#92

#92. Ásgeir - King and Cross (#10, 2014)

13th of 2014

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There's a throwaway line in one of the Danganronpa games by walking Nirvana reference Sonia Nevermind, who says that in her home kingdom of Novoselic, there's an anime that gets watched by over 90% of the population. It's obviously just done for laughs but it has me thinking about the way we don't often talk about ratings or anything like that in terms of percentages anymore. In the world of monoculture, these things got pretty out of hand, but now everyone just tends to their own interests (if they even have time) and even the most popular things feel pretty niche altogether. I remember having my mind blown when I found out that the #1 single in the country was generally being purchased by only about 0.05% of the population. That's making it all feel meaningless.

There's a stat I've seen thrown around from back in 2013 saying that one in ten Icelanders own the album "Dýrð í dauðaþögn", which is an incredibly impressive management of the population for something that doesn't even necessarily feel like a breadwinner, and has no outsider influence promoting it. There's not a single album that can claim that honour in Australia, as Meat Loaf's "Bat Out of Hell" falls a little short with its 26xPlatinum sales here. Put your hand up if you'd ever heard of "Dýrð í dauðaþögn", or its performer Ásgeir Trausti by that point in time. In any case, it might just be a true statement, as from what I can see, the album is certified for 40,000 sales, which tracks in a country of less than 400,000. As recently as 2025, the album returned to the top spot on the Tónlistinn album chart, seemingly being a fixture on the chart since 2012. Just absolutely incredible numbers for a folk & electronic singer who seemingly sprung up out of nowhere.

Iceland as a country also just seems to punch above its own weight in the world of music. I'm about to throw a bunch of praise onto Ásgeir, meanwhile you've got the obvious cases with Björk & Sigur Rós, two artists that have managed to make very beautiful and interesting music in very different ways. Even just heaping generic praise onto them doesn't do enough justice, they really are as good as they're made out to be and more. Meanwhile I think Emilíana Torrini and Of Monsters and Men are very underrated, mostly known for small pockets of their discography with a lot of gems, and more variety than you'd think. Lately I'm also very enraptured by Laufey and it's very funny to me that I'm writing this on the same day it was announced that she's getting her own God of War game. Truly a goddess on stage and screen.

I'm not entirely sure what the step by step process was that got us to where we are now, but I do know that we have American musician John Grant to thank for bringing this up for me to talk about. John Grant is a polyglot who can speak fluently in 5 different languages, including Icelandic, and he moved to Reykjavík in 2013, just in time to perhaps hear famous songs like "Leyndarmál" and "Sumargestur". Later that year, he came up with the translation, and Ásgeir was on board with it, giving us all the English translated album "In the Silence".

Once again, I'm missing some steps, but I came into this story at the same time as most people I think, which is when triple j featured the album in March 2014. Back in the early 2010s, triple j giving albums the feature status was a serious mark of honour that would frequently boost sales considerably. You can go back to 2011 and see a Lykke Li album on the charts going 30-33-31, a very strange run without the usual plummet, because those 2nd and 3rd weeks were during its feature album tenure. They'd also feature albums yet to come out, or on the week they came out, and those are harder to measure, but there's no doubt the boost was there.

When it comes to "In the Silence", it's probably the biggest splash I've ever seen with thanks to this boost. The album had come and gone earlier in the year in a few European countries without much of note, the highest it had gotten was #32 in France. triple j first started playing the album with some cursory spins for a week (I hadn't noticed it) before immediately giving him the feature album status and forcing everyone to take notice of this international gem. I'm extrapolating my own experience because two days later I bought it, but it just feels like they took him from complete obscurity (in Australia) to stardom. The album debuted at #18 on a busy chart week and then vaulted up to #8 on a less busy week. In an age where it's difficult to get people to try new artists, here's a lot of us going all-in on this guy we just learnt how to maybe pronounce the name of a week ago. I've never seen anything like it before or since. He also had a charting single with the most played song at the time on triple j, "King and Cross".

I mentioned "King and Cross" earlier here because it is actually "Leyndarmál", which as far as I can tell, is also the most popular song in Iceland. It's probably doing a lot of heavy lifting here because as much as I liked the vibe of the album, I didn't clock at the time that I was probably just hearing this particular song again and again. I certainly was interested in the whole thing, but this song was a big highlight. What can I say? You might not think of folk music for its big hooks, but when the king takes sides, it's already stuck in your head again.

