#42

#42. Arctic Monkeys - Do I Wanna Know? (#4, 2013)

6th of 2013

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Something I've been grappling with at this time is thinking about the notion of how you don't always know what you're sitting on. We're privy to the whims of promotion and well placed word of mouth stories that can do their best to inflate the stories of the past and present, but sometimes you can find yourself taking it all for granted. Future generations will be baffled at how little regard was given to an obvious classic in hindsight.

Something else I've been thinking about with the music charts of late is just how momentum-based an artist's success is. Once your position is established, as long as you don't fumble along the way, you set an understood standard for about how many people you'll reach. A new Taylor Swift song will enter at #1, a new Drake song might come close but probably won't get there, that's just what happens. To break out of this pattern is to do something so unexpected that it breaks those rules. For Arctic Monkeys, that's what "Do I Wanna Know?" was.

Basically, the additional punchline to what I'd outlined before is that by the 2010s, you would expect a new Arctic Monkeys song to not chart at all. They had their moment of buzz on their debut album, it faded out, and they were just playing to whoever stuck around. The only snag in this situation is that technically their 2012 single "R U Mine?" did chart, albeit very lowly and briefly. That seemed to be right on the upper limit of what the band were capable of at this point though, so more of a last gasp. Instead it turned out to be a warning shot, as the main event arrived with "Do I Wanna Know?", and it became the band's first top 50 hit in 7 years, their first since digital sales started being included in the chart. Thus we have the contradictory situation: Arctic Monkeys have their biggest hit in quite some time, but that's all it is on paper. It's a song that barely cracked the top 40 at #37, charting no longer than "I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor" and no higher than the "Who The F**k Are Arctic Monkeys" EP. On those terms, this is quaint. Something to get Arctic Monkeys fans off their seats, but a relative shrug from the greater listening public. "True Love" by P!nk and "Come With Me" by Ricky Martin were more pressing concerns. That's where we have to re-assess it with respect to the band's present momentum. In hindsight, "Do I Wanna Know?" is not only the band's biggest hit, but might have a case to be made as the most notable rock song of the 2010s. To chart as high as it did was to fight against a chart environment it didn't belong in and wasn't being welcomed into.

Strangely enough, I think UK audiences did cotton onto this one a little faster. In terms of chart position, it probably did have similar credentials to here (because Arctic Monkeys tended to chart higher there), but the longevity slowly revealed something beyond all of that. "Do I Wanna Know?" peaked at #11 in the UK purely because it was released in the middle of the week. The lost time meant that it couldn't catch up, and then every subsequent week there was just too much competition for it to get back into that conversation. You'd want to make a joke about them getting the last laugh, but the strange irony is that the song that blocked it was Tom Odell's "Another Love". That week at #10 was its only week in the top 10 before it dropped out of the chart after a couple of months. Except a few years ago the song was back in the charts and managed to climb to #10 again for a week, so this is like the one song you can't dismiss. "Another Love" has spent 400+ weeks and counting on the French charts, "Do I Wanna Know?" a mere 23.

When you talk about successful rock music in the 2010s, it often comes with caveats. Music is always evolving and changing its priorities. It's partly what took down the persistent appearances of rock bands as we knew them. The modern incarnations were always a bit slicker, maybe playing to pop audiences who liked the idea of a rock band more than the execution. Bands like fun., Maroon 5, Imagine Dragons or Twenty One Pilots whose additional influences made them primed to be excluded by some. What has made "Do I Wanna Know?" interesting is that it's arguably one of the last and biggest rock hits that are immune to this assessment. No one's leaving them out. In fact they might well be pulling the window of acceptability in the other direction because it's also one of Arctic Monkeys' most unabashedly rock leaning songs. It's not just rock on paper (which is a bad strategy in Rock Paper Scissors btw), it's cranking it up to 11, making the guitar and drums the star of the show. The most striking element is just how prominent the guitar is, punctuating every big moment of the song and giving it all a tone that even in Arctic Monkeys' discography can't help but stand out. The song just announces its arrival so loudly that you can't help but take notice of it.

In fact, I absolutely did, probably too much in hindsight. At the time it was my favourite song going around and I even voted for it in the Hottest 100, perhaps fruitlessly because I also voted for "Get Lucky" (#58), the song that beat it. This is not the only time I ever voted for adjacent songs in the Hottest 100 and it's always a little embarrassing, especially when you prefer the lower one. I've said it before, but the Hottest 100 result is still probably the best depiction of how significant this moment was for Arctic Monkeys. Those early hits all had middling Hottest 100 placings, but now they're converting it into their highest ever finish at #4. They finally got the last laugh in 2020, when the Hottest 100 of the Decade saw the song move a little higher to #3, but crucially, ahead of every other song from 2013. It just feels like this song singlehandedly gave the band a second lease on life, and one that they've been able to thrive on ever since. This band who got famous through Myspace now have an audience who weren't even born when Myspace was relevant. It's all in that je ne sais quoi, we all just seem to be drawn into this one.

