Every Britney Spears Song Ranked

What could be more 2004 than a Pepsi commercial starring Britney, Bey, and Pink as ancient Roman gladiators in the Colosseum? These three warrior queens step into the arena, scare away the lions, terrify the emperor, and lead the crowd in a death chant of “We Will Rock You.” You can spot members of Queen clapping along in togas, plus Enrique Iglesias as the emperor. A much greater work of cinematic art than Bohemian Rhapsody, with three stars who could give Freddy Mercury diva lessons. Hope we get a chance to hear Britney sing “Somebody to Love.”

It’s damn near impossible to do a dud titled “Girls and Boys”: cf. Prince, Blur, Good Charlotte. You think Britney’s gonna let that happen? She co-wrote this electro-porn morning-sex bop with Linda Perry. “Girls and Boys” should have been a monster hit, but it didn’t even make the album, getting stuck as a bonus track on the DVD version of In the Zone. A showcase for her 1980s New Wave style, in the hook (“Good little girls and good little boys make love togetherrrrr”), she quotes synth-pop pioneers Berlin and their 1982 pleasure-victim classic “Sex (I’m a …).” This song honestly should rank higher, but something has to be at 69, and this one earned it.

Keri Hilson summed up Blackout aptly in The Fader: “We were given the specific direction that she did not want the music to mimic her personal life. So we figured, OK, so let’s create a fantasy world that she would be happy in.” That’s exactly what happens on “Perfect Lover.” Britney inhabits an artificial world all her own, falling in love with a beat that satisfies her more than any flesh-and-blood lover can.

A poignant guitar ballad about a woman trapped in a suffocating relationship who finally escapes — a story Britney has lived on so many levels. Musically and lyrically, “Out From Under” feels like a prequel to “Passenger” a few years later.

The 2003 MTV Video Music Awards began with a bang: Britney dressed up in Madonna’s vintage white-lace bridal gown, emerging from a giant wedding cake to sing “Like a Virgin” onstage at Radio City Music Hall. Then Britney shares a forbidden kiss with Madonna herself. It segues into “Hollywood,” with Christina Aguilera and Missy Elliott. (I was a writer on the show, so we all snuck down to see these rehearsals — which meant an entire afternoon of Madonna and Britney making out.) Madonna put the MTV VMA performance on her Remixed & Revisited album.

Britney sets up a secret rendezvous — in public, these two pretend to be just friends, but it’s different “in the shadows where it’s hot.” There’s pathos in the way she keeps sighing “I want you like that.”

Back in 2008, right in the final minutes before Stefani Germanotta blew up into the Mother of all Monsters, she wrote this bad-romance piano ballad for Britney. You can still hear Lady Gaga’s vocals in the background. “Britney is a nice girl,” Gaga said at the time. “I used to scream for her in Times Square, and now I work for her. When I was 13, she was the most provocative performer of my time!” (You have to admit, that’s shade worthy of a Bette Davis movie.)

“I got all tricked out and came out to this thing/Looking so fire hot, a 20 out of 10” — love it when Freakney is feeling herself. “Up ’N’ Down” goes hard in her predator mode — “the beat just dropped and the room got sexy” — as she prowls the club, pouncing on the lap of her new conquest. Max Martin and Shellback help her go for vintage technotronic kicks. A flawless Femme Fatale banger that didn’t fit on the original album but defines it anyway.

An unusual item in her songbook: “And Then We Kiss,” as remixed by Junkie XL, the kind of smoothed-out, sophisto Europop she’d never much fancied before. It would made a clever left-field pick for the closing credits of a movie romance with a bittersweet ending.

Her steamy sleepover with Tinashe has a warm, woozy vibe that evokes Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope. If “Slumber Party” had been the leadoff single from Glory instead of “Make Me…,” that album might be remembered very differently now.

The scariest of “Mannequin” songs — B flosses on the catwalk, but behind the glitz, she can feel herself turning into a life-size plastic doll. “I’m frozen, I’m posing” — what an image for the celebrity damage she was going through at the time. What can it mean that the title role in Mannequin was played by Kim Cattrall, who breaks Brit’s heart so rudely in Crossroads? 

