#165-#161

#165. LAUREL - Scream Drive Faster (#74, 2020)

7th of 2020

I only ever heard 'laurel'. For that one audio illusion that went viral in 2018, this is technically the correct answer, it can't be disputed that the person on the recording did in fact say 'laurel'. I'm not saying this to discredit the 'yanny' heads in the room. If that's what you're hearing, you're not wrong, it's just a fascinating experience of the way we process sounds. I really wish I was ever able to hear 'yanny' because it's far more interesting to me than just hearing the thing that's being said. If I didn't introduce my brother to the illusion with absolutely no prompting and had him hear 'yanny', I might suspect everyone who said it was just playing a ruse. I do lament the experience for the many Laurels (and occasional Yannys) of the world who probably get reminded of this far too often, I was just mainly hoping that after several years of ignoring it, I might get that experience some people have where it just switches, but nope. Laurel all the way.

When it comes to LAUREL the musician, I was probably more likely listening to Foals most of the time. It's interesting to see her here because I wouldn't really say she's truly broken through at any point, and she's British so there's no local advantage here. We even had our own perfectly working version of LAUREL around the same time too, as I see a bit in common with LAUREL's earlier work to what Stevie Jean was doing then. "Estranged" is a very good song I think, though this will mean nothing to you if you're only familiar with LAUREL's later releases.

There's a clear transformation that's happened. LAUREL started making music at a pretty young age. She had a Dylan-esque moment of pivoting to more prominent electric guitar, which I'm sure bothered someone with a blog at the time, but that became the sound of her debut album in 2018. She had a good amount of airtime on triple j then but didn't really make large strides here, which is why it was so shocking to me when she cracked this list, but then it may as well be a different artist now. I don't know if you can pin it all to this, but it's worth noting that LAUREL got signed to Communion Music. It's a small independent label founded by, among others, Ben from Mumford & Sons, and it's probably best known as an early home to Catfish and the Bottlemen and Matt Corby. All I can say is that LAUREL takes up the synths on "Scream Drive Faster" and has never looked back.

When I listen to "Scream Drive Faster", I can initially hear the LAUREL of old, but it's absolutely smothered by synths on the chorus. There's almost a feeling an anonymity to this where I could imagine anyone singing it, her distinct vocals no longer feeling like the selling point. It'd be a problem if she didn't just excel in the new territory. "Scream Drive Faster" is the sound of going through a tunnel. The combination of synth and guitar creates this wonderful rush of euphoria. She manages to capture something similar to that one Canadian synth pop artist who will eventually appear on this list and no doubt be very fun to write about, when she barrels into a chorus of difficult to discern syllables. It's all just ear candy.

#164. Courtney Barnett - Depreston (#82, 2015)

24th of 2015

For a long time I'd not really been able to grasp the differences between the richer & poorer sides of town. You can absolutely call it some amount of privilege as I spent my earlier years atop a hill with a fairly big plot of land. I did move to a poorer part of town after that but any of the adverse potential effects weren't really felt outside of getting my bike stolen. I think more than anything, I just observed things within their own capacity and never felt the need for anything more. It seems appropriate here that I really felt it in one of my recent trips to Melbourne. Just that feeling in certain parts of town that you're not overly safe, and the depressing state of everything around you. It obviously made me think of "Depreston".

This is one of Courtney Barnett's longer songs, running close to 5 minutes, and while a lot of that is dragged on by the coda, it's generally one of her denser songs. She packs a lot of details into setting the initial scene. On first impression it is just a song about buying a house in a pretty run down part of town (specifically Preston). In terms of mundane observational humour, it's top shelf. We go from discussing the benefits of home-brewed coffee to the multi-purpose utility of having a two car garage. Just ignore the fact that there's a burglar being arrested down the road.

She properly shows her hand about halfway through the verses, talking about how the house is selling at a lower value because it's a deceased estate, implying that someone very likely just died there. That'd be a morbid detail on its own, but it becomes a new topic of exploration as she slowly paints the picture of what is likely an old woman who lived alone and had a husband or son who died in Vietnam. Courtney gets so distracted on these details that she loses track of what's going on and we just get a real estate agent's line about tearing the house down and rebuilding on top of it over and over again. A great bit of juxtaposition, the remorseful, sentimental person vs. the unfeeling capitalist machine.

Really, it's just Courtney Barnett at her best. Just that knack for detail, while anchoring it to a larger observation within itself. I always found this one easy to get into though because it's such a breezy song. Maybe that one guitar loop is a little indebted to Coldplay's "Don't Panic", but it presents us a new version of it that doesn't end way too soon at the 2 minute mark.

#163. Childish Gambino - IV. Sweatpants (#60, 2014)

19th of 2014

Something that made the Hottest 100 work so well for me initially is that it all felt tightly knit. The results reflected what had been played on the station with a tilt towards what made sense in those confines. Not everything that got substantial airplay got a look in, but everything that got a look in got substantial airplay. There'll obviously be an advantage for the higher profile releases, but it was close to a level playing field.

I feel this is something that's changed quite a bit with music charts as well. They also operated in a similar way at the same time. A different (though much larger) echo chamber where we'd all have a chance to be exposed to everything at around the same time, make our assessment and then either move on or stick around. That's obviously never been strictly true either, and labels got very good at wringing out greater potential from some releases than others, but things have gotten so fractured now that it no longer feels like even the sky is the limit. The way a song can have a tilt of virality that instead of lasting for a couple of days or weeks, gives it the momentum to thrive for years, and the way that this can happen to something that either was already a hit just a few years ago, or is currently a hit and is just riding another wave on top of that one. It really feels like we're all just being taken on a ride without much say in it anymore. It's a bit like how if nearly everyone was fed the same song on a curated shuffle playlist at the same time, we probably wouldn't realise until the charts came out a day later and it was #1 by the length of Flemington.

That's all to say that things have gotten topsy-turvy by introducing different variables for discovery and not having everyone clued into the same releases at the same time. As a constant that's been around for over 30 years, the Hottest 100 is a good way of documenting all of this, in ways that I'll continue to observe. Charts may look increasingly funny, but the Hottest 100 is (now) always 100 new songs released in the past year. It's just a question of where they come from, and how distinct the pecking order is.

In 2014, that stable set up I was used to felt like it was breaking down. When I was looking at social media votes across the board, I noticed some surprising contenders, songs that certainly had been on the radio but I didn't consider them to be especially noteworthy. It'd mostly be a lesson in voter demographics on social media and how that would distort reality, because the results would come out and they'd be put in their place, one song that stood out to me in particular was Childish Gambino's song "Sweatpants". It's not a song I was familiar with, but for a decent while it was riding in the top 10 for these 'predictions'. It seemed unfathomable, not least of which because Childish Gambino literally had a song (#207) that was doing well on the radio and the charts in that very moment that didn't seem like it was getting anything by association. It normalised eventually and by the end of my tally I had "Sober" at #37 and "Sweatpants" at #46. They'd end up at #31 and #60 respectively, much more reasonable, but still this is a remarkable showing for a song that had only been played on the station 8 times that year.

If nothing else, it's a reminder that Childish Gambino operates in a different space to most rappers with regard to his audience, many for whom it might still feel a bit weird calling him Childish Gambino as a default. To some extent I was already aware of this. He'd operated as a meme for years. His 1.6 score on Pitchfork being the site's most iconic ruling, the only one where you see the image and know exactly what album it is. "Because the Internet" doubles down on it all. There's a song called "Worldstar", the album cover is a GIF, and because he's still not satisfied, the album comes with a 72 page screenplay with sequences lined up to specific songs. I'm not going to go through the whole thing but at least I got a little more context as for why he slams his fist on a table.

I don't know if anything could have properly prepared me for what the album is actually like though. Whatever your impression is from the singles, they feel like curiosities amidst a generally much more low key affair. For swathes at a time, the album doesn't feel particularly interested in carving out hits, and it's very mellow. The stride does come back in the middle, starting with "Telegraph Ave.", and then there's a nice run towards the end, but it's very much an album I don't know what to do with. By all accounts, it seems to be a running theme in his discography.

