#68

#68. Grimes - Flesh without Blood (#71, 2015)

13th of 2015

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There's a newspaper article from 2009 in The Star Tribune from Minnesota that describes two friends going on a lengthy houseboat adventure from Canada down the Mississippi river on a home-made raft. The raft is filled with chickens and potatoes. It breaks down very quickly and they spend weeks travelling downstream and dealing with police authorities, Tom Sawyer style. It's all a bit of a goofy story except also one of the people in it is Claire Boucher, who'd later be widely known as Grimes. Just a window to a period of time when there wasn't anything too egregious about her. Well, she did name herself after a genre of music she knew nothing about, which must have created some confused Myspace users. I'd say the story of the artist who misleads people into discovering their music is a lucrative one, but then I only know about the success stories.

Things moved on very quickly. She released two albums in 2010, and following positive buzz, got signed to an independent label ahead of her next release. That album, "Visions" was a very big deal if you spend your time online. It was greatly acclaimed, and the album's two singles, "Genesis" and "Oblivion" got a lot of attention in particular. It's hard to describe the general sound of them on their own, as it's very dreamy pop music, but with a greater tempo than that usually entails, and a slightly twisted priority on where the music ends up going. I do consider "Oblivion" in particular to be a very pivotal release for me as a song I was rather hooked on at the time and have only found it getting better with time. I hesitate to make the comparison given the two songs' subject matters, but it does remind me a little of Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" with how overpowering the memorable instrumental hook ends up being as it runs through the whole thing. Grimes comes through with her own performance though that marks her as a very individual person, able to laugh off a serious situation with a facetious 'la la la la laa'. The two songs performed rather well in the 2012 Hottest 100, showing Grimes had some potential for stardom even if it could easily be a one-off fling.

What often ends up being the case though is that an artist can be so captivating that we can't help but keep them around. There's so clearly more to tap out of this. The next album wouldn't come until 2015, with some false starts along the way. We had "Go", a collaboration with BloodPop released as a free download in 2014, and then in early 2015 there was a music video for the song "REALiTi". Neither were properly released, but the reception for the latter was so strong that despite initially scrapping it, Grimes re-worked it and it ended up on her next album. That album, "Art Angels" is where we meet this project with the song "Flesh without Blood", but it was always so much more for me. I'll always greatly endorse the album cuts "Venus Fly" and "Kill V. Maim", which are still Grimes at her naturally quirky state, but I think they show her music functioning in a pop setting that might not naturally be conceived. She feels much more brash and mines some incredible results from it. The album must have won over some more fans because her next album came in 2020 with a greatly improved debut (in Australia at least) despite not really accruing any more hits.

Musically, Grimes stayed on my nice list for a number of years. The run of singles she had leading up to that next album is some of the most exciting stuff I've ever heard from her. The lead single "We Appreciate Power" manages to combine industrial rock with very contrasting, almost baroque pop in a song about surrendering to our robot overlords. You've got "4ÆM" for another frenetic banger, and my personal favourite "Violence", where she teams up with the now late i_o to make what feels to me like the perfect electropop song. She just ventures into so many different spaces and I like it like that, and I like it like that. That's also the only Grimes music video I've linked here that actually starts with the song normally, she has a habit, I guess.

I'd say there's an elephant in the room but the REALiTi is that it all just gets messier the further you go down the timeline. I mentioned "We Appreciate Power" before, and there's every reason to believe that the song was ghost-written by fellow musician and one time collaborator Poppy, whose sound it feels more indebted to. The two never seemed to be on good terms, but there are accusations that Grimes made her sign an NDA and didn't pay her either. The fallout from it all is just always very messy, and Grimes has a habit of mixing in completely out-of-pocket statements with otherwise valid ones that make it hard to really put her on either the good or bad side. On some level I'm sympathetic because like many female musicians, her position and what she represents tends to get warped by people who treat her as an icon rather than a person. It's all musicians really, but people just seem to be much more brazen about positioning themselves in a domineering state to define roles for women. She's just very messy and complicated, but fame can do this to anyone.

