#605-#601

#605. Broods - Heartlines (#42, 2016)

63rd of 2016

In 2016, Broods had the biggest chart hit of their career in Australia, and when the Hottest 100 rolled around, it was beaten by about 30 places by this song that never even charted. The two are neck & neck in Spotify streams to this day, but I always wonder how we came to this. Some songs just weather the tide of getting forgotten by the end of the year better than others I suppose. Personally, I blame Rihanna, but that's a story for another blurb.

"Heartlines" has another thing going for it, as the only song in Broods' discography that has a writing credit for one Ella Yelich-O'Connor, or Lorde as they're sometimes known. This is a pretty natural fit I would say. Two of New Zealand's most successful musical products of the time, and both known for extensively working with Joel Little. They've since gone their separate ways, as Joel doesn't have a writing credit on the latest album for either of them, but I listen to this song and can definitely imagine it being a Lorde song at times, especially that pre-chorus.

I do sometimes wonder if this song suffers from forced rhyming. The conceit of missing a connection with someone because they're overseas is a solid foundation, but how many words can you possibly rhyme from that? 'Heartlines' to 'state lines' is fine enough, but I can't imagine ever saying the phrase 'We could fool the datelines', unless I was a member of government in Kiribati. Really we're just rhyming 'lines' with itself over and over again. That's all minor nit-picking though. The song still sounds good, and as someone who is regularly thousands of kilometres from the people I talk to the most, it does hit that unique feeling of isolation pretty well.

#604. Hayden James - Something About You (#44, 2015)

60th of 2015

I like to believe I have thusly proven my commitment to fairly assessing music across all genres. How else would I unintentionally put this song so closely ahead of "Your Man" (#609) when they sound largely different but are anchored by one near identical hook? It's clearly proof that I'm not just making up these opinions on the spot. If you put that fast spoken bit at the start of your song, you're falling just shy of the top 600, that's just how it works.

In truth though I felt far more enthusiastic about this one when I first came across it. I've said before that I'm always excited to see new producers make a commercial mark because they feel more prone than a lot of other kinds of artists to make a genuine shift in the sound of the mainstream. A lot of popular music is just singers working in tandem with producers but sometimes the truest litmus test is to see what's making waves without a huge name attached.

At this point I'd already heard his song "Permission To Love", which was pretty good. There was an emotive side to it even with all the synths dripping down around it. "Something About You" felt like a toning down, but it allowed for a crisper sound as a result. I'll admit the pitch shifted vocals sound a little silly, emotional pleading of this nature makes you sound more like either a villain or a joke. It works best at the start of the song, that's a title drop I've never really dreaded because the song shifts into gear so immediately afterwards, and it's such a pleasant gear to cruise in. Also happy roughly birthday maybe, Hayden James.

#603. ZHU - Faded (#11, 2014)

65th of 2014

The rise of ZHU, and in particular this song, was quite remarkable. He severely lacked an image, and actively worked against the notion of having one. The lines 'Music is faceless. Let my music tell my story.' occupy my mind any time I think of him, because I had absolutely nothing else to go by. It wasn't even clear to me that he was providing his own vocals. It was his intention to succeed on these terms and it almost felt too suspicious how well it was working out.

The boring answer to all of that is that he had help pushing the single through a major label. Sony put the song up for pre-order for a while, so when it was released, it instantly shot out the gate to make people take notice. In my mind I always think that it immediately peaked, but it actually vaulted back up in the following weeks to reach #3 in a very congested top 10 that wasn't letting anything stick around. An excellent effort in promoting something that I couldn't see getting anywhere near as high on its own legs.

I just think it's neat, I suppose. It has two neat tricks going for it. Firstly that hypnotic riff that anchors the whole track, and then the pounding bass that comes through after. I still don't think very highly of ZHU's singing, but he knows how to switch things up and keep this largely repetitive song from getting too stale.

#602. Mac Miller - Blue World (#24, 2020)

54th of 2020

Well now I'm sad. Mac Miller was only 19 years old when he managed a surprise #1 album in the US, doing so without a major label or even much in the way of crossover hits. He turned 26 in 2018 and released his 5th album, but he would die from a drug overdose before the year was over. While he did end up releasing a lot of music in his lifetime, it still remains a major 'What if?', but really it's just a terrible thing to happen in general. As far as celebrity R.I.P.s go, this is one that hits me pretty hard.

Mac Miller started his career as the epitome of college frat boy rap. He seized that moment for all it was worth, with no reason to think he wouldn't just be another Asher Roth. I barely noticed him at the time because he never crossed over to Australia, but I was aware of him as that annoying "Donald Trump" guy, he existed to be clowned upon.

He got more on my radar with his next album, "Watching Movies with the Sound Off". In part because it's a memorable album cover for better or worse, but also because I remember the prevailing consensus I saw around it was that it was strangely good. Mac Miller spent his early adulthood being very prolific with releasing mixtapes, and really honed his craft in the process. "Faces" would come out the next year, and though I don't remember what the impression of it was at the time, it's been heralded as his most important release in hindsight.

I've never seen any artist's lyrics analysed as much as Mac Miller's for how it tracks his mental health journey. I think it goes a long way to showing why he resonates so strongly because he really laid it all out for everyone. He reaches rock bottom around 2014, but then starts to find a new level of clarity after that. I can't help but see parallels with my own life. He was about the same age as me, and my own mental health struggles lined up pretty close with his. I got through mine, and it really looked like Mac Miller was doing the same, but he didn't get to experience the other side. It's so tragic to see how close he got.