"Sweatpants" was clearly being included in one of those noteworthy groupings though, so there has to be something in that, right? I'd say so. Moments when Childish Gambino actually decides to go full on with actually rapping seem rare, so I can only assume it's because he needs to save up all his punchlines. On this song, it's a tour de force of moments. I feel incapable of criticising it because he simply is doing him better than I'm doing me. Shout out to Problem being recruited just to say his own name and make strange sounds, and also shout out to the music video which is extremely well made and pretty hypnotic. WAHHH.

#162. WAAX - Labrador (#88, 2018)

18th of 2018

I was doing my rounds of checking out new music back in 2015. I came across a song called "I For An Eye" by a new band, WAAX. I loved it. Prime content in the short, fast & loud territory. The lead singer had wild amounts of distortion on their singing that gave her voice unmistakeable personality, while also feeling like they're destined to never go big. Maybe in a post-Amyl and the Sniffers world I can believe it now, but at no point would I have said that their songs sound like they have the right crossover appeal. I was just glad they kept making more, because every new release was hit after hit for me.

Maybe in hindsight there was a slight transformation in the ensuing years. Ironically it was the band's most stable line up which went unchanged from 2015 up to 2019, but on the other hand, those iTunes tags did change from Rock to Alternative in 2016. There was also a steady uptick in the band's popularity. It's something I can track in my own Hottest 100 vote counts. They started out top 500 in 2015, then top 400 in 2016, then top 100 in 2017. None of these songs actually touched the real Hottest 200, so it's obviously well off reality. But when you're competing with just yourself, this feels like more of a clear victory. Just to put into context of how far off these projections might have been. Warm Tunas in 2018 had "Labrador" at #23, one of the widest margins of error for that year (it depends on your formula whether it's better or worse than "MANTRA" (#569) which slid from #8 to #45). Still, persistence paid off and WAAX were in! This was as far as they'd ever ascend the mountain, we'd just see a couple more Hottest 200 entries afterwards and I'm not sure we'll see another one.

It's worth noting here that they hadn't even released their debut album at this point. That would arrive in late 2019, doing pretty well and getting them to #11 on the ARIA Chart. I don't know if there's a tangible benefit to releasing an album on the same week as Taylor Swift. Maybe it gets more people into record stores that week, I don't know. Maybe a lot of people came in for the Tropical F**k Storm & WAAX combo given they landed at #10. I'm not sure what the consensus is on the album. It feels like they're experimenting a bit with different sounds that don't always land, while the hooks aren't generally as sticky as what came before. On the other hand, one of the advance singles, "FU" might just be my favourite WAAX song to date. It doesn't go as hard as say, "Holy Sick", but reveals some untapped potential out of Maz's vibrato. Her voice elevates it significantly.

Things got a little messy afterwards. The band did a publicity stunt in 2021, pretending to be looking for a new lead singer, but in reality just setting up a ruse for their next music video. This would all just be a bit of quirky fluff if band tensions didn't rise significantly shortly after. They did get a second album out, but when it came to touring it, the tour was cancelled halfway through. Details at the time were vague, but less than 6 months later, the band went on hiatus, playing a small handful of shows afterwards. Fast forward another 6 months and Maz announces that she's bringing back WAAX as a solo project.

Behind the scenes, I can only speculate what's going on. I've heard that the rest of the band were owed money, I've heard that Maz may have pulled the rug under them both before and after. Press release Maz might be different to behind the scenes Maz. All I can say is that audiences haven't really bought into the drama. I can't determine the extent of it, just that WAAX released a new album in March 2026 and this is the first I'm hearing of it. It wasn't submitted to the ARIA Chart so I can't measure it up to the previous ones. The lead single "HANDS" has actually managed to outstream everything on the second WAAX album though, so it's a start. Taken on its own terms, I love that song. It's fresh, anthemic, and it sounds vital. Whatever the full picture may be, Maz has obviously been through a lot as is tradition for women in rock bands who make music. She can have this moment.

Anyway I skipped over "Labrador", that's what we're here for. All that seemed like a good lead into this because it very much is a song about sexism in the music industry. That might just be the edge that brought it their biggest success, just clearly being a song about something that resonates. Let's just say it's not the only song about that very topic polling in the Hottest 100 around that time period. Like that other song, this one gets a lot of its talking points from the perspective of the higher up men setting the rules. There's a mix of outright insistence ('you're a girl and a girl isn't welcome in here') followed by being blindly complicit of a system that's bigger than them ('yeah, it is what it is'). That can be the most frustrating aspect of it all, the idea of this spectre that's keeping everything from changing. "Labrador" was never one of my absolute personal favourites in the WAAX catalogue, but I can't deny its vitality. We need a mix of protest songs, with the absolutely explicit and the easy to just thoughtlessly sing along with. There are in fact advantages to both.

#161. Stormzy - Vossi Bop (#27, 2019)

12th of 2019

There's a peculiar history of political moments in the UK Charts. In 1977, during the queen's Silver Jubilee, the Sex Pistols released "God Save The Queen". It charted at #2 and to this day, I have no idea if there was a genuine fix, or if people just willed a rumour into existence because they refused the reality they were given. In 2013, after Margaret Thatcher died, there was a concerted effort to get "Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead" to #1. It fell short of a Duke Dumont song that had too strong of a head start. I heard a rumour that the pro-Thatcher community deliberately bought up Duke Dumont's song to keep it at #1 that week, but after extensively searching discussions at the time, I don't see convincing evidence for it. Perhaps the most confrontationally political song to go to #1 was "Killing In the Name", but that's tangential to its actual role in topping the charts in that moment. I don't think people were thinking about the 1992 Los Angeles riots when they were sticking it to the X-Factor.

In recent times, there's been a pretty explicit one but it almost feels inconsequential, like it was snuck into an obvious hit because you can get away with it. Stormzy was on top of his game in 2019. He hadn't had a #1 yet, but you could see it coming. "Vossi Bop" was just that inevitable moment. In this song, Stormzy raps the line 'F**k the government and f**k Boris'. This would become a redundant statement just three months later when Boris Johnson became the new UK prime minister, which also means that this song was still charting when it happened. He also rhymes that line with 'I could never die, I'm Chuck Norris', a line that's gone out of date in 2026. I wonder if Vossy will still have his coaching job by the time this post goes live...Yep, I wrote this in April.

It's a testament to Stormzy's popularity just how far this song went though. You don't usually get a UK rap song as the 7th biggest hit of the year, and it even splashed over to Australia where it gave him his first ever top 50 hit. He'd have a handful more but this is probably still his biggest lead artist hit in Australia. It'd be his biggest Hottest 100 hit too except in the 3 years it's taken me to make and post this list, he had the Chase & Status collaboration "BACKBONE" go even further. On no level has it ever felt like he's making crossover hits in Australia, the cult of personality just does not translate to another continent.

If I were to ignore the song's own merits for a little longer, I have to give some more credit to the incredible music video. Insanely good editing and aura farming off the charts. He's even got Idris Elba (who is also namedropped in the song). Having since been to London, seeing all these deserted streets is really doing my head in, it's not like that at all.

In general though, it's pretty agreeable Stormzy. I don't think he necessarily sounds as potent in the past, but perhaps he's just grown up and is having more reserved fun. Like, there's an alternate song by this name where it's actually about smashing someone over the head with a bottle of Courvoisier. No point in punching down when you're already #1 though, to say nothing of the fact that Stormzy is a very tall individual.

