#790-#786

#790. Tash Sultana - Notion (#32, 2016)

81st of 2016

It's difficult to escape the comparisons to the John Butler Trio career arc. In 2016 Tash Sultana polls two songs, both fairly drawn out but catchy enough to defy the rules. The higher of the two becomes something of a signature song, and in the years that follow, we get numerous attempts to re-capture that hit in a more radio friendly way. We're talking about two songs where it takes roughly 2 minutes before any vocals appear on the record. It's something I suspect might be streaming poison to keep doing. I'm just imagining having "Notion" come on and someone could easily believe that it's a deep cut by Daughter, or more likely, jump out early because it just appears to be an instrumental for quite some time.

This song is not streaming poison at all, and I might go so far as to say it's the proto-typical Tash Sultana song. Helps that it's the title track to their first EP, all 6 tracks and 40 minutes of it. The only thing really holding it back is that it doesn't strike me as very ambitious once it gets going. The mood-setting intro is immediately the highlight and it just mostly stagnates until a guitar solo towards the end. Other than that, the main thing I remember is another instance of a very unsatisfying rhyme (gestures towards "Fire and the Flood" (#988)). Maybe there's a case I'm not thinking of where it works, but I look at notions/ocean rhyme on the chorus and it just feels unsatisfying. Like, you're just feeding us back the first word with a letter chopped off. Sheer stupid pedantry, but it's not a payoff to me.

#789. London Grammar - Baby It's You (#76, 2020)

74th of 2020

As time has gone by, one of the most peculiar aspects of popular music is the way that the albums chart has gone from a definitive popularity measure, to some sort of rout, to a vague combination of the two that's become even more confusing. If something is genuinely ruling the country, it'll get its flowers in perpetuity, but it'll be mixed in with two whole different breeds at the same time. In Australia and the UK, The Weeknd has possibly the biggest album of the decade, a hits package that's since gotten an expansion pack and charts in the top 10 pretty much every week. On raw numbers, it's justifying itself. It makes a decent showing on vinyl sales but in general, it's there because a lot of people are streaming The Weeknd's most popular songs every day. Ironically though, it's never gotten to #1, often because it's being blocked by albums that sell a lot of copies in one week (or even one day), and immediately drop off the face of the earth. These kinds of pseudo-popularity forms are always at battle, and the latter usually wins. I say they win because the shorthand for judging success continues to be peak positions. So much effort is expended to immortalise it, regardless of what happens in the long run.

With that in mind, the difference between a successful campaign and otherwise is massive, and with London Grammar we've seen it first-hand. You might not realise it, but their 3rd album "Californian Soil", which this song would eventually appear on is the band's only Australian #1. Their debut album spent 10 times longer in the chart but suffered from releasing alongside an album that might have a genuine case for being the most popular of the decade. What's more startling though is that London Grammar's next album, released last year, peaked at #79 in Australia. Sometimes this can be the result of a staggered campaign, for instance a late vinyl release (Here I am looking at the Lizzy McAlpine album last year), but it's not the case here. Something must have gone wrong in the promotion because London Grammar did about 1/5th the numbers of the previous album in pretty much all metrics. In saying all that, "Californian Soil" only debuted at #54 on the Spotify album chart despite being the #1 album in the country, dropping to #139 on the second week. You could argue that it's a more accurate showing without the mighty sales buffer. Still, in a world where many artists chug along with no new hits but a cozy #1 debut every few years, it's hard to fathom a harder, more random collapse.

For all that being said, it's not even the first big drop off that London Grammar had. They had everyone in the palm of their hand with their first album. Lots of songs I'll eventually be talking about. If that's not enough, they even complimented that with one of those songs becoming a very big crossover hit in Australia. They had every opportunity to continue being the next big thing and then just didn't. Their second album came out 4 years later and sold quite well, but for the Hottest 100, they barely slid in at #197, the kind of decline that suggests they were just done serving the general population. Luck was on their side in 2019 that they got to work with Flume and score a surprise new hit, and it seems that helped bring them enough favour to return to the Hottest 100 one last time with this song a year later.

Working with Flume may have influenced the sound on this song. Really it sounds a lot like a Vallis Alps throwback, but it's leaning into the band's electronic side in a way you don't usually see. In the context of the album, it sticks out a little bit, but the song never really goes overboard with it so it's not especially jarring. Listening to the album in full, there have always been a couple of songs I took away from it but it's hard to escape the feeling of stagnation, like outside of "Baby It's You", they're not sure where to take their sound and it's a lot of rehashing familiar ground.

One of the riskiest things you can do for your career is to take a very long time between albums. The moment people realise they can go on just fine without your music, is the moment that you've permanently shed a fanbase. For me it's worked well with London Grammar. Every new album cycle, I get re-introduced and get at least some morsel of a treat to enjoy. Hannah's vocal prowess is obviously the main event of the group and she has more than a few ways of making it catch you off guard. "Baby It's You" I don't think does it full justice. Another song that's permanently stuck in first and second gear and never really reaches the wow factor.

#788. SAFIA - Embracing Me (#23, 2015)

75th of 2015

Ignoring everything I just wrote, I don't feel the need to dive over the whole SAFIA history right here. As far as we're concerned, it's all contained in this time frame. A very exact one at that, from 2013 to 2016. The hits dried up very suddenly after that, but while they were making waves, they were very reliable. Maybe that was the SAFIA story all there anyway, we'll see.

Jumping back to 2015, SAFIA had not yet released an album, a very similar situation with their fellow Canberrans Peking Duk. A couple of Peking Duk & SAFIA collaborations will eventually appear on this list. Unlike them though, SAFIA did eventually release an album, and "Embracing Me" was the lead single from it, although I often forget that because it came out over a year earlier.

As someone who was pretty into them at the time, SAFIA had a way of turning every new single into an event around this time. Full support of the board in my eyes while having absolutely no idea what you were going to get. When songs are especially unique like that, I'm always going to remember hearing them the moment they were first unveiled to the listening public. Songs like "Born This Way" by Lady Gaga, or "The Last Man On Earth" by Wolf Alice. I can add "You Are The One" by SAFIA to that pile, and I can speak in high praise as it's the only SAFIA single from this era that didn't poll here. It's the song I most liken to "Embracing Me". Two songs that open up quietly, and let Ben show off his singing chops for about a minute before the drop finally comes in. It's not a total rehash, and on a good day, I might even say that "Embracing Me" pulls it off better. We've got a really solid 50 seconds going on...

I don't like the drop at all. It's a whole lot of bleeps and chopped vocals. It's not a disaster, I think they pulled off what they were trying to do without any metaphorical hiccups, but it's just not anything I want to hear. To make matters worse, it forms the skeleton of the track for most of the rest of it going forward. For such an exciting build up, we just get no real payoff. If you're willing to overlook the creepy lyrics, 'Like embracing me' just isn't a stunner of a hook. It sounds more desperate and cloying with how many times it's repeated.