#43

#43. Broods - Free (#71, 2016)

4th of 2016

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There's a lot of talk about how in the 2020s, the consumer agency has been ripped out of the democracy of popular music. Maybe few people will say it in those words where 'The charts are rigged' cuts closer to the emotional core, but anyway. There's something in it, at least. Gone are the days of the individual buyer selecting the album or single they want, paying money for it, and having it counted in the chart as such. Now it's an age of online playlists where there might be some general agency in so far as people are largely listening to the types of music they like, but they're increasingly less likely to be on the committee for what exactly they're listening to at any point in time. They might even be okay with this. Their feedback comes via the fact that they continue to listen, and maybe pay for the privilege to do so uninterrupted. Of course, the caveat here is that algorithms can flip on a dime, and it can be hard to discern the difference in popularity between two choices when an online server has decided to feed more people into one thing than another, for any number of reasons. Demand can win out, and cult of personality still exists, you just have to convince yourself you aren't being tricked into getting invested into the same thing as everyone else. That's something that goes back much further than the 21st century though.

I do want to shine a light on the mid-2010s again. There was a peculiar transitionary period when streaming was introduced. Initially it made for a minor difference in the state of play, but over time, it wasn't just controlling the flow of what songs would take off, but it would get the lion's share of the activity, before almost singlehanded taking over everything. I have to remind myself that the inflection point when sales & streaming were equally balanced is around early 2017, just because the weight of change felt like it came in much sooner.

2016 is a funny year in the charts. It was 10 years ago so I've seen people pine for it nostalgically. A year that seemed to just have so many major hits all at once, something that probably does roughly stand to scrutiny if you look into it. Ask people at the time though, and you're more likely to hear about how it was the worst period ever. The charts slowed to a crawl, and any semblance of variety was replaced with an increasingly indistinguishable mush of either trap or tropical house. To add to this, you had Spotify to be easily culpable for feeding it to everyone. Maybe they just were rightly onto something and it was a successful venture, but if you're not invested in those sounds, it just feels like everyone's been fed the same conveyer belt of slop. If it's done enough, you don't even need people going back for repeat listens, because curiosity listens count all the same.

From my perspective, 2016 to 2018 was the time when it felt like Spotify totally controlled the conversation. There was a popular playlist in Australia called Hot Hits Australia. It was helped by a combination of SEO and also sometimes just being on the frontpage as an easy option. It was a kingmaker. The huge boost in streams you got purely from being on that playlist meant that you'd singlehandedly get more streams than most other artists could ever organically produce. A lot of chart movement in this time period is just songs moving up and down the chart in reaction to how they've been shuffled around this playlist. The playlist still exists nowadays, but with a plethora of other options, it doesn't feel quite as impactful as it once was. It can probably generate Gold sales for anyone lucky enough to remain on it for a long time, but it's probably not making hits out of thin air.

Hot Hits Australia wasn't the only one though. It might not have even been the biggest contributor all up, just that it was hard to really tell with this other one. Also promoted constantly on the front page of Spotify at the time were the charts themselves. Both the daily and weekly editions of Spotify's top 50, perfect for the discerning consumer who just wants to know what's most popular right now. Being on this playlist meant for a huge boon that you'd often see immediately. Once a song has popped up on that chart as a new entry, they immediately balloon up by about 10,000 streams, and potentially ride that momentum into the distance (I have to imagine the top handful of tracks got far more streams, it just wasn't ever able to be measured reliably). There was a bizarre by-product of this that could be seen on the UK Spotify charts. Very few songs would peak between #41-#50, but so, so many would peak at #51. They were the songs that by all accounts should have been in the top 50, but were being left out because they weren't able to keep up with the promotional aspect of the songs that are just trapped in the top 50 on their own momentum. The same thing used to happen with the iTunes store. Reaching the top 10 meant a nice boost and potentially weeks of extra life. Slip out for one moment and you come crashing down to earth fast. One of the most interesting things I observed with this is that you'd get explicit hit songs like Enrique Iglesias's "Tonight (I'm F**king You)" or Lloyd's "Dedication To My Ex (Miss That)". The early adopters would go for the lewd version of the song and get it stuck in the iTunes top 10 as the accepted popular version. Once they fell out of the top 10s though, and after months of radio airplay for the clean versions, buyers would quickly shift over to the clean versions instead. The lesson here is that it's always easier to convince people to consume content if they feel they know everyone else is doing it.

When I think of the song "Free" by Broods, I think of it as a potentially huge, missed opportunity. Something I left out when talking about Australia's Spotify top 50 is the reaction lag that comes as a consequence of time zones. Not everyone knows this, but Spotify operates on GMT-0 for all of its national charts that it publishes (which all also update together, whenever Spotify randomly does). For most of the world, this is adequate. Being a handful of hours before or after means that you're mostly affecting streams in the midnight hours and it'll largely look fine. Spotify usually updates in the middle of the day, maybe even the morning for Americans. There's a little bit of lag in it, but you were likely sleeping through much of that.