#170-#166

#170. Flight Facilities (feat Emma Louise) - Two Bodies (#39, 2014)

20th of 2014

There's one more amusing twist in the tale of Taylor Swift in the year 2014. I can only wish that I had the foresight to record in detail all of the more particularly interesting Instagram posts I saw at the time. At the very least, if I was able to catch someone who was voting in protest of the Taylor Swift movement, and unwittingly included Flight Facilities' song "Two Bodies" while doing so. I'm just sure it happened, on the laws of averages and sheer volume. We just can't always catch the irony and contradiction in the various views we find ourselves holding and expressing. Just too much to keep track of at once.

"Two Bodies" is on the lengthier side of things but it's a little bit fabricated. The first 75 seconds of the song features an excerpt of an interview with Rod Serling. He's talking about a comment that TV producer Herbert Brodkin had made at his expense three years ago (or in his funny, old time way of saying it, 'I remember the quote, I didn't understand it at the time. I failed to achieve any degree of understanding in the ensuing years, which are three in number'). The quote is a notion that to strive for commercial success runs counterproductive to being a discerning artist. Herb believed that Rod Serling could not possibly entertain the masses while creating something worthy of praise. He breaks that notion down with his own belief that it's just wrong, and that as long as you, the writer, believe in the integrity of your own work, without feeling shame, then it's absolutely possible to achieve both facets of appraisal. Rod is saying all of this in the lead up to the release of his new television series "The Twilight Zone", which in hindsight is probably the unspoken whammy behind the whole quote. You'd be hard pressed to find many other shows that absolutely succeeded on both of those fronts in the present, and have gone on and stood the test of time for so many decades afterwards. Ariana Grande just had a hit in 2025 named after the show. It's timeless whether you've watched it or not. I think it goes without saying that whether you like it or not, that frivolous pop song that people were trolling the vote with in 2014 will probably continue to be very popular for many decades to come.

I always thought this was just a peculiar thing to lead into the new Flight Facilities single and album, given that this was effectively the lead single to the campaign once it got going. I don't want to accuse them of insecurity as if this was the way to sneak reveal that the album was going to be much more of a pop pivot than people might have been expecting and that it's okay. That's mainly because I don't get that vibe from the album "Down To Earth" at all, but more on that when I get to one of the other songs on it that I have less to say on, try to guess which one! It feels to me more like a frustration that I've grown to understand as I've gotten older and more beyond that line of thinking. It can be so bothersome to just have views parroting those like Herb's in this day and age. When there's something that's undeniably popular, and you think it's very good, but you find a crowd of people who turn their nose up at it. Flight Facilities are big in the game of making remixes, even anthologies spanning the history of popular music, so I'm sure they've encountered people who just can't believe they'd choose to put "Hypnotize" in their mix instead of a deeper cut from Biggie. They're obviously a duo who operate within the boundaries of both ideas though, pop enough to make the triple j countdowns, not pop enough for top 40. When your biggest hit is a nearly 8 minute slow burner that absolutely wasn't made to be a hit, it probably gives you a fresh perspective on the whole situation.

Emma Louise probably has some angle on this as well. Both of her entries on this list have been with Flight Facilities and she only has one other entry otherwise. It's her big breakout single "Jungle" in 2011 that landed her at #23. It was a big commercial success despite how low key it all was. I remember it managing to reach Gold sales back before streaming was introduced which isn't easy to do. It'd later get a whole new audience around the world when it was remixed by Wankelmut and re-released under the name "My Head Is a Jungle". That remix also got its own remix via MK that turned into a smash hit. On the surface, I might be a little put off by that but I found myself enjoying it as a contrast to the original. Okay, maybe the piano is a little too loud, but it's a fun arrangement. Surprisingly it never really got a proper push in Australia. It feels like radio catnip nowadays, any excuse to cheat the quota. My Emma Louise knowledge doesn't go much beyond this. I just have to give a shout out to her single "Boy" which I think is fantastic. She really utilises those drawn out notes, plays with a counter melody behind it and it accomplishes something equally chill and intense, like the best Air songs.

Emma Louise's voice is obviously the key asset though. She always sounded so far beyond her years and brought an incredible amount of gravitas to everything. That still carries through in "Two Bodies". Compared to "Arty Boy" (#760), she's much more in her element. It's all those vocal runs she brings to the table that can't really be emulated. I'd know, whenever Flight Facilities do a live show and they bring in their usual touring vocalist (I'm sure her name is here somewhere), "Two Bodies" is the one song where it doesn't feel quite as natural. Just a song she makes her own. I guess I should give credit to Flight Facilities as well. The whole thing is just composed of incredibly inoffensive but vibrant beats. It's all just very warm and inviting.

#169. Skegss - Got on My Skateboard (#39, 2017)

21st of 2017

Look, I understand the trepidation when it comes to an artist getting a big haul of songs on the list that you're not invested it. I feel it more than most because I collect all the songs, and it literally becomes a forced investment. For some, it's just 20-30 odd minutes of tedium that prevents them from hoisting bragging rights in their favour, and maybe something to be bothered about whenever they're reminded. For me, it's a spectre that haunts my shuffle playlist actively over the next 12 months, and then passively forever after. If someone gets 5 songs on the list, I'm probably hearing them almost every week for that next year.

My first instinct is to be annoyed. My second instinct is to go against that. Every time I see a discussion thread that boils down to 'Spacey Jane are boring, all their songs sound the same', to me, it screams of lacking effort. In the same way a LLM doesn't know what it's talking about, the more that gets said, the more it reveals the same thing. It's just the easy mental trap to land on. I've said time and time again that your earliest impression tends to be the worst one. Even with this, I can't imagine how often I'll still listen to something once or twice, deem it one of the worst things I've ever heard, certain that I'll never budge on that. Much like how I can certify the benefits of practice even when it doesn't feel like it, forcing myself onto these songs can unearth a better perception. It's why I tend to have better views about a lot of Gracie Abrams songs than if I were asked 18 months ago (that and she just has the most annoying detractors going around).

The 2025 Hottest 100 limited the maximum potential of a bunch of artists so there are no massive hauls this time around, just a large batch of moderately sized ones. You've got a whole new batch of Spacey Jane songs (although this time I'm more familiar with them in advance), Ocean Alley, Tame Impala, all the classics. Royel Otis is the one that raises the most eyebrows and I'd readily skip over them if I could. I'm gonna persist with them though. You want to trust the process, both a belief that there's something to be seen in it which is where the votes come from, and that I'll be able to find that something, as I have so many times before. Maybe it's already happening. You won't find charitable opinions about Royel Otis going around much at the moment, but I do think that they've got a knack for emulating very specific sounds of indie rock in the 21st century that I tend to be interested in. This is just a three paragraph pre-amble to say that I think "car" sounds like "Got on My Skateboard".

This is a good kind of homage even though I doubt it's actually intentional. It's probably the best part of both songs, just that steady rolling energy that the guitar provides. I haven't road tested Skegss for various skateboard related video games, but I suspect it's a fitting backdrop. When the verses are going on, I'm barely paying attention to what's being said (though it's hard even if you do try), because the momentum is just doing a downhill jam. It's the ideal iteration for a Skegss song.

#168. Remi Wolf - Photo ID (#75, 2020)

8th of 2020

Way back at the end of 2014, I was deliberating over what should be my favourite song of the year. The toss-up was between a song that will eventually appear on this list (though I'd ironically later realise it came out in 2013), and the song "Warning" by Cymbals Eat Guitars. If you do click on that link and you've never heard of them before, that is absolutely not them in the video. That was a chance discovery of mine that really bore fruit if you ignore the band breaking up not long after. I've generally found myself enjoying a lot of their long, moody songs with dramatic stakes, but "Warning" feels like more of a tilt at alt rock crossover appeal. A really nice riff and a chorus that goes unbelievably hard. When I couldn't really make up my mind, I went against "Warning" and my rationalisation was that it peaked too soon and trailed off without a proper climax. I guess they just never wanted to make typical song structures. Anyway, it's all moot because now I actually think my favourite song of 2014 is "Trustful Hands" by The Dø. You can make up your own mind as to whether it's just that they play more by the rules on that one or they just give out additional treats via playing the chorus in different ways.