I cannot avoid mentioning it any longer, but around this time, she was also in a relationship with Elon Musk. They separated in 2022 but have three children together, including their eldest son with the name X Æ A-Xii which I am told can just be shortened to Ash. In lieu of posting any opinions about him, I will just post the extremely complimentary Brennan Lee Mulligan monologue from a few years ago and now you can stamp your bingo card for me finding an excuse to put a Game Changer clip in here. When you belong to that Venn diagram of people who were already abundantly aware of the couple separately, it was a strange time. Grimes and her music have largely fallen out of my periphery since the 2020s though, only forcibly popping up when she did a collaboration with Rocket League and people briefly replaced their Cochise & Linda Perry goal songs with "Shinigami Eyes". I'm just beyond the point of dealing with her baggage, and happy to stick with what I know.

One such example is "Flesh without Blood", effectively the real lead single for "Art Angels". If we put our minds back to 2015, it was all just business as usual. Here comes Grimes with another banger, and it did pretty well, though more off of momentum and probably not really matching the impact of the singles that came before it. With 2015 being amidst a serious changing of the guard in terms of the artists who were polling in the countdown, her making the list felt like a slightly unexpected triumph, one who easily could've fallen way down the pecking order to never return. As per usual, I do think it speaks to the quality of the song on its own merits, Grimes wasn't coasting on this one.

"Flesh without Blood" is another pivot for Grimes. It's one of her only songs that I might be inclined to just call pop rock. It's taking her usual style but making the guitar & drums much more prominent. The song carries itself in a relatively straightforward manner while making some quintessentially Grimes decisions that make it stand out a little more. We're led into the song's chorus by a chant that feels anthemic despite being indecipherable, the second chorus buries the production to make it feel more like a bridge, even though the song already has one of those. You don't end up hearing the traditional chorus for a second time until you're nearly at the 3 and a half minute mark. At that part it's just a nonstop party where I mostly don't know what's being said, but I just get swept up in the excitement of it all. Beneath all the strange behaviour, Grimes fundamentally knows how to make music that just pops.

#69

#69. SAFIA - Counting Sheep (#35, 2015)

14th of 2015

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I live with some kind of undiagnosed sleep disorder. If you've managed to avoid this affliction, thank your lucky stars and appreciate every night that goes by without a stir. The simple version of this is that I just struggle to get to sleep a lot of the time. Sometimes my mind is wandering for this, other times it isn't. All I know is that it's likely a gamble that I'll feel like I got a satisfying sleep that'll suffice for my energy for the next day. It's been like this for basically all of my life. I remember being very young and asking my grandfather how he manages to do it, and I felt a little let down that his trick didn't seem to work for me. The weirdest thing about it is something I've discovered in my adult years, which is that my sleep tends to follow a very specific pattern. I'll go to bed, and after any amount of time (I want to say it's usually 20-30 minutes) I'll have an extremely vivid dream that lasts about 5 minutes. I'll wake up after that, and then at a point in time I can't recall, get to sleep properly but I'll wake up every couple of hours often certain it's been eight hours when I look at the time and find that it's only been two. I'll feel pretty tired through all of this until eventually I reach a point where I'm pretty confident I can't get back to sleep and I'll know I have to get out of bed.

It is possible that I have some variety of narcolepsy. The most telling symptom I've had described is that I can often take a short nap and will almost certainly have vivid dreams from it. It's so expected that it does seep into my unconsciousness and the dreams will often be lucid (though other times they are so wildly out of step with reality and I believe every moment of it until an hour after I woke up). I'm told this is the brain catching up on some of the missing REM sleep during the night. Back in 2019, I had a sleep study to try and get some closure, where they'd hook a bunch of things up to me overnight and study whatever happened. The only problem is that I didn't get enough sleep that night to conclude anything (I'll admit it's a little harder to get to sleep as it's a bit uncomfortable/foreign), so I remain in the dark about this. Perhaps I'll try it another time but my night owl schedule is difficult to work around, except oddly when I've travelled to different time zones and found myself going to bed much earlier, jet lagging in the wrong direction for whatever reason. Outside of the trying to sleep portion, it's the general fatigue that gets to me the worst. I can be so tired all day and struggling to stay awake when I'm watching a movie or reading a book. It makes me think back to my schooling days where I'd often plant my head down and close my eyes. I didn't think I'd ever fallen asleep in public before, but looking back on it, it matches more recent experiences when I've completely zoned out, and I just continue to feel so bad for my younger self who didn't remotely have the resources or context to clarify some things that were really starting to ruin my life. You can probably track the end result on my report cards where I went from a near-straight A student to barely passing two of my five Year 12 subjects. So much of it all comes down to the fact that I just cannot get enough sleep to save my life.