Australians were probably awake the whole time. For any given Tuesday's chart, what you're actually getting is streams that start at 10 A.M. (EST) on that Tuesday, and end at 10 A.M. on the following Wednesday. A quirk from this is that it means often tracks from big Friday new releases can pop up on the Thursday chart if they were released at midnight. The main problem though is that the roughly 12 hour period in which the charts haven't been updated is while most of Australia is awake. You probably won't see the updated chart until you log into Spotify again the next morning (and if we're being fair, it's often finnicky about actually updating for everyone). You're likely not seeing the result of these streams for a full day and it had a strange side effect for our charts. Whereas in other countries, getting into the top 50 just once was an assured success as it would react immediately on the next day, Australia ended up a little bit staggered. The understood wisdom is that in order to really solidify your place, you had to manage two days in the top 50 before things would kick in. For the most part, this is fine, getting in once is usually enough to say you're good for a second, but not all chart days are created equally.

"Free" by Broods was a respectable hit single in Australia. It was largely riding on digital sales but it managed to reach #30 on the charts, making up for "Bridges" not quite hitting the top 50. It just had one thing riding against it which is that it could not quite make the leap into the Spotify top 50. A huge potential boon was awaiting Broods, but every single day, the chart would come out and they'd be at #51 or #52 again. Digital sales are always a little more fleeting so they needed to make the leap sooner or later or the song would crash down the charts. This is the part where if I was making a YouTube video or something and I was good at editing, I'd prompt you all to assume the end result of this. Yes, "Free" by Broods did in fact make the Spotify top 50 eventually. It did so on the 28th of April 2016, about a month after it first came out. There's no reason to make any note of this date, just that it's a Thursday, which means that a bunch of new releases were right around the corner. One of those releases just happened to be "This Is What You Came For" by Calvin Harris & Rihanna. Whether or not you think the song is particularly memorable, it's obviously a superstar collaboration, and it ended up being a #1 hit. Every time Rihanna drop, she is the only thing y'all playin', or so I'm told. Such was the hype for the song that it managed to be a relatively rare instance of a song debuting straight in the top 50 on the first day, which was pretty impressive. It did no favours to Broods however, as the injection of this new hit song into the mix dropped "Free" down to #51 that day, and it never got any higher than that again. Calvin Harris & Rihanna singlehandedly dropped a nuke on this one song in particular. I like to imagine that there's a world where it hung on for one more day, and then took its strides up, becoming a much bigger hit. As it played out, "Free" dropped out of the ARIA top 50 a couple of weeks later, and largely faded into the background. Its wings clipped so thoroughly that it wasn't even the highest Broods song in the Hottest 100 that year, as non-charting "Heartlines" (#605) got the better of it. I feel like we're worse off for it because "Free" is one of the more interesting hit songs of the time.

Broods made their name on very wistful, unassuming music. You're there for Georgia evocative vocals and the pleasant music behind it. "Free" flips the script on this and goes much bigger. There's an almost industrial feel to the song's pounding synths. I'm reminded a little of "Everytime" from their debut album which was a big favourite of mine. They both go for that oppressive sound which I would best describe as 'What if "Time To Pretend" by MGMT had louder drums'. "Everytime" in particular stood out to me because there's so much force and emotion in Georgia's performance, like persevering through duress. She puts in another good performance here but I think it succeeds in a more general sense of having an incredibly catchy chorus. You're teased a little on the first time through which makes me appreciate it more on the subsequent goes around because they double it up. It's the fact you can mentally process that it might be over that makes it all the more satisfying when they keep it snapped into place. Just felt like a very easy song to get behind at the time.

#44

#44. Disclosure (feat Eliza Doolittle) - You & Me (Flume Remix) (#63, 2013)

7th of 2013

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If there's a major regret I've had over the years, it's not keeping enough tallies. They're a great way to cut out speculation and the bias of clustered memories. Really though, their best utility is keeping track of things you couldn't possibly manage yourself, especially if you're counting multiple things at once. The one that interests me the most, is to take note of how many times I've heard a phrase equivalent to 'That's a book that everyone had to read in high school'. It's happened so many times that I feel I need to take people up on it, as it's gotten quite impractical I imagine. Maybe I'm the problem as someone who bailed out of English class as soon as possible (only missed a year, but still), or it's just the not-so-robust curriculum standards outside of the big cities. In any case, if I did list off every book whose reading was a mandatory part of my studies and not just an individual project, I'm not sure I'd even crack 20. Furthermore, with a possible enforced quota of Australian learning materials, that small count includes so many novels I've never seen discussed outside of the single classroom. You're not getting "A New Kind Of Dreaming" by Anthony Eaton on any trivia games I suspect.