This whole ordeal has ironically become the most memorable thing about "Photo ID" for me. I think it gains an added layer because the song has gotten so popular in spite of it. Obviously in the age of streaming, you only need to hook people for 30 seconds and then it doesn't matter what happens, but I just can't think of any song that breaks the rules to the extent this song does. It wouldn't be ungenerous to say that the song gets through its core sequences in about two and a half minutes, leaving another two minutes to just waffle around and you absolutely feel it. This isn't just a popular artist getting away with it, this is Remi Wolf's only entry, and I feel comfortable saying it's her most popular song, though that's with the boost of a Dominic Fike version.

Even without that long outro though, it's still an interesting song. It doesn't really sound like anything else going on, and then you have Remi Wolf herself delivering multiple different tones. She goes from shrill to playful, running alongside, but occasionally also in contrast to the music. I greatly admire her higher register, which just cuts through everything and stands out. Just glad to see that weird, quirky music occasionally still breaks through, or maybe I just like songs with bridges about stepping on people's toes.

#167. The Avalanches - Subways (#91, 2016)

20th of 2016

I'll admit I'm very much someone who just wants to hear the music, but I do get some fun out of quirky promotional campaigns. Just these seemingly unnecessary means to drum up hype for music that we're likely going to check out already, but maybe just that added story can add something to the mystique. Like just recently, Olivia Rodrigo's had people all over the world obsessing over the colour of a wall. Just be silly enough with it that we'll remember.

For The Avalanches, this was a rollout that begged for gravitas. They had spent just about a decade (if not more) in that eternal limbo of whether or not that next album was going to come out. Every year we'd wait for Richard Kingsmill's blog post for new Australian albums to see if The Avalanches rated a mention, only to get disappointed when they did, and nothing surfaced. We all grew restless. It almost seemed like a wait for something that couldn't possibly live up to expectation. The music world had changed so much since "Since I Left You", and I don't think there's the same audience for that same barrel of tricks. Running too close to it would run the risk of the obvious 'Yeah sure, it's fine, but why would I listen to it over the established classic'. I think there are some very good songs on that My Bloody Valentine album that came out in 2013, but that's basically the precedent that was set when The Avalanches were gearing up for this one.

You might think you remember the first song released from The Avalanches second album, and I'll get to it when it has its day, but the first thing we actually heard from the album was "Subways". Why was that? Because about a week before the actual new single came out, there was a hotline number spotted on posters in London, you could call this number and hear a snippet of "Subways". I absolutely got in on this. It was just untoward enough to make the moment feel oddly special, and I gotta say, a new Avalanches album is exactly the thing that deserved this moment.

Since I feel like there are other things to talk about with the last entry, I'll use this opportunity to properly shout them out. The Avalanches are icons. They could've just released the single album and that would've been true, because it was true for a long time. They dipped into that fascinating well of plunderphonics, creating an album entirely out of samples and crafted something utterly beautiful. Every track on the album flows into the next, so it's just this endless journey from the title track of "Since I Left You" (a song I've taken far too long to appreciate) and sending you from hit to hit to hit. Maybe they cheat a little bit with the clear interlude tracks but it's strange how natural it all sounds when many of these components have nothing to do with each other. Then of course they throw the rule book out for the album's other big moment, "Frontier Psychiatrist", where it couldn't be more obvious what they're doing, but they turn it into a dozen odd moments. All the quotability of your favourite idiosyncratic comedy movie (your "Holy Grail", if you would) packed into about 5 minutes. They had me going out of my way to watch the film "Polyester" just to learn how clinically insane Dexter really is (he steps on women's feet) and watch Divine just be beset on all sides as everything goes wrong around them. I missed the moment as a 7-8 year old but I've been obsessed ever since I found out about it. On some level that extra time allowed the legend to cultivate, and it probably paid off well, given what there'll be to say on the next entry.

I think if you love "Since I Left You", you might not entirely get what you're after on "Wildflower", but "Subways" feels like a strong concession to that audience anyway. There's a prominent Graham Bonnet sample and it really sounds like The Avalanches of old (if that makes sense), while the main vocals in the song are from another song called "Subways", by 12 year old singer Chandra Oppenheim. Once again, The Avalanches are resorting to a very familiar sample that's already been used, which is my chance to reveal in case you didn't know, "Sang and Dance" by the Bar-Kays is where that 'na-na-na...' comes from, before Will Smith made it famous on "Gettin' Jiggy Wit It". WhoSampled lists 11 individual samples on "Subways", which is enough to sound like a cluttered mess, but I really think they prove themselves to still be on top of their game here. It all just feels like it belongs together, rather than the mishmash of elements it really is.

#166. E^ST - Life Goes On (#63, 2017)

20th of 2017

I find myself occasionally weary when an artist has a surprise streaming boon that's backed by big playlists. There's a constant mind battle between wondering if the song in question is justifiably the hit, or if you're just witnessing the system being gamed in that very moment. Late 2017 was the time when Kita Alexander had her song "Hotel" generously boosted into 2xPlatinum success despite seemingly little interest for it. Sometimes the first instinct is just to say 'I won't be suckered in by this, I'm better than that'.

I'm not better than that. E^ST had been around for a few years at this point. Generally pretty likeable and serviceable but not making major waves either. Her song "The Alley" stood out to me. It's a pop song with big stakes, self-imposed with intriguing percussion. It's a showcase of E^ST the singer more than anything though. One of the more glaring Australian accents to poke out, but also occasionally flexing her prowess. She also takes the same Psalm quote that Coolio uses in "Gangsta's Paradise", so it's pretty intense all up.

"Life Goes On" is not like this at all. I think I can fathom a turn of events where I feel so betrayed by it that I dismiss it completely. Gone is all that mysterious darkness, instead we enter full on optimistic fun. She's still dealing with a less ideal situation, but not wallowing in it. Maybe you could present the same lyrics and make it sound miserable, but when you put all the focus on 'Life goes on' with these bright, sunny beats, you've just made a summer anthem. Just a very enviable piano riff, that part alone does so much to turn this into a delight. Also happy things have lined up so I'm writing this during E^STER.

#175-#171

#175. Juice WRLD - Robbery (#42, 2019)

13th of 2019

It hasn't been a long wait, but we're back with another pseudo-posthumous entry here. In some regard, you can probably cut "Robbery" a little more slack as it was already something of a hit on its own and maybe there's a chance it could have polled anyway, but the reality is that voting opened in the middle of December 2019, a week after Juice WRLD tragically passed away at the tragically young age of 21. There's no way it wouldn't be on anyone's minds at the time. All of his top 50 hits had just re-entered the ARIA top 50 on that very weekend. Still, he was just barely getting started at that point without many hits to his name. "Robbery" stands as the only Hottest 100 entry Juice WRLD actually got to release while he was still with us.

I touched on it a little when I got to him before, but at the pointy end of the list, I think it's worth acknowledging just how opposed I was to Juice WRLD at the time. I found myself thoroughly irked by his breakthrough hit "Lucid Dreams", with its tired sample, occasionally misogynistic lyrics and most of all, that stilted delivery where every syllable needs a metre of distance apart from each other in a clunky attempt to forge melodic rap. It didn't get any better, the more I heard from him, where his worst tendencies would just seem to grow into more unavoidable issues. I was ready to conclude that he had nothing going for him and I should just do my best to ignore him.

Then "Robbery" came along and you can absolutely bet that nothing in my opinion changed at all. Even for a lot of people who liked what he was bringing to the table, this was a bridge too far. An utterly unhinged song with production choices that don't seem to mesh and an over-the-top performance that doesn't compromise itself at all. It was the last straw, the sign that we've been on the Juice WRLD experience for too long. It became the one song that seemed to troll me every other morning. My alarm would wake me up, and "Robbery" was on the radio. My favourite song would get played, "Robbery" would follow. Truly, a gift and a curse that I could not reverse.