An underrated New Wave nugget from the Circus sessions, with jagged rhythm-guitar blurts from Greg Kurstin and Nicole Morier. If “Rock Me In” had come from some unknown band with studded belts, leather bracelets, and emo fringes, it could have brought down the house at the When We Were Young Festival.

Finally, a song where we get to hear Britney yawn. “All right, I was out a little late last night,” she explains. “Got a little messy.” “Early Mornin’” is a superbly sultry R&B jam from In the Zone: She walks us through a night in her life, shaking her ass from club to club to hotel and back to club. She gets home by dawn, passes out on the couch, wakes up to do it all over again.

Let’s face it, Femme Fatale should have been a double album. Any other star in the biz could have built a career on “Selfish,” but for Britney, it’s just another amazing unknown bonus track. She flexes some of her favorite vocal poses in the mirror, to a Stargate synth-disco boom. She also tries some playful topping (“Sit down, shut up, who’s the boss now?/I’m about to show you now that I’m a girl and you’re a boy”), with fantasies quoting OutKast, Joni Mitchell, and James Brown. 

From her MTV reality show with ex-husband K-Fed — Chaotic, they called it, wonder why. Give Brit credit for capturing the sound of a dizzy romance spinning out of control. “Do you like the way I rock it? Boy, I think it’s so chaotic!” That’s fair warning.

“Man in the Moon” is another one of her Bowie space trips — she’s so great at these that she should just do an all-out sci-fi Britney Stardust album. She pines over a Major Tom astro-boy who’s stolen her heart and then left the planet (“Send my message into outer space/Wonder if it’s gonna float your way”) and sobs, “Houston, I know there’s a problem!” The melody comes from Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” which makes zero sense, but that just makes it more strangely touching.

Her cover versions are such a crucial part of her game, and this Joan Jett cosplay is a prime example. It’s an iconic scene in Crossroads: Britney enters a karaoke contest at a sleazy New Orleans dive, so she and her BFFs can get their car fixed on their road trip. Britney wins the cash prize by belting “I Love Rock & Roll” in a “Freedom” crop top, because America. Bonus: The karaoke host is played by old-school hip-hop legend Kool Moe Dee. Brit explained she did “I Love Rock & Roll” because “I love Pat Benatar!” (Close enough, right?) “It’s like she’s a rock & roll chick and she’s just having a good time, and it’s a very empowering song.” Twenty years later, Brit still doesn’t give a damn about her bad reputation.

A 16-year-old weeping “I don’t know how to live without your love”? If that isn’t authentic teen-girl melodrama, what is? Best moment in the video: Britney and her guy slip off to the bedroom for a sensual pillow fight. Obviously, she wins.

A milestone of cowgirl crunk, with Atlanta hip-hop duo the Ying Yang Twins and a banjo groove. Like our yeehaw queen says, “This is for all the Southern boys out there!”

“There’s a brave new girl, and she’s coming out tonight” is such a quintessential Brit hook. She perfected the concept of shy girls copping a badass attitude and forcing themselves out onto the floor. “Brave New Girl” is serious Madonna worship — it rips both “Material Girl” and “Ray of Light”? — that could have made a perfect theme song for a high-school sitcom on the WB. Bonus points for the title, quoting Shakespeare’s The Tempest in the scene where island-girl Miranda sees other humans for the first time, the Britney-est moment in all the Bard’s work. (But we could go on all day about the countless Shakespeare-Spears connections.)

“There’s only one bitch. The real one. Britney.” Well then. The DJ Mustard-produced “Mood Ring” was originally a bonus track on the Japanese deluxe edition of Glory. But in 2020, with the Free Britney movement on the rise, online fans led a #JusticeForGlory campaign to get her 2016 album charting again. Brit dropped “Mood Ring (By Demand)” as a thank-you to the faithful in late May — then watched it top the U.S. iTunes sales chart, just in time for Pride. The song’s rebirth seemed to symbolize hers. 