Anyway these are just the things that come to mind when SAFIA come up with a song called "Counting Sheep". It's said to be a song about insomnia though I can't find that quote from the band itself. The only thing they've said is that it's the evil sibling of the other SAFIA song that will eventually appear on this list. The only useful evidence you really get for this is the song's chorus that says 'never ending' and 'never get no sleep'. It definitely feels like it's more to do with a general Halloween theme (ignore that they released it in March). The middle section of the song has a bunch of movie references. Some appear to be directly lifted audio but the Casablanca quote is wrong enough that they must have done it themselves. The other quotes are from Peeping Tom, Misery & Nightmare on Elm Street, all movies I've seen since this song came out except for Peeping Tom but I'll see if I can't make that happen before this goes live (I did, it was interesting). There's a cameo in the video during this part by Keli Holiday. 

The message clearly got across though because the song has seemingly caught a second wave of popularity years after the fact, as someone made a Five Nights at Freddy's video for the song that actually has more YouTube views than the real music video does. I have never played any of those games because I suspect the general gameplay loop doesn't appeal to me (it feels like a clear case of a game made for streamers, more than anything), and I've no heightened views of the franchise after watching the first movie. I'm probably just 5-10 years too old for it though. Nice for SAFIA to get some kickback from it though.

I really enjoy this one. It's still very early in the days of SAFIA and they only had a small handful of songs at this point. This one felt like a step into greater popularity for them though. It managed to spend 9 weeks on the ARIA Chart and get as high as #55, making it unquestionably their most commercially successful song until "Make Them Wheels Roll" (#532) did a little bit better. It just makes the most sense to me. A song that's short and punchy. There's constant rising tension with the strings, and Ben's putting on a great performance on the pre-chorus. I don't know if the pitched down chorus is the best option just because it's taking away the group's best asset. When the band performed the song for Like a Version, Ben sings the whole thing in his crooner mode and it's quite nice. It's also backed by the other two band members sneaking in the riff to "Stairway to Heaven" which works oddly well. They've also done it backed by a string section and it still works even if it's not as scary as perhaps initially intended. Some say that's the sign of a good song, where the bones are simple enough that it can be transposed in all sorts of ways and still come out working.

#70

#70. Denzel Curry - Walkin (#80, 2022)

2nd of 2022

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I feel like I don't often give rap music enough credit lately. It's not that I don't like it, or I'm not interested in liking it, it's just that my current mode of listening to music for discovery purposes tends to do it the biggest disservice. It's an unavoidable problem when you're sifting through so much that it's not possible to give everything a fair go, the kind that can take many listens. I find this is the worst for rap music because it's often so dense, with lyrical touches that might go unnoticed at first. I end up favouring only those that have some kind of peculiar production style that makes it instantly stand out. Aside from that, it's just hard to latch onto a new generation of stars, something that I feel is universal as most of the big names in rap are still the same ones from a decade and a half ago, or more.

Denzel Curry falls somewhere in the middle of this. His big breakout single "Ultimate" came out in 2015, which is getting to be a while ago. He might still feel like he's a relatively young figure in the rap game only because his contemporaries largely aren't. Landing in this middle zone can get you the best of both worlds. I still feel like he was coasting on previous moments of fame when he got this song onto the list. That's not to say that the song is redundant, far from it. It's just the kind of song I'd expect to be largely filtered out due to not fitting in with what crossover rap tends to be. This is like an alternate universe where all the hip-hop heads got to tell their version of the story. The kind of artist people would be begging for you to listen to with self-assured confidence that it could just as easily fit in as popular rap music as well. Not necessarily the only time this happens here, so I guess in both cases, we have to thank that Californian rap metal band.

