#76

#76. Lana Del Rey - West Coast (#32, 2014)

12th of 2014

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It's so tough to do the follow up album. It's just about the most crucial step in an artist's career because it's the moment for many to decide whether or not they're in for the long haul or if the one album is enough for them. Sometimes it can come down to the enthusiasm you've nurtured along the way. Just having amassed enough ride or die fans can help encourage more to keep up with it. Maybe a lot of them won't, but you can break even if you have enough on your side.

Lana Del Rey had a bit of a gradual step towards this which may have helped her. By the end of 2012, she released an extended version of "Born to Die", which rather than just be a quick deluxe edition momentum booster, was genuinely substantial with 9 more tracks. Nearly all of these tracks have blue names on Wikipedia ("Blue Velvet" is a cover, but her version is pretty well known in its own right next to Bobby Vinton's big hit). As an added bonus, she got to spend 2013 as an odd hitmaker, getting dance remixes, and even initially proving without it via "Young and Beautiful" (#841). Given that she largely operated as a cult figure before this, having a genuine hit or two opened up her audience immensely, perfectly timed for the follow up.

I'm inclined to say that she remained a cult figure, but she never really stumbled after this point either. Not really making more crossover hits, but she had such a loyal fanbase that she repeatedly scored #1 albums in Australia without much surprise. Ironically it was her highly beloved 5th album, "Normal F**king Rockwell" that broke the streak. From this point on though, she's gotten so much more respect across the board that I feel it's fuelled a career renaissance for her. She's still not really getting crossover hits, but continues to boast enormous streaming numbers for an artist some might think never really stuck the landing in the first place. While someone might say 'What do you mean "Ultraviolence" has multiple songs with over a billion streams?', another side of the coin will be 'What do you mean "Ultraviolence" didn't have any hits at the time?'.

It's one of those cases where I might suspect it was just the wrong choice of single in hindsight and another might have fared better. The only problem is that "West Coast" has survived the sheer randomness of it all and is still the album's most popular song, so maybe there wasn't a better choice. I found it very interesting at the time because it's not at all something that screams a hit, but then that's a strange thing to consider when you're operating in Lana Del Rey's lane. I don't know what people are actually looking out for here. I suppose "Brooklyn Baby" is a reasonable proxy for what was already on "Born To Die", but that wasn't realised soon enough for me to talk about it.

All we have here is "West Coast" and in hindsight I'm a little surprised how popular it ended up being at the time. Maybe there was just too much desire for new Lana Del Rey that it gave her the leeway, but then you look at the Hottest 100 results and it's right up there at #32. By comparison, the title track to "Born to Die" only got to #34. I think there's a lot to like about "West Coast", I'm just surprised how universal it was. It's a song whose biggest identifiers are incredibly prominent drums and a tempo change on the chorus with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. I love the change up so much, I think it's one of the best choruses she's ever written, and it stands out more when there's basically nothing else that sounds like it, even on the song itself. She even starts singing in Spanish for a moment which just communicates to me that she's in full 'Could read the dictionary' mode and I'd be okay with it. It's a hypnotic song I suppose.

#77

#77. King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Gamma Knife (#61, 2016)

10th of 2016

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Getting interested in King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard is an extensive investment. The band have thus far released 27 albums and I wouldn't be surprised if there was another one by the time this post goes live (yep, 28 now). If not, we might actually be closing in on the longest gap between albums they've ever had, as "Phantom Island" came out waaaay back in June 2025. Still, that's more albums than there are James Bond movies, and they only started in 2012. In order to be into the band and have fully formed opinions about their discography, you have to be really into them. Give them a good rinse over and they'd become my most listened to artist almost by default. What ends up happening is that I'll have conversations about them with different people and they'll always end up bringing up something I'm not overly familiar with.

Fortunately, there's one big exception in all of this. It's literally the reason I'm talking about them right now, because if there's one almost universal thing that brings everyone together with this band, it's that "Nonagon Infinity" opens the door. It's the band's 8th album, released in the middle of a particularly prolific period for them and has run away to be easily the band's most famous album. You can pick and choose if you want their hard rock, blues rock or psychedelic pop (and all the other ones I left out), but this one feels like the quintessential inclusion. It's their Ocarina of Time, their And Then There Were None, their Season 6 of The Simpsons, hopefully you get the idea.

