#65

#65. A.B. Original (feat Dan Sultan) - January 26 (#16, 2016)

9th of 2016

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I think about the proverb about how the grass is always greener. There's some very serious truth to it. It goes hand in hand with the notion that no matter how comfortably successful someone becomes, there'll always be something they desire but can't have. Maybe money can make you happy so much as financial stability will do that, but do those super rich people you see ever look to be as mentally on top of the world as they are in a hierarchical sense?

This is something that can get weaponised through nostalgia. It's giving you a glimpse of greener pastures, perhaps ones you remember, dusting off the shakier parts of it, and re-selling it to you with the promise you can get back what was once lost. I'm not immune to the charms of this too, as I eagerly await a re-release of some old video games that are categorically worse than what came after them, but scratch a certain itch for the time frame they were in. I'm not so naïve to just say everything was better in a prior year, but maybe if you just take the good parts away from it, there's something to be salvaged.

One of the most eye-opening things I can ever recommend doing for any fan of music, if it's at all possible, is to specifically hunt down contemporary opinions on either the era or just specific, untouchable icons of yesteryear. History and marketing have a way of shutting out the dissent and glamourising the highs, but alongside every notable artist that never won a GRAMMY, or never had a #1 hit, sometimes the truth of the matter is that we've just had our perspectives clouded and the priority was never as strong as it feels now. It's always interesting to look back on things like this because it'll just feel like you've put a new filter on things, and you'll see people utterly disregard some all-time greats either because their potential hasn't been reached, or because they're in that moment staking the claim, and people have always been skeptical of the next big thing the way they are nowadays. The discussions are all very similar, just the names have been changed.

What I want to get into with this is culture wars. They're a frustrating reality, but one that can't really go ignored because it inevitably shapes the world view of everyone. Whether it drives passion, amusement or anger, the hold it has over us all is a big driving factor in global upheaval. All around the world, elections are staked, won and lost over this often incredibly petty part of life. I feel like it's the 'grass is greener' mentality that drives a lot of this. Someone will take something that is largely trivial to the greater populace, blow it up out of proportion, and incense a large swathe of the population into using it to drive their voting habits. Things like economic stability and infrastructure are almost certainly more important, but they're vague, hard to get a read on, and mostly just boring. What better way to motivate someone than to remind them of their own day to day hardships, and point the blame at a minority class who seemingly get everything handed to them? If you don't keep them in line, they're going to cut at your already crunched budget, or just get in the way of your own personal freedoms like being able to continue using those 'harmless' slurs you've been saying since you were a kid. It's an easy playbook. Just find any small bit of change, appeal to that sense of rejection to change, shrinkflation or otherwise and squarely blame those people who you already are at odds with for going too far yet again. In the age of AI slop proliferation, it doesn't even have to be something real, all too often I see sheer madness driven by something that was poorly explained, already resolved, or just flat out untrue in the first place.

The most apparent thing about all of this to me is the way you can see this way of thinking has lit a fire in the belly of people who were otherwise completely reasonable before. Like, it's all become a partisan battle that you're not allowed to ever concede on, lest you come out the loser. But more specifically, and this is another thing you can learn from looking at old conversations and writing, there are so many things that once went by without a whimper that now call forth outrage. Often times it can just make people unwittingly show their hand. When it comes to those culture wars, the unspoken part of it is that nobody can admit to being a bigot. It's one of those things that are just universally accepted as not okay, and will destroy any possible credibility one has, so there needs to be plausible deniability. Mind you, the bar for this is so low that certain world leaders and powerful people will freely refer to ethnic cleansing as a reasonable course of action, but it can so easily be waved away because they're just asking questions or whatever. Fascism or anything like it is just a fundamentally weak mindset that tries to reason with the idea that some people are just inherently superior, but completely undermined by those lesser than them. They'll never be happy because there's always a new problem. It should be completely untenable to all because if you tolerate this, the next target will land just a little closer to you.

The thing that I always find myself catching is just the more trivial sides of things. It's become something of a punchline to just conclude that something was done 'because of woke', on both a sincere and lampooning sense. Just the sheer lengths people will go to in order to keep up their one track mind (just don't ask them to define what 'woke' means). In the most trivial instances, it just ends up with someone making a fool out of themselves, and maybe in that sense they'll know better not to do it. I just can't help but think about the day of the year that triple j's Hottest 100 airs on.

