Weird pop-music question

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I know for a while, especially maybe late 2000's onward, a lot of people were trying to make pop music more organic and gritty. I think if it went either ambient enough or off-main enough it got classified as 'indie-pop' but you had a fair amount of joining at the hip.

I remember back in early 2013 driving with a coworker out to a work site, talking pop music a bit with her since she had her ear to the ground more with it, and while we were driving I was hearing a lot of processing and vocal effects that I really hadn't heard used in that genre before. I ended up commenting to her that I wondered when some pop singer, either male rnb or female vocal icon, would water-flange their vocals or whether anyone had ever done it. She knew what I was talking about but wasn't sure.

What I mean by that is something like a phaser/chorus on the vocals, like Ministry used to do a lot (ie. Just One Fix, Burning Inside, etc..) and Dope tried to follow up similarly, where the vocals sound like they're practically gurgling out of a tap or garden hose. It wouldn't shock me if someone like MIA, Charlie XCX, or Ariana Grande would throw that kind of thing in on a hook but - I haven't been diving through their collections enough to vet em.

Lol, forgive the strangeness of the question or the perhaps morbid curiosity for whether or not pop singers are doing un-poppy things. I'm just curious because my head's still mostly in youtube, soundcloud, and mixcloud rather than satellite radio or anything like that.