I haven't really properly described the album musically. Saying folk with electronic elements is the shorthand but I don't think it does it justice. Ásgeir's tender voice is probably the star of the show, with a very tender falsetto that doesn't feel like he's showing off, but just smoothly setting emotional stakes to it all. It's very much a more accessible Bon Iver in hindsight, but at the time, the foreign curiosity of it all made it feel like we were unlocking something new in what could be done in these genres of music. My favourite song on the album is "Going Home", which narrowly misses being in this conversation because it landed at #108, but leans more heavily into the electronic side of things and really emphasizes the sorrow in the performance.

To me, it's all one of the great triumphs of curiosity, and a reminder of why it can be worthwhile to trust those often villainised gatekeepers who really do just want to spread the joy of all the music that's out there. It's possible Ásgeir has set the bar so high, and everyone who laments the direction of triple j is being left unsatisfied in their hunt for the next Ásgeir. On any given week I've probably discovered a new song I greatly enjoy by an artist I've never heard of, and it's pretty exciting. Just the idea that the whole scenario can be changed in an instant, and a new voice enters the fray. It's what's so fun about keeping up with new music.

#93

#93. Lorde - Green Light (#6, 2017)

13th of 2017

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Talk about a lucky break for Lorde. I almost completely dogged a good chunk of her discography by continuously leaving her just outside the top 100, the pitchforks could easily have come for me if I also had this one a little bit lower. I'd never do that though, would I? (This is a very niche reference that's not important if you don't know it, but those who do had already thought of it and I need to placate that feeling. Otherwise I try to keep my in-jokes either subtle or inclusive). It's mostly the luck of the discography because I'm not sure there are many Lorde songs I'd put above this if I had free rein. Rather fond of that other Hunger Games song she did, and because we need another update, I can say that "Fallen Fruit" has now stood the test of nearly a year and I'm very invested in it.

"Green Light" is a very important release as it's Lorde's second lead single. The one that's here to test if she was just a fancy fling of 2013 that's otherwise too left field to really connect, or if we're looking at a generational star starting to spread their wings. The results were fairly inconclusive. One thing's certain, it's that she chose the worst possible week to release it in the UK. It was the same week Ed Sheeran released "÷", so right away that's 13 new debuts above her at #28. Such as the magnitude of this release, that it was something that couldn't be salvaged by just holding up, as the whole album's stubborn persistence kept her underpowered for all of the time it was in the limelight. Who knows how much more attention she'd get if it really was the biggest thing out at the time. That's an underrated commodity because we just can't measure it. As was established with "Magnets" (#116), she did much better in the antipodes. Another #1 hit in her home country, while she can lay claim to actually having the highest debut in Australia that week, so there's much less in the way of what could've been. The song held up pretty well to be a very respectable hit in those two countries, but the rest of the world just couldn't quite do it.

The peculiar thing about this is that if you look out for opinions online, this is a very beloved single. This wasn't a controversial left-turn, it was the opening move to an album that very much did solidify Lorde in all those positive ways I previously indicated. She wasn't just a singles artist with a quickly cobbled together album, she was making magic on both the album & single format. I've always found this disconnect interesting with pop music because it's not the same as the avant garde music that gets acclaim, this is popular music made to be a hit that's getting a big tick of approval.

I actually feel like the tides are turning with this. Though TikTok still feels suspiciously astroturfed to me at times, it's one that feels like it gets more personal approval through mass inundation of options. That's always going to make it feel like there's a greater chance to get more strongly attached to something than if you're just perking up at your favourites on the radio with the knowledge they're just going to be overplayed to death in the long run. With that in mind, I feel like there's been a shift for a lot of 'beloved on the internet' pop music to finally get a good run in the charts. The problem is that if you flash back to many other earlier times in the world of popular music, you're working with a large, ominous majority. It's a majority that's reasonably open to new ideas, but is slow to make the change, and will often congregate around a handful of popular sounds of the moment. It's kind of interesting because I don't think most people even think about it, they're just reacting to what they gravitate to and the numbers just show similar ideas working together until everyone gets sick of them.