On the other hand, that's the funny thing that starts to happen. I couldn't help but laugh at the sheer absurdity of the circumstance. The way it happened with this song that shined a light on all of Juice WRLD's roughest tendencies, with the song somehow managing to be enough of a hit to justify it. Much like how you can't help but laugh at some point watching "Groundhog Day" when the barrage of "I Got You Babe" finally reaches a tipping point, "Robbery" did just enough in its accidental overexposure that I relished the opportunity. Then I started to enjoy the song and the whole thing spiralled out from there. "Robbery" went from a song that I couldn't imagine a worse version of, to something I might actively choose to listen to, and a song I grew to really love by the end of it.

Honestly just this one song went a long way for me to better understanding the appeal of Juice WRLD and what he offers. I'm still not particularly fond of some of his earlier stuff, but I can see a version of it where it all comes together. "Robbery" to me, represents the whole ideal seen out to its logical extreme. This is a song where the protagonist is not remotely in a good place. You can hear it in the things he says and the way he says them. It's the sound of someone who can't consistently string coherent thoughts, constantly getting side tracked and jumping onto new tangents. Truly throwing absolutely everything at the wall here. I don't know if anyone's ever pointed this out before, but by landing so close to Denzel Curry's "RICKY" (#347), we had two songs in quick succession that spin parental advice into something misguided. I just love every strange journey Juice WRLD takes us on. It's a song that's perhaps lucky to have been released when it was, because in hindsight, it sounds like a twisted version of Lizzo's "Truth Hurts", a song that belatedly entered the spotlight just a month after this song had its turn.

#174. Mallrat - Rockstar (#13, 2020)

9th of 2020

I don't like to speak in certain terms. It often means making promises that while I would do my best to make certain, all manner of things could potentially get in the way, and then I just don't like the pressure of it. Look at Nickelback's song "Rockstar", it's just full of all kinds of future tense in its imagined life of luxury. I'm not sure any rockstars can guarantee all of those luxuries. Mallrat has it figured out. She has a whole bunch of phrases of certainty, but she gets away with it by starting her chorus with the word 'Maybe'. Big '/s' vibes to this one.

You might not be surprised to learn that Mallrat has never actually won any GRAMMY Awards. She hasn't even managed an ARIA Award though she has tallied up to 4 nominations now. The one surprising international nomination she has managed is an MTV Europe Music Award for the oddly specific category of Best Australian Act. It's a fascinating thing to look at, seeing how an international audience looks at us. I have no idea where they actually pull the nominations from. It's strange to see 5 Seconds of Summer get two early wins but then they're left out in 2018 when they actually had a major hit (Tkay Maidza won that one). Every year since 2020, The Kid LAROI has gotten a nomination but hasn't won. They put the awards on pause in 2025 so I have no idea, but maybe it could've finally been his year. Just living the Diane Warren Academy Awards experience.

Anyway there's a certain irony to this because of all the 'Rockstar' songs we have, this is the one that doesn't position the artist as the potential rockstar. Yet despite that, it's also the only one where I would make the claim that they've actually pivoted into rock to complete the illusion. I'm not used to hearing actual guitars like this behind Mallrat. There's a big solo near the end and it's the most interesting part of the song, just a strange rejection of pop song structure, with some of the filthiest tuning going around. If Mitski could find her phone, then she would have taken notes. But then she still did it anyway. Are you telling me you can take notes on pen and paper?

#173. FKA twigs - Two Weeks (#45, 2014)

21st of 2014

One of the things that Jessie J laments in her song "Price Tag" is the current era of 'video hos'. Just remember that when anyone ever says 'Am I the only one...', they're unintentionally evoking one Jessica Cornish. Clearly she was too ahead of her time though. Maybe a couple of years later and she might have really been onto something, maybe I'm onto that act of leading on again. There aren't many songs left in this list and even less that have these kinds of foreseeable properties, so I have to relish the chances.

Funnily enough, if you watch the music video for that song, at the exact moment she delivers that line, you might see someone familiar. That is in fact Tahliah Barnett, soon to be formerly known as twigs as a backup dancer behind Jessie J. I can't speak in all honesty and say that the tables have fully turned, just because nostalgia streams absolutely pay the bills, but let's just say that both of these singers released albums in 2025 and one of them peaked at #3, the other at #19 in the UK.

People might have mockingly called Stormzy a backup dancer, but for FKA twigs, it was an honest reflection. She was in a small handful of music videos before her music career took off, notably including some blink-and-you'll-miss-it shots in an Ed Sheeran music video. It's something of a touchy issue for her after she gave up dancing and started making music. She'd get stopped in the street by people who recognised her from those videos and eventually she started just denying it. On her debut album, the song "Video Girl" is about those mental demons. It's one of the more memorable cuts on "LP1" that aren't "Two Weeks".

I always think about the big shift in the Hottest 100 that happens pretty much immediately after 2014. Double J has been introduced and gradually starts to take up the mantle for all kinds of blog-core or otherwise acclaimed but not chart smashing artists. Prior to this, you could usually find a little space in the countdown for those songs that are beloved on the internet but might register a shrug elsewhere. That's the space where you get Animal Collective or The National polling. I put FKA twigs in a similar grouping just because she's the portrait of an artist that I'd generally never expect to be in the conversation. 2014 didn't play by the rules though, so she ended up quite high for her first and only ever appearance. Maybe this was her one undeniable crossover that had all the hype going for it, but I'd be lying if I said she's never made anything else worthy of the same attention.

FKA twigs was something of a curiosity to me at the time. You hear a song like "Two Weeks" and it immediately calls to repel you. Its stiff, cold production in combination with a chorus that anchors itself around saying an expletive made me feel like she was filtering out her audience right there. She's not your typical pop star, nor is she trying to be. She's a bit edgy and a bit weird. I think I warmed to the song eventually because there was too much assurance that she was onto a good thing. I even bought the album and listened to it a bunch. I deemed that she was pretty good but didn't have a very high ceiling for me.

She kept releasing more music and I kept listening though. There were some stopgaps between albums for her that I was pretty positive about. I felt like I was finally rewarded for persistence in 2019 with a big advance single to her second album. You know what I'm talking about here, it's that show-stopping single "holy terrain" with Future. This is one of those classic cases of a polarizing single that gets re-assessed once the album comes out and suddenly the artist can do no wrong. We'll have some more of these on the list, and it's one where I saw the vision right away. Also before that she released her actual showstopper of a single "cellophane", the song I'm most likely to see get brought up by people who don't otherwise listen to twigs. That's a masterpiece obviously but I just didn't give it enough of a chance at first, which is more of a showing to how an artist can fall out of commercial favour without actually stumbling. I think a lot of people would like a second chance at a first impression with that one.

I don't tend to think about it as much as I used to, but if I was pressed for a choice, I'd say that "MAGDALENE" is my favourite album of 2019. It's the point where FKA twigs went from isolated moments of intrigue to just full on nailing the atmosphere from start to finish. Almost every song is good enough to be a single for me and it hasn't lost any of that shine 7 years later. There's an incredible range of ballads & bangers that slip in seamlessly together. "sad day" in particular, really resonated with me and probably demonstrates that contrast the best. It's a very beautiful and chaotic song. Ditto 5 years later with the title track to "EUSEXUA", just a marvel of crisp, pounding production and she's never sounded better as a singer.

The whole thing was just a huge revelation though. I wouldn't say I've completely gone back to "LP1" with that same enthusiasm, it's mostly still just pretty good. "Two Weeks" however, I'm much more open towards. There's a certain quaintness to it with all that's come after it, so I no longer feel fearful of it. It's a strange flirtation with making an anthem that largely works. The phrase 'higher than a motherf**ker' is a flip of the same line from Nicki Minaj's "Starships" but I'd almost completely forgotten about it now, and I'm wondering if my hesitation in 2014 was due to that being a more recent phenomenon at the time. As far as I'm concerned though, it's twigs' phrase now, she treats it with a lot more gravitas, the kind that feels rewarding when it wraps back around to it at the end. A great bridge also it must be said, she pulls off that tender tone better than anyone.