Mac Miller was still around when he got his first Hottest 100 entry, but otherwise we're looking at one entry buoyed by the tragedy at the time, and two more posthumous releases. This is the first of those two. The album "Swimming" was released in 2018, and he was simultaneously working on a companion album, "Circles". Supposedly there was going to be a third one as well, I don't know if it was going to be called "In" or not. His estate didn't rush things, so "Circles" would take until 2020 to see a release, and it did very well. These posthumous entries were arguably his biggest hits, and he memorably landed back to back entries in the Hottest 100, next to Lime Cordiale who also landed back to back entries.

"Blue World" is an odd one. The gimmick attached to it is one of the producers who worked on it. It's one of the two guys from Khalid's "Talk" (#917), which means I still can't say who it is, but you get the idea. You can definitely feel his influence on this one, and it's a little distracting as well. I have to trust that Mac Miller did in fact record the lyrics the way he did, but you can definitely imagine a more sombre version of the same song if it was ever the plan. Comparing it to the other posthumous single of note, I'm sure he wouldn't want it all to be a mood killer, I've just never been sure how I'm supposed to listen to this one. The vibes are unusual to say the least.

#601. J. Cole - MIDDLE CHILD (#56, 2019)

54th of 2019

Oh hey, it's been a while but I finally get to talk about a US rapper who had a #1 album in 2011 but wouldn't really impact in Australia until years later. Even on those terms, it's arguable to say that J. Cole hadn't quite had his popularity recognised in the US, the sheer persistence of many of his biggest hits far outweighs their often unremarkable initial chart performance. I think many would be surprised to learn that "Wet Dreamz" and "No Role Modelz" only peaked at #61 & #36 in the US, while they combine for 22xPlatinum sales now. J. Cole fans are incredibly dedicated.

In Australia, J. Cole often had his popularity underrepresented because of his tendency to release albums in December, a big time to boost sales but only if you're there for a more general audience. He was probably primed to top the charts, but didn't do so until 2018 when he released an album in April. On the singles chart, he became a rare example as an artist who was able to flood with album tracks despite not having a visible career of hits that he was arguably coasting on. It's to the point that he has 24 top 50 hits in Australia, and only 4 of them have spent more than 4 weeks on the chart. Two of those are guest spots, both from artists who will eventually appear on this list (arguably both are being carried by J. Cole's guest verses in these instances), one is a belated long haul of "No Role Modelz", which in 2022 & 2023 managed an absurd 36 weeks in the top 50 without ever getting higher than #40, the other one is "MIDDLE CHILD".

I don't know if I would pick "MIDDLE CHILD" out as the obvious crossover hit of J. Cole's discography, but it's helped a lot by being a standalone single, letting it get all of the attention to itself. Something I've noticed when studying last.fm figures is that in the age of streaming, repeat listens from hooked fans are the key to rocketing up to the top of the charts. It's hard to do that when the whole album is released together as one big package, as you've got to rely on everyone spending time listening to the whole thing and then deciding on similar favourites to pick out and listen back to immediately. In the time you're listening to the new J. Cole album, someone could have already spun "MIDDLE CHILD" ten times. We saw this in 2025 when future Hottest 100 entrants Sleep Token were seeing very high debuts with their new singles, but once the album came out, they couldn't come close to matching the same daily figures. It's something that rings truer for artists without a proper mainstream following, or rather, a lack of true crossover hits.

"MIDDLE CHILD" is a song about J. Cole's odd position in the world of hip-hop. He's an artist who hasn't been around long enough to be a true oldhead, but is also clearly not part of the new school. It's a weird one because you have the knowledge and perspective to bridge the gap, but what usually happens is that you're either ignored or incorrectly lumped in with an extreme that doesn't really fit you, because the binary differences between those two groups can't help but get all the attention. When I was younger I used to get caught up in all sorts of arguments about whether new or old music was the clearly bad one, and I'd sometimes get assumptions made of my character because of association. Now that I've gotten older, all that it's really done is reinforced it more strongly. Largely that generational divides are stupid, but now I truly get to see the most negative stereotypes foisted upon me from both sides. All the while, you can't help but notice how superficial a lot of the differences are. A lot of zoomers can't help but default into musical taste and a sense of humour that's already derided for being codified as millennial or boomer-core.

In any case, J. Cole doesn't actually talk all that much about this. For most of this song it's really a prototype diss track, one without any specific targets named, but it comes with the promise that there will be a retaliation. This has no doubt gotten immensely funnier after 2024, when a J. Cole lyric instigated the Kendrick Lamar & Drake beef, which led to J. Cole weighing in on it initially, before he basically admittedly that he loves Kendrick and that he doesn't have it in him to be this kind of rapper. You just can't take any of the threats in this song seriously anymore. It'd be nice to imagine J. Cole using his position to mentor the next generation, but I'm not even sure if he's equipped to do it anymore.

As a pop song, it goes alright. I tend to find myself drawn into something that changes the game to an extent, where 'J. Cole finally gets a crossover hit' qualifies in that regard. When he's focused, he can be a pretty engaging presence on a song, I don't think it's controversial to say he's good at rapping. Maybe the auto-tune is a little cheesy but it gives the song a decent hook. My favourite J. Cole song is probably "m y . l i f e" from 2021 (helped by a certain guest feature). A pretty big hit in its own right, debuting at #11 in Australia and making #139 in the Hottest 100. He also made #105 with "p r i d e . i s . t h e . d e v i l" that year, a near miss that means this is still his only ever Hottest 100 entry. An odd curiosity but a pretty good one. A lot of very popular artists never even get to have that one victory.

