#740-#736

#740. Skegss - Here Comes Your Man - Like A Version (#90, 2019)

67th of 2019

I don't know if I've ever seen anyone explicitly say that they like to listen to specific artists for the gimmicks they provide (or at least, not in the mainstream realm). Even when this is in the equation, it usually takes solid songwriting beneath it to justify the passion. The funny counterpoint to this is that a lack of gimmicks becomes the perfect fuel to wage war on. Without it, you don't provide haters with a valid means to understand what gravitates people. You get lumped into a hypothetical b-tier and become the subject of low-hanging observations that very easily say what everyone's been thinking. It's why if you find someone picking on the triple j sound, Skegss are always going to come up pretty quickly. All of that in mind, it's why I don't find that sort of observation to be very insightful, and it's more interesting to actually look into the fandom mindset properly. People like Skegss because they write songs that succeed at being likeable within the space they operate. Well not this time at least, must be why it's the lowest of the 9 Skegss songs I have to talk about. Will I manage to find 9 things to say? Let's start by finding out.

Alternatively, let's not talk about Skegss because it's not their song, it's one of those perennial favourites by the Pixies. I'm the wrong generation for them, but I am old enough to understand that they're a beloved band that I'm supposed to hold in reverence. Saying this now has me thinking about all the possible bands of more recent time that are carrying this candle, because as far as likely backable artists of this calibre, your volume of options has increased a lot, but I digress and apologise to Pixies fans for the slew of hypothetical bands I just compared them to.

They have a lot of songs that are viable for continued appraisal. "Where Is My Mind?" is obviously the biggest one, it's big enough that during last year's ARIA Awards, they just turned up without being announced in advance to play it, since they happened to be in the country. I was having internet troubles and didn't get to watch the whole show, but that's the only thing I remembered. Most of my favourite Pixies songs are on "Doolittle". It's got "Debaser", it's got "Monkey Gone to Heaven", it's got "Wave Of Mutilation", it's got "Hey", it's stacked. "Here Comes Your Man" is also on that album. Not one I'd call a favourite, but not a song I've got beef with either. Well, admittedly the main riff is one that I might put into the overplayed basket, but there's plenty to like elsewhere with the song's shifting dynamic range. The backing vocals from Kim Deal feel iconic as well.

When it comes to Skegss take on it, it's about as faithful as it can be. The only real difference is that they start it up with a different intro. It can't help but sound a little like "I Touch Myself", and it polled in the same year as Lime Cordiale's cover of it (#969). It gives a little surprise gratification when the riff does come in, like you're being transported to a whole different era. I think the song choice is probably the most interesting thing here even if that's a low bar. As years have gone on, triple j have gotten fairly strict about the canon of songs that can be chosen as source material. "Here Comes Your Man" falls into an odd middle ground where it's a relatively well known song, but doesn't have recency or the credentials of being a chart hit behind it, so it's a song that could probably fall astray of those rules. You'd file it under a similar box as if someone covered "The Killing Moon", because a lot of people who might otherwise totally recognise it, just wouldn't click on it in the first place because it's just not *that* omnipresent. It's the kind of selection I can get more behind, and I wish we got it more often. There's a lot of value in teaching younger generations about the classic indie songbook. It's the kind of thing that turns people into obsessives like me.

#739. KIAN - Waiting (#20, 2018)

75th of 2018

In 2008, triple j launched Unearthed High. It was a competition with a simple premise, to find the best up-and-coming bands and artists that are still in high school, and reward them with accolades and attention. At a time when triple j was still dominated by major label acts with a lot of money and promotion behind them, it was always wholesome to hear something that felt like a true underdog in the system. The winner of the competition would end up coming to triple j's studios to re-record one of their tracks and polish it up for radio rotation, but the heart was still there. I think of the first two winners, Tom Ugly & Hunting Grounds. They were tidied up but there was still an undeniable feeling of being an outsider to the system.

Something changed in the 2010s with this. You're more likely to look through the list of nominees on any given year and find some big stars in them. The Kid LAROI, Montaigne, Thelma Plum, definitely notable. Some may dispute just how much of their success was cultivated before or after this stop gap, but there was also a growing trend of artists who felt like they'd already made the big time before they'd even won it. We'll later encounter on this list, an artist who'd already landed on the soundtrack to an American film, and another who had American producers working on their debut single. The quality can still be good, but you lose the fairytale appeal where someone can truly emerge out of nowhere, connections just win out every time.

When we enter KIAN, we get to introduce a whole different kind of beast. KIAN won in 2018 for the song "Waiting". By this point, he'd already had a Hottest 100 entry the year before, performing hook duties on a Baker Boy song I'll eventually talk about. Exploring one's own solo career obviously has merits, but we're getting very loose with the definition of Unearthed at that point. We're long past the point of triple j brushing up the tracks as well. "Waiting" already had a professionally done music video (it has 5 million views on YouTube now). He also set himself apart from past winners because the song entered the Spotify chart on the very day he won, and garnered strong industry support shortly after. He got signed to EMI, and aggressive playlisting allowed the song to spend nearly 9 months in the ARIA top 50. It's still true that one of the biggest Australian hits of the last 10 years was made by a high schooler, but it's the backdrop to a Cinderella story that's a little pre-meditated.

I do like KIAN's music generally, but I couldn't help but feel the artifice of its chart run stepping considerably over normal boundaries. You get a little jealous when it doesn't feel like the song is remarkable as the numbers are making it seem. In some respects actually the Hottest 100 result puts it a little in its place for not landing higher. 5 years later, Budjerah received a similar big label push behind his song "Therapy", and that landed 1 place higher than "Waiting" did at #19, but never actually reached the ARIA top 100 at all. It really puts some perspective on the difference between a top 20 hit and a non-charter in the streaming age.

"Waiting" is an odd little song. A lot of its hooks are built on a slight betrayal of expectations. When he lands on the 'you-ou-ou-ou' hook, his delivery and the music suddenly shift and it's like you've been teleported to a different part of the song. He leaves the title drop behind a call-and-response moment that feels distant, though effective. I think the song reaches its peak on the bridge. You get an odd addition of an electric guitar that sounds far less polished than anything else in the song, but the layered vocal lines give him a chance to really belt out those key lyrics. Changing up the backing music during the last minute of the song lets the repeated backing vocals land with a different energy.

KIAN never reached these highs again, so this is the only time we get to talk about him on his own. Every now and then he'll put out another song I really like. I'm especially fond of his 2020 single "Sunbeam", which feels like a perfect pastiche of BENEE's sound to that point. I'm just a sucker for that kind of breezy guitar sound that I can't describe without using a word that's in one of those BENEE song titles I'm not yet to talk about. Something about it though, my brain just lets it in once again.

#738. Tash Sultana - Pretty Lady (#46, 2020)

68th of 2020

It wouldn't be unreasonable to say that there's a certain expected sound you get from Tash Sultana. A lot of big guitar loops that take over the whole song, sometimes for minutes at a time. It tracks that they had such a big smash into the Hottest 100 on their first EP but lowered the ceiling considerably after that, you just get tired of it after a while. With "Pretty Lady", they managed to successfully update their sound without much trade off in audience, this is their 3rd most streamed song on Spotify by a comfortable margin.

It made me wonder how the album "Terra Firma", released in 2021 fared. It was a career first ARIA #1, helped by the fact that it wasn't released on the same week as a new Eminem album like the last one was. Hottest 100 voters didn't stay on board though, with nothing making any voting impact after this first single. I guess it's easy to say that the hooks just aren't quite up to the same standard.

I wanted to listen to the album to see whether "Pretty Lady" was a misleading lead, and I don't think it is. The main thing I notice with this song is more attention given to the percussion and bass. Often times in Tash Sultana songs, you can feel the empty space between the notes, but it's a welcome change of pace here. Not quite danceable, but more work done to keep a consistent groove in place. The whole album sounds like this, and I might even put in a good word for it if not for the hour long runtime having me ready to tap out a little too early. I guess I'll have to do what mostly everyone else has done and just stick with "Pretty Lady".