I actually was listening to Denzel Curry quite a bit in 2022, I just wasn't listening to "Walkin". It was the next single he released after it, "Zatoichi" that took my fancy. It exemplifies my point when compared to "Walkin". "Zatoichi" is much more immediate by way of its instrumental. It has this relaxed, kinda breathy sound looping through it that all just reminds me of some of the more introspective moments on Kendrick Lamar's 2015 album. Then the song's chorus comes assisted by slowthai and turns into a surprise drum & bass moment with all the intensity that usually entails. It's very easy to conclude why this might click with me on a single listen.

"Walkin" is a little bit more straightforward. The instrumental is light and airy again, but much simpler, so it doesn't stand out quite as much. Denzel Curry occasionally does some offbeat things, like cutting out the track so he can insist that he's not done yet, but in general this is one of the least gimmicky rap songs I'll encounter in this setting. Therein lies the appeal because Denzel Curry has always been good at rapping. He might not always keep his goofy tendencies in check, but in moments like this where he can just ride his own momentum, it feels great to witness. I did finally come around to the song by the end of the year and it felt rewarding to see it have its moment.

#71

#71. CHVRCHES - Clearest Blue (#51, 2015)

15th of 2015

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I feel like in the absence of a major viral or nostalgic hit (I'm not counting the Marshmello one), CHVRCHES don't necessarily get a lot of credit nowadays. This is the 7th time I'm writing about them, and there's another one that'll come after that. This is quite a lot to just sweep under the rug. In that sense, the historical record is there to cherish CHVRCHES in the long run, but I fear it'll only be at best on a superficial level. Just picking out the smallest morsels because curiosity won't run much deeper.

It is therefore my duty to report that "Every Open Eye" is an absolute gem of an album. It might get lost a little behind their debut album which had bigger hits and more direct appeal, but this is the sound of a band that absolutely tightened up their work and created an incredible body of work for it. It was released right around the same time as Carly Rae Jepsen's "E•MO•TION", which is another great album that does get its flowers, but alas, the only flowers you'll see here are the partially pixelated ones on the album cover.

I just think the whole thing comes together so well. Rarely is a moment wasted, and they'll have you potentially re-evaluating just what synth pop is capable of. I've not heard another CHVRCHES album that quite lives up to this one, but they do continue to find isolated sparks along the way. I think their 2021 song "California" would fit pretty snugly on this album. I just love all the big, encompassing sounds they come through with, as well as melodies that take unexpected left turns. "Keep You on My Side" has this wonderful frenetic pace to it, while "Playing Dead" has a big lift to match the initial stakes it lays out on the chorus. I wasn't especially fond of when Martin had lead vocals on the first album, but I think he fares better this time around. One of those albums where you're on such a high that I don't even want to stop ahead of the bonus tracks. To be fair, one of those is "Get Away" (#555) but they're all good.

I can understand the logic behind making "Leave A Trace" (#300) the lead single here. It's a clear, direct statement. I do feel however that "Clearest Blue" as the 3rd single is the big hold out we were waiting for. It almost feels like it's still making you wait for a while, until it decides to enter the pantheon of all-time great pivots. I'm talking "Dance Yrself Clean", "Nights", "Clearest Blue". You get the briefest warning before the song turns into an all-out rave. The obvious comparison point is Depeche Mode's "Just Can't Get Enough", but it's not living in that song's shadow at all. Just the sheer commitment to the moment, the intensity of it. It's all just incredibly satisfying, in a way that's simultaneously par for the course on this album, but also completely singular and nothing like anything else on it. CHVRCHES easily could've run into the typical sophomore slump that comes with reduced buzz on return, but the material was just too good to possibly deny. They made me a fan for life on this one. Hopefully that's meeting them more than halfway.

#72

#72. A$AP Rocky (feat Drake, 2 Chainz & Kendrick Lamar) - F**kin' Problems (#79, 2013)

14th of 2013

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There's a famous audio file that's been circling around on the internet for several decades now, the recording is older than I am, I believe. It's a two and a half minute skit of a man talking about the word 'f**k' ad nauseum. He goes on about the word's versatility. The way it can be used as a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, or how it can be used to cover a gamut of emotions as well. It's all largely just an excuse to say 'f**k' over and over again, while being juxtaposed by the decision to play part of Vivaldi's famed violin concerti "The Four Seasons" underneath it. I suspect I came across it as a wave of internet virality in the very early days of YouTube, but the main reason I think about it is because it used to get played infrequently on triple j during Super Request. Just an evergreen bit of fun to put on the radio.