#610-#606

#610. Ball Park Music - The Perfect Life Does Not Exist (#39, 2018)

65th of 2018

It feels like the whole set is open now. Kudos must be given to Ball Park Music because among all artists with more than 6 entries on the list, they're the one that managed to hold out the longest before finally showing up. That's full credit to a career of consistency because on average, we should be closing in on their 4th entry already. Well, I'd be lying if I said they were consistent on the Hottest 100, theirs is a train ride that's rockier than most, but it seems to be in good stead of late.

I've had to wait so long to talk about Ball Park Music that so much has happened. Since I started writing this, the Brisbane Lions won a premiership, and Ball Park Music can be spotted cheering them on under the Instagram post about it. Then several months later, they released a song called "Please Don't Move To Melbourne". No ribbing to be found in it, but I choose to believe it's not a coincidence. The city of Melbourne couldn't even field a team in the preliminary final, that hadn't happened since 2006, a couple of years before Ball Park Music formed. Also Ball Park Music got their first ever ARIA #1 album this year, a long time coming with all their near misses. Not to mention they're about to support Oasis on tour.

It's very easy to see Ball Park Music as the second coming of Custard. They also came from Brisbane after all, with a solid run of success that never quite netted them an ARIA top 50 hit. If Wikipedia is to be believed, Custard were absolute kings of not quite making the ARIA top 100 for a while, but they had brewing in them an almost smash hit with "Girls Like That (Don't Go For Guys Like Us)", which got to #52. Custard are still around actually, they reformed a while back and have released a couple more albums. At this point they're an amusing aside to learn about for anyone aware that David McCormack has the huge voice acting role playing the dad from "Bluey". Who knows what future awaits Ball Park Music.

For now I can behold the past, because we're looking at "The Perfect Life Does Not Exist", which comes from the band's 5th album "Good Mood". It's the only time we're going to see the cover here, so I have to marvel at it, it's clearly their best album cover. The song? Yeah, it's pretty good. There's definitely a common thread you can start to feel from a lot of Ball Park Music songs. Sometimes they get a little bit weird, sometimes they don't, but they still give a solid morsel to chew on here and there. Here, you get a lot of big dynamic shifts that come as a surprise when the song teases itself initially as just an acoustic guitar song. It feels like they're taking cues from that slightly more famous Brisbane band, Powderfinger. Now there's a good investigation for one band disappearing right as the other one pops up. I've never seen Bernard & Sam in the same photo before.

#609. Joji - Your Man (#98, 2020)

55th of 2020

Joji has one of the more unusual routes to music stardom. Prior to adopting the stage name, he spent years building a name for himself as a surrealist YouTuber, making content that I'm sure has a genuine craft & appeal to it. I just know that spending 10 minutes trying to verify his nationality through a vlog he posted was enough of it for me. He did prove to be very influential on the music world though, but I'll leave that for a later entry because it's a funnier juxtaposition.

For a time, he actually had two concurrent music careers. Before he released music under the Joji moniker, he made music as Pink Guy. That's music that I think is more easily identified as running under his schtick. Much more confronting and aggressive than any Joji release. Doing both concurrently has allowed him to explore two very different perspectives.

It's possible that it was all just intended to be a side project and nothing more. Whatever the plan was, I don't think anyone expected just how far he'd take it, with a big boost from the monster success of "SLOW DANCING IN THE DARK". Maybe that song has all the makings of a vagrant in the R&B world, but I think it does enough to stand out in its own right. There's a soft tone in the instrumental that's reminiscent of video game soundtracks, with a big explosion of sound that's instantly memorable. Maybe the real juxtaposition is finding out that Pink Guy is capable of something like this, but I suspect that the song's reach went far beyond his usual circle into people who had no context.

That must have ended up being the case as his career continued. I hesitate to say that his moment has passed because he actually hasn't released anything in 3 years, but for a time, he's been reliably charting well with his new singles on release. He does particularly well in Australia which may be due to his tenuous parental link to our country. I mentioned before that I watched one of his vlogs, and that was to reaffirm that he's self-identified himself as being half Japanese and half Australian. I'm not entirely sure if he'd get the same coverage here otherwise, although in saying that, triple j in their stat sheet only recognise him as Japanese, while the only ARIA Award nomination he's gotten was for Single Of The Year, suggesting the industry at large isn't fully behind the idea, and it's just a matter of ARIA counting him in their system.

I remember spotting "Your Man" as a potential hit from the outset. When Joji released his second album "Nectar" in September 2020, this newly released song managed to outperform every other track on the album on streaming release day, even the already released singles. It maybe also got me into the mindset that it was just more streaming friendly than those singles, which were a bit more out there in their presentation. That might go some way into explaining how two of those other singles landed higher in the countdown than this did. I mean, I think they're better too, obviously.

I'm not sure it's ever clicked with me before but since I've had both artists on my mind at roughly the same time, I can't help but want to share a half observation. Namely that I think this song gets one of its most memorable hooks from a Hayden James song I'm yet to cover. They even set it up largely the same way, with a repetitive intro that's cut through by some rapid fire syllables. Replace 'Have you ever loved?', with 'Want another hit?' and see if you feel the same way. They're even both questions, can I make it any more obvious?