#737. BENEE - Glitter (#19, 2019)

66th of 2019

It's interesting to go back to the time when this song came out. It's fairly unique in hindsight. "Glitter" would be surpassed quite soon after by "Supalonely", but it was a major breakout hit for BENEE due to going viral on TikTok. It's one of those totally arbitrary ones where suddenly every influencer and then some, is required to make a video that's exactly the same as every other one, I assume so it can just keep popping up on For You pages. They call it a challenge as if it's remotely difficult. The real challenge for me is to try and sit through compilation videos like this. You can't turn the sound off, and you can't look away from the screen. See if the constant mugging, or having to hear the same 15 seconds of one song over and over again is what gets you to tap out. I genuinely just can't do it.

I'm not in complete denial of the appeal of TikTok but the ways that it interacts with music charts just feels so counter intuitive. Also unlocking the achievement of virality on TikTok for any song feels like it's to be bestowed onto the lucky few, but over the years it just seems like every major star who's still viable always manages to get something to click on every album cycle. Especially if they're Drake. Half-hearted challenges like these just reek of artifice. The hint is usually when the videos have little to no intrinsic link to the song. I think about "Nirvanna The Band The Show", a show that constantly gets away with outrageous usage of copyrighted material under the clause that it's so vital to the story they're trying to tell that there's no way it could be done with any other material. Seriously, there's an episode where they're just straight up filming a screening of "The Force Awakens", and play the famous John Williams score without ever having to pay Disney for it at all. Stuff like this, or the Mannequin Challenge using "Black Beatles" (#150 in the 2016 Hottest 100), just feels too convenient as vehicles for whatever hit song was desired at the time.

I got off topic there, but the unique thing about this song is that this all happened to it and it was a hit...but only in Australia and New Zealand. Something that's been written about a lot over the years is the way that TikTok's algorithm does not region-gate, and so every country (English speaking at least, I assume) gets very similar content fed to them, breaking apart those country-by-country quirks the charts always served up. The "Glitter" situation seemed natural at the time, but then following that it felt like it almost never happened again. Future instances of local hits here seem to almost always come with some clear international attention. It's possible in the case of "Glitter", it's a misnomer due to the fact that the song had already gotten some chart attention in these two countries, and so its minor (on the grand scale) virality could only be measured in countries where BENEE had some notoriety. On the other hand, it also makes me perceive this as one of the last hold outs for this kind of isolated popularity. TikTok didn't just uproot everything overnight, but it's been about 6 years now, so it's a way of life for a significant chunk of music fans now.

Whether it's organic or not, the presentation of hit songs nowadays as random incidents does invite a different kind of scrutiny. When the difference between a massive hit and absolutely nothing can be flicked out of nowhere at any time, it almost makes you want to be madder. A bad hit song could easily have just fluttered away and did nothing. If you're aware of it, you also get to live in fear that it's eventually going to be uncovered. At least there's generally a time limit for the Hottest 100.

"Glitter" is one of the lucky ones. I suspect it was always destined to poll in 2019, but with the timing on its side, it became BENEE's highest charting entry, and to date it still is. "Supalonely" on the other hand, was a touch too late and got the "Sweet Disposition" treatment by landing at #126. Two months later it was a top 10 hit. As it happened though, while a vote is a vote, it just felt like "Glitter" got an unfair advantage in the moment to have that machine behind it.

I guess I felt bothered too at the time because it was probably my least favourite song she'd put out by this point. I can't pinpoint it to any exact reason because I think anyone listening to it would be right to say that it totally sounds like all her other stuff. If there's anything I want to point out in particular, it's the main music loop that doesn't really change or have the same dynamic range as those other songs. The hook isn't quite as sticky either. On the positive, I do appreciate that she's still playing around with her vocal runs, and the random backing vocals on the last chorus ('late now!') are a highlight for sure. Just wish there was a bit more to chew on.

#736. Central Cee - Doja (#39, 2022)

74th of 2022

I don't dislike Central Cee. This feels like a controversial opinion because most of the time when he comes up, it's with this level of derision that he's not just a subpar MC, but that he's so bad that anything short of absolute disdain for literally everything he's ever made is an act of rebellion. That sort of dismissal is so unproductive and boring and yet I so rarely see it challenged. I've been frightened for months that I have to publish this post. There's always a good reason too, usually a dodgy lyric, a dodgy sample...or maybe both. Foreshadowing is a literary device in which a storyteller gives an advance hint of what is to come later in the story.

On the whole I feel like he's a charismatic rapper. His distinctive voice makes him stand out, and I guess I'm interested in what he has to say as well. He doesn't always paint himself in the best light. I think of a song like "Commitment Issues", where he's trying to be romantic but can't stop telling on himself. It reaches such absurd extremes where it's impossible to take any of it seriously. No one's piling on "It Wasn't Me" levels of bad behaviour and playing it straight. No one's calling their girlfriend a b*tch while trying to get us on their side. Foreshadowing is a literary device in which a storyteller gives an advance hint of what is to come later in the story.

Central Cee has managed to break boundaries in his sub-genre thanks to savvy marketing. It's no longer a novelty to see him land on the Billboard Hot 100 on the strength of his own following, rather than the kinds of one-off crossover hits that usually happen (think "Written In The Stars" or "Don't Rush"). It's something he's even leaned into in his music. On the collaborative EP he put out with Dave, the song "UK Rap" has a hook of 'She don't listen to UK rap if it ain't Dave or Cench'. If you say it enough, more people will have it ingrained into them. It's also not unusual to see his music on the otherwise very US-centric 'RapCaviar' playlist on Spotify, and there was that time he got a big budget music video with Lyrical Lemonade, with a song that says 'UK rap or UK drill, gotta mention my name if you talk 'bout the genre'. Foreshadowing is a literary device in which a storyteller gives an advance hint of what is to come later in the story.

I think sometimes when I'm writing these things, I leave out a lot of assumed knowledge that might not be clear to everyone reading this. Maybe you've never even heard of these songs. Maybe you have heard them but don't keep track of names all the time. I'll be straight with you now. This is the 105 second rap song that uses a sped up sample of "Let Me Blow Ya Mind" by Eve and Gwen Stefani, with the opening lyric that hits you like a ton of bricks to say 'How can I be homophobic, my b*tch is gay'. That's what we're dealing with here. Just that one line is enough to derail his entire career. Well it's maybe that, the notion of ruining the sample, the strange decision to name the song after Doja Cat, and the fact that this amounts to a line where he admits his attraction to her in a very embarrassing lyric.

Beyond Central Cee, I've grown weary of what feels like surface level music criticism. Specifically the way that certain songs act as honey traps for these. It always feels incredibly predictable and lacks any interesting nuance. Like there's this warped perception of what good and bad means, and it's the existence of specific hallmarks that signpost them. A song can't be bad unless its badness is something that can be immediately understood on the first listen, or just by exposing its broken gimmick. You can always figure out exactly when someone's stopped listening to new music because of what song they hold onto as the emperor of bad music. Every now and then I'll still hear Lil Pump's 2017 single "Gucci Gang" used as an example of what's wrong with music now. Some people are still fuming about being told to put a ring on it, and maybe we're bracing for a decade to come where "APT." is an insult to music. It all feels like it comes from a mentality where whatever the hallmark of good music is, be it singing prowess, emotional lyrics, sick riffs or whatever, every song has to be assessed as if it is trying to accomplish that. It's acting as if "Doja" is Cench's attempt to make "Shook Ones Pt. 2" or "Paid In Full", and just failed on a catastrophic level. Sometimes it's just not that deep, and it doesn't have to be.

I just think it's funny. That opening lyric is a classic bit of comedic irony. Saying one thing in support of your character, but simultaneously being so oblivious as to paint yourself in an even worse light. It's just his entire bit distilled into 4 seconds. It might not be the best bit, but it's just not worth the reaction it seems to get. It's not my favourite bit either, but I'll admit I've grown to be very influenced by absurdist humour. In many cases, it's not necessarily the joke itself that's funny, but imagining the extensive sequence of events that led to me hearing the joke. It's probably just virality bait, but I just cannot believe that this was how he, or his label, decided to introduce himself to America. Me writing 6 paragraphs in defence of "Doja" is a similar kind of ridiculous parody of myself.

