Artist

Avril Lavigne

Born in Belleville, Ontario, 1984 7 studio albums 1 dive so far

Avril Ramona Lavigne, born in Belleville, Ontario in 1984, arrived in 2002 as the anti-pop pop star: a teenager in a necktie and skate shoes who sang about being sick of people putting on an act. Her debut, Let Go, made her one of the defining voices of early-2000s pop-punk almost overnight, the best-selling debut single by a Canadian woman riding at the front of it.

She refused to stay still. Under My Skin went darker and harder; The Best Damn Thing leaned into bubblegum-punk swagger; Goodbye Lullaby pulled the volume back toward something quieter and more grown. Across two decades, through a self-titled record, Head Above Water and Love Sux, she kept circling the same nerve: the gap between who you really are and the version the world wants you to perform.

What holds it together is the snarl and the sincerity sitting in the same line, a voice that can sneer at a fake one moment and ache the next. Start with the record where that tension was loudest, and the song everyone remembers as the sound of one particular summer.

Worth knowing

Her debut sold itself on authenticity: a teenager telling the world to stop pretending. Yet the songwriting trio who built it with her, The Matrix, later went on record claiming they had been the principal authors. Avril pushed back hard and split from them for album two. The song about not faking it became the one whose own authorship two sides told different stories about.