It's hard to hype the album much more than I do. It's just a complete thrill ride from start to finish. Only that's also an odd definition because it's an album where every track flows into the next one, including the album's closer into the start. Not only can you listen to the album on an endless loop, but I've also done it before. I once just spent hours on end listening to "Nonagon Infinity" and I came out of it, a changed man. Well, maybe that's a bit much, but it's very permanently lodged into my memory, and I have no desire to remove it. They largely get around any possible argument of repetition by having the album be relatively brisk at 9 tracks (get it, nonagon?) and you go away from each song largely remembering the hooks.

Oddly enough, it was one of the album's deeper cuts that first converted me over. The song "Wah Wah" which probably isn't a highlight for many, but it has given me a nice bridge during the album's slower portion in the back. The album is a little frontloaded in that regard but it's a necessary moment of recovery after the opening salvo. The run from "Robot Stop" to "People-Vultures" is just King Gizz at their absolute best, firing on all cylinders. That's nearly 20 minutes of highlight concentrated deliberate jamming that goes down a treat.

If you've done the observations here, you'll know that "Gamma Knife" fits in the middle of that too. For a band like this, reducing it all to just a single is tough, but I do think this song meets the assignment. As long as you've got that one frantic riff, and a good dosage of 'woo!', you've got the general summary on board. There's something primal about it all that I don't think I can put into words. The band just offers something you don't really get elsewhere, and I love them for that. Sheer volume means I'm never too far away from finding another King Gizz song I love.

#78

#78. Max Frost - White Lies (#42, 2013)

15th of 2013

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Sometimes we're a little betrayed by the truth. This is not the case. Unlike Miike Snow, Max Frost actually is just one person. I don't believe that his name was inspired by theirs, nor did he get it off of a hair dryer. His real name is Matthew Alexander Frost, so it's just a trendy shortening of that, I imagine. I can understand with a song like "White Lies", it would be easy to be cynical about this.

I don't know if there actually is a fascinatingly unique story to Max Frost, who seems to just be a guy who decided to make music and lucked out when one of his songs got discovered. I suppose the most interesting thing I found is that he was very interested in R&B and hip-hop music. He even initially was encouraged to sing hooks for a rapper but was reluctant to be part of it. I don't think he specifically said it's because he's a white guy from Texas, but it's probably what he means. Supposedly it's still a part of his sound but it's hard to hear much of it in his early stuff. His 2018 song "Good Morning" definitely matches the back story though. Ironically I do feel like the instrumental to his 2013 song "Be Who You Want to Be" sounds a little bit like one of his influences in D'Angelo, but specifically the song "Betray My Heart" which actually hadn't been released yet.

That's probably the most interesting thing with Max Frost, the way his music doesn't really fit into an obvious box. It's mostly that it's just not enough of any one thing to feel confident with it. I hear elements of pop, rock, dance, folk, blues, alongside Max's occasional rapid fire delivery and my brain just doesn't know what to do with it. I just opt for enjoying the music on its own merits here, because occasionally he has some fresh ideas with it.

"White Lies" is of course the main event. It might be the best example of that specific subset I mentioned with Thelma Plum's "Not Angry Anymore" (#194). The first thing you hear is that acoustic guitar that just feels so highly strung and thrilling. When Max Frost's voice enters the fray, you're taken aback by the way it's mixed, sounding too close to the microphone but kept back in the mix anyway. You could imagine him turning this into an in-your-face Michael Franti kind of performance (or otherwise what sombr does nowadays), especially on the second verse, but instead it's just this quirky sugar rush.

Other than "White Lies", I'm not sure Max Frost has done anything much of note. He didn't release his debut album until 2018, but prior to that he released two EPs. The second EP has the song "Paranoia" which triple j played a fair amount at the time, though it's lost in the sea of outweighed streaming numbers so it doesn't look like it's very notable on the whole. I guess I should shout out the song "Blind Fool" which is the least popular song on that EP, but the one that sounds the most like "White Lies". In general, he's just embodying that spirit of the person who could never quite repeat their first success, but that still gives him one more hit than the vast majority of people making music.