#745-#741

#745. Halsey - You should be sad (#19, 2020)

70th of 2020

Back in 2009, Lily Allen released the song "Not Fair". It's a song with a light country twinge that didn't feel especially out of place. Just another hit for an artist on a bit of a run. In Australia it may have been even more than that, and there's an argument to be made that it was her biggest hit. In Hottest 100 terms it certainly is, landing up at #8. I'm drawing a direct parallel to this Halsey song, a country pop song that was particularly popular in Australia, and is in Hottest 100 terms their biggest hit. It seems arbitrary that Australia ticked the box best, but it makes sense. America loves country music, but it's very rigid. The ruling power of gatekeepers and box filers makes it difficult to get away with it outside of artists' typical field of play. At the moment, Chappell Roan's country-tinged single "The Giver" is not getting a great run because it's not the right kind of country for country radio. The UK is generally more open to different things but country has always been a tough sell. Even now when it's been more normalised as a pop template, there's still a feeling of hesitation towards it, like a generation of music fans are just wired to reject it. Australia lands in the middle of it all and is just right for this sort of thing.

Sometimes you can predict the last hurrah as it's happening. I would be very surprised if anyone predicted 5 years ago that "You should be sad" would be Halsey's last ARIA top 50 hit as a lead artist. They had a couple more entries after it, collaborating with Marshmello and then the late Juice WRLD, and maybe there's still time to stay the course, but as it is, Halsey's last top 50 entry is closer to their first one than to present. The Hottest 100 doesn't always play by these rules though, so of our remaining Halsey entries to be seen here, one of them is from 2021.

For this particular purpose Halsey is lucky, a star even, that they got this song out when they did. Lately there's been such a rise in the use of country music as a coat of pop music paint that the cynicism of it just drips through. It's made worse when it seemingly tends to come from a perspective that sees it as a multi-step template. Think of every typical country music motif you can think of that you'd normally make fun of and play it straight. Halsey wins again in that regard by not going overboard. Outside of the music video, the song isn't really tethered to what it sounds like. It's just a particularly scathing breakup song. Okay maybe that is pretty standard country music fare but I don't think it owns exclusive rights.

I don't think the lyrics are the high point here though. I'm not complaining about the curse word, I think that works fine and Halsey has a good cadence to pull it off this time. I'm just getting myself into English teacher mode and seeing the monster pile of redundant phrases. Just the first verse has 8 whole lines that can be summed as 'I'm not mad but you need to know this'. It's nothing compared to the chorus though, just landing with the worst thud when it rhymes 'sad' with 'mad'. I feel the same way about P!nk's revelation that someone is just like a pill, except that they make her ill. Maybe there's a song I can't think of in this moment that pulls off this grade school lyric construction, but it really puts a hamper in the foot tappable prospects.

#744. The Cat Empire - Brighter Than Gold (#89, 2013)

80th of 2013

I always thought The Cat Empire was a cool name. There's something neat about the silly image of it. Anyhow, I retracted my thought when I saw the album cover for "Steal the Light" which I've forced upon you now. I can appreciate that their weapons are their instruments but the whole thing is just very ugly on so many levels. As for The Cat Empire appearing here, I'm Moe the bartender in that 2000s era Simpsons episode, baffled at how they just keep getting in here. This is the last time though, surely.

The stop gap before this album was 2010's "Cinema". It landed two songs in the top 200 section but nothing in the top 100, a first time for the band. In hindsight, it's easy to look at "Falling" and "Feeling's Gone" and say that while they're pretty solid, there's not a lot to write home about. If The Cat Empire wanted to make it back onto the edge of the spotlight, they'd need to do what they do best. They needed to make a song that's endearingly irritating, and they succeeded when they made "Brighter Than Gold".

If you're like me, the most important thing you're going to remember about this song is the way Felix (the Cat Empire guy) layers his voice along with the backing vocals into this distracting mess. In hindsight, it's not so bad but on the radio it always sounded like some aggressive auto-tune work going on. Whatever's going on there, it definitely stands out in a way that a lot of their recent singles weren't. The album's title track also came relatively close to polling though, that one's also pretty solid, sounding like their older material. Really it's making me think that a lot of "Brighter Than Gold" fans forgot to come in and vote, "Wolves (#884) managed to land higher than it and it doesn't make much sense. I should mention that there's also a lot of song here that isn't the chorus. I don't find the verses very engaging, but when they get into spontaneous jam session in the second half, I'm pretty into it.

#743. Angus & Julia Stone - Chateau (#3, 2017)

75th of 2017

So much of music consumption nowadays is incidental. When it was all done by purchase, you can have your speculation on the merits of exposure and coercion, but it's very largely with intent. Really in the age of streaming, some of the most intent-driven actions are skips. That's data we're not privy to, but I'd be very interested to see what it looks like, and whether it evolves in a meaningful or interesting way. I try not to partake in much of the discourse, but it'd look a lot different if chart climbs we're told to believe are natural are accompanied by a big spike in skips. Given that 30 seconds of listening is enough to count as a play, you can also easily imagine a new concern, the fraction of ill-gotten streams due to skips coming 1-10 seconds too late.

The reason I bring all of this up is because it also has me thinking about the sound of a streaming hit. Back when it was a budding paradigm shift, there would be a lot of pet theories about how it came about. Why one song would sell well but stream poorly, and another vice versa. Are some streaming hits (especially the more unassuming ones) just lucky to get swept up in the moment. The alternative perspective is that we've removed a lot of gatekeepers, and we're just seeing a natural democratic process acted out. You wonder if there's a secret sauce baked into some of these songs that makes people inevitably respond to it in droves. I think about how often times you'd see a Twitter poll running for 24 hours. Even if it keeps receiving a steady influx of votes for that entire period, short of deliberate intervention, the general proportions of the vote will show themselves in a matter of minutes. Once you have that small sample, everyone else falls quickly in line with it, even if they are individually acting on their own accord.

Obviously though, this doesn't really hold up to that same scrutiny with music streaming. When you witness so many hits or 'misses' switch their role with no real provocation, you get inevitably distracted by how arbitrary it all feels. When so little of the music I'm into nowadays makes its way onto the charts, it's not that they're bad, it's just that there's so much music out there that what are the odds that the best music is what's being celebrated out there? It's just not likely. Even still, you just get so many weird cases. Back in 2014, WALK THE MOON's new single "Shut Up and Dance" was a surprise streaming hit, getting so many streams except that no one was buying it. Months later and the script was flipped, suddenly it was selling super well, but its streams couldn't quite live up to that and held it back from charting higher week on week. I make no exaggeration when I say that I've seen these two components flip their prominence on this song at least 3 more times after this. It's obviously a popular song that sounds like a hit, but the weird pace in which it converted that reality still makes it feel like a gatekeeper had to give it the go-ahead. But if there's anything to take away from these scenarios, it's that it's impossible to justify disparaging anything for not being a hit. They simply just haven't had their WALK THE MOON moment yet.

"Chateau" is not entirely a song that this applies to. Given how scant the situation is nowadays, you might be surprised to know that this song managed to make an impression on Australia's Spotify chart on the week it was released. Again, given that this is built on first impressions, I want to know how much of it is successful marketing as opposed to the natural virality of a hit song, but I digress. Whether by accident or design, "Chateau" had the special sauce and really converted itself into a major hit single, with numbers not too far off that of "Big Jet Plane". If you want to throw in an argument about those streams not amounting to any genuine connection, then simply look at its placement in the 2017 Hottest 100. A #3 finish is enough to say that people liked it. Angus & Julia Stone released their first proper album since then last year, made no Hottest 100 impact, and the biggest singles are struggling to match the streaming numbers on the deepest cuts from 2017's "Snow". Was the magic gone or did nobody hear it?

I just feel like with a song like "Chateau", it's incredibly easy to imagine it not being a hit. I don't foresee a scenario where it turned up on a later album and its special sauce makes it go gangbusters. It's so easy to say this because we've seen this play out already. I return to mentioning the original Lady of the Sunshine version of "Big Jet Plane" that received very little attention before or after it was made into a hit. If you think that they sound different enough to justify that, then fair enough, but I'm also always thinking back to 2022, when two near identical versions of the song "Miss You" came out around the same time, and it was the major label version that suspiciously usurped the independent one after a fairly even start.