#787. Haim - Want You Back (#47, 2017)

82nd of 2017

The Hottest 100 reinforces the idea that a lot of people jumped off the Haim ship after their debut album. This is the only song they've polled after that big year for them in 2013. Certainly if you were to compare them to, let's pick London Grammar and SAFIA as two random artists, the album by album stream decline they've got on Spotify is pretty respectable. Maybe it helps when you've gotten a piece of fortune in the stock of eventual Hottest 100 entrant Taylor Swift. As a band that never truly took control of the charts in their home country of America, the collaboration "no body, no crime" might be the only song a lot of people know from them.

I probably could have been one of those people who bought the debut album and then lost interest afterwards, but they have a habit of really catching me off guard sometimes. They're unlucky not to have another entry here collaborating with a certain Scottish DJ on a song I still have a lot of love for a decade later. They've got a small part with a cavalcade of very cool and random names on a "Hunger Games" soundtrack song I love, and then when I thought I'd heard everything from them, the song "3am" from their latest album just floors me. I don't think anyone ever asked for R&B Haim but it works so much better than you'd expect. It was their 7th most popular song in the past year on last.fm (even higher if you include the Thundercat remix probably), so it's not just me going rogue.

I don't have quite the same enthusiasm for "Want You Back". I can see why they went with it as a lead single but it feels almost a little too safe. I recall finding myself more drawn to the super catchy follow up single "Little of Your Love", but in general I feel like the middle section of the album gets into a pretty likeable groove. All the pieces are there for this one, it just doesn't stick the landing.

#786. The Weeknd - Blinding Lights (#71, 2019)

74th of 2019

Answering the question of what the biggest hit song of all time is, is a fruitless endeavour. You want there to be an answer. There are so many cases of two individual songs in isolation where one is objectively more popular without dispute, so a definitive answer must exist. All you can really do in the end though is pick a particular metric to measure. Whether it's sales, radio airplay, a well-sampled poll, you'll probably find something that feels right in that way, but wrong in another. To take sales as an example, you wind up with Elton John's "Candle In The Wind 1997" single usually. Makes sense contextually, but it's not a satisfying answer. Not a lot of people continue to rave about that record, it's hardly Elton's signature song, and realistically, isn't even his signature version of that particular song. If you're looking for something more agreeable, that ticks a wider variety of boxes, and actually feels like a satisfying answer to that question, "Blinding Lights" is not a bad option.

You're probably aware of this one. Released in late 2019, sounded like a hit, and when the Christmas season got out of the way, it very much lived up to that, decimating the charts everywhere as almost undoubtedly the biggest hit of 2020. For about half a century, the biggest hit song of all time on the Billboard Hot 100 was Chubby Checker's version of "The Twist". It had two runs at being the hottest dance craze of the time which allowed for it to unthinkably become a #1 smash hit in two separate runs. Billboard weights its all-time lists with respect to different eras' standards, so while "The Twist" may have only spent 39 weeks on the Hot 100, it was so ahead of the pack that every record breaking smash hit in the '90s/'00s/'10s just could not compete. This was until "Blinding Lights" became the song to unseat it. Surprisingly it only spent 4 weeks at #1 on the Hot 100, due to an utterly tumultuous period for the chart where anyone and everyone was making a joke of the top spot with sales gimmicks taking over for what probably should have been months upon months of domination for The Weeknd. A better way to visualise the domination though is to say that previously the record for weeks in the top 5 was 27, tied by The Chainsmokers' "Closer" and Ed Sheeran's "Shape Of You". "Blinding Lights managed 43 weeks. Australia did manage to let it run rampant for 11 weeks at the top. Smash hits either side of it from Tones And I and Glass Animals (both will appear on this list eventually) slightly overshadow it, but it's a fairly strong innings. Oh and it's also comfortably the most streamed song of all time on Spotify, that's got to give it some credit in the 'This is the song that is liked by the most people' stakes. Its 500 million play lead only extends every single day, so for the time being, it's not going to change any time soon.

The song is fine. Can you tell I find it more interesting talking about chart achievements than about this song in particular? I've always preferred "Heartless", the song he put out a couple of days before this one. More Metro Boomin & Illangelo team ups in my Weeknd discography please. Love the video too, just oozes with chaotic fun. "Blinding Lights" is a more standard procedure kind of fun. Max Martin ticking the boxes of carefully planned fun that just don't stand out quite as much as his earlier masterpieces as pop music has come to better form itself around his standard. Not to mention, a-ha already created the most iconic synth riff of all time, anything else that comes for the crown in such an obvious way as this does, is gonna be viewed relatively unfavourably. With a few exceptions, I'm surprised more people don't see The Weeknd as an extremely generic pop star. So many of his biggest hits are songs that anyone could have made. His Hottest 100 catalogue is extremely frustrating as a result.

#795-#791

#795. PNAU - Go Bang (#7, 2017)

83rd of 2017

Since early on in 2017, Australian songs have had a hard time reaching the ARIA top 10. The last one to do so just squeaked over the line at #10 for a single week before quickly falling back in line. That's been a common pattern too. Occasionally you'll have outliers like "Be Alright" (#986) but even they've become so few and far between that on most weeks, the best-selling Australian single is "Riptide" (#885) once again. There are just so few opportunities now for local artists to amass the staggering concurrent audience size needed to reach that level. triple j's Hottest 100 is one of the very few things we've got, and it's why "Go Bang" reached the ARIA top 10 for a single week. Not counting a guest feature on a ZAYN single by an artist who will eventually appear on this list a couple of times, the last Australian song in the top 10 was "Chameleon" (#851) almost a year prior. PNAU were doing some seriously heavy lifting for the rest of the team.

The title of 'Highest polling PNAU song' has changed hands 4 times. It was a real shock when "Embrace" was finally unseated by "Chameleon", but then perhaps a bigger one when this song went just that little bit higher, netting them their only ever top 10 finish. It's weird because this is the follow-up hit which lives to be in the shadows, but maybe "Chameleon" achieving further success beyond the polling cut off re-installed the drive to vote for PNAU in these things. Or maybe like me, people just like this one more. You can protest and point to the Hottest 100 of the 2010s, where "Chameleon" polled at #149 and "Go Bang" didn't make an appearance, but I'd argue that given the nostalgic lean of those poll results, it wasn't a fair fight to begin with.

This song feels to me like they found a successful formula with Kira Divine, and now figure they can build off of that into something new. "Chameleon" is a song that largely settles into its own groove and lets Kira take it from there. This takes the sometimes stale piano house trend and gives it a real kick into action. So much of it is the same chord played over and over again but it really elevates things. I did end up rating all of the PNAU entries pretty close to each other, it's really a matter of finding those slight variations on the formula and weighing them up. On a positive note that I didn't get around to mentioning before, Kira Divine actually is credited on all the relevant songs on most of the relevant platforms (YouTube remains unchanged). Better late than never.

#794. FISHER (feat MERYLL) - Yeah The Girls (#68, 2022)

81st of 2022

Speaking of formulae, FISHER mixed it up this time. No, the music still sounds like what you'd expect, but in 2022 he managed to poll two songs at the same time. This means I can look at their respective positions as an examination of their individual merits, rather than just an annual check-in with how FISHER stock is trending. I like this one less, ergo the polling position makes sense to me.