The strange thing about it all is that I could never figure out what the 'song' was actually called. Back when JPlay was still a thing, I tried to find it at some point to no avail. Subsequently, I had no idea where it came from. It may have been something that got played on triple j constantly a few years back and I was just coming in at the tail end. The truth is that it's one of the early remnants of perhaps misleading internet sharing. The recording was misattributed to more famous names in order to get it shared around, until the misconception just stuck. Part of why I got so curious is because if I were pressed for a name, my recollection was that it was a Monty Python bit, but that got increasingly hard to believe as I learnt more about the troupe's work and couldn't really imagine where it'd fit in. You'll also find it sometimes attributed to George Carlin which is more believable given his famous stand-up routine about curse words, but it also doesn't sound like him. In case you need more reason not to trust it, Google's AI search confidently said it was Richard Pryor. It's all a bit like how every comedic song that gets shared around always gets attributed to "Weird" Al Yankovic, despite them all being too crude for him.

The interesting answer to this is that the recording you're possibly familiar with was actually done by Jack Wagner. If you don't recognise that name, he was a long time employee of Disney. His voice is recognised by many as the voice of the PA system at Disneyland. His voice is prone to pop up elsewhere as a result of that, and I can't say for sure if I'm familiar with it in those contexts because all I hear in his voice now is that one skit. This wasn't really uncovered until around 2005, when the ever familiar skit was brought up specifically about trying to attribute it, and solved when someone who worked with Jack on the recording managed to chime in. The recording is actually a remake of what this person describes as 'the original crappy version (that I am positive no one here has EVER heard)', and it was given to them by the nephew of Bobby Cochran. Jack decided to record his own version with much better quality, better grammar, and his own decision to include Vivaldi. So that's the answer to the mystery of the skit that gave us the phrase 'f**k the f**king f**kers' in such a mature voice.

You're right, that does have next to nothing to do with this, and I was fully prepared to start this post like normal, but what better opportunity to provide some clarification on something that goes misunderstood pretty regularly. It's also very slightly pertinent here because "F**kin' Problems" operates on a partially similar level, which is that the word 'f**k' can be both used in both the sexual and the frustrated sense. 2 Chainz eloquently puts it when he says that his love of bad b*tches is a f**kin' problem, but that he also literally has a f**kin' problem because he likes to f**k. He'll never be the darling of the so-called "City Fathers", but he does internally justify the opportunity to re-use lyrics to reinforce the song's hook. On that level, it's pretty genius. It's the same 2 Chainz who brought us the lyric 'She got a big booty so I call her Big Booty'.

I would like to highlight 2 Chainz here because it's the only time he's ever made the Hottest 100 ever. He came close the year before, as "Mercy" with Kanye West was a near miss at #111. Admittedly he's the least memorable of the four on that song and gets tucked away at the back. Later on, he got even closer, courtesy of Chance The Rapper's "No Problem", which would have made for an amusing titular pairing from him if it made it. I'll admit that it took a while for me to warm to his particularly direct brand of bars, but in a world without regular 2 Chainz guest features for many years, absence has made the heart grow fonder. Just in general, I find him an interesting case because he didn't release his debut album until he was just about to turn 35. Like you wouldn't think he's only a few months younger than Kanye West. His southern drawl is key to making this whole song work.

This song has gained a new reputation that grows more noteworthy as time goes by. It's the last time that Drake & Kendrick Lamar ever appeared together on the same song. This is by the slimmest of margins because Kendrick released "good kid, m.A.A.d city" just two days before this, which has the song "Poetic Justice" on it. It's very loosely a collaboration this time. The music video gives off the impression that they were never even together in the same room and there isn't much of a throughline in their verses. Drake is generally the odd one out here who hasn't gotten the memo to be as utterly depraved as possible. He's better for it though and easily has the best verse here. I clearly just want as much Drake as possible here, because the music video actually changes the song slightly and has A$AP Rocky finish his segues into each verse, which sounds weird and I don't like it.