#79

#79. King Princess - 1950 (#34, 2018)

8th of 2018

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We're here to celebrate a momentous achievement. On account of the fact that it now statistically cannot be beaten, I'm here to report that King Princess has the biggest gap between appearances. You have to go all the way back to January 2025 when I got to "Pussy Is God" (#908), and there you'll encounter a fascinating juxtaposition as back then I was apparently content to write 5 sentences and be done with the entire entry. It was primarily because I thought I had more to say about this one, which is somewhat true. A lot of it is just general observations, but they're ones that read a lot nicer when you're talking about something you openly enjoy.

King Princess is 5 generations deep in the family tree of Lazarus Straus. She could never get suckered into getting an Ancestry account because all of this information is extremely publicly available and organised. Her great, great, great grandfather Lazarus Straus was an entrepreneur who by the chance result of living 3 years longer than his associate Rowland Hussey Macy, was able to acquire ownership of Macy's, the department store. He soon after handed it over to two of his sons, one of which died on the Titanic, the other has a city in Israel named after him. The former had seven children, and the youngest son of those is King Princess's great grandfather. You can call out nepotism possibly but I'm not sure she has accrued mass wealth by this long chain of descendance, and it doesn't appear that there's anyone famous in her bloodline that was alive even 80 years ago. If there is a noteworthy connection, it's that her father is a recording engineer who owns a studio, so she grew up seeing bands come through and grind out the recording process, which drew her into music, though it made her hesitant to sign on at a young age because she craved creative control. Very early on, before she adopted the stage name, her father did help record her music. She eventually wound up with the newly formed Zelig Records, a subsidiary of Columbia Records founded by Mark Ronson, and would end up releasing her first two albums with them.

I do need to mention Columbia Records because it makes for the most transparent part of the equation and it's the kind of thing that would get dragged through the mud nowadays. A good part of why you have even heard of King Princess is because in March 2018, Harry Styles tweeted 'I love it when we play 1950.' At this point, the song "1950" had been out for less than two weeks and hadn't really made an impression anywhere. A week later and it started popping up on Spotify charts around the world. Harry Styles is also signed to Columbia Records so it's not exactly subtle what's going on here.

I actually missed that part of the equation at first. When I first heard of King Princess, it was because the song inexplicably got foisted onto Spotify's Hot Hits Australia playlist, which at that point tended to decide what became a hit. Two weeks after first appearing on there, it rocketed towards the top of that playlist which tended to be a monumental boon. You'd hear two of the biggest hits of the moment and the year in "God's Plan" (#507) and "Psycho" (#563), and then get this inexplicable change of pace. It's possible that a lot of people bounced off of it, but as long as they made it to the 30 second mark, it counted, and "1950" became a #25 hit in Australia largely through this. The song only narrowly scraped through to #48 in Belgium and even lower in some other European countries, but this song hung around for months until the playlist swapped it out for her follow up single "Talia" and then it suddenly crashed out of the top 50.

This was all very common practice at the time and so if you look at the charts circa 2018, you'll see massive stars and iconic hits that just keep inter-mingling with these random, unremarkable artists who were never heard of before or since. Actually at the very same time this was happening to King Princess, future Hottest 100 entrant Noah Kahan was getting his chart breakthrough very early in Australia with some thanks to similar leveraging (I should be fair to "Hurt Somebody" though because it actually cracked the ARIA top 50 before this playlist got to it). Perhaps there's still time for Dennis Lloyd to become a household name, who's to say? In fairness, he's probably still more famous than King Princess is, but he's never made the Hottest 100, so never mind.

This is all well and good for securing a hit song but when it comes to retaining credibility in a music discussion space, just a frightening prospect. If she actually had become a global star thanks to this song, it'd probably be hanging around her for eternity, the same way many have negative views on Gracie Abrams because of her associations through her father and Taylor Swift. Instead she only ended up sort of famous only in Australia where it was easier to escape the scrutiny. I probably wouldn't have lived it down either but the sneaky work around here is that I just really liked the song. I guess sneaking around does get you somewhere.