For a very long time, triple j's Hottest 100 was synonymous with Australia Day, January 26th. Given that the school year tended to start a little bit after that, it was basically the only thing I ever associated with the date, as it had no real bearing as a holiday for me. If you want a quick history lesson, January 26th has been roughly associated with being Australia Day since 1935, but it wasn't locked in as the specific permanent date until 1994, meaning that triple j's Hottest 100 actually pre-dates it. For that reason, the Hottest 100 date has actually fluctuated a bit. In the earliest incarnations it was held in the middle of the year, but they changed it in 1991, delaying it to right at the end of the year. This proved to be pivotal to the result as Nirvana won that poll, having risen to prominent in the latter half of that year. I don't believe January 26th got locked in until 1996, which was also the first time an Australian band won it. From that point onwards, it actually gets difficult to verify because there isn't a lot of online documentation that's survived from before 2003. I did find a comment online from 2004 that suggested it wasn't quite on Australia Day a few years ago, but it's hard to say they're not just confusing it with the countdown that aired that year on January 25th.

I can readily believe that they missed the exact date in 2001 or 2002 because I know they did in 2004. It'd be for the same reason too, as a leg of the Big Day Out festival coincided with it, and triple j didn't want to divert their coverage of it. That's how easily they were able to break the tradition though, and so it was only from 2005 to 2017 that triple j consistently held the countdown on January 26th. A tradition to some maybe, but the main thing I found whenever the changed date was ever mentioned is that the biggest reaction you'd tend to get was one of slight bemusement. By today's standards, you should expect outright fury, but in a time where we weren't all being prodded at all angles to take a dramatic stand on everything, it just didn't happen. Since 2018, triple j have consistently held the Hottest 100 on a date that falls somewhere nearby January 26th, but never on that exact date itself. Righteous fury comes forth. This was the point of no return for triple j or something like that. Once again, short term memories that don't have all the facts in place start to override reality, and of course, empathy for the purpose behind the change. In reality it's much more reflective of contempt for that purpose. No one raises a fuss if a national touring festival gets precedent, but heaven forbid we listen to the plight and concerns of our Indigenous population. I'm sure they're not racists for this, just people who galvanise and reinforce the views that would be held by these theoretical white hoods.

If you're in the need for another history lesson, Australia was federated on January 1, 1901. It's a great date that's easy to remember, and would serve as a logical place to put the national holiday, if it wasn't already stuck in the calendar as a significant day that kicks off the year itself. After some discussion in the early 20th century, January 26th stuck as it marks the arrival of the First Fleet in Australia. This is a somewhat controversial decision to say the least, as while it is historically significant for Australia, it also marks the beginning of two centuries of genocide for the Indigenous population who had been living there for millennia. There was concern raised about this decision even back then, but given the way the self-appointed white government treated Indigenous Australians, it doesn't surprise me that they didn't waver on it. For many, January 26th is a day of mourning, and is often called Invasion Day. Recognition of this has increased in the 21st century, though it's admittedly a minority view that polls only about a third of the country as wanting to change the date, so neither Labor nor Liberal parties seem interested in pursuing a change that would inevitably cost them votes. As we've also learnt in recent years with the Voice referendum, there's no small part of the population who take pride in celebrating any form of progress being held up.

In 2016, A.B. Original jumped into this debate by releasing the song "January 26". It's a fairly pointed political track that makes their stance on the date clear. At the time, I felt like it was Hottest 100 nectar. What better way to send a message than to vote for this song, knowing it'll have to get a spin in the countdown on January 26th? I wouldn't have thought Briggs & Trials had the kind of notoriety to get that far, but sometimes these things can step beyond the music and end up on a different playing field. That's how we ended up with the song right at the pointy end of the list at #16, on what would end up being the last ever Hottest 100 held on the date.

For a good while after the song was out, I actually hadn't gotten around to listening to it. Sometimes when a song broaches a difficult topic, I can be hesitant to getting around to it because it can feel like I'm being suckered by provocative marketing, listening to something I'd never go near if it didn't have a bonus source of attention. My hesitation was born purely from not having heard the song, and once I heard it, it was a big remedy to it all. "January 26" is a protest song, first and foremost, but when you only look at it on that level, you miss the other vital aspect which is that it's just really good. This is a song that sounds like a hit on every level except for all of the provocative lyrics. It's short and sharp, never dawdles, and finds a great place for Dan Sultan to deliver a big hook.

