks “Have I been influenced, or is this actually me?” while examining how personal taste has fallen out of fashion, linking recommendation systems, online discourse and status signalling. In Guardian Weekly she has written about the pressures on stars of pop culture to overshare, treating celebrity openness as a commodity shaped by proximity to “reality” and the demands of publicity.

Earlier work on campus “lad” culture and student media shows the same concern with how group identity is reinforced through jokes, misogyny and shared reference points. She has also covered the troubled return of the podcast “Reply All”, analysing how controversy, DIY charm and audience trust interact when a show attempts a reset.

Taken together, these essays map out a coherent interest in how taste and expression are mediated by institutions, platforms and informal communities, and what happens when those structures shift.

Voice and framing

Aroesti writes in a direct, unadorned style that keeps the cultural object in front of the reader while steadily widening the frame. She favours clear summaries of plots or albums before moving into thematic analysis, making her work easy to brief against specific projects in music, TV or film. Her recurring attention to gender, comic tone, authenticity and the politics of sharing means she is especially attuned to stories that touch those areas, whether in a new record, a streaming sitcom or a podcast relaunch.

She does not treat pop culture as trivial; instead, she uses accessible formats to examine how people negotiate identity and power through what they watch, listen to and post.