#172. DZ Deathrays - Shred For Summer (#67, 2017)

22nd of 2017

In a crucial blow for pretending that I can have diverse opinions, DZ Deathrays have stepped in with all three of their entries in the range of about 20 places. In some ways, I feel like I went out of my way to make this happen because if you'd asked me a few years ago, I'd probably have "Gina Works At Hearts" (#193) as the clear standout. It's just the song from the album I like a lot which can lend a lot of favours. Instead I've just come through here and elevated my opinion of their other two entries so they just end up in that same general area.

"Shred For Summer" is probably something you'd get from a DZ Deathrays song title generator. This is their entire vibe boiled down to one mantra. They did release it as early as August which might be jumping the gun, but sometimes you have to just have your cogs in place. Just like Tame Impala needed to get "Dracula" out in September to build up to Halloween. Only the way it's going right now, it might end up a bigger success for Halloween 2026 and absolutely solidify those cheesy playlists given how easy they are to crack. DZ Deathrays were ready, and for it, we had the album come out in summer, and everyone was doing air guitar when this landed in the Hottest 100, also in summer.

It's just a behemoth of a song though. You get a fake out at the start with this incredibly distorted riff, only for it to come through cleanly on the verses. I think there's some lineage in that other two piece band, Royal Blood. It's a little funny because "Figure It Out" has a thick guitar riff of its own that plays through the whole song. For DZ Deathrays, that's the bar they're hitting for the song's quiet bridge. It just goes to show that if Royal Blood wanted to make the Hottest 100, they should've gone harder, or been born in Australia, that's probably a boon for success in this, and only this metric.

#171. What So Not (feat George Maple) - Gemini (#90, 2015)

25th of 2015

I hope you're sitting down for this because this is a revelation that rocked me a couple of years ago. Back in the 1960s, NASA enacted Project Gemini as part of its space program, a precursor to the Apollo program that eventually put men on the moon. A lot of people don't know this, but when Project Gemini was operating, they were pronouncing the word 'gemini' with a soft 'i' at the end, in a way that makes the word rhyme with hegemony. Just thoroughly unpleasing to the ear, and a reminder that I, and many others my age who played "Jet Force Gemini" as a child take some things for granted. I have no idea if this was the experience for What So Not, Flume or George Maple. The word doesn't appear in the lyrics, and I can't find any explanation on why the song is called "Gemini". It's lost in the more pressing discussion of the song's release and the circumstances around it.

This is something I touched on when talking about "Innerbloom"'s remix by What So Not (#720), but it can't hurt to serve up a reminder a year later. What So Not was a duo with Emoh Instead and Flume. If you were really into Flume, it was your way of getting more beyond just the surface releases. They parted ways in 2015 with Emoh Instead taking up the What So Not name going forward, but before they did this, they put together one last song together, "Gemini". Maybe it's the Swedish House Mafia effect that made it the biggest What So Not song, or maybe in both cases it's just justified as obviously the song that would be the biggest just from listening to it.

This song is also our spotlight moment for George Maple. She has some tenure outside of this. She co-wrote Tkay Maidza's "Simulation" (#673), and before my cut-off period, she was on vocal duty for Flight Facilities' shining disco treat "Foreign Language", under the mononym of 'Jess'. I'm made to believe that she also sings on Hayden James' "Something About You" (#604). She picked up some strong associations via Future Classic and ended up on Flume's debut album, which might be why she's here. I thought her solo career was going to take off when her debut single "Talk Talk" did big opening numbers on SoundCloud, only to discover that doesn't amount to a whole lot. Great song, though. She'd keep it up until 2020 and has released two albums. I'm particularly fond of her song "Kryptonite", absolute banger.

I feel like "Gemini" gets us the best of all these worlds. George Maple does feel a little overpowered by the production, but she still provides an alluring base to structure it around. There's a little instrumental moment before the second chorus that feels like a call back to classic Flume, but it's all building up to that big blast of a drop. I think it's a little like what Flume would do on "Some Minds" (#637), these two songs were released about a month apart. "Gemini" just has the stronger skeleton, allowing the synth boops to feel more confident, and always a treat to come back to.

#180-#176

#180. RÜFÜS DU SOL - On My Knees (#9, 2021)

8th of 2021

As far as I can recall, if you look at the Hottest 100 through any reasonable statistical model, what you'll find is that Kanye West is probably the most successful artist who has never made the top 10. There's one slight exception to this as he has a producer credit on "INDUSTRY BABY" (#439), which is an entry here where I've started it off with the same fact. It's relevant again because I think he's very 'lucky' to still hold that distinction. It's something RÜFÜS DU SOL could easily have taken away. They're very good at polling well and polling often, they just had one stroke of luck when they finally got rid of that hoodoo on their 4th album. "On My Knees" is the only RÜFÜS DU SOL song to ever make the top 10. Okay, "Innerbloom" made it for one of the special countdowns, but there's something that can be more noteworthy about the ability to so quickly win that respect. "On My Knees" was released in late September 2021, so it was just a few months they had, while it was already fighting an uphill battle being the third single released from "Surrender".

I'm not sure if it's the most likely contender, but "On My Knees" became something of a crossover hit, the kind they hadn't really had since "You Were Right" (#274). That's momentum you can carry to the bank and something that's stuck the landing. "On My Knees" remains one of their most popular songs to this day, always impressive for an artist that was arguably well past their commercial peak. All the more impressive too for its finish in the Hottest 100. In one of the more US pop dominated years, they managed to take up one of those underdog Australian slots.

To me, this all makes sense. "On My Knees" is a culmination of everything I want from RÜFÜS DU SOL, and packaged in a relatively pop friendly context. I'm reminded of The Presets' big hits from "Apocalypso" in 2007. There's a sinister darkness in the sound of it, but it never feels at risk of frightening you off. You're drawn in by the light at the end of that tunnel. On top of that, they're a group that have fully honed their craft in a way that can't help but sound big. Every synth stab, every drum pound, it's all working together to create this monster of a song. I wouldn't call it Tyrone's best vocal performance, but the pleading tone works well with this backdrop. There's a nice, underrated moment on the bridge where they briefly reel it back in and I'm reminded of the very early RÜFÜS DU SOL days, the RÜFÜS days if you will. It sounds so pretty before building back up to a completely earned climax. I think on the surface I just liked this song for being catchy but the more I go back to it, the more I just admire the craft of it all.

#179. The Amity Affliction - I Bring the Weather With Me (#67, 2016)

21st of 2016

The album "This Could Be Heartbreak" is the black sheep of The Amity Affliction's discography. It's absolutely one of their most successful albums, released at the height of their popularity, but it's been pushed aside in the years since. It's the necessary follow up to the big commercial breakthrough, with all the classic trappings. You'll listen to it and just get something that sounds similar to their previous album, "Let the Ocean Take Me". For the many people who jumped on board with that album, it's probably close to what they want, but it's hard to justify picking it up first after the thrill is gone. I listen to "Tearing Me Apart" and I can't escape the clear similarities to the last Amity Affliction song I'll be talking about in this list.

This isn't just the view from the fans though, by all reports, it's felt even more strongly by the band themselves. Gleaning from interviews, Joel & Ahren both weren't a fan of the album, and it's possible Joel associates it with a time when he was going through an alcoholic relapse. Generally though, they accepted that they leaned too hard into what they'd done before and ended up with some of their cheesiest songs. It's an album that gets very little coverage in their modern setlists. The one song that seems to have survived is "All F**ked Up" (#827), and even that song fell out of favour for a while when they had just released "Not Without My Ghosts", taking up the mantle for a while as the token softer song in the metal setlist. By comparison, their most recent setlist has had them typically playing 2 songs from "Chasing Ghosts" and 3 from "Let The Ocean Take Me". I don't think many people are lamenting the lack of "Some Friends" to be fair.