It did have me wondering about the titular phrase. Usually when you get these sorts of things immortalised in song titles, they're somewhat fresh and current, but it was pretty antiquated by the time this song came out. From what I can see, people have been using the phrase 'yeah the boys' for a very long time, but it was specifically around late 2016, with the proliferation of a Facebook group of the same name that the phrase really took hold in Australia. It really captures a certain set of low effort lad culture memes that I feel the internet has collectively moved away from. In any case, the gender flipped term here showed up shortly after with slightly less negative connotations.

I'm uncertain if MERYLL, the Dutch singer on this song, was familiar with the phrase before recording it. It appears that she didn't actually meet FISHER in person until 2023, and she wrote the song as a topline with the UK producer Bad Milk, and then it just ended up in FISHER's hands (or maybe someone else's? Let's save that story for a FISHER blurb I'm having trouble filling out) afterwards. MERYLL is typically a hardstyle vocalist and said in advance of the release that this was her branching out into something totally different. She's not so much singing on this song as she is regaling us with a mundane story. There's probably a shout out to "Can't Feel My Face" (#839). That song only peaked at #12 in Spain where the song takes place, so maybe it's just slightly more novel to hear it in that setting. The Weeknd's only #1 hit in Spain is "La Fama", his 2021 collaboration with Rosalía. The last actual line of the song is 'Girls on the game'. That's a phrase I can't see having been picked up outside of video games, but I wonder if FISHER extrapolated the title from it, giving the song a more viral launching point.

It's a solid groove but it doesn't move me much. Eventually I'll be able to pinpoint the little parts of FISHER songs that really click with me, but we're doing the bare minimum at the moment.

#793. Halsey - Hold Me Down (#42, 2015)

76th of 2015

Halsey was always destined for big things. Anyone who's managed to lock down a considerable audience before playing the radio game just has a huge head start. This song comes from Halsey's debut album which entered the ARIA Albums Chart at #2, this was months before Halsey ever had a top 50 single as a guest, and years before they had one as a lead artist. That's a big pulsating sign that's telling the record label 'Hey, this is a good investment you've got here'.

triple j had hopped onto the Halsey train a few months before that, so they may have played a part in that strong opening. It's where the station's idiosyncrasies come into play here. This song was Halsey's highest entry that year. It's because it's one of just two songs that got played substantially at the time. Whatever you think about "New Americana" or "Gasoline", they didn't really get a shot here. It makes this feel like a temporary stop gap. Halsey's on weighted training clothes until they go on to bigger things. For whatever reason, that didn't especially happen. A couple more of their songs in later years would end up in a similar position to this, but only one Halsey song landed substantially higher, in the top 20. So the dust has settled and this is still one of their biggest entries. Odd, that.

It's not a song that's felt like it's a star maker. If you're already into Halsey, then sure, but there's very little in the way of mind-blowing charisma or intrigue to it. It all feels very cold, slow and mechanical. I'll admit I had prerequisite disadvantage here. About a year before this song came out, there was a minor Australian hit song by KYA & LDN Noise, called "What I Live For". That song has the exact same hook at the end of its chorus as this, and with it being rather pulsating, just adds to this song feeling sluggish and tired by comparison. This gets a fairly standard passing grade.

#792. Olivia Rodrigo - traitor (#67, 2021)

82nd of 2021

2021 has always felt like a big turning point year for the Hottest 100. It's the year where TikTok solidified itself as the breaker of every hit song going forward, and it spilled through to triple j. A lot of the usual old suspects are shoved down the pecking order, and what we got to replace them were 5 Doja Cat songs and 5 Olivia Rodrigo songs. That alone is enough to leave a sour impression on some old heads hoping to have the pop hit machine filtered away from their periphery. Olivia Rodrigo especially might just be the breaking point. You can throw in past justifications for other artists where they made their name on triple j, but you really can't with Olivia. She's a former Disney star who had her first proper single (which I'll get to eventually) debut at #1 before she turned 18. There are no hard yards to be seen here.

Olivia tends to get a pass because most people seem to like at least some of her music. She's something of a genre hopping machine which in some cases has brought some very unexpected sounds to the top end of the charts. I've generally liked her music but I always find the albums a bit patchy. I do respect that she doesn't just bloat them for streaming stats. Thanks to this, you could make the argument that "SOUR" deserves commendation as the most streamed album of all time, because its least streamed song has over 350 million streams, more than any other album I think.

This was clearly demonstrated when the album was released, and Olivia's very small discography was vastly outweighed by the demand for her music, so people just kept listening to it over and over again. There are only a small handful of albums that have managed to land their entire track list in the ARIA top 50. Every song on "SOUR" charted for at least 4 weeks.

A lot of people don't like when whole albums dominate the singles chart. I think it's great. With so much general movement controlled by radio playlists, streaming playlists, algorithms, or in the past, the measurable visibility of a track on the iTunes front page, it's refreshing to see those mechanics interrupted by the true voice of the people. Most of those songs aren't part of that assembly line so you get to see something close to organic movement. Something it also does is gives you a chance to watch the relative popularity of different tracks in real time. It might start off being influenced by what's at the top of the track list, but before long, it's a question of how many people saved and replayed certain favourites, and the real picture shows itself.

It's why I found myself rooting for "traitor" at the time. Just like "Too Good" (#929), it was an album track that launched itself very high on the charts. In its second week, it climbed up to #5, overtaking one of Olivia's actual singles, and it stuck around in the top 10 for a good while after that too. Ironically it wasn't until it became a single that it started slipping out of the charts, and it makes sense. I've had times when I've owned an album, and a single release has shined a light on a deeper cut that I wasn't paying attention to at the time ("Teenagers" by My Chemical Romance comes to mind), but you just can't do it with this album. Everyone had already heard it all, the era of 'hey, here's the new single, start listening to that' has never felt more dead and buried.

Did I actually like "traitor" though? I think I did at the time. As was the case with most of her songs, it showed a new side that sounded fresh. It's all very silly and melodramatic. Taking a friend to task because they patiently waited until after Olivia broke it off to start dating her ex that there were clearly feelings for beforehand. It's the emotional maturity of Tony Soprano yelling to his therapist because his nephew started getting intimate with the woman he decided not to sleep with. Ain't it funny? I prefer to keep this one as a deep cut. The rest of her entries here have a bit more going for them.

#791. Kingswood - ICFTYDLM (#56, 2014)

77th of 2014

If you've never heard this song before and don't plan on changing that, I'll get it out of the way: It stands for 'I can feel that you don't love me'. Maybe you could figure that out anyway. Some conversational acronyms have a way of solving themselves, like we all have predictive text simmering inside of us. Actually I find it's much harder to decipher words when they're spelled out to you in quick fashion, it's too much to process when they spell out 'S-E-N-T-I mentality' in the first verse. But that's got nothing on "Party Started" by The Cat Empire, major props if you could keep up with the bridge on that song. I finally gave up this year and looked it up.

The Kingswood story is that of an occasionally raucous band who seemed to mostly only poll while at their most mellow. They've since taken that a step further and landed on a more country-twinged sound. The fandom hasn't quite followed with them, but they did manage to rack up 5 entries here along the way, so they've got a healthy showing.

As a fan of that raucous energy, this one puzzled me a bit. The most interesting thing about it is the title, while you're generally being robbed of any payoff to anything exciting here. Time has been a little kind to it. It reminds me a little of a 2013 song by a band that'll eventually appear here, operating on a similar scope of ideas. Not sure I'd ever want to try out the inferior product, but I suppose a little variety can be nice.