So while I think that "Chateau" is a reasonably likeable song, more than pretty much anything else at its threshold, I just can't help but feel distracted by how arbitrary its success feels. Many hit songs announce themselves in a way that nothing could ever take their place, but this vague bit of escapism just never feels like it's stepping into the spotlight. You often hear talk of how some songs could only be made and be a hit in a certain time period, or the opposite where they could be made and be a hit in any time period. "Chateau" feels like a song that could be made in any time period, but really only could be a hit in this very specific late 2010s window. 5 years before or after and it's got no chance. They caught lightning in a bottle.

#742. British India - Suddenly (#76, 2015)

72nd of 2015

I don't know if anyone else has the feeling of growing up with an artist. It can be from being the same age as them and having the same vague experiences in life, and you'd imagine it builds an unrivalled bond. The guys in British India aren't really my age, but as someone who started listening to triple j right when they got their big break, I had that feeling echo through all the same.

It's May 2007. I've just experienced what feels like a near-death experience on a high school camp because of poorly explained intel, and I've tuned into JTV Saturday to see a new band emerge on the screen. The name British India has me curious. Which is it? I struggle to determine from watching the music video. They're Australian as it were, and their song "Tie Up My Hands" is commencing what will eventually be a charge to the #1 spot on this highly sought-after (by me) chart. Compared to what's usually getting to the top spot, it's quaint, but likeable. It kicks off what will be a lengthy career of making hits specifically to the triple j market that never quite hit the big time. There are some borderline cases, "Run The Red Light" had a lucky sales week to get into the ARIA top 50, and then much later, "I Can Make You Love Me" seemed to take them to a new level, scoring Gold sales without streams being added, fairly impressive for a song that peaked at #70.

We're at the back end of things, but from 2007 to 2015, British India were usually good for a Hottest 100 entry or two each year. In that respect, "Suddenly" is the swan song. It seems to endure as one of their most popular songs to this day, but with how it struggled to place much higher than their recent entries still, you can tell the writing is on the wall. In 2016 they made it to #194 with "I Thought We Knew Each Other", a song I rate quite highly, and it's been nothing since. Actually they went 7 whole years without releasing anything at all. They broke the silence last year with a single called "Threshold American", which they've also been touring. I feel like I wouldn't name a tour after a song that makes it sound like they're touring a different country, but I guess that's just British India's brand now. If you're after that raucous energy, as one of the few people who've heard that new song, I can say they've still got it.

I never really felt like they had it on this song though. I always found the popularity a little puzzling as I could never figure out what made this song in particular stand out or warrant attention. It has some similarities to "I Can Make You Love Me", but with none of the intensity that made that song click. British India have never been shy about utilising do-do's & whoa-oh's to get attention, but this feels like it doesn't have enough else to go with it.

#741. Glass Animals - Heat Waves (#1, 2020)

69th of 2020

Every so often following the ARIA Charts, I'll think I have a good grasp of what's capable of being done, until a new song comes along and practically re-writes the book of what the limits are. They'll manage a kind of longevity that has you in disbelief as all prior experience leads you to believe it shouldn't still be as high as it is. Once it was "I Gotta Feeling" by The Black Eyed Peas. Then it was "Shape Of You" by Ed Sheeran. The Weeknd's "Blinding Lights" (#786) had a short turn, but it was merely a prelude to the reigning champion, "Heat Waves" by Glass Animals.

It's really difficult to explain just how much of a freakish outlier this song became. For many years, it felt like there was a soft cap on just how long a song could last in the top 10. You could get to about 22 weeks, and maybe a few more but that was the absolute limit. A couple of songs started to move past 30 in the late 2010s, and one song that'll appear on this list set a new benchmark when it got to 41 weeks, most of them at #1. The next big song to come along was "Heat Waves", and it managed 88 weeks in the top 10. I can't call this setting a new standard because it's still so far ahead of everything that's come along since. Another song that'll appear in this list eventually made it to 53 weeks, but you could add on Ed Sheeran's 24 weeks with "Shape Of You" to that and still need to find some change if you want to be on speaking terms with Glass Animals. In the time since I wrote this, Benson Boone has taken second place and is hitting 61 weeks today. Might have some gas in the tank too but he's starting to slip. If that's still not enough in the degrees of taking everything way too far, "Heat Waves" became a #1 hit in early 2021, a cozy 6 week reign that could've been longer if not for another song that eventually will appear in this list. One year later in 2022 it inexplicably caught some more headwind and returned for another 5 weeks at #1. If not for a single week of misfortune when a short lived Ed Sheeran debut pushed it down to #11 in late 2021, it would have never even left the top 10 between those two stints. It would end up one week short of spending an entire 3 consecutive years in the ARIA top 50. Recent trends I've observed suggest less stagnancy in the chart to allow for these kinds of runs, which leaves "Heat Waves" with some potentially unassailable records. Although, I always think these things can't be beaten until they are. I'm not gonna fall for that trap again.

Maybe the most interesting thing to ponder in all of this is that we're talking about "Heat Waves" by Glass Animals. A by-product of the streaming era is how strongly it's galvanised the power of the fanbase. It's not necessarily deliberate stan culture existing to buoy the biggest of the biggest, but it's just a natural by-product of the situation. A lot of people are going to their streaming client of choice, think of an artist they want to listen to, and go nuts. The bigger artists are just going to keep coming up trumps when this happens, and anyone who doesn't fall within that periphery will slip behind. It's why when you go through that history of unstoppably popular songs, there's a consistent throughline of them being by the biggest names in music. Artists with loads of hits, that strengthen each other in turn. Maybe you can allow an exception when there's a certain peculiarity to it that commands attention (a "Gangnam Style" if you will), but "Heat Waves" by Glass Animals just isn't that either. The construction of the song actually feels designed to bounce people off. The quiet intro with muffled vocals, and then the pitch-shifted ones that come after. You don't get the real pay off until 40 seconds in. If we're continuing my monologue from before and it turns out that this really just is the platonic ideal of a song as agreed upon by the most people, then it's so strange that it's this one.

Something that's going to be difficult to top in the running of 'Stupidest Thing I've Done For The Sake Of This Blog' is that I read "Heat Waves". That is, the fanfic about two Minecraft YouTubers expressing deep emotional feelings about each other with a running motif about the hypnotic power of the titular Glass Animals song. I should clarify as I don't expect anyone else reading this to have gone this far that I don't mean that literally, but they do obsess over it to a great deal, going out of their way to interpret the titular phrase in a sexual way like you do with (non-glass) animals. It's one of those things that almost seems too calculated to be coincidental, given how new the song was at the time, the fact that the album has 'Dream' in its name, and that the world responded in kind to make this song that hadn't made a major dent yet, to become one of the biggest hits of the decade (almost certainly numero uno in Australia). There are a lot of people who have incidentally built up a very curious relationship with this song that were belatedly rewarded by having to hear it everywhere a year or so later, strange to think about.

If you're dying to know my actual thoughts on the fanfic, it's really not my place to judge. I've read fanfiction before. It's low on my hierarchy of things to do when I'm bored, but there have been some media properties I've been into that translate well to the format. Cannot say I'd ever gone out of my way to read homoerotic fan fiction about actual real life people before tonight. As someone who mostly only watches streamers I know personally, the appeal is a little lost on me, but it's probably a generational divide. I'm also always thinking about classic literature and how many of their motifs that seem stuffy to me, were actually outrageously modern. If you consider "The Great Gatsby" (note: I swear I've read more than one book) to be the defining novel of the Jazz Age, does it ever occur to you that the book was released in 1925? What has become a time capsule to the prohibition era was written so long before the 21st Amendment, so long before World War II, that there'd be no inclination that great upheaval was incoming, F. Scott Fitzgerald was just writing about very present-day life. I am doing an awful thing and comparing it to a fanfic that frequently focuses on the minutiae of streaming and using Discord. Frequent mentions of how someone forgot to mute or unmute, eyes being locked in on the 'is typing...' notification. It's aggressively modern, but at the same time, I guess that is what life is like for a lot of people and there's some merit to printing that. On the other hand, there's one part where someone joins Dream on a call and he's annoyed at them because he's presently speedrunning on stream. In my personal experience, I'm used to having voice channels specifically for streaming, akin to a Do Not Disturb sign, but also if I don't want people to jump in, I just wouldn't be in a voice call while streaming. I mean, for someone with 10,000 times as many followers as me, they sure paint him to be stupid. There's also a sequel to this fanfic called "Helium", I suspect named after another track from this album, but that one didn't make the Hottest 100 so I've spared myself any reason to read that too.