The only other song from the album that still got a reasonable shake is "I Bring the Weather With Me". They haven't played it in a while, but they stuck with it for a pretty long time, so there's always the chance it comes back. On an album full of attempts to find the next hit, this might just be the one that makes that most clear. I wouldn't say it's the most derivative, but just the song that's always felt like it packs in the most hooks. It always feels like it's ramping things up to a good pay off, and I think having Joel sing the title line works better than when Ahren does it. Just a very well put together effort.

#178. DZ Deathrays - Like People (#47, 2018)

19th of 2018

I was blessed a while back when someone brought this song up while I was researching for my entry on San Cisco's "Reasons" (#495). They seemed to think that both music videos were filmed at the same venue. It's something I couldn't get myself to confirm (I spent a lot of time looking at windows). If there's a similarity to be noted though, it's that both videos do start with fairly long cuts (36 seconds for San Cisco, 27 seconds for DZ Deathrays). Both videos abandon this style afterwards.

This was an important entry point to this because it introduced me to a music video I'd either forgotten about or never seen before. I'm now willing to put in all my chips and say that the music video is a strong contributor to how "Like People" did so well. Maybe it wouldn't have been a convincing take in 2019, but we've got some added evidence in the 2020s to suggest what we probably should have already known. People who listen to triple j just love The Wiggles. I love to imagine someone catching the video on TV on a late night and having the slow revelation as a man emerges from a bathroom stall wearing a suit and puts on his glasses. Maybe you recognise him or maybe you don't, but then a minute into the video he re-emerges in a red dress shirt and you realise you're looking at Murray Cook. What an absolute legend. I watched it multiple times before I realised he grips a steaming potato because he's making a Wiggles reference, I just thought it was neat. It all just feels like a full circle moment. DZ Deathrays are about the right age to be some of the first fans The Wiggles ever cultivated. Murray would go on to play the song with the band at Splendour In The Grass that year, and also join in on a cover of AC/DC's "Highway to Hell". This was clearly hinted at when Murray mimicked the Angus Young guitar dance in the music video.

"Like People" comes from DZ Deathrays' 3rd album "Bloody Lovely", which after the breakout success of "Black Rat", earned them much more attention. They went from a #23 charting album to #4. They outsold Shannon Noll if you can believe it. I don't know if the band ever quite captured the exuberance from that release again, but in its place is just the mother of all chunky, chunky actual guitars. They were definitely playing around with distortion effects before, but it all combined with the drums to just make the songs feel more danceable. Here they just smash you over the head with an enormous guitar riff and leave you to pick up the pieces. The chorus is just classic DZ Deathrays release, that's a knack I'm not sure they've ever lost.

#177. Gang of Youths - Let Me Down Easy (#2, 2017)

23rd of 2017

Recently in the world of petty, silly internet drama, there's been a lot of focus on the TV show Breaking Bad. In most places you can look, it holds up a pretty significant mantle as a common go-to answer to the question of 'What is the best TV show ever made?'. Whatever the real answer to that question might be, it's not really important, it's just that the show has more fans willing to stake the claim than anything else. Maintaining that status quo is of highest importance to them.

It's so important that they're willing to tear down any potential threat to this. There's a Game of Thrones prequel of sorts that recently came out. It's getting very good reviews. I've pretty much memorised every word of the trailer that plays every time I try to watch an HBO show. In fact, one episode of the show even managed upon release to reach a 10.0 rating on IMDb, the highest rating you can get, and one that has been held exclusively by an episode of Breaking Bad for over a decade. I should clarify firstly that a 10.0 doesn't really mean it's the obscenely high approval of rounding up at least from 9.95, because the site heavily filters perceived trolling. Secondly, it's a reasonably common thing in pretty much all websites like this that scores start off high and then find a more realistic chasm in the days and weeks following, as people come to check out the hype and don't have the same enthusiasm as the day one die hards. That didn't stop Breaking Bad fans from attempting to right a perceived wrong and put Game of Thrones in its place. They succeeded, and dropped the new episode down to a 9.8 or something.

Once this happened, it opened up a war worthy of both TV shows as suddenly everyone got tired of Breaking Bad fans pushing them around, and fought back. That Breaking Bad episode that had been sitting at 10.0 for over a decade? It's now down to a 9.5. So laser pointed is the targeting that it's been bumped below about half of the episodes from the same season. The fans have truly lived the experience of being Walter White. Their need to be on top getting in the way of swallowing their pride and causing a cataclysm in its wake. Now don't get me wrong, I enjoy Breaking Bad a lot, it's definitely worth watching, but its fans are just so obsessed with an impenetrable status they want to foist on it that it can't possibly live up to. They make me want to dislike it out of spite. Nothing wrong with passion (lest I be the blackest pot), but rein it in before you turn into everyone else's villain, all awaiting your downfall.

I mostly find all of that to be pretty funny and it doesn't affect me, but it's a good way to lead into an issue I've had with Gang of Youths ever since they became demonstrably one of the most popular bands in the country. They've brought along with them that exact kind of insufferable fanbase. It's probably helped them in the long run. By all accounts, you need fans who have no qualms about bringing up your music in conversation with others. Enough so that you can be looking around online and just see the name pop up over and over again, enough to convince you it must be important. For Australian artists, this is even more important because it's very easy for our local music to feel insignificant without the global reinforcement. How nice it must be to be able to talk about an Australian band who are actually very good, and not just a watered down, less inspired version of something that could be found in the US or UK. These are the people who have turned Gang of Youths into some kind of international sensation. They're also the people that very much damaged my feelings for the band's music.

It's something I've been grappling with every time the band have appeared on this list. That slight pattern emerging where their later releases have been working less for me than the earlier ones. Normally I wouldn't find this weird, but I see so much enthusiasm for the later stuff that I can't help but feel like the problem rests with me, where I can't muster as much myself because on some level I just don't want to. None of this is fair to the band themselves who have done nothing wrong in this regard, which itself bothers me. Now that all the players are on the field, it's easier to finally explain this one.

Ever since 2005, triple j have been giving out J Awards. It's the big climax of Aus Music Month every November, where we find out among other things, what's been judged the best Australian album of the year. It doesn't hold quite the same level of interest as something like the Mercury Prize does in the UK. Historically, you can't really see the needle moving much from hype. It might have helped on a small intangible scale in the past, where you could look at any belated success of The Panics being bolstered by that little conversation-starter. I've always been interested in it, but that's just me.

The one time that it certainly did make waves was in 2017. Gang of Youths were of course nominated and it made sense: They had everything going for them. Huge acclaim, huge sales and a plethora of certain hits just waiting to be canonised. It even could serve as belated gratification for anyone who thought their first album should have won back in 2015. Gang of Youths did not win the J Award. They lost to A.B. Original's album "Reclaim Australia", an album whose most famous song will eventually appear on this list. The "SICKO MODE" (#229) incident had not yet happened, so as far as I was concerned at this point, I'd never seen a more utterly inane outpour of the 5 Stages of Grief on full display from everyone who was not content to let this stand. Clearly the mood was akin to Skin on Skin (#288) for them, 'If it ain't Gang, I'll burn them bridges'. For months on, I'd just keep seeing variations on the same comments that were so clouded by their personal judgement that they'd try to apply unnecessary logic. Suggestions that everyone knows Gang of Youths should have won because their album sold more (people whom I suspect would not cede then that Bliss N Eso would have deserved it over Gang of Youths considering their album sold even more). They'd boast that the ARIA Awards actually got it right by giving their equivalent to Gang of Youths, and following the Hottest 100 which saw three songs by Gang of Youths in the top 10, start laughing at the fact A.B. Original had nothing to show for it. Top it off with a lot of barely disguised racism (which is odd, coming from fans of a band like Gang of Youths), and they just created the most toxic fanbase in Australia. My instinct tends to be that I never want to publicly side with anyone when they make an arse of themselves like that. Gang of Youths probably did put out my favourite Australian album that year, but I've also never listened to the whole thing since November 2017. I just can't give them the satisfaction.