It's just another layer of why the song's arrival was so peculiar. Everything about it strikes you oddly. The artist's name, the song title, and then you listen to the song and it's this strange, stilted performance that doesn't remotely sound like popular music of the time. It's obviously not completely unpalatable, but it fits into a strange place where it's a ballad that isn't direct enough to appeal to the ballad crowd. People like grand, universal statements, and this song has a confusing title lyric and a chorus that's hard to even make out the words to.

I am not the right person to be talking about this, but as best I can understand, King Princess is a gay icon. I was recently put across the fact that there are only 6 people who have an '___ as a gay icon' Wikipedia article and I don't think any of them are actually confirmed to be gay (it's a funny list: Cher, Judy Garland, He-Man, Janet Jackson, Madonna & Reba McEntire). King Princess very much is, and isn't remotely subtle about it in this song. The first line is 'I hate it when dudes try to chase me'. What the song's title lyric really means, is throwing it back to a time when queerness was heavily hidden in society, and all higher authority was corrupt. From that, the song captures the idea of worshipping someone so far beyond what they actually represent as a person. Enjoying them conceptually in a way that might paper over the cracks that get in the way of that ideal fantasy. It's the same way I very much enjoy the song and completely have to pretend that it got here on its own merits. Realistically though, that's just every hit song, some are just more obvious about it than others.

For me, "1950" represents an exciting new voice in music, someone who's not really playing by the pre-established rules, and being rather interesting for it. I may not enjoy "Pussy Is God" very much, but it's unquestionably just a strange song for popular discourse. A somehow even more unabashedly queer song that's not shy in the slightest. "1950" has a chorus that's very stilted with a strong vocoder effect, but it's used in a memorable way that makes every line delivery feel important. In the years since, she's continued to impress me in unexpected ways. I'm particularly fond of "Ohio", a slow burner that goes wild halfway through, and she even got my Hottest 100 vote a little later with the song "Only Time Makes It Human", which snuck in at #199 in 2020. It's full on disco pop and one of the catchiest songs I've ever come across, guaranteed to get stuck in my head when I remember it exists. Strangely enough, it's a song with the same co-writer as "1950", Nick Long, who has since gotten a lot more attention for co-writing nearly every song on mgk's two big pop punk albums. Diversity, thy name is Mikaela Straus & Nick Long.

#80

#80. Tame Impala - Borderline (#18, 2019)

5th of 2019

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Records preserve history, but it's important for all of us to take the correct reading of it. Misinterpreted data is just as bad as incorrect data. I'm going to stop before I take this metaphor any further or apply any drastic implications to it. I'm doing the goofy dramatic interpretation of music again, that's all it is. Maybe there is justification to reach for grand statements but I find it can be undercut by this set up and just make you look silly. There's a time and a place, and it's not here.

How it applies here, is that we can have records of hit songs but they don't always tell the full story. Writing about music doesn't necessarily convey the full feel of it. Nuance can get lost, or clouded by vague recollections that sound accurate enough to go without questioning. I'll admit that sometimes it's just very inconsequential things, like wondering how certain songs were edited to get played on the radio, and how much they actually did get played when they seem to challenge one's perceptions of it in a modern era. The classic one though, is wondering what version(s) of a song are actually popular.

This is something that's generally pretty complicated. When the topic comes up, it feels like it's painted with broad strokes that I'll admit I understand the desire for, I just don't love the execution. When there's a hit song that's obviously boosted by a remix of some sort, I just tend to treat it as one big package deal. There might be a majority stake one way or the other, but I'm not in the habit of shutting the rest out as irrelevant noise. Funnily enough, I often suspect the lack of clarity in the matter is part of what causes the divide. Depending on who the listener is, they might not even mind what version they're hearing as long as the core concept is intact. I still listen to live versions of Two Door Cinema Club's "Undercover Martyn" and Jeff Buckley's "Lover, You Should've Come Over" that I downloaded so long ago and the original versions sound as wrong to me as those versions probably would to you. We're largely arriving at the same purpose; we just got it ingrained in different ways.

