Six

The opening number of the musical Six arrives like a lightning bolt — a stadium-pop anthem that crashes through the fourth wall before the audience has a moment to settle. Electric guitar riffs collide with thumping bass and a pulsating synth bed, the whole production dripping in the neon energy of an arena concert rather than a history lesson. The tempo is unrelenting, a defiant march forward, and the dynamics stay deliberately high — this is a song about reclaiming volume, about women who were talked over insisting on being the loudest thing in the room. Six voices braid together in the chorus, each one distinct in timbre — some bright and cutting, some rounder and fuller — but the blend is total, a unified force. The lyrical conceit is clever and caustic: these queens have been reduced to footnotes in someone else's biography for centuries, and now they're done with that arrangement. There's glee in the reclamation, almost reckless joy. You feel it in how the singers lean into the consonants, spitting history back at history. The song belongs squarely in the TikTok-adjacent pop moment of the late 2010s, channeling everything from Beyoncé's stadium gospel to Spice Girls-era girl-group kineticism. Reach for it when you need to feel outrageously, unapologetically seen — opening a show, walking into a room where you've been underestimated, or simply needing something that sounds like winning.