Obviously, the situation sucks. Gang of Youths have done nothing wrong by me, and anything I say about a terrible portion of their fanbase doesn't change the fact that I've encountered no shortage of fans who aren't like that, and are just willing to enjoy a band that makes music they greatly resonate with. Given the volume of their songs still to be seen in the pointy end of this list, I probably still am one of those fans myself. I just feel like I'm holding onto old memories of when there was palpable excitement on all accounts. Why must Icarus always keep flying higher?

The J Award was just the first time they'd fall short after seemingly having conquered everything. Something, if treated right, could be a means to stay humble. A reminder that there's always more to learn, and to not get complacent. Sometimes we all need a Jackie Chun (this is a Dragon Ball reference, not a spelling error), or whoever'd keep beating Ash at the Pokémon League. Two months later and it happened again. Gang of Youths had a mighty haul in the Hottest 100 no doubt, but they were stuck the bridesmaid. "Let Me Down Easy" finished at #2. Suddenly the popularity argument doesn't work anymore, they were beaten, outnumbered. You can make excuses for this (I might save some up for when I talk about that song), but some of the things I saw made me all the happier for the result. I don't think I could take in those dangerous, volumetrically compressed volumes of smug if that brigade truly had things go their way. There's just no way my opinion of "Let Me Down Easy" would have lived to tell the tale.

With that all being said, I have always felt a little odd with this particular song. I guess I just can't really pin down its audience, and what in particular it does to be the de facto hit from this Gang of Youths album. I hesitate to call it their biggest hit because some other songs make a strong case, but when they were at the peak of their powers, this was the song that drove most of the votes. It was something I found puzzling. I found it easier to imagine passion and excitement elsewhere, but this was just a bit perfunctory with its best crossover appeal elements feeling insufficient. Like, it feels like it's the most easy-going song, it has a title that doesn't feel like it's a learned literary reference. I just couldn't muster up that extreme enthusiasm so it was hard to place in general.

It's unfair to this song to say it's just the simple, radio friendly single. It still clocks past 5 minutes, and while you can maybe take away a pleasant, simple mantra out of the hook, this is a song that isn't pulling any punches for being just as lyrically dense as any other Gang of Youths song. I don't think anything else resembling a hit song has ever used the word 'solipsism' before, although funnily enough JAY-Z used 'solipsistic' on the song "Caught Their Eyes", which came out just a month after "Let Me Down Easy".

Maybe I pine for something more exciting, and thrilling, which we get in other Gang of Youths songs. I will be perfectly fair to this one though, it's not without its moments either. There's a subtle touch to it that plays off well. Maybe the strings aren't doing anything exciting, but they do accentuate the mood and give it a good lift in the chorus. What I really love is that little synth that comes in afterwards though. It's this little magic touch that veers on the side of goofy, but gives the song a real 'floating in the air' vibe. I like to think that's what they were going for. I also feel like I should shout out the song "Rainbow Kr**t" by The John Steel Singers. I enjoy the steady guitar riff in this song but I think it's in part because it reminds me of that song, which does something similar.

#176. Bloc Party - Ratchet (#36, 2013)

33rd of 2013

When I was a teenager, Bloc Party felt like one of the biggest bands in the world. It wasn't entirely unfounded. Their quick turn around on releasing albums at the time meant that from my perspective, they were the band that got played the most on triple j for a while. I used to check the old JPlay website which would re-affirm this. They had memorable music videos, they made the Hottest 100 most years, everything was coming up Bloc Party.

The irony in all this is that like many cases alongside them, I missed the boat when it actually counted. Bloc Party are more than anything, the band that made "Silent Alarm", their debut album. It's a wall to wall selection of extremely tightly made post-punk revival that might just be the flag bearer for the entire sub-genre if Interpol weren't also around to make a case. At the same time though, they found a way to make it just a little more crossover friendly with extremely danceable tunes and guitar riffs that weren't content to just set a steady pace. That's not even acknowledging the band's true secret weapon in original drummer Matt Tong. One of the first things you hear on the album is his contribution to "Like Eating Glass" and he single-handedly sets the pace for the whole album. It's not unreasonable to say the band haven't quite been the same since he left in 2013.

This is all to say that I did eventually get around to "Silent Alarm" mostly through gradually picking up songs I'd hear from place to place over the years. I absolutely love it. In 2025, Bloc Party went on tour for its 20th anniversary and I immediately snapped up tickets because the album does mean that much to me. It ended up being a bit of a misnomer as the band didn't actually play all of the album, but it ended up being a mix that not many could really argue with. I didn't realise when they played it, how rare it is for "Two More Years" to end up in their set.

I've gotten a certain thrill out of seeing less obvious songs converted into the live experience. Any song that doesn't just sound like a typical four piece band plugging it out with their instruments. One that stood out to me is "Mercury". It's the lead single to their third album, the one where things started to go a bit off the rails for them. I remember at the time they had the most songs on the Hottest 100 voting list that year but then none of them made it. It was an album with a strange roll out and strange songs that people didn't know what to do with. I have a certain fondness for the singles from then, and the main thing I remember was how surprisingly "Mercury" came through in the live setting. It just came alive in an unexpected way. Even more than that was one of their much more recent singles "Traps". That's one of those songs that I think with its studio version had a lot of people scratching their heads at what had become of this band. When they sneak it into the setlist though, it's surprising just how much it fits in regardless. I was grinning through the proverbial window with my SICKOS shirt as they snuck 'cute like Bambi' and 'lick, lick, lick' into the set.

The whole experience could have been a great bit of research for this blog, only they let me down by leaving "Ratchet" out of their set. Maybe on the surface it shouldn't be surprising, as it's just a standalone single and in the same standing as "Two More Years", but Bloc Party do have a knack for those. It's an odd quirk that they've only polled songs from their first two albums in the Hottest 100, but their first 4 album eras all had non-album singles that got through, with "Ratchet" being the last one. It's also a song that they generally include in most of their sets. I feel it's a song that would absolutely soar in this setting. A song where any moments of emptiness are filled out by everything going on, giving it every opportunity to sound better than it does on the studio recording.

It was odd at the time to see Bloc Party turn back the clock with this one. Overall, they've only ever had three charting singles in Australia. "Ratchet" managing to do so in a time period where it was difficult to break through was all the more surprising. I couldn't tell if they were preaching to their core audience or had tapped into something that went beyond it. There isn't a global bat signal that says 'Hey, Bloc Party have got their shit back together', and even if there was, I'm not sure "Ratchet" is the song to do it.

"Ratchet" feels quintessentially like later period Bloc Party. The kind where Kele puts strange things into the lyrics that can be distracting, and the whole core of the song just sounds so strange from a band that got famous for being so tightly locked in. From what I've seen, the whole situation can be a little touchy and it's something I can't help but notice with any rock band with a black singer. Whether it's Living Colour or it's TV On The Radio, there's this weird expectation that they're supposed to fit in and not express themselves fully, lest it be seen as an incoherent mess. It's something that Kele has spoken about in interviews before, this idea that he's a novelty that doesn't fit in with his contemporaries. This only got more relevant in 2010 when Kele came out as gay. To me, it's all part of the package and I'm not sure Bloc Party would have stuck around quite as long as they have if they conformed and just made "Silent Alarm" over and over again. I love hearing him having fun on this song.

On the whole, it plays out like a strange experiment though. There's no foundation to anchor in the guitar so it just feels like it's revving up on its own, and then becomes a loop to bring in and out of the song. Shout out also to the loud siren that plays just before the chorus. It's an experiment that mostly works though, Kele goes a long way towards sending it all soaring.