In a career of frequently bringing surprises and oddities, this might just be the most conventional Joji song. It does stick out a little bit with its blending of R&B with a dancefloor groove, but it's so tastefully done that it doesn't sound unusual at all.

#608. Ocean Alley - Infinity (#24, 2019)

55th of 2019

My iTunes collections of every notable Ocean Alley hit from 2017 to 2024 means that I have a unique piece of metadata archived alongside it. Everything that goes up on the iTunes store has to get tagged with a genre, and through that you can learn interesting things about marketing, before usually concluding that it's all meaningless. This is a dance song, by the way.

Some artists can't even stay consistent in their own catalogue. I have Lana Del Rey's "Doin' Time" (#823) tagged as Pop while the rest of the songs I have on the same album are tagged as Alternative. I'm not sure who's making these decisions or why. In the case of Ocean Alley, they start off as Rock, but then shift over to Alternative around 2019. It's a fuzzy line, because the first single they put out in 2019, a song that's yet to appear here, is the first in the Alternative set, while "Infinity" came back for one last hurrah for Rock.

I wouldn't normally mention this, but firstly how else do you dive into yet another Ocean Alley song? Secondly, I do think there's some merit to the label. In what would end up being Ocean Alley's title defence year, "Infinity" feels like a different side to what they were showing in 2018. Less of the hazy surfer vibes, and more of a rigid foundation. The guitar tone just sounds so nice here.

#607. Jamie T - Zombie (#43, 2014)

66th of 2014

Of all the inexplicable throwbacks served up by the 2014 countdown, this has got to be the funniest. There are few artists that serve as a blatant flashback to my early times of getting back into music in 2007 more than he does. There's a triple j interview from back then when he was in for Like A Version where Robbie Buck announces him by trying to pronounce his name correctly. Jamie T doesn't tell him how to do it, but just laughs and says he's close enough. It's lived in my head for years just because of one jtv Saturday recording I replayed a bunch of times. But he was already ingratiated to me before that with a series of singles that were getting spun all year. From my perspective he got done a bit dirty by release dates to not have a Hottest 100 berth with "If You Got The Money", since it had ample airtime after it already tried and failed to get in. He'd make up for it 2 years later when the voting worked out a lot better for him, "Sticks 'n' Stones" landing all the way up at #14. He went 5 years without releasing another album and I had no reason to think he'd ever be back, alas.

I'm sure I've said this before, but he's a curious case for me as an artist I always saw as a rapper first and foremost, but he really is just a rock singer who raps a bit. There isn't a whole world of difference in what he's doing compared to say Arctic Monkeys. There's another British artist I may well say something similar about when he shows up here. It's another layer to why he felt so stuck in that period of time. By 2014, Arctic Monkeys had already switched up their sound a couple of times under the fair assumption that the world and they weren't really pining for more variations on their debut album.

When "Zombie" came out, it felt like a half-hearted attempt to keep the fire burning many years later. It was around the same time Kasabian came back with their last UK top 40 hit "eez-eh". More exciting, newer artists weren't able to break through because people couldn't move on from their dinosaur acts of yesteryear (I do have a soft spot for that Kasabian song). Similarly, "Zombie" became Jamie T's last UK top 40 hit as well with a concerted push a decent while after it first came out.

It's really easy (eez-eh?) to paint "Zombie" in such a way, some sort of dried out re-animated husk, kind of like a...yeah it's too easy. It's more like a return with the edges sanded off a little. Jamie T's first two albums sound inescapably like the time they were released. I think this is reflected in his streaming performance nowadays. He actually has surprisingly better numbers than you'd expect, and "Zombie" is rubbing shoulders with his biggest hits to this day. I did eventually warm to it as well, I just think that it lacks in memorable lyrics, or at least I don't think it's as funny (oh oh oh) to sing along.

#606. Spacey Jane - Bothers Me (#75, 2022)

59th of 2022

You know it's funny. You see, my wife is a big fan of your band, she bought "Here Comes Everybody" the day it came out and has been listening to it ever since. More than just that, she wanted to vote for you in triple j's Hottest 100, and did that on the first day, and you know what she said to me? She said it's a shame that there are only 6 of your songs to vote for. Now there's one thing that bothers me, it's that when they counted down all those songs for 2022, all of a sudden there was a 7th Spacey Jane song at #113. Now you don't think that triple j saw a solid number of votes for a song that wasn't even pushed as a single, and thought they could chuck another one on do you? It sure would have been a convenient way to rid them of that Wolfmother record that had been lingering on for so long. Ah it's probably nothing though, I'll get out of your hair.

Oh, one more thing sir, you say that you're no longer interested in toeing the line because you don't need somebody telling you how to act. You wouldn't mind elaborating on that a bit further. I'd hate to think someone as brilliant as yourself would accidentally admit to committing a felony and then putting it out on tape.

Maybe by all accounts this song shouldn't be here. It seems like it lucked out as being arbitrarily chosen as a 6th song to represent Spacey Jane even though it never received substantial airplay at any point. It doesn't even have an impressive stand out performance on streaming, so I'm not even sure the Spacey Heads were all that keen on this song beyond it acting as a stat point in their favour. It was just there and riding so high on the Spacey Jane fanfare at the time that it couldn't help but get in as well.