So while it's easy to listen to "Green Light" and think that it sounds like pop music, and it is, it also doesn't really sound like pop music in 2017. The piano's a good start, but it really needs to be sharper, maybe add some light guitar and a drop is a near necessity. When you look at what was hitting big on the charts just before "Green Light" came out, it feels like you need to go in whole on the current tastefully pleasant dance music, or go so aggressively against it that you placate everyone who isn't interested in that. Lorde doesn't really offer a full alternative to this which is why I feel she landed in a weird spot where the song has a relatively smaller but very passionate audience. I don't want to knock that either. It's possible to find a middle ground where you validate niche online popularity without also dismissing everything else as co-worker music.

I wouldn't call "Green Light" a failure by any stretch, but it does feel like it's the point that solidified Lorde's position in popular music for most people. She wasn't really going to have another "Royals" (#134), but she's going to stick around for those who are along for the ride, and that's typically been sizeable enough for her to make serious dents on the chart. The experience is slipping a little but Lorde's last lead single still went to #1 in her home country, and top 10 in Australia. That feels so out of line with what's going on in the charts that it's worth celebrating, and it's hard to not feel like songs like "Green Light" sowed that seed.

What makes it interesting for me also is that it's one of the most successful examples of what feels like a 'Dazzle them with the premiere' kind of songs. There are many of these cases where an artist returns and you really have no idea what you're going to get, but then you find it to be an odyssey of sorts, where there's often a surprise later on and you haven't just figured it all out after one verse and a chorus. "Flash Delirium" by MGMT is one of these songs, "The Last Man On Earth" by Wolf Alice is another. There are perhaps a couple of songs I could describe this way that are still to come on this list. It's something I generally find quite exciting. It's satisfying that feeling in the back of your head when you're thinking that there are still minutes to go on your first listen and still surprises to come. It doesn't always pan out, but in the best cases, you're just left scratching your head and thinking that the artist has really stepped up and who knows what else they've got coming later. Maybe "Green Light" is a little too structurally conventional to really pass that, but I just think of every development in the song. The sudden start, the gaps Lorde leaves to let the song breathe, and when the verses pick up some new melodies along the way, all leading up to the realisation of why the song's called "Green Light" and how readily you can feel assured that that's the moment. It makes me wonder if Lorde could have really turned it into a smash if she had a bigger fanbase going into it. I think of Olivia Rodrigo whose second album lead single "vampire" features very similar tropes and ideas to "Green Light", but a bolder structure. That song turned out to be a very big hit regardless, which could just as easily be a sign of Olivia Rodrigo's popularity and momentum, but also maybe lends some credence to the idea that songs with this sort of theatricality just have more of a chance to be the proudly big hit songs that they seem to announce themselves as.

#94

#94. Vera Blue - Lie To Me (#68, 2020)

4th of 2020

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Earlier in 2026 I was pretty addicted to playing WikiGacha. It's an ironic gacha game where you open card packs and collect every Wikipedia article 5 at a time. There are nearly 7 million articles and you can only really open a pack every minute, so you're not realistically going to get them all, to say nothing of the increasing risk of finding doubles. It's a fun bit of mindless activity that can occasionally let you learn or discover things. I wound up with about 0.5% of all the articles so I picked up some memorable ones over the weeks. Articles like Paul the Apostle, Simon Cowell, Aromanticism, Gay characters in fiction, all the classics. I bring this up now because one of the very first cards I ever acquired was the article for "Lie To Me", which amused me at the time given that it belonged to the extremely small subset of songs I'd eventually write about that also have Wikipedia articles. As a nice little bonus, I also ended up with Vera Blue's article later on.

"Lie To Me" is a song that's very of its time, because the same year it was released, the band Tired Lion also released a song called "Lie To Me". A year later, and The Buoys were demanding for someone to "Lie To Me Again" (#280). Vera Blue's song doesn't really have much in common with those songs otherwise. Well, I guess The Buoys' song never ended up on an album, but they did at least have an EP. For Vera Blue, you guessed it, it's another non-album single.

It's hard to not see it as just general experimentation to figure out where her music is headed in the future. There's a clear spectrum of influences that are pretty consistent with what she's made in the past. You've got Celia Pavey, the folksy singer who won hearts on The Voice Australia with her wistful singing and acoustic guitar, while you've got Vera Blue, the internal vice that had her experimenting and using her voice as a template to build things around.