#800-#796

#800. Rudimental (feat Anne-Marie & Will Heard) - Rumour Mill (#96, 2015)

78th of 2015

The vibes were off for this one from the beginning. Rudimental scored their biggest hit with "Free" (#858) and I felt like it was a worrying sign for their future output. The real sign was when they started rolling out their second album with the song "Never Let You Go". It's faithful drum & bass in typical Rudimental style but just lacks the pulse and excitement of "Feel The Love" or "Not Giving In". It's efficient that they got Foy Vance to fill in the role of both Alex Clare and the other guy who will eventually appear on this list, but he can't rise much above perfunctory even when he's giving it his all. It pretty much tanked their album campaign which was only salvaged by the easy saving throw of having an Ed Sheeran collaboration on deck. For someone who's never made the Hottest 100 before as an artist, I sure find a lot of reasons to mention him here.

The saving throw for the triple j crowd seemed to be this song. A touch too low key to really become a proper chart hit, but it did well enough and voters found room for it in the end. I'm not entirely sure what the draw card is. Anne-Marie hadn't really started her solo career yet, and while I was pretty enthusiastic for Will Heard's contribution to songs like "Sonnentanz (Sun Don't Shine)" by Klangkarussell and "Tear It Down" by The Aston Shuffle, they didn't exactly turn him into a household name either. I guess people just liked the vibe of the thing, it's a little different to what you'd expect from Rudimental.

Actually if we're talking about Hottest 100 performance, Anne-Marie is an odd one. She'll appear once more as a featured artist on this list, but she never made it in on her own. That might not sound so strange given that she very quickly moved away from the triple j radar, but if we're isolating that brief period in 2016 when she was in their good books, it feels like a serious underperformance. Australia was the first country to really give her stripes, with "Do It Right" and "Alarm" performing far better than on her local UK charts. She even came in for Like A Version to cover a reasonably niche Australian song that will eventually appear on this list. For all that she got as high as #195 and never got playlisted again. I always have to share the fact that she's a black belt in karate. As a music nerd who also moonlights as a world record holding speedrunner (or vice versa), I support those who find their calling in multiple fields. This song largely exists because Anne-Marie had already been working as a live vocalist for Rudimental for a couple of years at this point. It certainly won't be the last time we see that sort of relationship in this list.

With my Rudimental inclinations laid fully on the table (and the notable remaining entry for them prodding in a similar direction), I was largely unamused by this at the time. It just seemed to meander with no real sense of purpose. The repeated vocal hook that shows up in the second half of the song starts sounding very silly if you pay attention to it as well. I suppose though when I take the song for what it is, it's perfectly adequate. As I'm listening to it and writing this, I'm catching myself nodding along to it, which implies they were doing something right.

#799. Mashd N Kutcher (feat Dan Andrews) - Get on the Beers (#12, 2020)

75th of 2020

I don't know how many international readers I get here. For any of you out there, bravo for sticking through what is me talking about niche Australian music half of the time. Once again this is true but it's a little bit different this time. This novelty song featuring numerous soundbites from the then-premier of Victoria is a joke that you might have an easier time being in on than I do. It's been years and I'm still thoroughly not in on this joke.

Taking things back to 2020, we had the COVID-19 pandemic. Australia being its own continent and not being very densely populated gave us a decent chance to stay vigilant about it and keep it contained. As is often the case, any successful curbing will spawn skepticism that it's even a big deal, which then leads to it spiralling out of control.

I've been living in Western Australia for nearly 15 years now. We're so far away from most of the country that we're largely not thought about at all. London is considerably closer to Moscow than Perth is to Melbourne. Our COVID-19 response was short and sweet. The border was effectively closed down, and we scarcely had any outbreaks. Mask mandates were fairly brief, but in general the pandemic barely affected my way of life.

A key point of interest here is the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne. They're by far the two biggest cities in Australia, and fairly close to each other. It's hard to know how seriously people take it from where I'm standing, but there's a lot of back-and-forth about which city is better. For many years, a sticking point that Melbourne always had against Sydney was their lockout laws, effectively a curfew on the city. The city's nightlife can't help but be dragged down with it. This law lasted from early 2014 to early 2020.

A couple of months after that, Melbourne and the state of Victoria were met with constant lockdowns to try and quell the pandemic. At no point should I ever have been able to name the premier of a state I don't live in, but seeing Dan Andrews give press conferences over and over again updating the situation is something even I couldn't completely avoid. Given what Victoria had prided itself upon in the preceding years, I can imagine people weren't too happy having to put up with the constant containment measures. On the other hand, the Gen-Z (or thereabouts) response to this sort of thing often falls under the banner of nihilistic dadaism. Shitposting, in other words.

Mashd N Kutcher are an unexpected name to show up in the Hottest 100 history books. They're an electronic duo who largely specialise in mash ups, or usually just taking a familiar song and slapping a beat behind it. I was not particularly fond of what they were doing, but I suppose in hindsight I have to give them some credit for their source material. No where else would you find people digging through with samples of Art vs. Science's "Parlez Vous Francais?", or Powderfinger's "(Baby I've Got You) On My Mind". Still, they were a novelty act that never got played on triple j and were largely off my mind when they were off the charts.

It took me by surprise when they did show up like this. On the other hand, triple j as a radio station largely operates in two studios, one in Sydney and one in Melbourne. It's only natural that they're going to feed into this sort of discourse. They're the national youth broadcaster after all.

So what is this exactly? Well it's a novelty record that's taking snippets from a speech that Dan Andrews gave in March 2020, one where he declared it inappropriate to 'get on the beers' with all your mates around. This re-arrangement of words is all done in comedic effect to make him effectively say the opposite. It's done with the silly irreverence that makes it almost apolitical. It's a very Australian joke. I'm sure I, and many other people I know can quote Homer Simpson's 'sweet can' monologue verbatim after all. US President Donald Trump also has his voice appear on this track to get us to boo him for never having had a beer in his life. I say president, but when this actually polled in the Hottest 100, he wasn't president anymore, and I'm writing this now as he's president-elect, but posting near the start of the next administration. It's been a long 5 years.

To get back to the point, I'm someone who can honestly say I've never had a beer in my life, and I live in one of the few parts of the world that weren't drastically affected by the pandemic. On no level is this joke built for me. I can appreciate the comedic value of it, and it amuses me greatly that it both polled in the Hottest 100 and made the ARIA top 50, but there's only so far I can go with it.

#798. Meg Mac - Roll Up Your Sleeves (#24, 2014)

78th of 2014

When I think of this song, my mind draws back to 2023 during the AFL Brownlow Medal broadcast when they just randomly brought her on stage to sing this song (she also sung another one of her songs that'll be on this list, but I missed the start so I'm only just learning this). This might have started a new tradition because they did it again in 2024 with another artist who'll eventually appear on this list. I always see people saying they want more Australian artists to appear on the big stage and get proper exposure that's so often reserved for international stars and I agree, but then as soon as it happens you're just met with endless complaints about why some obscure singer is hogging up time. I kind of wish those two factions would dish it out together. I wish I could remember the timeline a little better because it's very possible that I had either just ranked this song on my list, or was just about to, so the timing of having it thrusted upon me would be amusing.