This is all part of a more specific point I want to get to when I talk about Röyksopp again, but generally speaking, the Hottest 100 is occasionally home to results that probably aren't quite what you remember in your head, or what you immediately assume when looking back at it historically. Wolfmother polled twice with the song "Woman". It's their second most famous song, so I'll assume you probably know it. The catch is that neither of the two versions of the song that polled are the one you probably think of. In 2006, it was the MSTRKRFT remix which takes the song in peculiar directions, but the other version of the song is from 2004 on the band's self-titled EP. It's noticeably less polished and sounds like more of a direct soundalike to the band's '70s influences. This version of the song is a bit buried, so you can't find it on the band's official channels. Maybe that's accidentally erasing history, or maybe the band's more polished sound on the debut album has become part of the identity and you wouldn't want someone to accidentally stumble on a different version that sounds noticeably 'worse', but not enough that you're always going to be completely convinced it's the wrong one. There was recently a remix of the song "Dirty Cash (Money Talks)" that now sits atop the Spotify chart for The Adventures Of Stevie V. The artwork and crediting are similar enough that it took me a very long time to question it, by which point the stream has already gone through. Keep at it for long enough and I wouldn't be surprised if it starts supplanting all the versions of the song from the '80s & '90s.

Something that might become increasingly jarring if it's ever actually discovered is that for many people, "Borderline", the Tame Impala song they know and love, did not actually poll in the Hottest 100 like that. The version of the song that many people likely know did not exist in 2019, after all. "Borderline" was released way back in April 2019, ten months before "The Slow Rush" was released. All was good with the world, until Kevin Parker decided he didn't love the final mix of it and made a new version for the album. The single version was deleted from all streaming platforms and exists only in vague remnants if you hunt specifically for it. The song was modestly popular at the time, but has done monumentally better in the years that have followed, making it probably Tame Impala's second most popular song. That's 1.2 billion streams on Spotify all for that new version. It's a surprisingly comprehensive sweep as well. A few years back when my hard drive carked itself, I needed to re-download all of my iTunes library, which I managed to do because iTunes keeps all of that stuff there somewhere, even when it's not available to purchase. The only exception in my entire library was "Borderline" which I simply was unable to acquire again, and needed to requisition it from a friend.

I might be over-reacting a little here, but it feels like the number one talking point about this song so I needed to make sure I did all the necessarily build up to get to this point. I'll continue to say it louder for the people in the back: The new version of "Borderline" is one that I'm not particularly fond of. Great to get that off the chest. It's hard to really describe the difference without instructing someone to listen to the single version on loop for a while and then switch over. You just immediately feel the difference. There's no 'ahhh', the drums seem to suffocate the melody, and the very nice subtle bass feels like it's getting a little too much attention. If I had to rank that version of the song, I'd be in a serious conundrum because the core concept of it still works obviously, but it's in this uncanny valley that feels like it's actively trying to re-write my memory when I hear it.

Completely deleting the song feels like a vast over-reaction to me anyway. The sheer fact that it's here shows that people were generally content with it as it was, and it also outperformed every other Tame Impala song released that year. As long as I can help it, I'm going to stick with this version of the song as the one I remember. At the very least, it's become something of a novelty bit to just get overly exasperated at these differences that I don't think most people even know about or would even notice. This entire entry has been the logical conclusion of this bit, spending as much possible time running it into the ground. I've said my piece, Kevin.

But yeah, "Borderline" is really good. It does feel a little bit sacrilegious to name the song as such. We're talking about an absolute classic Madonna single here. Solange also did it a few years earlier in 2016 but at least had the sense to append a parenthetical to it. This is just taking aim at pop canon with little regard. R.I.P. "Here Comes The Sun" and what not. In general, it feels cut from a similar cloth to "Patience" (#217), but refines the general idea. The keys in that song serve to leave it feeling spacious and un-grounded, but here, it's just sprinkled under the main melody, in time with the drums in a way that feels more purposeful. Might also be the best flute in this whole list outside of "Mask Off" (#276). When it comes to Tame Impala going full pop sensibility, I don't think it gets much better than this.

#81

#81. Haim - Falling (#27, 2013)

16th of 2013

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When I was young, I had a bit of trouble with live action TV. It wasn't a hard and fast rule, but I probably needed things to be inherently slapstick as a focus. The Home Alone movies started and ended with the rube goldbergs and seeing Joe Pesci receive cruel and unusual punishment. There was nothing he could do, Kevin was a made man, and he wasn't (isn't it funny that those two movies came out only a couple months apart?). I think there was a part of me that just assumed these things were for adults, otherwise they would make them a cartoon.