In any case, triple j cited this as a factor in the success of "Heat Waves" (the song) when it topped the poll, and a year later, Billboard cited triple j's article to re-iterate that fact. This niche subculture is now a part of us all, a part of us all, a part of us all, you get the drift. It obviously doesn't explain the next-level degree of success that the song ended up with, but it's nothing if not a solid early barometer on the potential of how the song can affect someone. I mean the Hottest 100 votes do as well, but people like to cast doubts on how seriously people like the songs that they vote for, especially to explain away the popularity of underwhelming songs they don't care about. Absolutely no one is accusing the fanfic author of only mildly tolerating the song. The one weird trick to prove your undying love of a song, truly it doesn't get much weirder.

I should probably at some point here offer my actual thoughts on the song. Generally I've never liked it as much, or hated it as much as I've probably been supposed to at the relevant times. When something becomes this big, you tend to feel obligated to scrutinise it with a more powerful microscope (I will pause myself from linking to that Vance Joy song again just this once), but often times I just get so detached from the process of songs blowing up that I don't feel like I can muster the interest to do so. It's a pleasant chorus, the song avoids some of those bizarre lyrical trappings on the rest of the album, I just gravitate to other Glass Animals songs more.

#750-#746

#750. D.D Dumbo - Walrus (#47, 2016)

79th of 2016

The man known as D.D Dumbo is an enigma. He showed up, released some songs, released an album, got some pretty good acclaim in the process, and then disappeared. Every year or so there'll be a new thread on /r/triplej asking if anyone knows what happened to him. At least Gotye still keeps us updated on what he's up to, D.D Dumbo's been radio silent for 7 years now. He's not really a guy you can just replace either. His two popular songs don't sound much like anything else. Heck, they don't even sound much like each other.

I won't pretend I was fully on the wavelength. He's got that alt-J kind of weirdness down where it feels like coming across a successful idea is the result of carefully curating the best of a bunch of unorthodox ideas. The most memorable parts of "Walrus" are all the little incidental moments. The plucky riff that comes in constantly, the slightly unsettling inhaling & exhaling sounds that bridge the loops together, and D.D Dumbo's own performance occasionally coming out of hiding to deliver morsels of lyrics. It may well be the best version of whatever strange idea came about to conceive it.

#749. Khalid - Saved (#62, 2017)

77th of 2017

This list circumstance exists in such a way to perpetuate the idea that I think all of Khalid's solo songs are roughly equal in quality. There's quite a lot of variation there, if "Location" was on the docket this would be a very different story. At the end of the day, we're just plucking small segments out of a large discography and if they happen to be ones that line up pretty closely, there isn't much I can do about it.

"Saved" is the best one to make this observation on because it feels like the most unusual choice. The ARIA Charts don't always capture everything, but they can do a pretty decent job at setting the pecking order. When you start talking about genuine pop stars, you can draw the line with a fair amount of accuracy. Top 50 hits are probably primed to make this list, anything else and it's unlikely. There's another tangent to this I want to get to once I reach a certain Lizzo song (not the one with similar chart credentials to "Saved", but the other one, that had me re-assessing the parameters of a hit song). Khalid is not a perfect example of this situation anyway. He went through so many hits at once that triple j listeners weren't able to simmer on them and drive them through. Maybe this would be different nowadays. Future Hottest 100 entrant Gracie Abrams managed to spin a 5 entry haul out of a chart history where only two of those songs really lit up the charts, but Khalid actually had plenty of genuine hits that still couldn't muster up the Hottest 100 votes. Amidst all this, you've got "Saved", a song that reached a measly #92 on the ARIA Charts, a week after it polled.

As I alluded to not long ago when I was talking about "Young Dumb & Broke" (#753), this was actually the first Khalid song to get put into rotation on triple j. In the age of TikTok becoming the gatekeeper & kingmaker of hits nowadays, there's a growing sentiment that triple j doesn't jump the gun on new artists like they used to, and should do. I used to feel this way but I don't really think it's true anymore. Granted, I'll accept that they're probably not the ones making the artists famous anymore, but you'd be surprised at just how often they're able to maintain bragging rights on these things. Future Hottest 100 winner Chappell Roan was getting played on triple j in 2023, "Messy" by Lola Young hit #1 on the ARIA Chart this year, but triple j were playing it a full 6 months before it even touched the top 50. The next big thing is probably getting spun right now and we're all just waiting for someone in America to tell us it's good. In the time since I wrote this, Ravyn Lenae's single "Love Me Not" has vaulted up the charts around the world, triple j first played it back in January before this, as well as several other songs of hers last year. Not full bragging rights, but more than they're getting credit for.

It's impossible to fully work out the voter mindset. While you want to believe that every song stands for itself, there can be the occasionally difficult to shake feeling that the voting list might betray the current listener experience, and substitutions are to be had. Someone might be thinking 'I wanted to vote for "Pumped Up Kicks", I compromised, I voted for the Like A Version cover and "Helena Beat"'. Khalid was one of the hottest tickets in popular music when voting was taking place. But you'll scroll to his name in the voting list and see just four of his songs. "Young Dumb & Broke", and three deeper cuts. I'm not saying that "Saved" is an unknown song, but it's probably a sufficient outlet to satiate the supply & demand discrepancy, and that probably helped it a little bit. Maybe it didn't look too strange at the time, but when "Eastside" (#888) and "Talk" (#917) polled similarly in the years that followed, it starts to stick out a bit in hindsight.

In any case, "Saved" is cut from a similar cloth to "Location" really. They're both songs whose central lyric is built upon the social dynamics of phone meta-data status. It's the kind of thing that could sound incredibly cheesy & forced, but I think Khalid's straight-faced delivery pulls it off. If he started making songs about the asymmetry of who's following whom on social media, or who's more likely to send the first conversational DM, that might be a tougher sell. Here it's just about keeping a phone number saved. That has conceptual roots that pre-date smartphones. It's a cute breakup song. He's toeing the line of needing to move on. He's able to delete all their old photos but this one small thing he's clinging onto keeps the possibility on the line. On the other hand, writing a whole song about it means that we're inundated with lyrics that scream 'not over it', but that might just be a forced perspective as a result. If you're prompted to talk about something over and over again, it might just reinforce your investment in it regardless of where your true feelings lay. Have I ever mentioned how endlessly fascinated I am by the Korean adventure game/visual novel "BURIED STARS", about a bunch of pop idols on a reality show that get trapped underground? It's too rough around the edges to really recommend, but it's so unique and intriguing that I'm constantly thinking about it. I don't know anyone else who's played/read it so I've got no one to talk to about it. I just spent over an hour writing about a Khalid song that doesn't really inspire much out of me at all. If I hadn't said all this, it would be reasonable to think that this is the thing that's living rent-free in my head. It's pretty good but there's not much to think about.

#748. Arctic Monkeys - Arabella (#18, 2013)

81st of 2013

Album charts have always been a little off. For what is supposed to be the ultimate barometer of popularity and success, it's never quite worked that way. There's always just some level of noise getting in the way of a natural state of affairs. It does what it's supposed to, but there's no difference between someone purchasing their favourite album ever, someone making a purchase they'll immediately regret, someone buying a present for someone who also might not be interested, or someone just buying an album because it's the only way to get the song they want. There's just no telling what has & hasn't stood the test of time on face value alone.

In recent years (roughly in the middle of the 2010s in most places), streaming has put in a different perspective. In a time where buying albums is no longer part of the regular music fan's activity cycle, it's a necessary change, but one that's brought in a new layer of noise. What the streaming era has taught us is that there is a substantial valley between people listening to entire albums, and people just cherry picking their favourite singles. Possibly they're never even trying out the whole thing, possibly they're not even aware of the album. Australia and the UK mitigate this system a little bit, where the top two tracks of any album don't contribute to the weekly streaming totals, but the loophole is as simple as you think. What if an otherwise frivolous album just had 3 hit singles? It's this cheat code that can turn an apparent flop album into a hit. Usually it's more than 3, but many very successful albums nowadays operate so heavily on this that it's often so frivolous. Benson Boone recently has had a successful album that's endured well, but that's only because he kept his previous hits on there, accruing steady streams like "Age of Empires" villagers. Take them out and it'd crumble very quickly. I can never get a read on how popular he really is because I rarely see someone so popular but with such a gulf. Doja Cat's last album made the fatal mistake of having only two big crossover hits, so it sunk like a stone, but more people have actually listened to it than Benson Boone's album.