This isn't Meg Mac's highest placing Hottest 100 entry, or highest charting, but it's probably endured as her biggest hit at this point. It makes sense really. It's got all those hallmarks of esteem and grandeur. All those little chorus hooks for everyone to fight over what their favourite one is. At this stage I just wasn't fully convinced. I feel like there's too much focus on that piano melody and it stops everything else in its tracks while it's happening. The momentum does arrive towards the end of the song but I'm just never engaged on the way there. Also it's very funny that the song has the lyric 'he is not fancy, he just wears black', as if that isn't 80% of all Meg Mac photo shoots.

#797. RÜFÜS DU SOL - Like An Animal (#28, 2015)

77th of 2015

With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to say that RÜFÜS DU SOL's music has developed quite a bit over the course of a decade or so. Mostly it just sounds bigger, befitting of the bigger venues they're playing. It's not a straight line of course. I'm still avoiding mentioning of a certain song from this album that didn't poll under normal circumstances. On the other hand, we are looking at a time capsule of a moment when this was the slightly more idealised version of their sound. I just can't imagine them making something like "Like An Animal" again.

I can't think of another song of theirs that signposts itself for being as lightweight as this one. The high pitched cooing and breezy synths set a pace that never really changes. After that, I feel like it suffers a bit from a lack of personality. So much focus is put on the title lyric, but it never says anything of substance. Maybe they could have picked an actual animal? There's almost nothing in the lyrics to play into the theme, apart from maybe being 'on a hunt' and you can 'hear me calling'. I'm not saying that their lyrics are of utmost importance, and I can't pretend that there's much brilliant insight in the rest of their entries. But an empty simile just feels so much more draining than run of the mill lyrics.

#796. Drake (feat Wizkid & Kyla) - One Dance (#31, 2016)

82nd of 2016

Every now and then, the sheer mechanical nature of music's pecking order gets itself exposed to a wider number of individuals than usual, and the results are rarely flattering. It's largely a streaming era phenomenon but the principles of it have been in place for a long time. Relevant in this case is that popular artists have a certain expected reach when they promote a new song. If that artist reaches a high enough threshold, they'll start topping the chart with regularity. The result of every individual music fan listening to whatever they will, and the one who covers the most ground will win out. Possibly, they'll do it over, and over again because they've become a bigger part of their success than the songs themselves.

"One Dance" was the song that truly signalled that we were living in Drake's world. As a lead artist, it was his first #1 hit in the US, UK and Australia, after his previous single was unlucky to miss out everywhere, we will get to that one someday. Even so, that song would've just been a small blip by comparison, because "One Dance" just ruled the roost for months on end. In the UK, it was #1 for 15 consecutive weeks and fell just shy of breaking the all-time record. This is all while being met with confused puzzlement at the whole thing. "One Dance" is not a song that aims for spectacle, it aims for likeable, enough so that it might not be obsessed over in the greater scheme of things, but when the charts are added up, it's once again the song on the most people's playlists. It's arguably Drake's biggest hit to date, and in case you were wondering, no number of events transpiring alongside a certain other rapper in 2024 have clipped its wings. It still goes along in its merry way, getting streamed a million times a day on Spotify. Until we ship things off to a new platform, it's been decided that "One Dance" is a natural part of life, and even if we do move elsewhere, it'll probably find its way back in anyway.

I generally avoid talking about this song because it's a discourse I'm not very interested in adding to. Once you've seen a song's success blamed as a catalyst for Brexit (the vote happened in in the middle of its chart reign), it's hard to want to chime in and offer any views that line up with that mindset. If you're willing to meet Drake at his level, it's a fairly standard dancehall song. There are some nice hooks here and there. Wizkid & Kyla both feel like they're part of the tapestry rather than vital voices, which is unfortunate, but at least Wizkid has had a lot of success on his own afterwards. Kyla really is part of the tapestry though as it's just a sample of a very minor hit of hers from 2008. That's the kind of crate digging that a chart nerd can get behind.

I was never super convinced by the whole thing, but I never really got bothered by the success. I chose to look at it optimistically as a sign of the changing tides, where Drake had previously put out a lot of good music that never charted especially well here (Drake has 83 top 50 hits in Australia, "One Dance" is his 7th chronologically). So there was a new avenue to have some potentially great stuff dominating the charts. What we actually got 9 years on...well at least there's some enthusiasm to be found, and an appreciation for how well the Hottest 100 filters it down.

#805-#801

#805. Bring Me The Horizon - True Friends (#99, 2015)

79th of 2015

For most artists, getting a #1 album represents the peak of their popularity, or alternatively, the capitalisation that comes after the spiritual peak. Bring Me The Horizon are a strange case in Australia where it's probably more accurate to say that they got successively more popular with each album and only really peaked in 2015 when they already had three #1 albums. It's accurate but a bit of a misnomer at the same time. They first hit #1 in 2010 with their album that has a very long title. They broke the record for the lowest ever sales managed by a #1 album, but they outsold everyone else and that's all they needed to do. Commiserations to The Script who were #2 that week which is the only time they've ever been that high on the ARIA Chart. Bring Me The Horizon scored another #1 album in 2013, which was a little less surprising by then, and it houses two songs I'll eventually write about. That album, "Sempiternal" had some surprising longevity though, and set them up in 2015 for "That's The Spirit" to go to #1, and uncharacteristically achieve Platinum status. As an aside, at this point they still hadn't even gone to #1 in their native UK. In contrast to a certain Abingdon band I'll eventually write about, they just got everything right in regard to timing in Australia.

Let's ignore "maybe" (#826) as it's not really their song, but if you told me that we'd go close to a decade on at the time and I wouldn't find another new Bring Me The Horizon song to put below this, I'd be a little surprised. They have a certain haphazard approach where you never really know what you're going to get. This one isn't even that crazy, all things considered. It's just a song I cannot lend out my full interest and consideration into. It's that title lyric with its twist on the idiom that's too plain to make you take it seriously. I hear 'true friends stab you in the front', and aside from losing the slight double entendre (unless people refer to their chest/stomach region as their 'front'?), it just makes me think of face stabs in "Team Fortress 2". Bring Me The Horizon strike me as the kind of people who might be aware of that reference, so maybe that's where they got it from. They've probably had dumber lyrics than that, but it's given such focus that I can't help but be taken out of it.

#804. FISHER - Freaks (#80, 2020)

76th of 2020

I'm pretty confident in saying that FISHER's Hottest 100 fortunes peaked immediately, and they seemed to be declining in the years that followed. This entry in 2020 has all the hallmarks of being his last entry except he continued to poll year after year, 7 in a row. With a couple of exceptions, it often feels like the FISHER fervour goes completely under my nose. There must be a lot of people just politely enjoying his music and voting for it without making a big deal about it. That seems like the demographic he's trying to hit.