If you already clocked where I'm going with this, then I'm sorry that I'm so painfully predictable. If not, enjoy the confusing ride. There's an Australian children's TV show from the '90s & '00s called Round The Twist. It's about a father and his three children who move to a new small town and live in a lighthouse, where supernatural things seem to happen very regularly. I don't think there was ever an accidental poisoning and subsequent shoot out but I never saw the whole thing. I just generally found myself confused by everything going on with it because I was incapable of paying attention to story lines, something I've only gotten marginally better at. Another curious quirk of the show is that it essentially had three different runs, first in 1990, then 1993 and finally in 2000. It means that millennials across the board are likely familiar with it as part of their upbringing, but there's the quirk to it in that most of the characters had to be re-cast each time around. I think they mostly did a good job at finding new cast members, to the point where I'm not even sure which generation I'm most familiar with, just that Season 1 Bronson is unrecognisable to me.

I thought I should do my homework on this so I decided to properly watch the first episode of each iteration, and then I also watched the third episode of season 2 because I wanted to try the Glass Animals method (#901). I do not recommend taking this path because that episode has the boys doing a literal pissing contest. There's also a water spirit that looks suspiciously similar to No Face from Spirited Away, only this came out nearly a decade earlier. Also got some big Final Destination vibes from that episode. I didn't know Paul Jennings was a big creative force on the show, that's interesting. I guess I don't really know what a normal episode is supposed to look like. There's a strong pattern of children being tortured, and I've also witnessed spying on a girl in the bathroom, and the vitally important m-preg episode. I do love how passionate the bully kids are about political canvassing though. I think my favourite part was at the start of the second season where it felt like they were lampshading the conceit, wondering if they'd lived past lives as different people, Pete suggesting his twin sister might have been more attractive (I will not weigh in on this).

What on earth does this have to do with "Falling" by Haim? I mean obviously there are three Haim siblings and they get up to wacky adventures, no one's denying that. More importantly though, there's one thing about Round The Twist that has stuck with me as long as I can remember, and that's the theme song. It's performed by the original actress for Linda and stays for the whole duration, so she's arguably the only consistent part of the show. It's very extra, and it's very memorable. For my benefit, it also succinctly explains the premise of the show which is always nice. The first three words, sung on their own are 'Have you ever'. I'm led to believe that the opening line of "Falling" is 'I give a little', but I have never been able to experience anything other than this strange coincidental match up that my brain feeds to me every time the song starts. I just so badly need Danielle to follow it up with 'Ever felt like this?'. It hasn't yet, but maybe if I watch even more Round The Twist I'll start hearing it everywhere. It has proven to be a fun side adventure to get me to take a short break from watching later seasons of Lost (#142), something that I'm still doing because much like some of those characters, I simultaneously live in the past, present & future. I'm gonna edit this post months in the future, laughing at my former self who has no idea what he's in for in season 6, I imagine.

If this is all too off topic then I apologise but it's hard to muster up a whole lot for what is my third time around on the same Haim album, all with songs I have pretty similar feelings about. Haim are one of those bands that don't necessarily have iconic songs, so Jeopardy! like asking about them but it's more like 'Can you name that band that's three sisters?' and not 'What's that song about not letting your mind retire?' (#111). If you want some statistical fluff to go along with this, then I can report that "Falling" is technically their breakthrough single in this context though I say it with the cruellest of circumstances. By all accounts they should've been celebrating the victory in 2012 except they landed at #106 with "Forever" and #101 with "Don't Save Me". The worst thing about that is that "Don't Save Me" actually entered the ARIA Charts in January 2013, late in the voting period. You get the feeling they just needed a little more time to climb up the rankings. Maybe it served them better in 2013 though. It's one thing to want to make amends for an unfortunate result (one as clearly sign-posted as the #101 position at that), it's another to have it perfectly positioned as the band clearly are on the rise and release their debut album in the next year. For all I know, everyone wildly overcompensated and that's why Haim only ever had one entry outside of 2013 (#787).