Popularity is tough to figure out though. There's still merit to getting a lot of people to just listen to one of your songs. The whole system will tend to reward albums that are being listened to in full on the whole though. Vinyl sales, and a decent trickle of streams for the deeper cuts can make the margins. Sometimes those big hit packages can feel like unstoppable behemoths, but so many of them do eventually fall by the wayside.

This whole preamble was just to point out that when we're talking about popular albums of the 2010s, it's really hard to look past "AM". It might just be the one album that has the whole package. Great sales on release, solid week to week sales to this day, plenty of people listening to the whole thing in full, and so, so many hits to prop it up even if they weren't initially. "AM" was a big deal when it came out, but it only went so far. Mumford & Sons' "Babel" and The Black Keys' "El Camino" outsold it at the time for instance. Its sheer refusal to die in the streaming era has sent it past pretty much all of its contemporaries now. Only Taylor Swift and to a lesser extent Billie Eilish can compete, and at the time I'm writing this, "AM" is outcharting every Taylor Swift album except her newest one. If anyone felt like this album was rock & roll's saviour at the time, it's more than lived up to the responsibility 12 years down the road.

We'll be talking about three songs from "AM" here. "R U Mine?" also polled before this cut off in 2012, but to be fair that's also the single version that sounds a decent amount different to the album version. It pains me a little knowing that most people know it only as the album version now as the slight differences distract me immensely. I guess I understand how purists for "Tomorrow" and "Prisoner Of Society" feel now. Arctic Monkeys have polled something with all seven of their albums over the years, but the three entries they got in 2013 landed higher than everything else ever could. Just a tidy three entries at once all in the top 20, getting to the meat of it with no filler.

I can probably talk more about "AM" when we get to one of the later entries, don't want to blow the whole thing just on "Arabella". When it comes to this particular song, it's not one I'd really miss a lot if it was gone. It just feels like it's overstepping its boundaries just a little as a song whose most notable feature is how much it sounds like "War Pigs" by Black Sabbath. I feel like they shouldn't have been able to get away with it, and I'd rather they tried something more original instead. I'm not a massive fan of the way the drums are mixed in either as it flattens the song a lot, even in moments when it wants to rock out. Can't argue with success, but it really doesn't come quite near the mark of greatness that's implied by it.

#747. FISHER & Shermanology - It's A Killa (#48, 2022)

75th of 2022

We last saw FISHER with "Yeah The Girls" (#794). That song fell into my lap at the same time as "It's A Killa" and I have always gotten the two mixed up. They're both a little more vocal-driven than his previous hits, and the slogan phrases have been subbed out for slogan sentences. Nothing says 'yeah the girls' more than a woman saying 'bang, bang, bang, it's a stick-up', like hell yeah, get that bread, girl. They're also both Dutch coincidentally enough.

It's a different flavour of Dutch, mind you. Shermanology are a brother & sister duo and they're from Curaçao in the Caribbean. That's almost as far as you can possibly get from Australia geographically, so short of any comments about musical output (which I'm still pawning off to a later FISHER entry), credit has to be given for reaching out here. If you're one of those people who gets unusually annoyed about nepotism, then it's my duty to annoy you further, as Shermanology's collective father is Tony Sherman who had a #10 hit and three #11 hits in the Netherlands in the 1970s. You think you like Shermanology for their work with Afrojack and prior Hottest 100 entrant Avicii, but it's all the lingering remnants of Dutch soul & disco hijacking the poll ("Tonight" and "I Wrote You A Letter" are bops to be honest). Andy Sherman (the son) also occasionally sung with The Artful Dodger, which is almost making me want to revive my convoluted flow chart where I tried and nearly succeeded to link every single Hottest 100 entrant ever.

While Dorothy Sherman is definitely singing on this song (possibly Andy has some backing vocals but I'm not sure), it's not clear how much Shermanology are actually contributing to this song, which puts them on equal pegging with FISHER. The duo did put out a 7 minute remix of the song later that has a fairly different vibe to it. Like if I actually produced something, I'm not sure I'd need to remix it myself, but who knows really.

This song probably isn't going to turn many needles for or against FISHER. Another one where you can distil most of what you need to hear down to about 30 seconds, or even less. We're starting to see some worthwhile ideas pop in though. There's a pretty good build up, and I like the switch up on the outro (something about that one note it lands on just sounds funny, and the rhythm is infectious). I'm also always endlessly fascinated by audio panning. You can test your left headphone on "Phoenix" by The Butterfly Effect, and your right headphone on "Obsession" by The Cairos. Or you can just listen to Dorothy after the drop on this song, where her repeated title drops echo back and forth for some reason. My praise can only be faint because I think other FISHER songs do it all better, but this is a start.

#746. Boo Seeka - Does This Last (#85, 2017)

76th of 2017

When it comes to who just makes, and who just misses out on the Hottest 100, it's always going to be a bit arbitrary. When you're on the higher end of things, there's a certain proportion of votes that guarantees a look, but towards the edge, it's unpredictable. Making and missing out can be the difference between whether or not another artist decided to release an album. Hockey Dad made it to #116 this year, that's not very close, but they were beaten out by a collective 16 different songs by Billie Eilish & Charli XCX. No one ever thinks about the casualties of Brat Summer.

Making and missing out can be the difference between getting a proper send off or not. You can look at the bottom end of the 2017 countdown and see a decent handful of artists who haven't appeared since. On the other side of this, there's an alternate version of history where I still have to acknowledge the omnipresence of Kasabian, who landed at #117 in 2017 with "You're in Love with a Psycho". Instead, their Hottest 100 story ends in 2011, and we're tackling another Boo Seeka song instead.

It is a slight bit egregious to talk about "Does This Last" as if it's some late career triumph for Boo Seeka. This came out 6 months before their debut album, and they've got three of them now. The Hottest 100 vote was fickle though, because they also landed at #170 that year with the later single "Turn Up Your Light", and it's been nothing since. triple j haven't really spun any of their new singles after 2020 either, they're just a nostalgia piece now. You may find yourself asking why this only lasts for so long.

I don't remember having any strong feelings for this song at the time. I can imagine wanting to pick any sort of low polling scapegoat at the time given some of the songs that just barely missed that year's countdown, and this is a pretty good scapegoat all things considered! That's not really fair though, it got in, and I think it's a worthwhile continuation of the Boo Seeka history. There's another band in 2017 that was going well overboard in this regard, but the orchestral sweeps do a lot to give a bit more emotional heft to this one. You might not pay it much notice, but while it's on, there's an appreciable quality to it.

#755-#751

#755. Allday - Protection (#94, 2019)

69th of 2019

The prevailing feeling I had at this stage of Allday's career is that he pivoted to a pretty chill vibe. It wasn't what I'd have predicted, but it proved a good way to market his still unpolished performance. Certainly there's another song of his I'll get to that exemplifies this and feels like the poster child for it. Really though, he's always been making chill music, some of these later songs just smooth things down even more. No bouncy production or anything, just a pleasant waft. Anyway 5 months after this, he released the song "All da Way", a complete pivot in the other direction with a darker trap sound. It might actually be my favourite song I've heard from him, I just think it's neat. This one's pretty good too I suppose. Hey, now that's a "Right Now" (#852) blurb callback.

What might help this song in my estimation is my inability to always distinguish it from his other song. They've both got the same last 4 letters, and by cribbing the title from one of Massive Attack's most famous songs, it's inevitably drawing me to that headspace. With this song in particular though, I think contrary to what I said before, a lot of the change in pace does come from Allday's performance. His runs through the chorus here are silky smooth and add a lot. Now if this is still just a stop gap to more progression for him, that doesn't matter because he hasn't made the Hottest 100 since.