If nothing else though, this song makes me think of "Columbo". It was well timed for me because I got caught up in one of those renaissance moments on social media where something related to the show goes viral and a bunch of people who weren't even alive for the syndication get caught up in it. Everyone knows it for the inverted format, a murder mystery where you get to see the killer commit the crime and instead spend the runtime wondering how they're going to get caught. It feels antithetical to the whole concept but it's unbelievably effective and you get this wonderful dynamic where the detective manages to come across as bumbling and ineffective, but keeps getting closer and closer to unravelling seemingly perfect crimes. I always recommend watching "Suitable For Framing" as it's a great example of the whole set up with one of the all-time greatest endings. I wish I could experience it all again at some point but "Poker Face" (the TV show) is a handy substitute to have around of late. I could talk about this show for hours probably, it's great comfort food.

When I'm forced to acknowledge it on its own terms, "Bothers Me" is pretty good though. Yes, it's another low tempo Spacey Jane song that isn't looking to thrill, but it's very cosy in its own right. There's some guitar feedback that runs mostly in the background that really adds to the nostalgic feeling. The people who love this album now are going to continue loving it for a long time to come. It's basically laser focused to remind you of the non-specific good times.

#615-#611

#615. Chance The Rapper (feat Knox Fortune) - All Night (#18, 2016)

64th of 2016

It's difficult to figure out what was going on with the voting for this song. The voting list seems to suggest nothing untoward, but if you look up any social media posts including votes from back in 2016, you'll see that the song was credited as "All Night {Ft. Knox Fortune}/Kaytranada Extended Joint". The forward slash does a lot of work in hindsight, but I remember at the time thinking the song was doing surprisingly well, owing only to the explanation that the extended remix was more popular in its own right. Both versions got equal airplay at the time, although triple j had veered more to the remix later on. On the day, triple j played the original version and basically pretended this whole saga never happened. In the years that have followed, the original version of "All Night" has become one of Chance The Rapper's most popular songs, and triple j are far more likely to play it, but I wonder how many people felt robbed when their votes contributed to a version they were less interested in.

This is Chance The Rapper's only entry as a lead artist. It comes from his popular "Coloring Book" mixtape, and I think this voting result goes some ways to showing just how popular he was. It wasn't quite as obvious because he wasn't putting music out for sale, or even on all streaming platforms at once. He'd just built up a lot of good will that he'd cash in on later. Mostly in the form of hit songs alongside Justin Bieber, but he's still got a #1 hit now. Despite the success, he never troubled the Hottest 100 again after 2016. A lot of critics like to look back at this era with respect to presidential terms, and so you'll often see Chance The Rapper seen as a specific relic of the Obama era with just how quickly his prospects of being the next big thing fizzled out afterwards.

To date, Chance The Rapper has officially released one album in his career, 2019's "The Big Day". This album gained immediate infamy for how bad it was. A nearly 80 minute saga about his marriage. It's a reputation that's preceded things to the degree that 'I LOVE MY WIFE' has become a memetic phrase to mock the album, even though Chance never actually says that anywhere on the album. I just assumed he did until I finally made the grim decision to listen to it now just to put it all to bed.

I honestly don't think the album sounds anywhere near as bad as it's made out to be. I don't want to listen to it again because it's way too long, but I'm sure you could trim it down to a concise 45 minutes and salvage something of value on it. Everyone goes open season on Chance's bars for being corny, I won't disagree on that but I also think that it's something he'd been coasting on for all of his career. The difference between endearing & cringe is paper thin it seems. It all feels like a knee-jerk online reaction from fans, because a lot of critical reviews were relatively positive and more willing to go along with Chance's ambitious project. In any case, it's done largely irreparable damage to his brand that he's never recovered from. To make matters worse, he ended up getting divorced.

I was definitely more on board for the "Acid Rap" and "Coloring Book" years though. Nowhere near as much as the most ardent fans, but when he was on, he really could play a part. His verse on Action Bronson's "Baby Blue" is iconic, and if you disagree, I hope there's always snow on your driveway, and that you win the lottery and lose your ticket. There's another song I'm strongly thinking about too, but it's too early for that. Chance is allowed one victory lap.

To be fair, "All Night" immediate stood out as a highlight to me on "Coloring Book" when I first heard it. Not necessarily in the usual way as it wasn't really shocking or extravagant, but it did have an immediately catchy hook. Chance does feel a bit like a guest on his own song, and a little like he's stumbling through something he doesn't belong in. The song isn't long enough to drag on though, so it's suitable enough.

#614. St. Lucia - Elevate (#93, 2013)

65th of 2013

We've already had Panama (#856), so what's another Central American nation? This would actually be a lie, however. St. Lucia is the project of South African musician Jean-Philip Grobler, and he named himself after the small town of that name in South Africa. In case you were wondering, St. Vincent has never made the Hottest 100, but she also didn't take her name from the country in question. What a waste of good musical geography trivia.

I don't know if I have much else to say about this one. I've always liked this song, and it feels like a perfect culmination of what it's trying to be. Synth pop that just sounds enormous, and layers itself in a very tidy and pleasing way. No other St. Lucia song I've heard has ever gotten my attention the same way this one does. I think it's mainly just Grobler's vocals, that rest too far on the side of hammy, that it gets distracting. I hear a bit of it in this song as well, but I think he manages to get away with it for the most part.