Talking to people who have different politics to you is a frustrating ordeal. Sometimes the differences only have to be slight and that can still be too much to deal with. I feel like Briggs & Trials take turns here with two different perspectives. Briggs is direct, as he often is. Taking all the shit-slinging and throwing it right back, emphasizing all the tired, seemingly teleprompted responses people tend to give out. If his verse is a punch to the face, then Trials delivers it to the jugular, reminding everyone of their twisted priorities as they live in comfort provided by the very atrocities that they distance themselves from because they didn't directly commit or witness it themselves. It's important not to fall for all the classic trappings that the privileged parts of the country throw around to get away from any sort of reconciliation. They want nothing more than to ignore any sort of protest, leave it to only the small minority to be part of it so they won't have a loud enough voice to change anything. I'm well aware that I myself have a habit of wading out of difficult conversations because I don't always have the confidence to put up the right words to correctly convey myself and understand the situation. It is something that means a lot to me, and as I currently witness as the political opposition veers further and further right, it's not something I can just silently protest on with just my vote. There's no room for empathy when everyone's too busy looking out for themselves, or just having their strings pulled by the billionaire class. Fuck that.

#66

#66. BENEE - Evil Spider (#51, 2019)

4th of 2019

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One of the benefits of incessantly cataloguing your music listening and taste is that it gives you the chance to look back and see harbingers of the future. My taste has shifted quite a bit over the years but music itself doesn't necessarily work by my whims, so whatever it is that appeals to me now was likely circulating in some capacity in the past. The main curiosity here is investigating at what point it became clear that my primary focus shifted away from alternative rock on the heavier side to quirky indie pop of little to no consequence. It's something that's a little hard to define because there aren't clear bounds to what this really represents.

Much like how a lot of early hip-hop successes in the Hottest 100 are anchored around a rock skeleton, what you'll likely find is some edge cases that straddle the line both ways. Ali Barter is one such example, where her music is in every sense part of this world, but she's still fundamentally making rock songs, with often loud guitars and satiating that part of my interest. You can go back earlier, to artists like Sia and [redacted] who are certainly more apparent in shaping my taste, but I don't think their particular brand matches the aesthetic. We're looking at extremely obscure music without any particular star power to drive it out of its niche. We're looking at music like BENEE's early career.

In this regard, I think BENEE arrived at the perfect time for me. Right around the time when I was most susceptible to her music, as well as likely to hear it. Before her music really blew up, it looked primed to just sit in my corner, because there was nothing to suggest she was hitting the big time. As a result, we've got a brief period where it was open season, and we've got this quirked up song about being a spider sitting here.

I can't genuinely say that this is the most inconsequential song still to come on this list because I believe some are objectively less popular, but it really feels like it on vibes alone. I'm self-conscious about putting it so high up here because it just feels completely unnoteworthy next to all of its company, and yet here it sits as a representative for a specific niche of music I'm especially interested in. Like, there are so many other songs I could totally disrupt the list with if they were on the list, this is just the one that got a chance.

Maybe the most historically interesting thing about this song is that it's the single that was out when BENEE decided to change her name. I don't believe this was ever explained, and my only guess is that it needed to be easier to draw the connection between pronunciation and spelling. For a couple of years I knew her as 'Bene' and while I didn't do it myself, I can imagine some people wanting to say 'bean', and then on the other end of it, having trouble finding this 'Benny' artist they're hearing so much about. As someone who tracks play counts very ardently, it's a little bit annoying, but then last.fm finally got released from their corporate shackles lately so maybe they can fix this all up.

Much like I said about "Find An Island" (#88), "Evil Spider" does feel like a slight change of pace for BENEE compared to the two songs she released before it. It answers the mystery of whether she was ever going to make something a bit more upbeat. Change is gradual though, so it's still intrinsically a moody song. It means she gets to use both sets of tools though, so there's a genuine sorrow you feel out of the song's chorus that I don't think would come naturally to everyone. Otherwise, the fact that this song polled higher than her previous single just goes to show how much her profile increased in 12 months.

#67

#67. Peking Duk (feat Nicole Millar) - High (#2, 2014)

10th of 2014

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One last chance to get this out of the way before I try and move on from it. Back in August 2025, ARIA made a post on their social media about how Keli Holiday's "Dancing2" had debuted on the ARIA Australian Singles chart. The song had just come out but it was fairly well promoted so it was on the charts from the jump. On Instagram, there were dozens of comments cheering it on (I'm just linking it because I'll never find it again otherwise), just the one tucked away at the bottom calling it trash. On Facebook however, there's a big contrast because there were literally zero comments on it, for a while, at least. Three months later, the ARIA Awards happen and suddenly there about 80 comments, all of them roughly around the same week and not a single one since then. This post that might have had a few thousand views at the time now has over 100,000, all because everyone needs to chime in with their baffled two cents. This is a pattern that Keli Holiday now exhibits everywhere. Just the mere glance of that curly head hair or curly chest hair is enough to start a riot. ARIA have started regularly pre-emptively closing comment sections for him, something they only otherwise tend to do with First Nations artists.