I suppose I can't argue with success. I just don't always connect with the vision when it comes to writing hooks. It's something that dogged her lower entries a little, where you'd hear it but just not like where it's going. "Lie To Me" feels like one of her most instant songs to me in this regard. It's a song where the hook lines up with the melody beneath it for a real kick. She also gets the benefit of economy here because the hook gets looped over a second time but with more drums backing it, so it's a thrill again. I don't know if I'd call it her best vocal performance, where her shrill tone might be an acquired taste, but it's always felt like the best fit for this cold, icy production.

#95

#95. Violent Soho - Blanket (#53, 2016)

12th of 2016

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Sometimes they just call out to you. By all accounts, it's just another one, but there's that little edge that makes you not only lean into it, but start to wonder why everyone else wouldn't make the same conclusion. When the voting turned out for Violent Soho's "WACO" album, you have the two clear big hits and then everything else is just fighting for the best seat at the table. In that regard, "Blanket" is ahead of the pack, the highest entry for Violent Soho that isn't one of their show-stopping singles. Just a clear potency to it that was detected.

For me, it's just an economy thing. When you think about the song "Covered in Chrome" (#122), the first thing you'll probably think of is the song's chorus, where the word 'yeah' is uttered 15 times in a row. It's doing for the word 'yeah', what "Runaway" did for high E's. With thanks to some other contributions in the lyrics, the song gets up to using the word 'yeah', 50 times. This isn't entirely unprecedented I'll admit, I tried counting and found Usher & Lil Jon got up to at least 76 together (Ludacris did not provide any help). It's memorable though, I made a tweet a while back that said "Covered In Chrome" is just a guy at a computer pressing the 'yeah' button, which I assume would have done numbers if we lived in a just world.

With "Blanket" it gets a little more complicated. I really want to say that it surpasses "Covered In Chrome" on this metric but I don't know if I can verifiably say this to be the case. I'm running on my first instinct that the song's chorus is punctuated by triplets of 'yeah', but it's probably more of an 'ayyyeaheah' and I don't know how to count it. If we do go on my instinct and I'll bet I wasn't alone on this, you'll reach 60 times for this song, a count that certainly could've come to matching Usher if they didn't cut it out of most of the song's final chorus, just missing the forest for the trees here.

You can't have possibly expected the last Violent Soho entry to have gone any different, right? This song unlocks a primal urge to jump around and be stupid; the same way it compels me to start talking about the word 'yeah'. I suppose I can be fairer to the song on the whole, it really is a crisp production from the beginning, something that's only disrupted by the raucous chorus, which actually finds a way to out-do itself towards the very end. It's a very 'I'm out of breath' kind of song. It's good to have those every now and then.

#96

#96. RAYE & 070 Shake - Escapism. (#67, 2022)

5th of 2022

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The passage of time can do some pretty spectacular things. I have been anticipating this entry for an incredibly long time. I suspect I foreshadowed it with an entry I wrote back in 2023. I was feeling a bit of frustration with the way RAYE was being acted upon by the general public. It felt like the closing chapter of a story where we're all annoyed by the machine that allows certain things to occur, only to end up unwittingly siding with that machine in the long run. As she might say on one of her songs, sit down and let me tell you the story of RAYE.

RAYE's music career starts when she is just a child. She uploaded an EP to SoundCloud in 2014 (all songs that she wrote and co-produced herself) which is discovered by Olly Alexander of Years & Years (who is about to get considerably more famous, himself). This gets RAYE signed to Polydor Records. It gets her in the door and she starts to link up with bigger names. Her big breakthrough comes in late 2016 when she gets featured on Jonas Blue's new single "By Your Side". It's not as big as his hits that came before it, but it's a modest hit. As someone who couldn't possibly be interested in Jonas Blue's music at that point, I took a note of RAYE here as I found her to be distinctive in her role. A bigger break would come just a couple of months later, as she was also a guest vocalist for Jax Jones on "You Don't Know Me". Not only is the song a bigger hit (the 10th biggest hit of 2017 in the UK) and a bigger role for her, she actually appears in the music video for this one.