#613. San Cisco - Hey, Did I Do You Wrong? (#79, 2017)

59th of 2017

It's been a long time since I can remember being excited for San Cisco to make the grade, so it's a solid credit to them that it's taken this long just to start looking at their original material. Maybe that bodes poorly on them and we're about to just run through an endless stampede of San Cisco. I don't study the upcoming portion of this list thoroughly so I couldn't tell you if that is or isn't the case. Makes it more fun for me when I see what's on the docket.

"Hey, Did I Do You Wrong?" comes from San Cisco's 3rd album "The Water". It was the first sign of real cracks in the process as lead single "SloMo" couldn't quite crack the list, landing at #121 in 2016. If they managed to get in with that, they'd have a consecutive run of 10 years in a row on the countdown from 2011 to 2020, matching The Living End's record.

I'm not sure if this is a significant step up to justify putting them back on the hit list, but it is solid cosy vibes. It's the kind of thing they've just always been good at, even on their debut album. I don't really have anything to add on this one but did you know that Scarlett had a child with James from Pond recently? That kid's surely going to grow up to be the greatest drummer in all of Western Australia.

#612. Hilltop Hoods (feat Illy & Ecca Vandal) - Exit Sign (#10, 2019)

56th of 2019

If you're remember when I was talking about "Painkiller" (#806), I mentioned a Hilltop Hoods song that was firmly released in 2019 but for lack of any arriving options, was nominated for Single Of The Year at the 2020 ARIA Awards. I say firmly 2019 and I mean it. This song debuted in the ARIA top 50 in March 2019, and left the chart in July 2019. Hilltop Hoods' next hit "I'm Good?" (#779) was released a fair bit later in the year in 2020, but wasn't able to repeat the feat of being nominated in 2021. They haven't had a major hit single since these two, so there might not be another chance for it.

I could say the same thing I said about "Rushing Back" (#619). This isn't a single that screams long term success, especially since Hilltop Hoods so often have short-lived singles that don't truly crossover. But on the other hand, Illy is a much more notable name to get than Hilltop Hoods had usually been working with, so it serves as a sorta last hurrah for this era of Australian hip-hop. The 2020s have been very different thus far. Maybe it doesn't feel like a major hit, but it really did hang around for a long time, accumulating 6xPlatinum figures in Australia.

It's not just Illy here though, I have to give a big shout out to Ecca Vandal. She belongs to a group of artists of whom I can only recall Sycco at the moment. Artists who I certainly noticed thanks to an early single on triple j that wasn't a hit by any stretch, but stuck out to me as aggressively annoying. When this happens, I often can't help but have them grow on me because it's basically a self-imposed character arc at this point, waging a war inside my own head. You know who had an arc? Noah.

It helped too that her music kept getting better after that. Her first single "White Flag" has its appeal centred on how well you can get down with her vocal inflections, but then a year later she released "Battle Royal", which just instantly asserts itself with huge rock energy. Is this the part of the blog where I endlessly spiel about the Japanese novel of nearly the same name? Absolutely not, there's a better opportunity later on if you can believe it. Ecca Vandal released her debut album a couple of years later in 2017, and it's a riot all the way through. My favourite song is "Broke Days, Party Nights" which once again sets a new standard for how hard one can rock. Truly she had no money and three parties with this one.

"Exit Sign" doesn't really play to those strengths but I'm still happy to see her here. Just one of the more unlikely artists to score a Hottest 100 top 10 finish, especially as she hasn't gotten remotely close otherwise. She sells her hook with all the necessary conviction though. She's like the audio equivalent of that one America's Next Top Model GIF where the contestant very enthusiastically enters the scene. Everybody say 'Hi!'.

Otherwise the song is mostly memorable for the occasional bizarre lyrics. You've got Pressure creating the mental image of your parents seeing your nudes, Illy getting over-invested in a '15 minutes of fame' bar, and then Suffa going on full old man rant about the way people use the word 'literally'. He's been doing this for so long, he just wants to be with his kids.

#611. Parkway Drive - Crushed (#48, 2015)

61st of 2015

'Crush' is such a vividly violent word. It probably has no real place in the world of pop music but I always found myself disappointed when I saw it in a song title and it didn't amount to the tough image I conjured in my head. That's right: Jennifer Paige, Mandy Moore, David Archuleta, all massive disappointments to me. On the other hand, earlier in 2025, Playboi Carti & Travis Scott released a song called "CRUSH" that does give me what I want. When they say it like that, it sounds absolutely rancid and unpleasant. Playboi Carti will eventually appear on this list in an uncredited role. Anyway, Parkway Drive did this thing a decade ago and didn't make it sound gross, just aggressive in a way that only Winston can pull off.

Compared to the other Parkway Drive entries I've had here, this feels more naturally within their area of expertise. It's not all serious, there's some silly energy that comes about from screaming 'BANG, BANG, BANG!', and even the titular phrase, 'crushed by the fists of God' feels absurdly melodramatic. It sufficiently gets my attention though, and I'm pleasantly lacking in things to critique about it. Their first Hottest 100 entry, "Sleepwalker", still clears this but it's a good substitute for this era.

#620-#616

#620. Alison Wonderland - Church (#31, 2018)

66th of 2018

When I was in high school I remember starting to notice a bunch of people exclaiming 'church!' and I had absolutely no idea what it meant or why they were saying it. At around the same time, I discovered that T-Pain had a song called "Church", although I never heard the song because it wasn't a hit in Australia and even if I got past the curiosity-blocking thought that I probably wouldn't like it, back then it wasn't easy to just listen to songs on demand! I eventually learnt two things. Firstly that the phrase is basically a substitute for 'Amen!' and is just an enthusiastic way of agreeing with someone. The second thing I learnt is that the T-Pain song is an absolute banger. I guess Alison Wonderland's one is pretty good too.