The other thing I don't necessarily like is some of what A$AP Rocky starts saying. I've called it out once but he really managed to get in here with song where he can drop a derogatory slur for lesbians and make the same joke about how he's able to get them to sleep with him. He is a sharp dresser for sure though, and I'll admit that the lyric 'Put the chrome to your dome, make you sweat like Keith' got a little bit funnier in 2025. He's just lucky to get carried by everything else around him this time around. Kendrick's verse is mostly just funny for the general juxtaposition. We really did not know what his career was going to be like when he was doing guest spots like this, or with The Lonely Island, or with Robin Thicke. It's interesting to see him invoke "Money Trees" with the Halle Berry line, as if it was already a classic and not just a song he dropped two days ago. There's only one word to describe that kind of hubris, beast.

#73

#73. Phoebe Bridgers - Sidelines (#99, 2022)

3rd of 2022

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This feels like a glitch in the matrix. This is the only time Phoebe Bridgers comes up in this whole list and it's with a loose single that isn't particularly noteworthy in her discography. Technically she comes up again in 2023 because boygenius had a bumper year but otherwise it's all we've got. I think what you take away from it is two things. One is that it represents the sometimes realistic document of the year in review that triple j's Hottest 100 provide, the other is that sometimes triple j just fumble the bag a little bit.

In some regards, you can probably combine the two factors in one. The idea that triple j didn't fully prioritise Phoebe Bridgers sooner is a relic of a time when she wasn't quite as famous as she is now. You could make the argument that they should have been on board with her, but there just wasn't enough irrefutable evidence at the time that she was a major player outside of all the blogs & tumblrs of the world. The end result is that she landed at #109 in 2020 with the song "Kyoto", maybe an underperformance in hindsight, but it's a song triple j had played once prior to December 2020 and only scarcely after that. It's very rare you'll get something that isn't a crossover hit to defy the airwaves like this, and it was a big sign that there was something in all of this.

The only problem was that Phoebe Bridgers hadn't released a new album since then. I feel like there was serious potential for her to surprise everyone but we just hadn't had the opportunity to see it. With the right material, I suspect she could have seriously cashed in with this, whether intentionally or not. A bit like how it's not very surprising nowadays to see Lana Del Rey cracking the singles chart despite clearly not operating in that lane. Now that I've changed this paragraph all into past tense I feel there's some truth in the matter. Phoebe Bridgers now has charting singles in the US & UK as a lead artist, and also a #1 album in Australia. I suspect the Hottest 100 will follow suit.

I'll admit I'm not sure what that might sound like because I'm not entirely sure I'm the right market for Phoebe Bridgers. I'd listened to her first two albums and I often found the thrills to be few and far between. Of the two I'm somewhat partial to "Punisher" more so (early days, but I think "Lost Weekend" might be my favourite though), which has a bit more variety to it, and more lyrics that seem to poke their head out and take you aback. "Kyoto" is a very good song, and I can't not mention "I Know The End", the album's explosive closer that tricks you into thinking you know where it's going before it takes it to yet another level. I'm not opposed to her sound on principle. The elephant in the room here is that since that album came out, I've grown especially fond of Lizzy McAlpine who is not at all subtle with her influence from Phoebe Bridgers (with a side order of musical theatre). She put out 3 albums between "Punisher" and "Lost Weekend", and it nearly ended up being 4, so there's a gap in the market being seized. I must admit also that it's a nicer fandom to be in because while they're similarly popular, I feel like Phoebe's space as a critical darling & generally eccentric personality means people bring out their weirdest when talking about her. Strongly cultivated niche following backed up by algorithm friendly music and a genuine crossover hit (but not too big of one) feels like the sweet spot.

None of this all matters when it comes to "Sidelines" though, which I've always been enamoured by. It feels like an obvious single because it has a properly pronounced chorus and hook, but the whole thing sticks pretty easily. I wonder if it's partially indebted to the verse structure with repeated use of the phrase 'I'm not afraid of...', which uncontrollably recalls Hoobastank's "The Reason". It's a solid vessel though for Phoebe to deliver her typical gut-punch lyrics though. I love the little sprinkles of instrumentation though, you know you're obsessed once you start mentally cueing up something like those strings that break up the second verse.