It's a proper launching pad for RAYE's own music, which starts to trickle out over the years. She has mostly modest success in the UK, her biggest hit as a lead artist being "Decline" with Mr. Eazi, a song that largely interpolates its chorus from Ja Rule's "Always On Time". She releases some EPs along the way, but there's no news of an album, that will be important down the track. Her next big hit comes along in 2020, as a guest vocalist for Regard on his song "Secrets". You start to see the pattern here, as she only seems to make major waves when she's a guest vocalist on dance songs. It was around here when RAYE properly got on my radar as I was drawn in by her songs "Please Don't Touch" and "Natalie Don't". The latter is a little indebted to "I Will Survive" and "Jolene" but does enough to stand on its own. The EP it comes from also contains the song "Love Of Your Life" which I believe is the first RAYE song that was played (sparingly) on triple j. None of these songs make any headway on the charts and before you know it, RAYE is back with another smash hit, this time with Joel Corry AND David Guetta on "Bed". Actually in the UK there's another hit at the same time, "Ferrari Horses" with D-Block Europe, which strangely becomes important later on.

We can only really guess what's going on behind the scenes, but it reaches the tipping point. These songs are still sitting on the charts when RAYE publicly announces that she has parted ways with Polydor. A big part of her grief comes from how she'd been making music for 7 years and was still unable to release an album (according to a tweet from her at the time, she was on a 4 album deal). To her, it's a great deal of shame that makes her feel undermined as a musician and recording artist. Additional comments suggest that she believes she'll only be allowed to make an album if her current single does well, turning the experience of her occupation into 'frantically looking at numbers and stats'. Meanwhile she does everything asked of her by the label, which is probably where all the collaborations come from.

This is one of the most publicised cases of label drama I can recall, where RAYE's very open expression of the situation paints it as a damnation of the very thing that many of us took for granted as a spectator sport. I can remember making fun of artists who wouldn't get albums out because despite being a consistent hitmaker, the label had no trust they could get the same public invested in the long form. Behind many of these cases are talented musicians who don't really get to showcase it because it just isn't the priority in the popular music machine. There are certainly lanes for this, but you have to be pretty fortunate to find yourself in them. Like nowadays you get singers like Skye Newman & Sienna Spiro being derided as carbon copies of singers before them, but they have to fit in that template to get attention in the first place. Joseph Heller could write a book about this.

This story has an exciting climax however, because RAYE started releasing some music independently in 2022 (kind of, she's with Human Re Sources which is under Sony's umbrella, but not as big as Polydor is for Universal). Her first couple of singles didn't really make many waves, but she followed up with a rare modern Double A-Side single, "Escapism." / "The Thrill Is Gone.". I'll bet you know what happened then...very little, actually. I cottoned onto "Escapism." right away as a pretty interesting song, but I remember reading some opinions online that seemed pretty underwhelmed by it, and wanted something more akin to her previous single "Black Mascara.", a bit more straightforward and danceable. For me it felt like some of 070 Shake's weirdness rubbing off on her and I was pretty Rachel Keen for it.

This time I have an even better case than Olivia Rodrigo for being onto the song before it got big because I did actually download it a little while before the song suddenly went viral on TikTok and soared up the charts. From what I can tell, the viral trend uses a sped up version of the song, but I don't think there's anything interesting about the trend itself. It seems like an excuse to get more people to hear this song that sounds a bit different from what's on the radio. I got a little annoyed at the time because now that the song & RAYE were hot property, suddenly all those dismissive voices disappeared and everyone started acting like the song is the greatest thing to exist. If it was just that, I'd probably have been fine with it all.

Instead, what happened is that it ended up being heralded as a major victory against the major labels. Polydor didn't think RAYE was viable as an artist making the music she wanted to wait, except oops, she went to #1 in the UK (and even charted very well in America) doing things on her terms. All of this is great, but I feel like when you're riding on a viral trend, you're just exposing that very same general starvation of everyone else that it causes. You shouldn't need TikTok to make a song sound worse and then suddenly be on board, not only is it not a great look, but it's not a viable one either. It all became even more palpable across 2023 when the whole thing outed itself as the gimmick that it was, and RAYE was struggling again to get a hit when all the bandwagoners jumped off. You're telling everyone you love RAYE and you hate Polydor, but you're unwittingly going straight back to Polydor's offices to give them more money via their artists that continue to play by the rules.

What added to this (and it's probably where my first hypothetical rant came from) is that RAYE did eventually get another hit in 2023, producer cassö saw something in that D-Block Europe collaboration and turned it into the song "Prada", where all three are credited as lead artists. It was some sort of win for RAYE anyway, but it was weird seeing it treated as a defining hit for her when it was arguably more disposable than the music she had to make before (I do actually like it a lot, admittedly). It's like saying you love Tinashe and your favourite song is the Disco Lines version of "No Broke Boys". Paying lip service through the path that's so easy because it's no longer actually going through the forest.