If you don't look at that context, "Falling" looks like a massive breakout hit that I don't think it really is. Like "Find an Island" (#88), it's a nice choice to steady the ship, and maybe convince more people that this is an artist to look out for, it's just never felt like the prime Haim song, especially when the next single after it was so much more successful (I'm not linking "The Wire" again, but it's obviously "The Wire"). It gave the song an identity crisis for me that's taken a long time to get past.

"Falling" is a pretty great song that gives me plenty to like in it. Just on the production side of thing, the prominence of the bass makes it feel so different to every other Haim song, and the way they layer it with the percussion creates this lively feeling to it. Counter-acted by the shouted title lyric is one of the most captivating hooks they've ever written to lock the whole thing in place. That's the real gimmick of Haim, the fact they write some of the weirdest melodies and distract you enough with spectacle that you'll never question if it works or not, you've already got it stuck in your head.

#82

#82. Sampa the Great - Final Form (#89, 2019)

6th of 2019

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I have to issue a correction. Not for this blog, but one time, which I suspect was in late 2015, I was in the car with some family members with the radio on. A song was playing that someone was very much not into, exclaiming 'who is this?'. I wasn't very confident but I assumed it was that new rap upstart I was hearing about, so I said it was Little Simz. I suspect it was actually "F E M A L E" by Sampa the Great. In hindsight, I would never make that mistake again, but the differences in their flows were not quite as obvious as they are now that we have a decade of further experience to go by. I would also sooner defend both of them because they've proven to be pretty fantastic MCs.

In the case of Sampa the Great, what we've got here is one of the most unexpected breakout moments I've ever witnessed. That is a time accurate observation before, it was in 2015 that Sampa the Great first started getting played on triple j, and over the years she continued within that periphery. triple j plays so much Australian music that it's normal to become acquainted with many artists who you can be pretty certain are going to stay in their lane. Sampa the Great seemed like the most obvious one of these. She had a distinctive voice for sure, but nothing in her music screamed like it was ever primed to break through. There's never been much space for female rappers in Australia, and even less for rap that was so slow and introspective. The song I first cottoned onto was "Black Dignity", which I think is fantastic, but you can't listen to it and say that it's a future hit. Even when her music was more upbeat, it still just didn't really fit in with what the kids were listening to. I sometimes got a Macy Gray vibe except nearly two decades too late for that.

I'm not sure I even clocked any of this when "Final Form" came out. It's a bit of a different turn for her, but at the time I was already on board so I didn't consider the idea that she could convert more people. Even then, for as many people in the music industry who might talk it up, it still doesn't mean it'd convert. It's not like The Drones ever made the Hottest 100 after all. As it turns out, it was a bit of a sneak into the list, but it's rare that you get a song that so triumphantly announces its own arrival. This song's horns roll out its own red carpet and it's marvellous. Both those horns and the post-chorus vocals are sampled from "Stay Away From Me" by The Sylvers. Another song that came out a year earlier than "Final Form", "Late Night" by Space Invadas has a similar use of the sample.

I don't even think anything is compromised for it all in the end. It's certainly more pop friendly than usual for her, but it's still a song that takes nearly two minutes to get to its hook, and before that you get multiple verses of Sampa just owning the microphone. It all just feels like one of those moments when all the people who want to champion a talent like this finally have an easy avenue to win people over. Sampa the Great hasn't really had another hit or anything like this since. I thought her song "Better Days" with Baker Boy had some potential there but maybe not enough people heard it. The only other interesting observation I have to say in the aftermath is that her second album was called "As Above, So Below". That's also the name of Australian rock band Stonefield's second album from 2016. I remember hearing from Birds of Tokyo that they named their 2016 song "Above / Below" as such because they didn't want to copy Stonefield. I'm going to assume I heard that during a live show though because there's no word of it online. Jury is out on whether or not the current #1 album in Australia got the message, though that artist will eventually appear on this list. Maybe Sampa the Great could get a bigger hit in the future. She left some room for tempered expectations when she said she only 'might' final form. While I'm at it, Freeza never actually said 'This isn't even my final form', but in fairness he's had so many final forms at this point that it's hard to feel threatened by it. Well, he would be threatening if he wasn't just a cartoon, what with all the planets he's blown up.