#754. Lime Cordiale - Colin (#34, 2022)

76th of 2022

I may not see eye to eye with Lime Cordiale on everything, but one thing that they got completely right happens in this song. Treating Colin Hay with the same reverence that Austin Powers gives to Burt Bacharach, and going so far as to name the song after him. It's all I could ever ask for. Well, I guess they could've given him a feature credit. I've seen people get them for less. It does make the reveal more exciting though, like when Travis Scott releases a new album with no features and you get to lose your mind when some people show up out of nowhere (SZA on "TELEKINESIS" is a good example).

That's a good detail anyway. I find it hard to elaborate further on the song itself. There's a nice sentimental quality to it, but it's nothing that warrants particular remarks. Perhaps there's something to be said about respecting multiple generations of Australian canon because you could totally imagine this song being called "We Are The People", but we can't go encroaching on Empire Of The Sun's territories. Luke Steele looks like he'd totally cast a spell on you. I was going to remark about how "We Are The People" is about half as old as "Down Under" now but I forgot to carry the one. Now that I've over committed to it, the fact that it won't actually happen until 2035 makes me feel young instead.

#753. Khalid - Young Dumb & Broke (#13, 2017)

78th of 2017

Remember back when future Hottest 100 entrant Taylor Swift released the song "Fifteen", recalling the wistful naïveté of a young teen while she was at the ripe age of 18? At least she was right about feeling "22", but then she had a birthday by the time it was released as a single. Anyway, this comes from Khalid's album "American Teen". It tracks because he only just turned 19 before it came out, and here he is recalling the wistful naïveté of high school kids with that remarkably wise distance of a couple years. Some of my social media feeds have been reminding me of all the stupid and cringeworthy things I was posting when I was in high school. I laugh at that, but then this morning I saw one four years removed from that time and it wasn't any better. You're making a huge mistake here with your multi-platinum smash hit single from your multi-platinum smash hit album Khalid, you just don't know it yet!

I've said before about how thoroughly Khalid inundated the system with hits, and it all starts in 2017, in such a way that there are four or five different songs that could claim some ownership to breaking him through. Technically in Australia, his first top 50 hit is a short-lived (but quite good) collaboration with two artists who will eventually appear on this list, but it's a slight misnomer. His actual debut single "Location" probably broke first but took several months to appear on the ARIA Chart, because we don't always get to have accurate archives. There's about 3 months of chartworthy streams on that song that never got counted, and it missed the ARIA End Of Year chart as a result. It also didn't appear in the Hottest 100, but that's because it was released in 2016, so it wasn't eligible once it got popular. triple j's first actual foray into the world of Khalid was months earlier in 2017 and that song will be appearing on this list. Otherwise, you've got "1-800-273-8255" (#1000) popping up briefly before exploding after a turn of virality, right around the same time that "Silence" and also this song were en route to becoming top 5 hits. Everything was coming up Khalid, all at once. You don't think about the grand scheme of things while it's happening, but there's a case to be made that Khalid is one of the most successful artists to never have a #1 single or album in Australia. My usual go-to answer for this is future Hottest 100 entrant Nelly Furtado, but his 9 top 10 singles quite comfortably stomp out her 5. Otherwise you might want to be looking at Imagine Dragons and Marshmello. Both of them have collaborated with Khalid in the past, he was just everywhere.

This is one of those songs that teeters on the edge of blatant repetition where it's not enough to notice unless you pay attention to it. We're talking about a chorus that rarely skids away from the same few words for a whole 45 seconds. Alas it's the folly of being required to do the most writing about your life when you're a teenager and have nothing to write about. If you can look past that, you're probably just here for Khalid's unnaturally aged vibrato. I think a lot of his later releases smoothed it down, so there's a personality in this you don't usually get.

#752. Catfish and the Bottlemen - Longshot (#39, 2019)

68th of 2019

"Longshot" is our one step into "The Balance", the third Catfish and the Bottlemen album, and still most recent. It's been 6 years now. It's not an album that's been responded to kindly either, severely lacking the streaming success of their first two albums (outside of this single), and it didn't even debut at #1 in the UK which has got to be the most catastrophic failure imaginable. I was running through the list of UK #1 albums last year and I'd have to cap myself on all the bands you'd never think are still topping the charts with their new albums. Snow Patrol, James, Elbow, The Libertines, etc. You'd have to really screw up to fall out of favour so quickly in the UK. This is where I find that they released it on the same week as P!nk's new album, and I can definitely consider that to be really screwing up. Maybe they'll blow all my estimations out of the water with their fourth album, but it is very easy to believe that they picked up a high school aged fanbase early on, but didn't get quite big enough to get ironed on in the same way. People my age are still talking about My Chemical Romance, not to mention that other contemporaneous band who'll appear on this list much later in their career. Just can't imagine anyone saying 'Hey, remember "Longshot"? I miss those guys'. When you're taking this long between albums, that's vital to making the comeback stick. Every day now, a would-be Catfish and the Bottlemen fan is discovering future Hottest 100 entrants Fontaines D.C. instead.

The subtext of all of this is that my favourite Catfish and the Bottlemen song is on this album, the later single "Fluctuate". They weren't quite as big in 2019 so it was never getting a berth. I find it to be an instance where the haphazard tunes just kind of accidentally fall into place, and compound effectively.

"Longshot" by comparison feels like it's going for pop gold by comparison, cramming in hooks everywhere. I wouldn't say they falter in the expected way, they're just not my favourites. That's most of the song anyway, which probably undersells it. The bridge takes a surprising turn away from the boilerplate verse template, and then the last chorus changes up the instrumentation in a way that's easy to miss. It just sounds that little bit different. I'm always thinking about the idea of music that is and isn't 'streaming friendly', and that strikes me as the kind of thing that puts people off without realising. Weird but not in an obvious way.

#751. Hockey Dad - I Wanna Be Everybody (#61, 2018)

76th of 2018

Welcome to the world of Hockey Dad. In case you need catching up, they've got 7 entries from 2017 to 2020, most of them coming from "Blend Inn", that album that's somewhere in the image behind here and also above this message. They're generally pinned as another surf rock band but have more garage roughness to that. Despite how loud they can get, it's just two guys. They're also in the canon of musical things alongside Fall Out Boy and that one Mitski album by getting their name from The Simpsons, so they've always got a soundbite of Bart Simpson saying 'Hockey Dad rules!' to fall back on. Gotta be one of the few good things to come out of 'Going to England' episode.

Just missing out on making the top three quarters of this list is "I Wanna Be Everybody". It's not an especially objectionable song, but we're past the point where that's a pass mark now. I just compare it to all of their other entries and feel like it's the one that offers the least. Its most distinguishing feature is its addition to the canon of songs that use that particular guitar riff. I want to just say it's the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" riff but that's not the first one either. Still, you add in the perfectly timed drum fills and it's amusing just how blatantly they're lifting from that template.

#760-#756

#760. Flight Facilities (feat Emma Louise) - Arty Boy (#99, 2017)

79th of 2017

It's a cynical way of looking at things, but it is funny sometimes to imagine with some producers that there's a 'Press In Case Of Emergency' button where they call up the previous collaborator that worked before as a safe fix. It's almost never *as* effective because you need to at least do something to make it worth going to (although that trance song that went to #1 in the UK in 2023 between two frequent collaborators I still can't name stands as a notable exception). Flight Facilities haven't done this in the most brazen way yet. There's no new Giselle or Christine Hoberg teaming. They do have "Arty Boy" though, bringing back Emma Louise 3 years later, and they did something similar last year too. My understanding is that this was planned to appear on Emma Louise's own album in 2016 but it didn't end up going through, so Flight Facilities re-worked it and put it out as a standalone single. Suffice to say, I'm talking about "Arty Boy" first.

This isn't really a rehash of their previous collaboration and it works on a different level altogether. Guitar is a tad more prominent, Emma Louise is trying out new flows, it's also the only song I can think of that rhymes 'models' with a form of imbibement that isn't 'bottles'. Actually it's a song that pairs luxury and hedonism in the lyrics with a conceit of distance from it. Easy to miss this because the deflection is hidden away in one lyric that Emma Louise doesn't fully enunciate at the end of the second verse.

Emma Louise could probably sing the dictionary and that'd be fine, I'm just not a huge fan of what else is going on in the track. The beat tends to just throb in and out without any consistency underneath it to keep up the momentum. Aside from another 2017 song we'll get to that deliberately does it as a bit, there can't be that many otherwise conventional songs that have as many cumulative seconds of sheer silence as this does.