I mention this for two reasons, firstly to highlight just how mindless the whole thing feels. When you see a months old post driving activity for a short stretch of time and only that, it's absolutely an algorithm at work just in complete control of everyone's periphery. Every befuddled comment just reeks of someone in an endless doomscroll that needs to regulate themselves. If not for that reason, then for the fact that if they really, genuinely don't like the song, then making a derisive comment is probably the worst thing you can do. I know from experience that for every person you might dissuade with your witty takedowns, there's all the more chance that you'll inadvertently put far more people onto it. All those derailed posts about Keli Holiday tend to have another thing in common, which is that consensus or not, there are in fact hundreds, if not thousands of likes on the post. Given that most ARIA posts tend to struggle cracking double digits, that's an incredible amount of attention given firstly on the forefront, but then subsequently as the whole thing becomes a controversial talking point. The only way to make something seriously fall short is to ignore it, the same way these people successfully manage for most other Australian artists who get their moment in a tiny little hole with sunlight poking through between 5:05pm and 5:08pm. Unless the message here is that people need an adversary and thus it's justified, but now you're the ones being performative, you dumb pricks. In conclusion, social media is a land of contrasts.

"Dancing2" is actually moderately more relevant here than the obvious surface level thing. It has another aspect in common with "High" which is that it also finished at #2 in the Hottest 100. This is an almost unique affliction for Keli Holiday as the only other artist who has made it to #2 twice is Ben Lee. It comes with a remarkable gap of 11 years though, not far off of Silverchair's entire career which is also bookended by near misses. I don't know how many voters contributed to both in this case, but given the sheer consistency of the Duk over the years, I can imagine some volume stuck around. "High" also strikes me as a song that was a near miss for the top spot, as it was leading projections over "Talk Is Cheap" (#862), making it something of a toss-up, or at least not likely to be a runaway victory. I find myself wondering what a reversed result might do. I think I may have said something before (though I can't find it) to the effect that this result may have paid dividends for Peking Duk, who never had to be the face of the elevated standards that the #1 finish provides. Anyway I probably made that comment over a year ago and it hasn't aged well.

Has "High" aged well though? It's interesting to look back on it. One of the most peculiar things about it is that it very immediately entered the charts and slowly climbed its way up, becoming a top 5 hit, before settling back out. Obviously it's very strange by today's standards, but it was even a little weird then. Peking Duk just had no established hitmaking presence at that point and it's the kind of thing you'd at least expect would take a little longer to spread around. Like, this song caught on faster than "Royals" (#134), its predecessor in the runner up status. Electro-pop is generally an easier sell, but to me this felt like a song that commercial radio would've been hesitant to jump on board with. Actually I have the stats to back it up, and the song took 6-7 weeks to crack the airplay chart, and despite the mandated law that Australian music must be played, it actually lagged a decent way behind its sales performance on the radio. I just don't think they're very down with a song whose big hook goes the better part of almost 50 seconds with very few words uttered at all.

Undeniably though, it stands out. When you're in a competition to evoke the strongest reaction, then letting it all out on the table is one way to manage it. It just sounds enormous, like the audio only equivalent of fireworks. I compare it to their previous single "Feels Like" and on the surface it's operating on a similar level, but it never reaches the same heights. I can never remember how it goes but I could awkwardly vocalise every single instrumental moment of "High". The only thing that really lets it down is the repeating synth that runs through most of the song, which lands a little on the side of farty sounds. The drums also swing in and out of being a bit too compressed which is a shame because when they get it right, it sounds terrific. Fortunately it's very rarely the centre of attention as Nicole Millar is here to steady the ship.

It's easy to forget in all of this that for a very long period of time, Nicole Millar wasn't even credited on this song. Perhaps another one of those marketing decisions for a clean credit sheet, or maybe it's just something they never thought would take off like this and need it. I can't remember when exactly the change was made, but I'm also writing this not long after The Chemical Brothers finally credited the vocalist on "Go" (#203). I'm still not going to do it yet but they had their opportunity to open a new suit early for me. Something that helps factor here is that Nicole Millar has had something of a solo career since the song came out, but I don't think she had any music out before "High". I'm somehow only just now learning that she was born in Canada, which makes her the equal highest landing artist born in Canada in the Hottest 100, tied with Justin Bieber (#669). The main thing I just want to say about this is that "Gimme A Break" is a pop banger that doesn't get enough love. Cut from a similar cloth to Dua Lipa's "Be The One". She comes through to fix that song's one weakness of having an underwritten bridge. In general though I don't feel the need to move my hands up and down to weigh my options because the benefits far outweigh my minor squabbles.

#68

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

13th of 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#69

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

14th of 2015

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

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

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

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

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

#70

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

2nd of 2022

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

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

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

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

#71

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

15th of 2015

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

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

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

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