I won't pretend to not be susceptible to the formula but this song does put me in a bit of a bind to talk about. The drops in here aren't extremely different to each other and lyrically it tops out at three instances of the same 7 words. It's probably a song about partying but it is admittedly funny to consider it a song about foot fetishes. 'Shoes come off, and freaks come out', that's the whole thing, make up your own mind. I don't know if these are the same freaks that come out for the mighty trumpet. Hard to see it as anything other than the most redundant FISHER entry.

#803. Vance Joy - First Time (#50, 2014)

79th of 2014

This is the 5th Vance Joy song I'm ranking in the 800s. The side effect to this is that no matter how varied my opinions may be across his discography, we're getting a whole big helping of 'well I'd say it's pretty good but I do have this slight problem'. Jumping backwards and forwards through his discography just so I can keep saying the same thing over and over again.

Well it's mainly this song that elicits the reaction. Actually there's two of those problems here and they're not very interesting. Firstly it's the very undercooked bridge. It all just feels like he left a gap for it but never got around to putting anything there. The other thing is that the cracking in his voice reaches a critical mass here and the end result is a lot of goat noises. In the large pantheon of Vance Joy songs about getting laid, it's definitely one of the catchier ones. He doesn't waste any time kicking into gear which at the very least makes it harder to dread.

#802. PNAU (feat Kira Divine & Marques Toliver) - Solid Gold (#36, 2019)

75th of 2019

This entry finally allows me to divulge the fact that Kira Divine is singing on all of PNAU's entries. It's one of those things that feel like a holdover from a previous era (that PNAU are very much from). It just seems so crazy that the woman who sung on their two biggest hits (by a mile) and is all over the music videos got no credit for it. Of course this song wasn't nearly as big so it's a bit like when someone links the original source of their hit tweet in the replies, no one's seeing it.

This song is probably better than I think to give it credit. Whenever it starts and we're greeted by Marques Toliver's verses, my Chainsmokers alarm goes blaring. It's as if they invented a very specific recipe for having hit songs in the last few years and now more artists are trying to see if it works for them. Just the whole song sitting in cruise control so we get through this unexciting guy's story about someone he knows. I also have to once again append to a post on the day to note that Kira Divine just released a new EP today and Marques Toliver is on three of the songs.

Kira definitely fits the assignment much better and is a ray of light when she gets to take over. Not the best of hooks, it feels like the title is being sung multiple times but it's actually a couple of phrases that sound like it, not sure if the whole thing is fully thought out. It's at its best when she's singing in time with the pulsing of the beat. They know they're onto something when you get surprised by a double chorus at the end, it's very satisfying.

#801. BENEE - Beach Boy (#81, 2022)

82nd of 2022

This is the first of a handful of times that BENEE is going to appear on the list. Her most famous song will not be doing that, sometimes things don't just work out the way they feel like they're supposed to. It works out for me though, as not being tremendously into "Supalonely" while being quite content with what we did end up getting.

We've got to start somewhere and we're going straight to the end of the line. "Beach Boy" is a weird one for me. For most of her career up to this point, she pretty much worked with one producer, Josh Fountain from the NZ band Leisure. It was fairly lucrative and I can't argue with the results. "Beach Boy" is her first Hottest 100 entry that wasn't produced by him. Instead she went to Greg Kurstin, which is certainly a high profile upgrade (he's had a hand in at least 4 more entries I'll be talking about, as well as plenty more in the years prior), but I'm less convinced it works. It feels like a half-hearted recreation of what her music used to sound like. The chill vibe is there, but there's less flavour to go along with it.

I'm not fully convinced by what BENEE's bringing to the table either. The whole song seems to be built on the fact that 'beach' sounds like 'bitch' and she uses the two words interchangeably, like she's trying to hide some sort of plausible deniability on some pretty tame profanity. It's mildly amusing that if I look up BENEE in my music library, I'm always going to see "Ebeneezer Goode" by The Shamen, a song with similar aspirations.

#810-#806

#810. John Butler Trio - Only One (#87, 2013)

86th of 2013

If you go from 2001 to 2010, you've got 15 helpings of the John Butler Trio. They had a level of success that seemed unstoppable, with a fair amount of crossover power as well, consistently churning out moderately sized hits and monster album sales. I guess things moved on after that. triple j brought in a whole lot of new listeners in the 2010s and they were interested in finding their own new generation of stars. This is the only John Butler Trio entry after 2010 and it only snuck in at the bottom of the list. Somehow I wrote this entire paragraph without even thinking to make an "Only One" pun until just now.

I don't know if anyone else had this experience, but I remember growing accustomed to the JBT line up from when I started listening to triple j and it felt a bit sad when it changed up on the next album. I eventually found out that this is a very typical turn of affairs, the average John Butler Trio member who is not John Butler lasts for about one album cycle and sometimes not even that. I guess I just felt slightly betrayed when I no longer recognised the other guys in the music videos, but then maybe even more when they released "April Uprising", an album with a lion on the front cover and the Brisbane Lions went on to miss finals for 9 years in a row starting after that.

I can't say for sure how much of the sonic shift that happens across their discography goes down to the shifting band or rather just John Butler's shifting creative spark. We're a long way from "Better Than", and an even longer way from "Betterman". I cannot in good conscience say that this sounds like standard John Butler Trio business, because the only thing I hear in this song is the steel drums, they just completely dominate anything else that's pushing to be noticed. It makes for a perfectly serviceable track, just one that's hard to get excited about.

#809. Billie Eilish - when the party's over (#8, 2018)

83rd of 2018

Billie Eilish has gotten so popular over the years that it's very difficult to decide which singles need the most significance ascribed to them. She's the kind of artist with a following that insists on digging deep. She's got nothing short of 9 digit play counts across all three of her albums and plenty of cuts that have long surpassed the average shelf life of contemporary hits. I look at "when the party's over" and feel like I have to treat it as sacred to some degree, because in many places it launched her career to a new level, but I look back on it now as just another step on her inevitable conquering.

I'm probably being influenced by other parts of the world on this. In both the US and the UK, this song was her first top 40 hit. In Australia, it wasn't even her highest charting song in 2018, as another song she polled (and thus I will write about) charted higher about 6 months before this one. That particular song has also long since outlasted "when the party's over" on a global scale and is her most streamed song ever now (though I would not count out "BIRDS OF A FEATHER" one day catching up with the pace it's at). Maybe "when the party's over" was just cashing in the cheque on that previous single and lapping up its kudos. Sometimes timing is everything and it's why I'm always a little skeptical to just take chart positions to heart.

But maybe the real reason why I tackle these questions with regard to "when the party's over" is because I've never really seen the spectacle with this one. Habitually I find myself pitting my own perspective against the average person, where the different things I've encountered lead me to arriving at a different opinion on the confluence. I don't think that's quite the case on this one though. On some level I actually do get it. The song sets a mood, it's sparse, it paints a very clear picture in its lyrics. I suppose I just don't find myself feeling the resolution, if there even is one. I think the repetition on the hook tips too far into a sort of nauseating novelty that stops it from hitting right. I don't feel like the additional verses after the first one do anything to give it more gravitas. It's just a relatively pleasant song I don't find myself ever wanting to put on.