#759. Queens of the Stone Age - If I Had a Tail (#46, 2013)

82nd of 2013

Most bands follow a pretty common trajectory in all counts of popularity and reception after they've hit it big. Just a series of slight diminishing returns that nonetheless allows the ship to keep chugging along. Often times, the immediate success of an album runs into the main factor of how well their last album was received and if the releases come in a steady manner that keep people wanting more without starving them in the process. Queens Of The Stone Age just don't work under this rule.

"...Like Clockwork" was the group's 6th album, and it was released 6 years after "Era Vulgaris". Now for me, "Sick, Sick, Sick" and "3's & 7's" are two of my favourite QOTSA songs ever, but I'll admit I'm biased as they're the first ones I knew. I'm aware that otherwise it's probably their least popular album up to that point. Despite that, they came back bigger than ever in 2013, scoring their first ever ARIA #1 album, and also landing 3 songs in the Hottest 100, the most of any year outside of "Songs For The Deaf"'s monster haul of 5 in 2002. I guess I should point out that in that 6 year pause, Josh Homme did release the self-titled Them Crooked Vultures album, a supergroup collaboration with John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin and another very famous rock star I'll eventually come into contact with here. That album sold particularly well, and with Homme doing most of the vocals, could easily pass as a QOTSA album. They've worn so many different hats and had so many different members that he really is the only consistent piece of the puzzle.

I enjoy "...Like Clockwork" quite a lot. It's the QOTSA album I've listened to the most, and I'm glad it got a good haul here otherwise we might just be stuck with the single most popular song...this one. I've always had a little trouble wrapping my head around it, but I suppose it would feel weird no matter what song it is, there just isn't an obvious one. There's often talk about the way songs hit it big for having captionable lyrics, obvious little bits to focus on in TikToks, stuff like that. I don't think this way of listening to music is exclusive to the younger generation though, I think there's a certain allure to the lyric 'If I had a tail, I'd swat the flies', and that can go a long way. There's also some intrigue in the personnel. This is the last song released on a QOTSA studio album that has former member Mark Lanegan on it, I believe that's him with the menacing backing vocals in the chorus. If you listen to the album version, you'll hear an outro section sung by the lead singer of another rock band who had a particularly successful 2013, and will eventually be dissected here.

That works in parts, but I can't escape how relatively sluggish the song is. It's got that goofy dad rock vibe that isn't fun to get through. Or maybe it's a different genre of dads with those shout outs to "Lady Marmalade" and "Da Doo Ron Ron" that I never thought fit in well. I just think that one of their later entries pulls this off a lot better, so stay tuned for when I can go back to lambasting this song's shortcomings again.

#758. Khalid - Better (#52, 2018)

77th of 2018

I want to dispute Khalid's claim of nothing feeling better than this in that I can think of 757 other things that do. In his defence, a good 300 of those such things didn't exist when he made this statement, so that's not entirely fair. Even I'm subject to the same problem with how long ago I ranked this list. I had no idea for instance that Hanumankind & Kalmi would put out the music video for "Big Dawgs" and absolutely stomp this song in terms of 'Music videos where motor vehicles are doing cool shit around the performer'. This one's still pretty good but damn, that "Big Dawgs" video is just perfect.

This relatively unassuming song is one of Khalid's biggest hits. Only two songs spent more time in the ARIA top 50, and they're both collaborations, "Eastside" (#888) and another one I'll get to in due time. That longevity is key, as it easily could've fizzled out at the start of 2019, but it just kept powering on. Released in September, this was the 77th biggest hit of 2018 according to ARIA, but then it was the 28th biggest hit of 2019. That sort of thing is pretty normal to see, but you can compare it to Khalid's Marshmello collaboration from a year prior, which actually peaked later in the year and that only improved from 50th in 2017 to 30th in 2018, so "Better" really had the legs. At the time I'm writing this, it's his most streamed song on Spotify today as a lead artist.

If you had to pick a song to represent Khalid's discography, I could probably think of a few better choices from his first album, but this isn't far off the mark either. It's probably the most natural progression. Not reinventing the wheel really, but a nice update 18 months later with a bit of polishing. I'm probably signposting my own allegiance by putting his entries from his first album higher than both the entries from his second album, but I do still like the approach here. It goes down a treat if you're in the right mood for it.

#757. Boo Seeka - Deception Bay (#50, 2015)

73rd of 2015

Not everyone takes the full album format as serious business and the sole means to consume music. We have data to back this up more than ever before in fact. On the other hand, it's a brutal trajectory if you're a standalone single that slips outside of the periphery. The height of success for Boo Seeka was definitely in 2015, on the back of three popular singles that never made it onto their debut album. Of those, "Kingdom Leader" has held up the best, sticking the landing as a permanent fixture atop their Spotify charts, so it's in good stead. "Deception Bay" has fallen short of this and it takes a lot of going out of your way on their page to find it. I'd feel comfortable saying that "Deception Bay" is their signature song but it just doesn't get as much attention anymore. Back in 2015 it was on top though as their only Hottest 100 entry that year. I probably prefer "Kingdom Leader" the most of the three, but it's not a stark difference.

You can pick any 2015 entry to blame for triple j Unearthed High winners Mosquito Coast getting locked out of the list at #101, maybe even this one. The other day I got absolutely shafted in a trivia setting because I thought the real world Mosquito Coast was a geographic feature in Australia. It's actually more roughly the east coast of Nicaragua, but I thought an Australian band would have to have named themselves after a local feature. Given the timing of it all, I was probably misled by "Deception Bay" being around at the same time. That one very much is Australian, just north of Brisbane. As best I can tell, the name comes from an English surveyor thinking that it was a river, naming it as such, and then giving it this name when he realised otherwise. If you want more deception in your bay though, Boo Seeka's from New South Wales. Not only that, but they've also done the Panama move and now years later is a solo project with the name unchanged. Panama the band/solo artist also isn't really from Central America, if you can believe it.

It's easy to want to file away a typical triple j sound at any given time but I don't think Boo Seeka really fits into it. There's an unmistakable style they've got that doesn't really play into any trends. I might personally file it under the kind of pleasant that I can't imagine getting super excited about, but we all have different perspectives on these things. It definitely has their stickiest hook though and that goes a long way.

#756. Dune Rats - Bullshit (#33, 2016)

80th of 2016

There are lots of artists for whom the #101-#200 ranking zone is the ceiling for them. I'd be very surprised to see Crooked Colours or Confidence Man go all the way for instance. This is just the reality of it. After a while, everyone's generally decided whether or not they're invested and either does that on a steady basis or moves on. You can usually get a good idea for who is primed for the big time.

I thought Dune Rats were gonna be one of those artists. They were not without their opportunities. I listen to their early hit from 2012, "Red Light, Green Light" and it feels like a perfectly catchy distillation of their vibe that fits perfectly into the sounds of the time. It didn't get over the line though. A year later and you can see them in the music video to a particularly popular song I'll eventually get to. A year later, they're leaning even harder into their novelty stoner image and fall even further away from the mark. No way are these guys ever gonna go anywhere. Anyway album number two comes around in 2016 and not only does it hit #1 on the ARIA Chart, but it gives them four Hottest 100 entries across two years. Heading this up were the first two singles that had no problem getting over the line, and got to have the always fun result of landing back to back.

That album is called "The Kids Will Know It's Bullshit", and as much as it would make sense for it to be the case, that isn't a lyric in this song. They're not shy on saying the word 'bullshit' both in and out of sentence form, but I guess what they landed on was a better self-deprecation line than just "Everything You Say Is Bullshit". Their most recent album is called "If It Sucks, Turn It Up". Aside from the weed thing, this is just what they aim for. 

You'll have to wait a few days to see if I also went and gave them a back to back, but suffice to say, this was the higher entry they had in 2016 and I didn't especially approve. I do have to give credit though; they've updated their sound quite a bit. It's not quite as lightweight as before and the guitars have some nice crunch to it. I can't argue with the notion that 'bullshit' is certainly upper tier in terms of profanities that are fun to say. I wouldn't say that the song is entirely riding on that principle though it gets pretty close.