This is all to say, I jumped the gun a bit. Maybe I'm just lucky it's taken so long to actually write about "Escapism." because this is a story that's still developing. If there is any accusation to be made that RAYE's crossover was just a one off gimmick single, then that is clearly no longer the case. RAYE released her second album in 2026 and it was preceded by the lead single "WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!". That song went absolutely gangbusters as soon as it was released. While it's certainly a bit more crossover friendly, it's also impossible to deny that RAYE's idiosyncrasies are all over it. It's a song that goes full-on into over-the-top jazz showmanship, with RAYE seemingly pulling off about three roles in one to pull it all together. The numbers are still coming together, but at the end of the day, it might just end up being her biggest hit to date. Despite the album going incredibly heavy on the musical theatre theatricality (I was just listening to it earlier, it's wild), it's managed some genuinely impressive longevity on the charts. I'm writing this two months after it came out and it's still doing better week on week than her previous album's debut. That's taking it beyond lip service and it's proof that people are actually listening to RAYE's music, her quirky vision being very viable. I tend to believe her when she says that she does it for the music and not the success, but sometimes you do need that on your side so you have the financial capacity to do what you want. I would love it if RAYE and her story could further educate everyone on the troubling reality that faces so many musicians around the world.

I don't want to understate just how unusual "Escapism." is as a hit song. From the very start you get an incredibly off kilter synth that doesn't really agree with the drums that compliment it. RAYE switches up her flow multiple times in the lead up and gives the only sense of stability you can get early on, ironically as she's describing a night out that's gone all wrong. If the song ended around the two and a half minute mark, it'd be a little unusual but no more than that. Instead she passes the microphone to 070 Shake who immediately transfers it to her own element. I'd like to talk more about 070 Shake but this entry has gone very long and she'll have a bigger starring moment later on this list (ironically, uncredited). Her verse is brief, but it rubs off on the rest of the song that finds itself in an extended coda that completes the twisted saga.

I should also note that this song landed not particularly high on the list, as a consequence of being a late bloomer (if only there was another month to build the profile, alas). I suspect it would have a very good chance at a top 10 finish if the timing was a little better, but then RAYE's made up for that with two #5 finishes since, once with her own song even!

#97

#97. Methyl Ethel - Scream Whole (#65, 2018)

9th of 2018

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I'm very fascinated by the way some songs don't say their titles. When you're not really down in the depths of music knowledge, it can be an easy way to communicate knowledge. You might not have ever looked at the meta data, but when someone says "Mambo No. 5" or "Uptown Funk" (#252), everyone knows exactly what you're talking about. They're the kinds of songs that Jeopardy! I feel likes to ask about because no one wants to see someone get pinged for saying it a little incorrect. No matter how popular the shorthand is, the John Denver song is in fact called "Take Me Home, Country Roads". In that case though, he does say the actual title, even in the right order. It gets a little messier when you deviate from that. I'll bet there are a lot of people who think Kings of Leon have a song called "Your Sex Is On Fire".

Methyl Ethel feel like absolute masters in this art of deception. I look through all the songs of theirs I have in my music library and the songs that actually just say their titles are almost outnumbered by the ones that feel like they do, but don't actually. The song "One and Beat" actually says 'One and *the* beat'. "Trip the Mains" says 'You're tripping the mains'. I was half expecting to find out they actually say 'Ruin her' on "Ruiner". They do also enjoy making songs whose titles don't come up at all, in fact one of them will notably appear later on this list. As for now, we're ready to talk about "Scream Whole", and how they actually say 'Scream, I'm whole'. But wait, they're not done, because they also say 'Screamed whole' afterwards. I'm not mad about any of this, because it suitably does help me remember which song is which, I just can't believe how many times they do it. Oh and the other funny thing is that I keep calling Methyl Ethel a group, but they're not really, as Jake Webb is the main creative force behind it all. It's a Western Australia thing, I guess.