#808. Luude (feat Colin Hay) - Down Under (#65, 2021)

84th of 2021

I'm surprised I haven't spoken much about sampling yet, if there's any place to do it, it's the bottom end of the list when we need to dish out all the uninspired ones. It's one of those frustrating things when you've been in too deep with knowing music past and present, a whole lot of songs that might have sounded fresh and exciting when you were younger, all of a sudden sound trite and obvious. If I heard something like "Hip Hop Is Dead" by Nas nowadays, would I dig the sound of it or would I scoff at the basic Iron Butterfly sample?

I guess that deep down, you want musicians to impress you with their crate-digging. It implies passion, knowledge, and a desire to deliver the best to their audience. Something that's often taken for granted is the fact that musicians pretty much always do have all of these traits. They're in the business because they love music. On the other hand, it is a business, and they've got bills to pay, so it's generally a lot easier to go for mass appeal, sometimes in the most shameless way.

I don't think that Luude is a hack musician. He's been at it for quite a long time now, and the most disparaging thing I can say is that 2017's "Paradise" sounds suspiciously akin to popular trends of its time. He did however have some runaway success with this single, and it started a pattern of seemingly trying to re-capture the magic to diminishing returns. He seems to have stopped doing that now though. There are only so many times you can be intrigued by the prospect of 'What if that song you've known forever had a drop?'.

Irrespective of what he specifically did with it, this release bothered me initially. I have a lot of admiration for Men At Work. They did a lot in paving the way for other Australian artists to hit it big overseas in the early '80s, and they had quite a handful of hits to boot. I don't know whether it's our own doing or if we're being influenced by America, but you wouldn't know any of this by cultural observation. It just feels like their entire legacy is frequently simplified to just "Down Under", a song that feels more like a novelty than anything else at this point. As something of an Australian myself, I just get sick of seeing this song come up over and over again. Behind the funny Vegemite sandwich song is a really tight collection of hits. "Overkill" is one of my favourite songs of all time, at least it has that one episode of "Scrubs". Still, I hear the chorus of "Dr. Heckyll & Mr. Jive" and think that it could easily pass as a song by XTC, another outrageously underrated band. Colin Hay has a similar low register to Andy Partridge.

It's pretty cool too that Colin Hay actually re-recorded his vocals for this version. It makes it feel more like a mutual honour than a joke. Amazingly this won't be the only time he shows up on this list, and the next time is probably with even more reverence. Nothing but the best for the king I suppose. As far as this goes though, it's hard to get too much excitement out of a relatively faithful (if over-the-top) remake of a very overplayed song. I think Luude has enough ideas of his own to justify it, and given the option I'd probably choose to listen to this over the original most days, I'm just always disappointed to see our reference pools shrunk down time and time again.

#807. Tame Impala - A Girl Like You - Like A Version (#66, 2021)

83rd of 2021

I wonder if Scottish folk feel the same way I do about Men At Work with Edwyn Collins. For him it's less about erasing history as it is him never fully getting his dues in the first place. Still, he had more than a small handful of charting songs in the UK, but then brings along with him one of the harshest ratios between his 1st & 2nd most streamed songs on Spotify you can find ("A Girl Like You" beats "The Magic Piper (Of Love)" by a factor of over 100). He does have a cheat code to get out of this if you include his work with Orange Juice, but on his own he's a very prolific musician mostly known for just one song. I'll give a personal shout out to "Keep On Burning" and "Do It Again", two later career singles of his that are nearly just as catchy as the big one.

Some years ago in 2016, the Norwegian band Sløtface put out a song called "Empire Records". I love it, it's full of their typical brand of fun energy. It made me realise though that I'd never seen the movie of the same name and I felt like I was missing the context on it. I'm not really though, and they're referencing "High Fidelity" just as much (that movie I watched for the first time last year and enjoyed a lot), but it was an interesting experience. I'd previously just known the movie as being the source of how "A Girl Like You" became a big hit. If you also thought this, I'm here to tell you that it's a lie, the song was a hit first, and then they used it in the movie. I guess you could just get away with a retro sound like this in the mid '90s.

Anyhow this is just the standard Tame Impala take on the song. Generally what you get here is the sound of the original song's guitar solo but spread out so the whole thing sounds like that. It sounds fresh enough to not be a complete waste, but it does remove some of the more interesting sounds and ideas from it. I respect the choice of cover though. It's the kind of song that's just a bit too old without finding a new generation that you seem to find less and less of on Like A Version. On the other hand, it's a solid exception to my rule of not being impressed by remakes of the same song in quick succession. A couple of years after this Like A Version, Dove Cameron put out her own spin on it in a song called "Girl Like Me". It fascinates me so much because she did not have to go so hard on it. Her sampling of the main guitar riff packs more of a punch than the original, and makes this cover feel a bit lightweight by comparison.

#806. Ruel - Painkiller (#22, 2019)

76th of 2019

Unless you pay extremely close attention to this stuff, it's hard to make sense of ARIA's Single Of The Year category, a publicly voted one. Rather than the industry nominated and selected categories, this one is fairly objective as it uses ARIA's Charts from the previous 12 months (say, around October to September), and it just gets the biggest hits. To be eligible, the song has to be at most a few years old, not previously nominated for an award (although they seem to break this rule sometimes), and they can't double up on artists. That last rule can be brutal given how many eggs usually go into a single artist's basket for distributing the local hits of a given year, and they have to fill out 10 nominations somehow. The big killer too is the sales window. Any song that gets to live out the full 12 month is going to have an unassailable lead for any late bloomers, and it can result in some funny things getting nominated.

Take "Painkiller" for instance. It's Ruel's biggest hit, both now and at the time. It managed a steady run in the ARIA top 50 starting in June 2019, and lasting until the end of August. This wasn't enough to make the nominations for 2019, but come the 2020 ceremony, this song which had been absent from the top 50 for the last 15 months was nominated as objectively one of the biggest hits of the following year. It's not even the earliest nominee that year because Hilltop Hoods also had a very early bloomer, but their excuse is that it was overshadowed by the previous single in 2019. In reality, not a single one of that year's nominees were released in 2020, it was a strange year I suppose.

Whenever I think about "Painkiller", that drawn out fact is the main thing I think about. The song itself doesn't evoke very strong reactions out of me. I like what he's doing with his voice on the chorus, it gives the song some character and it's an effective hook. I'm torn on the guitar which sounds either fun or wonky at any given point. The verses are very comfortably on the rails, just passing time really. Is this enough words? I've still got 4 more Ruel songs to go.

#815-#811

#815. Vance Joy - We're Going Home (#53, 2018)

84th of 2018

This might have been my favourite Vance Joy song when I first heard it. There was nothing remarkable about it and it signposted its momentum like you're staring at a rollercoaster, but I admired the craft all the same. I think more than anything, there's a layer of warmth in it you don't get much elsewhere. Listen to the way the drums kick in on the chorus and it's just lovely.

If it was just the first minute I think I'd still rate it very highly. After that, you get all manner of attempts to spice it up and they don't land as strongly as the first one. The brittle bridge is cute, but then the song gets taken over by this need to be big and exciting again. Over time I just fell a little out of interest and had other songs of his overtake it.