Britney raises a Cheeto martini to the Eighties hit from Bobby Brown, the Teddy Riley collab that helped invent New Jack Swing. But Britney really sinks her fangs into the chorus — “Everybody talking all this stuff about me/Why don’t they just let me live?” She sings “My Prerogative” like it’s her life story, which it is.

A Britflix-and-chill booty call, cooing over a frisky acoustic-guitar loop. “Do You Wanna Come Over?” makes a late-night “u up?” text sound like a political statement, as she boldly declares, over and over, “Nobody should be alone if they don’t have to be!” Who could argue with that? As Britney told Matt Lauer in her classic 2006 Dateline interview, “I think everybody should be pro-love, you know?”

An overlooked gem from In The Zone, an airy synth-disco focused on her breathy ardor. Don’t worry, B — if he hangs up, you can always e-mail his heart. She wrote it with one of her fave songwriting duos, Brian Kierulf and Joshua M. Schwarz, who penned TRL-era classics like Aaron Carter’s “Aaron’s Party (Come Get It),” Nick Carter’s “Girls in the USA (Featuring Mr. Vegas),” and Willa Ford’s “I Wanna Be Bad.”

One of everyone’s favorite Britneys: the leather-chick headbanger who sounds like she spent the Eighties prowling the Sunset Strip metal clubs with a switchblade in one hand and a spare can of Aqua Net in the other. “Rock Boy” is where she turns into MotNey Crue, snarling “Meet me in your dressing room” like she knows she’s the real star of the show.

“I don’t really wanna be a tease/Would you undo my zipper please?” Britney, always there to cut to the chase. “Showdown” is one of the first of her many killer collabs with Bloodshy and Avant, with Britney whispering her salacious come-ons.

A summit of electro-pop legends: Robyn and Imogen Heap pitch in to write a Britney disco banger. And even by her standards, it’s a filthy one. In “Over to You Now,” Brit invites her lover to go somewhere secret, somewhere new. “Do you like this? This place that I’m bringing you to? Because I do!” My, oh, my — wherever could this location be? “This special place, it’s in the basement,” she explains. “It’s kinda hard to find the entrance/You need some juice.” In case you’re not getting it, she keeps moaning, “Oh, my God!” Happy travels, you two.

The most shameless “Halo” rip ever — but there’s no sin in that, since every artist should rip “Halo” at least once. Britney hits the road with her lover at the wheel, finally trusting somebody enough to be a passenger. (“My hands in the air while you’re driving/This is living!”) Katy Perry, Sia, and the rest of the writing team came up with a seriously touching lyric, too. Britney earned her halo — I just wish “Passenger” came out in time for the Crossroads soundtrack.

Britney tries to get a little emotion out of her boyfriend (hmmm — anyone we know?), but like the dude in an Olivia Rodrigo song, he’s not the compliment type. Herb Ritts directed the steamy beach video, in the mode of his classic clips for Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” and Madonna’s “Cherish,” with Britney wearing an impractical macrame bikini. “Don’t Let Me Be the Last To Know” was written by Mutt Lange and Shania Twain; as Shania-Britney moments go, it’s up there with the great Crossroads scene where Britney sings “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” 

Her demo of the Lady Gaga classic, before the songwriter turned it into her own hit. The bare-bones “Telephone” demo leaked in 2010; Rodney Jerkins strips it down to the sound of a plucked harp and a jaded party girl strung out on AutoTune paranoia. The song will always belong to Gaga and Bey, but the intensity of this demo is pure Britney.

It makes sense that one of her most openhearted love songs is a tribute to, well, the touch of her hand. She makes her solo date night so romantic, murmuring, “I can draw the blinds and teach myself to fly.” Britney has always called it one of her most personal songs, and one of her favorites. “I really love the vibe of ‘Touch of My Hand,’ ” she said. “I love the subject that, you know, I’m touching on because no one’s really talked about some of those things in a lot of songs written lately because people are scared to go there and to express themselves in that way. And, you know, I think it’s an empowering thing for girls.”