By all accounts, I'm still a little surprised this is here. When you're sitting right on the edge at #99, it's a genuine toss-up that could've gone either way (lucky G Flip took another year to put out that album), but by all accounts, this just feels like a song without quite enough of a profile to get across, just stellar top 200 material. Whether it speaks to just how strong the song is, wanting to make amends for a near miss in 2020, or the potential avalanche of a fully focused Phoebe Bridgers campaign, I can't say just yet. I do love that this is the song we get out of it though.

#74

#74. Amy Shark - All Loved Up (#36, 2018)

7th of 2018

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I feel like I have to issue amends for Amy Shark. It's an inevitable part of the process that not everything with this list will hold up to scrutiny over the years. I look back at lists I've made over the years and want to shuffle things around. It's been a good 3 years since I started making this list and it's inevitable that it won't all sit perfectly. That probably includes things I haven't even reached on this list to some extent, though I find myself mostly content with it for now.

It's been nearly a year since I last had Amy Shark appear on this list so I haven't had an appropriate chance to mention this. Back in January, I caught "C'MON" (#928) on my shuffle playlist. This was an incredibly chance encounter because a few weeks later I'd load the newest Hottest 100 onto it and suddenly it'd fall so far down the priority list that I genuinely might not hear it again for years. As these things often happen, because it didn't have my entire attention, I couldn't lock into my own recalled feelings and it just kind of jumped out to me. I rather enjoy the song now. Measuring it on what the song is actually doing, rather than my own idealised version of it, there's something worthwhile. The instrumental doesn't take too many bold risks, but the gravitas comes across. I see the vision, and though I'll spare myself the task of re-sorting this entire list, know that the previous position is not doing it the justice I would like. That concludes the minutes of the previous meeting, let's get on with the current agenda.

I did not have the best first impression of Amy Shark (#871). Learning that she's also a landlord did not help either. The road to rehabilitation is a long and largely pointless one. When she's getting these Hottest 100 entries, she's getting my money either way. It's just a nice cache to have because I am sincerely not a hater and I don't want to be. I managed to prove myself somewhat open minded around the release of her debut album because she just casually released my favourite song of hers, and I wasn't at all shy with my enjoyment of it.

We have to get the elephant out of the room. This is a Jack Antonoff song. You could be forgiven for just thinking it's his non-union Australian equivalent, but it's the real deal. This is getting him at a pretty high demand part of his career, as he was just done with co-producing half of Taylor Swift's latest album "reputation". As a matter of fact, that might just have been the thesis statement on here because something that clicked with me pretty quickly is how much "All Loved Up" sounds like "Call It What You Want". That's the Taylor Swift song obviously, in case the title still only makes you think of Foster The People, it's important to consider all of the perspectives here. I'm a big fan of "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things" so I know what it's like to have Taylor Swift take some of the most specific of song titles away. If I can fit it in, I might even have another story like that on this same album, because Taylor Swift's villain arc just knew no bounds at the time.

It's a superficial similarity I would say. You won't spot a familiar melody or anything like that. They're just both very washed out songs with echoed background vocals and a pre-chorus melody that feels like it's stepping over what was previously established. There's less than 10 seconds difference in length between them with very similarly reserved bridges. I know, I can't believe it either. There's history of producers doing this with Australian artists. Max Martin & Dr. Luke produced The Veronicas' "4ever" and P!nk's "U + Ur Hand" at around the same time and largely got away with it. Australia is the country that made both "Sexual" and "What Lovers Do" big hits, two versions of "Macarena", two versions of "Waiting For A Star To Fall", two tropical house versions of "Fast Car", we just do not seem to care.

I also don't really care. Mainly because it's funny, but because I like trying to pick out and ascertain the advantages in either case. Usually the winner is just marketing and I don't really get my wish, but it's fun to think about. Is Amy Shark ever competing with Taylor Swift? Oh absolutely not. I do like to think of this one as the slightly improved second attempt though, as "All Loved Up", just has all the extra dynamic range to get more out of it. Every moment of it just pops out.