The strange thing is that I find myself looking back at "Scream Whole" in hindsight and considering what happened afterward. For the uninitiated, this is the last entry they ever had in the Hottest 100. At the time it felt like they were going from strength to strength. This was the lead single to their 3rd album that came out late in the year and still managed to sneak onto the list. By all accounts, you'd expect more hits to come when the full thing came out, and it just didn't happen. They didn't even get close; the story just abruptly ends there. It's all so abrupt that it feels like the best explanation is just label shenanigans. Methyl Ethel were never signed to a major label, but instead a subsidiary of Inertia (which has close ties with Warner). It feels like they pulled out all the stops for them initially, but then quickly backed off. I'm not sure when exactly Methyl Ethel parted ways with their label (they were pushed off the current acts listing on Remote Control's website at some point in 2021) but they were on with Future Classic for the next album in 2022. It's possible they weren't seeing eye to eye, but you can certainly feel the lack of coverage for Methyl Ethel ever since then.

It's a shame because the music has stayed very potent I think. I actually voted for Methyl Ethel in the 2019 countdown because "Trip the Mains" landed so well with me. A great bit of art pop with addictive building tension. Chalk it up as another case where I reckon they nailed it and it's met with a national shrug. At the very least, we were on the same level for "Scream Whole", which while I wouldn't put it at the top of the tower, has remained a very potent single with strong replay value.

It's a song that delivers on a pretty simple principle. Give us a nice riff, give us a nice hook, and you're mostly set from there. It's not just that though, and I can feel it in the rest of me that there's more than just the taste on my tongue. I find myself most addicted to the little things in the song, like the way the quiet & loud dynamics are managed. The song gets remarkably peaceful for big portions, it's produced very cleanly and you never feel like you're being barraged by anything. I love the little variations in how the hook is delivered, how there's more force to it when the music comes back in. The song also has a nice bridge if you consider the different lines that come in towards the end. Most importantly though, I love the creaky wheel sound they've got going on here. I don't even know if everyone else even notices it, but it comes up sometimes in the instrumental break and feels like the defining moment of the song for me. Just a rickety ride that nonetheless always reaches its destination.

#98

#98. Olivia Rodrigo - drivers license (#13, 2021)

2nd of 2021

For me, it's a Thursday night ritual to go through all of Spotify's New Music Friday playlist. It's an absolutely arduous task because listening to 90 odd songs in a row you've never heard before is just monstrously tiresome. You do not get the occasional breaks of familiarity to get your veggies down. Most of the veggies aren't even good for you, I'll listen to them once, and never again. It's all just to find that small handful that could very well define my year or even more. The reward is just too good.

It might seem obvious but there's a pretty big lull around the end and start of the year. You get a 3-4 week period where you're not even sure if you're gonna get a New Music Friday, because so little music is being released and promoted during this time. It's nice to get a little reprieve I suppose, but I do still crave new favourites and I'm often struggling to get them for a while. A particular day that comes to mind for me is the 7th of January 2021, where nothing of note happened I suspect. I don't think the playlist was very big that week, but more importantly, I don't think many were bringing their A-game to this dead release period. I think I saved two songs that week initially, and then out of desperation, snuck in another song that piqued my curiosity a little without being an instant addition. That bonus song was "drivers license" by Olivia Rodrigo.

I didn't really know who Olivia Rodrigo was. I might have heard the name in passing, but I quickly just clocked her as a precocious artist with a song that was a little gimmicky but seemed to pass the initial sniff test where I didn't want to rule it out. I went back to it the next morning and it started to warm up to me. For about a day, the song felt like a little secret. Then the song started making immediate appearances in a lot of national Spotify charts and it was like 'Oh, cool, I guess it wasn't just me'. A day later and the song has clearly taken the world by storm. It wasn't just riding on up to #1 during a slow period, it was doing monumentally unprecedented numbers. The difference between 'Oh, I guess this Bella Kay singer is doing well' and 'We all need to stop what we're doing and pay attention to this kid because they might be the most important thing of the year'. Olivia Rodrigo was so far ahead of the competition that when Glass Animals won the Hottest 100 with "Heat Waves" (#741), they were doing numbers that would ensure #1 on most normal weeks, but instead had to wait a full month before "drivers license" could finish its stint. In Australia, its Spotify records stood for a solid 2 years, and it still has the 6th highest weekly total of any song ever, with 3 of its adversaries being first week numbers for Taylor Swift songs.