It's been three days to you but for me I'm writing back to back entries on Australian artists who think they're being very clever with their punny names. We'll encounter her a few times, but the short version of the story is that she was inspired to make electronic music after hearing "Silent Shout" by The Knife and obsessing over the album, and its emotional resonance. I can rep that notion. The Knife have made so much great music following their own ideas in ways that can be both chaotic and beautiful, sometimes at the same time. So much so that this won't even be the last time I can introduce an Australian artist who was inspired to make music by The Knife.

I wouldn't necessarily say that I can hear The Knife's influence in her music although I suppose it does operate on a level beyond just making mindless bangers. "Church" is one of her biggest hits but it's still centered around a toxic relationship. I like to imagine that she's still co-opting 2000s slang around the title phrase except I think she just means it literally. Not sure how much the metaphor resonates with the younger generation, but what can you do?

The thing that struck me with this at the time is that it felt like a concerted effort on the part of EMI to try and market Alison Wonderland more as a pop star than a producer. When I compare this to her other entries coming up, that are also a few years older, I get the sense that this song is written with the vocals as the focal point, a bit different to her older songs where her voice feels like more of an instrument that can get drowned in big choruses. On the album, there's even a song, "Here 4 U" where she isn't actually credited as a producer. A lot of the album has noted producers Joel Little & Josh Fountain credited in different places, and I listen to it and just hear a slightly more chaotic version of what they might make with Lorde or BENEE. I'm not saying this is a terrible thing, but there's something about those earlier releases that stood out a bit more to me. This feels like becoming the very system she used to disrupt.

#619. Flume (feat Vera Blue) - Rushing Back (#2, 2019)

58th of 2019

This is one of Flume's biggest hits ever and it's not even on an album. It was a top 10 hit thanks to the Hottest 100, but I always forget that it was already doing very well before that, and after it as well, spending 8 months in the ARIA top 50. Admittedly a good contributor to this was an aggressive playlist push on Spotify. They were seemingly intent on letting this song see out all of 2020 with solid figures, and it ended up as the 27th biggest hit of the year, even with a sizeable number of sales stranded in 2019. It's the kind of thing that makes you stop and think, 'Why this song?'.

The lazy way to look at it is to say that it's arguably one of Flume's most high profile collaborations. On a technical level it's not, but in terms of fanbases with the ability to cross over, a Vera Blue collaboration is going to do a lot more than the usual. Flume was already scoring massive hits that didn't have big name vocalists, so why not give it a little extra juice to go further?

Flume teaming up with Vera Blue is a long time coming. They ironically had their chart come ups at roughly the same time, Flume with his self-titled album out around the same time Vera Blue was making a name for herself on The Voice. Two years after that, Vera Blue would release the song "Hold". Flume hears it, and gets in touch. In 2016, Vera Blue appears with Flume for his Like A Version appearance, alongside three other artists who will eventually appear on this blog, mostly alongside Flume. They covered the recently viral Ghost Town DJ's song "My Boo", and I'm a big fan of it. The vocal harmonies completely shift the energy of the song while still retaining the core appeal. Maybe I am just glazing that one particular vocalist but I also love what Flume does with it to make it his own.

Vera Blue is obviously a huge get for this song. On the surface, this has the feel of a song whose verses exist to make space between the choruses, but she can make the most of the time she has largely to herself. She saves more of the vocal flourishes for these moments after all, hitting all the high notes. Flume occasionally predates the subtle foreshadowing meme when he occasionally disrupts the peaceful tune at that point. When you get to the chorus, it feels like it's building a little on what was happening in "Some Minds" (#637), letting us have fun with the peculiar tune of rapid bleeps, but not disrupting the song's structure in the process. If you imagine Flume to be a spewing robot, you can even listen to the chorus and treat it like a duet, as they take their turns to do very different things. No one does it like he does.

#618. Methyl Ethel - Twilight Driving (#97, 2015)

62nd of 2015

We had to get to one of them eventually. This song is remembered not just on its own terms, but for the fact that during the 2015 Hottest 100 broadcast, it was accidentally played out of sequence. For about 4 minutes, the whole country believed it to be the #98 song, only for a correction to be issued after it finished playing. It's the only mistake of this nature I can ever recall, although some may recall "Talk Is Cheap" (#862) starting up in the background of another song during the 2010s countdown. It's been 10 years and I cannot help but think of this incident any time this song (or the #98 song) ever comes to mind, just an amusing bit of lore to add to it.

I wasn't really aware of it but at some point in the past handful of years, Methyl Ethel has adopted the Tame Impala version of branding. It's the borderline gaslight of suggesting that what was previously understood to be a band is actually just one guy and a bunch of other session musicians who show up on tour. It mostly tracks that Jake Webb is the sole writer & musician for most Methyl Ethel songs. Why am I only just finding this out now though? It's just, how much more betrayal can I take?

Methyl Ethel has been rather successful though. This was the first taste of that, although one that always feels a little misleading in hindsight. I would describe Methyl Ethel's music as art pop. Mostly conventional and catchy, but under layers of the occasional off kilter idea and all manner of literary references. Of all the Methyl Ethel songs I can name, this is one of only two that actually just uses its title properly in the lyrics. It's just so oddly conventional.