As a result, I do feel a little lacking in the department of literary knowledge. There are just so many of the most famous novels ever written that I've not touched, and only a handful I've gotten to of my own volition as I've gotten older. It's a feeling of inadequacy, but it does have the occasional advantage, where I've not cast my net so wide as to retain nothing. The result of labouring over some of them for so long, and my own tendency to zero in on curiosities means that I've occasionally retained arcane knowledge of these books. At the very least, more than enough to get by. Sometimes it's hard to realise this, and I might be a little off base on this one, but when I first heard about Eliza Doolittle, the British pop singer, my mind went straight to George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion". It's a book that left enough of an effect on me that I bizarrely cited Henry Higgins as a hero when I made a MySpace page. It's not the only time that this has happened though, because not long before Eliza Doolittle emerged, so did another singer who shared their name with a minor character in The Great Gatsby. They'll also appear on this list some day and I really wish I was keeping a tally of how many times I've said that about this particular artist now.

Eliza Doolittle's appearance on this song does quite a bit to put a time frame on this entry. She still makes music now, but her dallying with the mainstream pretty firmly starts and ends in the early 2010s. It also coincides with a re-branding as ELIZA. The hits she managed back then are a certain brand of quaint that feels like a precursor to the career of Meghan Trainor, though recently she's pivoted to a Pop/R&B hybrid that still suits her pretty well. It's a strange curiosity that she's managed to get her name attached to one of Disclosure & Flume's most popular songs. I don't know if it was a business decision (she and Disclosure weren't on the same label) or just a well-considered scoping out for talent. I have to wonder also if the success of this song contributed to her career pivot, proof that she had serious vocal chops that weren't necessarily the focus in her bouncier tunes. 

The 2013 context that might also be lost is that this was a pretty notable hit for Disclosure at the time, only I'm just talking about the original version. It reached the UK top 10 on debut and hung around for a decent while. A bit of a comedown after "White Noise" (#251) got to #2, but considering that Disclosure only have three top 10 hits ("Latch" peaked at #11, the other one is "Talk" (#917)), you have to admire the hit streak after the fact. That's not what we're talking about though. It got here via the more triple j approved fashion of Flume remixing it. A largely Australian curiosity at the time, though one that's taken the world by storm in hindsight. I wasn't joking when I said that it's one of both Disclosure & Flume's biggest hits, and they both only have one or two songs each that comfortably beats it. Yet another huge multi-platinum success during an extended period of not being in the spotlight.

The original version of the song has received very little kickback as a result of this and largely faded into the background. If you haven't gone back to it in a while and largely listen to the remixes, you might be surprised to find out that the song's verses and chorus have been largely left out and might sound unrecognisable now. Flume's arrangement decisions seem to have dictated what "You & Me" really means to the world. It's to the point that the song's other famous remix by Rivo, which came out a few years back, is largely working with the same structure as Flume's. Rivo is young enough that I might almost suggest that he doesn't even know the original. Both of the remixes largely focus on the background transitional vocals and pushing them to the front alongside the title drop portion of the chorus.

The result is incredibly effective. It manages to lift some extra gravitas out of the performance and accompany them with some fresh musical ideas as well. You'll mostly remember this remix for two things: The healthy dosage of violins, and what I'm dubbing the release spark on the chorus. We're still pretty early in the Flume journey here and you can tell he's just figuring out what makes a reaction. It's one I've been smitten by since I first heard it. The way it all locks up and disarms you. I can't help but freeze in place whenever it happens. The idea is good and the execution is incredibly clean. I just love how it all sounds together. Giving more of a starring role to the background vocals has an interesting effect where they just sound haunted. It makes for a remix that's more than good enough to stand on its own.

#45

#45. Hockey Dad - Homely Feeling (#54, 2017)

9th of 2017

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There's a listing on the Wikipedia article for Hockey Dad's debut album "Boronia" that suggests Jeff Rosenstock produced it. It got me interested with a chance to remark upon the idea that he must have been doing some miniature tour of Australia at the time, to go with his Smith Street Band credits. That's a generally interesting thought and would add an extra layer to the ascent of Hockey Dad. While I do find myself fascinated by Wikipedia anti-rabbit holes, the problem tends to be the sheer lack of secondary sources anywhere, unless you're unlucky enough to have seen it spread across from that initial made up fact. We're talking about a band here who were barely out of high school. Nothing about the album feels like the sound of different personnel. Largely just Hockey Dad as we know them, though a bit more mellow than the later years.

That's the album that largely put Hockey Dad on the map though. A handful of songs that got triple j airplay. The breakthrough was slow though. "I Need A Woman" has amassed a lot of streams now, but couldn't make a big impression in the moment (I have it at #298 in my counted Instagram votes for that year). If you need something to compare that with, two years later, they got to #184 with "A Night Out With", which I had at #174 in my tally. That's a promising progression, but then so is Disco Stu's chart of disco record sales. It was time for Hockey Dad to prove themselves, and we're sitting on that breakthrough moment right now.