#814. Ocean Alley - The Comedown (#48, 2017)

84th of 2017

Nothing says preview hit quite like this. A single entry one year, hitting the top spot the year after. That specific sequence hadn't happened since the '90s. Ocean Alley follow a similar path getting there to Lime Cordiale as well, given that they both put out an album that was largely ignored by triple j but gained a huge following that had them primed to receive votes as soon as the opportunity arose, and then even more once everyone else was on board. There must be an initial word-of-mouth spread that only eventually kneecaps a band once no one feels obligated to tell anyone about them anymore.

I can see why someone might hear this and want to spread the word. You might associate Ocean Alley with laid back reggae rock, but I don't really get that from "The Comedown". This song feels like pure "The Dark Side Of The Moon" worship (a looming Like A Version is being foreshadowed here). That combination of moody darkness surrounded by unexpected guitar riffs that take you by surprise if you have no idea what a Pink Floyd is supposed to sound like. I'd like to imagine that there's no shortage of younger music fans who have ignored the band either incidentally or intentionally but have stumbled upon music that sounds like it and loved it, with no idea that they're worshipping a new iteration of dad rock.

In theory I should be all over this but it took some time to make the connection and get anything out of it. When I first heard this, all I heard was a sluggish, empty song that never seemed interested in taking off. That and its idea of a hook was saying 'I'm so faded' and 'I'm so wasted', giving the vibe of listening to an inebriated person's ramblings, something I'm never in the interest of doing. I did come around to it a bit more over the years though. I don't agree with all the instrumental choices (I think the keys get a bit tiresome across the run time), but the bass is exceptional. It's not always easy to notice in a lot of songs but it's the glue that keeps it all together here.

#813. Thundamentals (feat Solo) - Got Love (#90, 2014)

80th of 2014

I've probably been on record as saying that the range of songs that fall under the banner of 'yeah, that's pretty decent' is some of the hardest stuff to write about. I might change my tune about that as I get further, but I will say that damning myself to writing about the same artist over and over again in quick succession is the real challenge. Every week it's another Thundamentals song I don't feel very strongly about.

This one is a bit more to my speed though. I'll refrain from starting every post with 'This is the best song I've written about so far' but you get the point. It's borderline cruise control here, just a feel good song with a nice and catchy chorus. Maybe not their strongest hook ever so it could wear out your welcome when they start the song with it and place it straight after 3 more verses, but it does what needs to be done.

It's also an early preview for Solo who gets a verse here. He's an MC for two different Australian hip-hop groups who'll make an appearance on this list. Not someone I think about very often but he does have a fairly recognisable flow that takes me back to several of his earlier songs when I hear him rapping on this. He actually gets the second verse here which is some prestige to offer to the guest artist I suppose.

#812. The Kid LAROI - THOUSAND MILES (#33, 2022)

83rd of 2022

The 2020s have not been kind to the Australian music industry. It's really boring and obvious to point at algorithms and TikTok as being responsible for muscling Australians out of our own local scene, but I've also been watching it happen for years in real time. The moment you give increased traction to those with bigger followings, it's just inevitable statistics, and before you know it, you'll have an entire generation who've grown up almost exclusively on American culture. The only Australian artists who seem able to hit it big now are the ones that get big outside of Australia.

This has treated The Kid LAROI just fine for the most part. He has one of the biggest hits of all time, eventually I might refer to the song by name. On the other hand, the international market giveth and taketh. The Kid LAROI still does reasonably well on the charts, but it almost feels like he's shackled by his international performance, so if America decides they're done with him, he won't fare much better here either.

I bring this up for "THOUSAND MILES" because it feels like the end of an era. This was a pretty big hit at the time, debuting at #4 on the ARIA Chart and sticking around for months. On the other hand, it might just be the last convincing Australian smash hit. Or at least it is on the metric that the song was released about 3 years ago and it's arguably still the most recent Australian song to spend more than 1 week in the top 10. Most since then are lucky brief gasps that suggest there's a ceiling our artists just can't reach anymore. Technically my statement isn't true, as there's another artist that ARIA consider to be Australian who had a #1 hit shortly after this (and it'll be on this list), and some may want to also claim BLACKPINK's Rosé as Australian, but both feel like technicalities that don't really represent them properly. The Kid LAROI named himself after his Indigenous Kamilaroi heritage and got his start on triple j Unearthed. Fair enough if you think his music sounds very Americanised but he's wearing his heritage for everyone to see and I think that's cool.

The song itself here goes pretty alright as well. I feel like it progresses itself in a way that lets him show off his vocal range a bit more than he usually does. I love the sorrow in his voice as it builds up to the big hook, or I'd say that except there isn't much of a hook. I guess it's a fun trick to say 'a thousand miles away' (oh and there's that Americanisation I guess) with an empty echo while the music strips back, but it just feels like cutting things off in an unsatisfying way. Like if I just ended this blurb here.

#811. Kanye West - Follow God (#87, 2019)

77th of 2019

In case you need reminding, in 2019 Kanye West made a gospel rap album. He's been known to make outlandish promises regarding his musical output and not deliver on it, but he really did do exactly what was on the docket for this one. It's provided an avenue for him to swallow up Billboard's Christian music charts and be named as the biggest Christian rap artist of the year time and time again. It all sounds like a joke, but I do think it's serious, even if filtered through Kanye's strange way of approaching most things and explaining himself.

Truth be told, this isn't an extremely radical shift for him. He's been rapping about God from the very beginning, whether on the vitally poignant "Jesus Walks", or from the same album on "Never Let Me Down" where J. Ivy inexplicably delivers a poem that feels like a sermon but is also one of the hardest verses on the whole album. He dabbles in it from time to time and often finds great inspiration in it. This won't be the last time we encounter Kanye in this mode on the list. There's reason to be optimistic with the project going in.

I'm pretty well versed in Kanye's discography up until anything after "DONDA" which I've tended to avoid. From this still fairly large subset, I'm safe in saying that "JESUS IS KING" is my least favourite of his albums. It's not a total dud but it instead feels very workmanlike. It's as if he's working on a deadline and cares more about that than quality control. Or rather, getting the bare bones done on a song and moving on without much care for what's left. You've got a lot of very short songs with few ideas to pass around. It's not all a dud mind you, songs like "Selah" and "God Is", while they don't make it to any playlists I'm in charge of, manage to jump out as fragments of what could have been a greater album. It can't go unmentioned that he even got the Clipse to re-unite and guest on a song alongside Kenny G, the maddest of Mad Libs right there. For the most part though, there's just a low ceiling of enjoyment and it doesn't marvel or intrigue me like most of his other albums. What's truly bizarre is that Kanye has had 5 #1 albums in Australia and this is the only one that spent more than one week at #1. The most enduring thing about the album for me is the Chick-fil-A lyric in "Closed On Sunday", it's not a great endorsement.

Then we've got "Follow God", the hit of the album that seems to have survived beyond the album cycle. It makes a modicum of sense that it ended up this way. In the TikTok perspective, you can play a short clip of this song and almost completely divorce it from the context of the album, just enjoy Kanye sounding relatively engaged as he raps at a consistent tempo. There's a chopped up soul sample too, I love the old Kanye. Conceptually I enjoy it but it doesn't offer a whole lot else, and it's over in less than 2 minutes. It has you thinking 'Is that it?", and Kanye's seeing the streaming number go up and figures what I'm trying to say is 'Aww yeah, that's it'.