The odd thing that happened with all of this is that "drivers license" very quickly got overshadowed. It felt like there was a concerted effort in the aftermath to make her later single "good 4 u" (#341) into something even bigger, and it arguably was. Its pop rock sound playing more immediately to a wider audience than this piano ballad. "drivers license" was supposed to be that impossibly big crossover hit that had the Hottest 100 win gifted to it, but by the time voting rolled around, it landed at a pretty underwhelming #13 next to "good 4 u"'s #4. I'm just doing all of this to report that in the confusing lottery of post-chart longevity, "drivers license" lost the battle but appears to be winning the war. "good 4 u" came very close to overtaking the lifetime Spotify streams of "drivers license" but has severely fallen back in the past year or so, falling a rough quarter of a million further behind every day at this stage. I'm not doing this to put down "good 4 u". Sometimes when I look at the daily numbers of the most streamed songs of all time, I have to remind myself that by all accounts they're very good, I just want to give more credit to "drivers license" because I feel like it sometimes gets severely underrated, which sounds crazy for a song of its stature, but with it launching her career, it's the perfect song to downplay in favour of a more interesting personal pick. It's her "Royals" (#134), her "Last Nite", whatever fits best for you.

I just think "drivers license" is a really good song. It manages to be incredibly expressive in its musical queues without feeling overwrought. A lot of subtle decisions with Dan Nigro that make the whole thing just seem like the inevitable conclusion. You'll often see the song's bridge highlighted, and I won't deny it, it's a special cathartic rush that keeps the whole thing together right to the end. I'm often the first person to be critical of writing by incredibly young artists but I think the focused theme of the song keeps it all in check. There's an odd coincidence in this, which is that in correspondence with the 2020 Hottest 100, this song got to share chart space briefly in the top 10 with Spacey Jane's "Booster Seat" (#676). Two hit songs at the same time that use car terms to signify a specific time in one's life. I like the way Olivia uses it here because it works as a launching point for all the experiences she's having, while if you're older, it's a contextualisation that reminds you where she's at with all of this.

Anyway, the other important thing to note here is that Olivia Rodrigo was not exactly an unknown entity when this song came out. To the music charts she was, which gave her a fairly rare feat in the modern era of having her first ever chart appearance being at #1 (something that was fairly benign 10-20 years ago with how many reality TV stars did so). She was just more famous as an actress on the Disney Channel. That's one of the things that will most quickly age you out of knowing stars because every year after you stop watching it, someone new is going to come up and be incredibly important to a generation of fans who will soon be old enough to really buy into it. It feels like the reason why the Jonas Brothers were only a mild chart presence for many years but soon were having solo careers and even a #1 hit that were far bigger than the early preview could've prepared one for. Olivia Rodrigo was on Bizaardvark, and then High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, a strangely named show about theatre kids staging a musical based on the High School Musical films.

I've not seen any of this, but it is relevant to the "drivers license" story because the song is heavily believed to be referring to Olivia's HSM:TM:TS co-star Joshua Bassett, who in spite of strong chemistry with Olivia at the time, was reportedly dating Sabrina Carpenter ('That blonde girl') instead. None of this has really been confirmed, it's not even clear if the two were dating, and apparently it was on Dan Nigro's suggestion that 'brunette' was changed to 'blonde' in the lyrics. Regardless of this, there was a quick response to this amid the drama. There were response songs and they weren't very good.

That would normally be the end of it, but as you might have noticed, in the long stretch of time since "drivers license" was released, Sabrina Carpenter has gotten considerably more famous. Huge hits, headlining festivals, massive cult of personality. After years of slumming with a music career that was going nowhere, and seemingly needing an algorithm to prop her up, she's absolutely made it and it can't be denied. The problem for me is that I just cannot help but think of the song "Skin", where she goes full heel, boasting about all the sex she's having and how not mad she is. This is while she was an adult (21) and Olivia was a child (17), and feels like one of the dumbest things I've ever witnessed. It was a long time ago now but I just can't stop thinking about it and as a result, remain almost completely incompatible with her music. I couldn't tell you if it's good or bad, I've just opted myself out of the conversation completely. I'll just say that maybe the best moment from a football game I've ever attended was technically punctuated by "Espresso" playing throughout the stadium (and there's a nice story behind it being that song). Sometimes when I say that a song really changed things, I can be completely genuine, if in an unexpected way.