Getting into the Hottest 100 for the first time is one of the easiest ways to tell people who are just trudging behind the cutting edge that a new main character has emerged. I call it the preview hit because the 12 months that pass between countdown votes allow everyone to react to the result accordingly. We're all much happier to put in our chips on something with proven viability than pure speculation. A common trend is for people to hesitate even putting one of their 10 votes down on an artist who likely won't make it, even if they're much closer than realised. It's a reliable contributor to that common feeling that some artists just seem to show up time and time again on the list. "Homely Feeling" is Hockey Dad's submission to be part of that social circle. With 6 further appearances and another 6 that landed in the Hottest 200, it's hard to deny the results. And yes, I am one of those people who started paying attention to them on the back of this impressive result, and a hit that can't be denied.

"Homely Feeling" clocks in at a very brisk 2:21 in length. Every subsequent entry they've had is longer, including one that's more than twice as long and will appear later on this list. It can be treading a fine line when you do this. Cutting off the fluff maybe, but leaving little to chew on as well. I think upbeat rock songs have a way around this. "Buy Me A Pony" by Spiderbait is my prime example. It's incredibly short but gets away with it because it never really feels like the band is cutting corners, doubling the length of the first verse when it feels like it's gearing up for the chorus. I also think of the even shorter "Forever Malcolm Young" by Frenzal Rhomb, which stretches the definition of a verse, but nonetheless gets through three of them, and even an instrumental bridge. The core pieces of a song are all there and it's done in under 90 seconds. 

"Homely Feeling"'s contribution to this notion is the inclusion of a pre-chorus section to stretch it out. The whole song is basically over by the time the second chorus is reached. I've never felt short-changed by it because the song's high points are so sought after that I don't want anything to get in the way of it. You can sense that they're onto something right from the song's slimy opening riff and how tightly they string it all together after that. You know what my idea of a "Sweet Release" (#717) is? It's the moment in the song where everything comes crashing down together. The massive drum fills, the locked in guitars, and the huge cathartic 'Saaaaaaaaay'. If the whole thing is a vehicle for a single moment, then it's definitely one of the best. I was incessantly replaying the song for it. When I download songs for my Hottest 100 collection, I usually spend the better part of a year until I log a 10th play of it, but "Homely Feeling" waltzed over the line with some extra change in about 5 weeks. Very rarely I felt quite as disappointed in myself for not seeing the magic sooner, and it'd take me quite a while before it felt like I could pay Hockey Dad back for this one.

#46

#46. Future Islands - Seasons (Waiting On You) (#23, 2014)

5th of 2014

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I find it hard to escape my theory that Australian artists generally have a harder time being accepted overseas just because the discourse rejects them. The US & UK are so adamant about endorsing their own product that they soundly reject all comers at times. Simply put, it's a product of being so invested in your own produce that the sheer lack of supportive voices elsewhere heightens the sense of mediocrity. I'm used to hearing voices and opinions that are in the interest of talking up Australian artists, but Americans have no reason to care outside of the novelty of it. So frequently I see American pundits dismiss Silverchair outright with no consideration for their discography beyond the handful of songs that made it to their radio stations in the mid '90s. If they were a Canadian band, there might at least be enough conversation within earshot to acknowledge that there's something there even if it's a localised phenomenon, but there just aren't enough people batting for Silverchair whose words escape this continent.

I feel the same way about The Vines. Their role is just to be Australia's contribution to the early 2000s garage rock revival largely centred around New York and The Strokes. They're especially noted because at the time, when faced with the opportunity to highlight this scene, Rolling Stone magazine decided seemingly on a whim to give The Vines the front cover. The headline is 'Meet The Vines, Rock Is Back!' with The Strokes, The White Stripes & The Hives mentioned below. All bands that have remained popular for far longer, whereas The Vines are generally seen to have flamed out pretty quickly (although I remember continuing to hear their new music on triple j right into the 2010s). It's something that's easily branded as a failed experiment, or just a cynical ploy to manufacture another moment whose only gimmick is 'What if The Strokes were from Australia?'. Any hype or rave reviews for the band get disavowed as the general public largely abandoned them and turned it into a sinking ship. To acknowledge The Vines is the prelude to dismissing them and appearing erudite for doing so. Take that early 2000s rock media, I knew they were a sham and I'm happy to voice that opinion because I know nobody will go in to bat for them.

Maybe you can out me for having fallen for the local propaganda, but hearing about the band all throughout the 2000s, I was fully convinced that they were legends. I didn't know very many of their songs, but the few I did just cemented it completely. "Get Free" deserves to be in the same conversation as Blur's "Song 2" for accomplishing the same reckless energy in the form of an extremely catchy two minute song. I compared them to The Strokes just before, but it feels more like an image thing because they achieve a level of raucousness that The Strokes don't really approach. I get the same feeling from The Vines as I get from extremely unpolished SoundCloud musicians. Whatever attempt there is to rein the band in to be presentable is overtaken by the sheer chaos in the songwriting decisions. It's very rare that the songs aren't taking a backseat to the wild screaming that Craig Nicholls does on many of their songs, though they do polish things up later on. Once he was a young man, no one could understand. You will find some high profile defenders of The Vines though. Alex Turner, Kevin Parker & Brandon Flowers all strongly cite The Vines as an inspiration whether musically or for just making them want to make music themselves.

