Last month, pop superstar Billie Eilish released a single called “Everything I Wanted.” It draws on some obvious touchstones of pop’s last decade: Drake at his most inward-facing, Lorde at her most defeated, Lana’s morose murmur. Mostly, with its muted palette and whispered vocals, “Everything I Wanted” sounds like it was recorded under a blanket, hiding from the world. “I had a dream I got everything I wanted / Not what you’d think if I’m being honest,” whimpers Eilish. “It might have been a nightmare.” Pretty harsh stuff from 2019’s teen idol!

“Everything I Wanted,” though, is also emblematic of the pop’s disposition in these dwindling years of the 2010s: downtempo, sullen, genreless music reflective of the demolished cultural boundaries of the internet and a lurking sense of isolation and doom. “I’m gonna take my horse to the old town road,” crooned another surreptitiously fatalistic smash from the past year, “I’m gonna ride ‘til I can’t no more.”

Could this ominous pop era be further from the one that ushered this decade in? The biggest hit of 2010 was “TiK ToK”—as in, “on the clock but the party don’t stop!—a debaucherous, dance-pop thrill ride rap-sung into a vocoder by Kesha, who brushed her teeth with Jack Daniels before leaving the house to take over the world. “TiK ToK” emptomized the sound of pop of the early 2010s—straightforward, unencumbered dance music—which, in 2019, feels quite a bit more than a decade down the old town road.

The entire journey of popular music in the 2010s—from the exuberant EDM of Calvin Harris and Lady Gaga to the contemplative trop-house of Justin Bieber and Jack Ü, the sinister trap of Future and, finally, the matte-colored mishmash of Eilish and Post Malone—represents a serious mood swing from crisp hope and change to murky despair. Or at the very least, from music all about a simple good time to music that is very much…not. Lizzo, notwithstanding.

Below is a timeline of the decade in pop, told through 10 songs that help spell out how the genre’s mood, texture, and subject matter evolved—and devolved—in the 2010s:

2010 - Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”

To the extent that popular music tells us something about its time, everyone really craved some good, mindless fun as the decade rolled in. Fresh off a painful recession and the promise of our first black president, America entered 2010 just as EDM-essentially European-style synth-driven club music—placed a vice grip on pop. Shimmering, uptempo, dance hits like Katy Perry and Snoop Dogg’s “California Gurls,” Taio Cruz’s “Dynamite,” and David Guetta and Akon’s “Sexy Bitch” owned the charts, while former R&B stalwarts like Usher pivoted toward the club with songs like “OMG.”