If The Vines are remembered for one thing in particular, it's how recklessly out of control Craig Nicholls was. It's something the media lapped up at the time, comparing him to Kurt Cobain and relishing the excitement of the moment. Things would go south around 2004 when their second album came out to little fanfare, and Craig's on stage antics took a step too far when he started berating the crowd and attacked a photographer. He was charged with assault, but had the case dropped after he was diagnosed with autism. That's the part that has me taken aback. He'd lived his whole life, gotten uprooted significantly by fame and didn't even know about his own diagnosis until his late 20s. Suddenly all of his outbursts and erratic behaviour make sense as he was put into the worst possible situation for someone like him. He's mentioned in interviews about how he's never really felt like he fits in but also with direct precision that music is the most important thing in his life. I feel it so much. Negative press for The Vines never stopped after this, and those same reckless tendencies they were once lauded for would see them derided. I've said it before here, but I can't stop thinking about how readily acceptable it is to mock people who are either on the spectrum, or come across as such. Not always directly, but through highlighting any irregular activity or perspective for the express purpose of getting other people to point and laugh at the abnormal individual. I've read enough articles today from journalists seemingly encouraging Craig to die young, or lamenting that he hasn't, that it's pretty clear the narrative is 'punch down now, lament later, learn nothing overall'.

Sorry, why did I spend so long talking about The Vines? Well they have one crucial thing in common with Future Islands. They both have a highly memorable performance on David Letterman's show that seemingly sets the tone for their whole reputation in an instant. For The Vines, they performed "Get Free" and it's not immediately unusual, but the further through the song they get, the more unhinged Craig's performance gets. It starts no longer resembling the actual song and increasingly fewer consonants get out of his mouth which looks glued to the microphone. At the end of the performance, he knocks over the drum kit and throws his guitar in that vicinity. You can see Hamish Rosser leave the set in frustration. In truth, the whole band was frustrated. What you see in the video is the result of having the band locked in the studio for a 10 hour day all so they can perform a two minute song. I enjoy the performance a lot, but it's very polarising.

For Future Islands, it's not quite as complicated. Letterman had so many artists perform over the years that it's largely going fade into the background as noise. Future Islands was the exception, as the performance was shared around so much that it's hard to argue with the notion that it singlehandedly made them into stars for a moment. Perhaps it was a trajectory they were slowly headed for (they had just signed with 4AD on that album), but it's hard to imagine them as anything more than niche indie darlings poised to put the 8.2 no BNM Pitchfork reviews in the bag. Instead they got millions of views, an album that charted in the top 40 in America, and a single that went Gold.

There's a good chance you already know about it, but the performance is always worth going back to. You get to see Sam Herring standing out in his tucked in shirt and short hairline absolutely seizing the moment. First it's the casual dance moves, then he starts beating his chest and occasionally growling out his performance. Switching between all of these on a dime but doing it with such assured confidence that he pulls it off. It's one thing to look at it as a band taking the most of their opportunity and shooting their shot, but I feel he just absorbs himself into the moment, lets down his inhibitions and relishes in the moment. I can't help but be in awe, as someone whose own performance opportunities have tended to see me shy away from being myself and desperately trying to keep in line. With that in mind, I love seeing praise for this sort of thing, opening up the world to the idea that we can be ourselves and be lauded for it. It's something you can put on the good pile opposite the very large bad pile where these things don't quite work out like that.

The clearest validation of all this is the fact that I'm talking about it at all. Maybe it's an early incarnation of something that could blow up in the 2020s, but nothing about Future Islands feels like crossover potential was ever on the cards. Their whole aesthetic just flies against anything that could be considered trendy. You generally need to appeal to the kids because they're the ones more likely to actually try out new bands, having not gotten their fill already. Everything about them feels so world-weary that it's just hard to imagine it ever happening on its own. Would you believe me if I said that Sam Herring was only 29 when this song came out? The band were on their 4th album and had been around the track plenty of times by now.

It helps that "Seasons (Waiting On You)" is so hard to deny. I latched onto it not long after the performance and got around it, but it wasn't until around the end of the year when the song really solidified itself for me. It's right around End of Year list season and very likely what prompted me to give the song another run. What can you say to fault it? The opening synth stabs feel iconic at this point, and much of the emotional heft still carries through on the record. The song balances its light guitar noodling with the big release that comes on the song's chorus and it feels like you're getting the best of both worlds. The whole thing feels so universal. Lines like 'People change, and some people never do is so simple, but the heft of the delivery evokes so much. They say that the song is about the weight of past experiences and the potential trauma that stays with you, but I can't help but see it as the light at the end of the tunnel. All the emphasis on where you've arrived, and the catharsis it provides.

#47

#47. Mac Miller (feat Anderson .Paak) - Dang! (#46, 2016)

5th of 2016

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"Dang!" is a complete anomaly. Mac Miller spent most of his career charting only in America and Canada. His first album went to #1 on the Billboard 200 and every album since then has charted at #4 or higher. Meanwhile it took him three albums to even chart in Australia, and only his posthumous "Circles" album charted in the top 5. Just largely not a going concern over here. Enter this song, and it doesn't really move the needle in the US, but it actually charts in Australia. The only other real national chart it enters is in France where it gets a little higher and I have no idea how it happened. It feels like a strange form of word-of-mouth that somehow skipped over its starting place. It's probably one of Mac Miller's most popular songs, just by clearly appealing beyond his regular base, but it's never had any real ascended attention for it. In that sense, we're probably witnessing one of the last remnants of triple j airplay making a real dent in the wider world of popularity, as for years before and after this, it was the only song of his they ever playlisted. Evidently whoever decided to do that must have heard something special in this.

The most likely culprit of this is Anderson .Paak. It was at this point in time that he was on a lengthy run as a reliable featured artist. It got to the point that I recall triple j (or a similar site) even published an article at the time ranking all of his recent feature spots. At the time, I was very into the Louis Futon remix of GoldLink's "Unique". It's a remix that feels more natural than the song that it's based on, and just ends up as a blast. For my money though, the real starring role is on KAYTRANADA's song "GLOWED UP", which was a near miss for this list at #107. Let's just say that if it had qualified, it'd be making a serious push for a top 10 finish here. From the opening notes, that song has a hypnotic grip on me I just can't get elsewhere, and .Paak's role is just to glide over it all effortlessly. If I'm giving "Dang!" the bronze medal just for his feature credits in 2016, then that's not to be taken lightly. I'm not sure anyone's ever had such a strong run of smashing it out of the park on other people's songs.

The other element in place here is Mac Miller's improved credibility. It's one of those things that generally happen behind the scenes through people who are incredibly thorough about sifting through music and finding the gold. By the time the moment arrives to suggest genuinely listening to Mac Miller for me, he's had some well-liked albums and an acclaimed mixtape. It's enough to give him a proper chance, and one that he flourished with, and allowed him to firmly put his past reputation behind him. You just can't imagine him as the loud, obnoxious frat boy he used to be. The music got a lot more reserved, and the lyrics were much more personal.

I haven't seen much of a re-assessment for "The Divine Feminine", the album this comes from. I think this could potentially happen down the line by sheer volume of recognisable songs. It didn't make a noticeable splash at the time, but now about half of the album boasts some serious streaming numbers, including the song "Cinderella" which is charting around the world as I write this. That's one of the wildest things that's happened in the charts in 2026 because it's an 8 minute long song and wasn't even one of the more popular songs to begin with, though a belated collective realisation that the song is about Ariana Grande seems to be making it resonate strongly. I think if you put it with the other popular songs on the album like "Congratulations" and "My Favorite Part", there's potential that it gets seen as a classic. It's the same thing I feel has happened with Kanye West's "Graduation". Mac Miller doesn't really have a single career defining moment so you'll probably get everyone to fall back to the album with the most songs they recognise or want to go back to. I wouldn't begrudge this; there's every chance that "Dang!" gets a bit more attention and suddenly finds proper recognition beyond the small pocket of us who admired it at the time.

There's a quote from me around when the song came out that I lamented the fact it wasn't one of the biggest hits of the year. It shows how much of a shock it all was to the system because I also disparaged Mac Miller as part of a backhanded compliment to Anderson .Paak. I'll contend that the song runs for a little over 5 minutes which is generally a dealbreaker in 2016. Like, I'm looking at the Billboard Year End list and the only song that makes it to the 5 minute mark is "Low Life" by Future (though both of Adele's songs are close). In a year where it felt like he and Drake were pulling hip-hop in two different directions, there wasn't much room for this light, airy single, in addition to the fact that Anderson .Paak was to the Billboard charts what Carrot Top was to the Box Office. The song is funky, but more in a jazzy way than a "Cake By The Ocean" way. The brass elements are used in sparing fashion that allows them to poke their head into the song for small additions, but never in a way that overtakes Mac's command over the song. Getting Anderson .Paak to say 'Wait!' and have the music cut out each time is a good decision.

Otherwise it's just a very idiosyncratic song. What could just be an endless screed of the two of them lamenting lost love is just constantly propped up by fun ideas. Mac Miller doesn't even introduce himself until around the 50 second mark, and it's after Anderson .Paak has stopped singing and started echoing. Mac's just in the background himself like he's amping himself up before going at full speed (not literally). Anderson .Paak is turned into another instrument to pop up during the verse, and it's all building up to hear Mac say 'We both know that's some bullshit' with the trumpets right behind him. The music changes up completely again for Mac's second verse. When he gets to the punchline for the second time, he changes the 'We' into an 'I', and the music is considerably more empty for it, which is just a funny idea. Then in all spirals into a quirky bridge which I like a lot before .Paak steers it back on course near the end. It borders on needlessly complicated but the whole thing just winds up being so relaxed and easy to like.

#48

#48. Arctic Monkeys - Why'd You Only Call Me When You're High? (#6, 2013)

8th of 2013

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There's a common trend in social media, particularly on YouTube, where people will deliberately pronounce a word strangely, or just go out of their way to make an easily noticeable mistake. It's one of those tricks where you prey upon everyone's inherent desire to look smart and how algorithms tend to reward engagement. Very similar to any post that presents itself as a 'challenge'. Sometimes they'll delete all the responses that are actually correct, but sometimes they don't need to. You're just going to see it because your aunt has confidently undercounted just how many triangles are in that picture. I don't know if this was the intentional design Arctic Monkeys had in mind, but I'll bet that a lot more people started talking about this song because of its strange use of past & present tense in the title, than there were people who disavowed it instead.

Here's your interesting bit of trivia. "Why'd You Only Call Me When You're High?" is the last Arctic Monkeys song to hit the UK top 10. In fact, when the band were actually releasing singles, they easily did so with their first 5, starting with "I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor", up to "Fluorescent Adolescent". Aside from this song, they never did it again, with a series of near misses and generally moving outside the realm of sounding like a band that makes popular music. There's always the chance that this could change, as Arctic Monkeys have remained extremely popular in an overall sense, which means their new singles tend to get a decent look-in despite not really catering to popular trends at all. All those songs I've talked about on this list from their recent albums charted around #20, and most recently in 2026 they had a #16 hit with "Opening Night". Perhaps one day, they just give that old audience what they want and ride to the moon, or more likely, the OCC changes the rules again which leads to significant ease in reaching the top 10 again. "Opening Night" was only #28 on the streaming chart that week, so they're already making it considerably easier than it should be. With all of this in mind, there's a curious elephant in the room and the room is getting smaller every day.

It's very interesting just how well this song did at the time. It felt like Arctic Monkeys suddenly had a new lease on life and were suddenly striking every time, albeit with diminishing returns. The instinctive reaction at the time was to give this particular song less consideration. It was riding on another song's coattails, and felt like it lacked the serious stakes of that other one. Just seeing the title evokes memories of previous Arctic Monkeys songs that feel like roughly half a joke. This is just one album removed from "Don't Sit Down 'Cause I've Moved Your Chair". With that in mind, sometimes the most effective form of nostalgia and the passage of time is the addition of all the extra evidence that follows. You can call for debate regarding various other songs on "AM", but for the most part, you can re-phrase all of this to say that Arctic Monkeys have never had a hit quite this big since. In fact, it's comfortably going down as their second biggest Hottest 100 hit, well ahead of third place (#748).

Furthermore, "AM" is an album that regularly develops new stories on the charts. On any given year, there's a solid chance that one song from it has gotten a new burst of popularity. Sometimes the best way to get a feel for how popular an album really is, is to look at the least popular songs, the ones that are most likely only being heard as part of a full album listen. Arctic Monkeys fans have the opportunity to screw up that analysis because there are only a small handful of tracks left still at that supposed base level. It's not a once-off deal though because sometimes you get multiple goes at it. "Why'd You Only Call Me When You're High?" has had this so many times that it's accumulating major numbers overall. It's 5xPlatinum in the US without ever touching even the Billboard Hot 100 Bubbling Under chart. At some point, you have to take all of this on face value and accept that the song has something going for it.

I feel like this song, more than anything else on "AM", sells the idea of a slick, modern Arctic Monkeys moving along with the times. It's very much a rock album, and this is no exception, though it's a little less obvious about it. Most of the album feels like it's making easy concessions to the idea. Either there's a big riff right from the jump, or it's building up to it. It's just one of the easiest ways to provide a cathartic release, and probably what's expected of them. "Why'd You Only Call Me When You're High?" feels like one of the first times that Arctic Monkeys have managed to play the pop game but not back out of it. The main skeleton of the song is Nick O'Malley's consistent bass riff as Alex barely touches his guitar. Combine that with the drumming and there's a hip-hop feel to it, matching with Alex Turner citing Dr. Dre as an inspiration for the album. It proves that Arctic Monkeys can write a catchy song without conceding to the easy crowd pleasers.

Outside of that, the song isn't very long but keeps filling itself with good ideas. The guitars you do get in the song are often introduced to add more simple but playful ascending scales. The backing vocals sneak back into the second verse as an echo. The part that always sticks out the most to me is right towards the end of the song, when Alex returns to sing the hook, and there's this strange, futuristic feedback loop running quietly behind him. I always imagined it akin to a phone, but it's more like an alarm. It feels strangely appropriate for the song's general tone of paranoia. The moment when befuddlement makes way for derangement.