Well it's almost conventional. This song has the makings of an acoustic guitar jam but instead it's just layered in thick reverb that makes it tough for anything to cut through. Jake has said in an interview that there was an intentional idea initially to come across as androgynous, which is probably why his voice is rarely clear on this song. It's very difficult to recall any lyric that isn't the title phrase. It is a very uniquely Australian line though, cautioning for kangaroos on the road at night. When I was a kid there was a camping ground I'd regularly get driven down to, and the road to it was a haven of kangaroos crossing the road. I can't confidently recall if I witnessed any incidents but it's a very real danger that was put into me a long time ago.

#617. Jack Harlow - WHATS POPPIN (#42, 2020)

56th of 2020

I play a lot of Jackbox games. There's a wide range of quality but on the whole, it's a refreshing resource for social party games that usually has enough material to survive playing over and over again. I've spent an inordinate number of hours playing Drawful and the like. The most recent game they've put out is the Survey Scramble, a game compilation that utilises their wide audience reach to create possibly the largest ever Family Feud style survey, which they proceed to play around with in various set ups. The first game is mostly just you trying to guess the top prompts, but the sheer volume of prompts they have ranked gives you a lot of amusing results to work with.

The most addictive game in my experience is Squares, which turns the survey board into a game of Noughts and Crosses, where each square pertains to a different section of the survey result. The middle square for instance is the difficult to intentionally hit #16-#20 section. Early on when I was playing the game, the prompt was something like 'Attractive cartoon characters', which is pretty ridiculous but also difficult to get into the mindset of what could possibly be a popular result. I'm bringing all this up because I won this game thanks to "WHATS POPPIN". I remembered Jack Harlow making an offhand reference to Shego from "Kim Possible" and it gave me the confidence to put down a guess that I never would've backed myself to make, and it gave me the winning square. Thanks Jack, your horny years watching the Disney Channel won me some brief bragging rights.

First impressions are important. It's your one chance to make a statement before all your foibles are set out on the table for everyone to either continually notice, or simply remember and feel certain have continued to always be there. This is why it's good that this post is set up in such a way that it's so hard to imagine that this entry, with a completely irreverent tangent about cartoons would possibly be the first entry anyone reads on this blog. When it comes to the music world though, it's a foundational moment when everyone's trying to figure out if you're a flash in the pan or a lasting star, and how worthwhile it is to get on that train.

For a lot of artists, their biggest successes come while everyone's still figuring this stuff out. Nickelback's first hit was their biggest, Imagine Dragons were most reliably churning out hits at the start of their career, stuff like that. They'd eventually become a scarlet letter on the playlists of enough people that it can end up putting a serious cap on their potential from there. Justin Bieber is a rare case I can think of where an artist had the stigma attached to them super early, but he was able to shake it off later in his career. It just took a lot of years of growing up to do so.

"WHATS POPPIN" will always stick out in Jack Harlow's discography because it was the one moment that he was a fresh face. We just had no idea what we were in store for when we bought into this track. Maybe in hindsight you can look back at it and point out all the corny bars, but he comes across with such a bravado in this song that it's easy to overlook it. It's that admirable quality of rapping with enough confidence that you trust he knows what he's doing.

Jack Harlow makes a lot of references to sports in this short song. I always find it amusing that he compares himself to John Stockton, a name I only know from playing an old NBA video game where he was notably the only white guy on one of the All-Star teams. It sits a bit better than Post Malone calling himself "White Iverson". On the remix he compares himself to Gilbert Arenas and makes the obvious realisation that his surname rhymes with 'arenas', a punchline that Eminem had already used 5 years prior to this. Like sure, it sounds snappy, but I don't know how you could possibly think that no one else has made the connection. My basketball knowledge has limits though because I was going to question his lyric about being with the basketball team and then name-dropping the Cardinals, because how was I supposed to know that there was a college basketball team call the Louisville Cardinals that have nothing to do with the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team. You'll never catch me memorising college basketball facts for Jeopardy!, that's a bridge too far.

About that remix, I've never really gone out of my way to listen to it. It's a pretty ominous remix, one that was very successful and helped get the song to all of the chart peaks that are attached to it. On the other hand, Jack Harlow managed to get DaBaby on his song a year before he imploded his career with homophobic remarks, but more startlingly, he teams up with Tory Lanez mere weeks before he was charged with shooting a certain female rapper in the foot. Lil Wayne's also there and has largely kept his reputation intact since then (you can tell I wrote this before "Tha Carter VI" came out, but a poorly received album isn't new for Weezy). One out of three is actually quite bad.

#616. Golden Features & The Presets - Paradise (#75, 2019)

57th of 2019

Golden Features belongs to the pantheon of artists who are noted for wearing masks that keep their faces hidden. We've already had Daft Punk, there'll be another one later on, but this is the homegrown Australian version. It's a memorable gimmick. Golden Features' mask is so blocky that it's almost comical. You can barely even see the eye holes most of the time.

In an interview, Golden Features mentioned that he used to be a graffiti artist until he became an adult. It's relaying the idea that you can create stunning art but are unable to take credit for it, pure love of the game type stuff. He hoped to achieve something similar with his music but found that too many people fixated on the image instead of the music, so he gave up on it. He'll still wear the mask, but it's a lot easier to find photos of him without it nowadays. I'll try and do my part and not mention it again across his 3 entries he has here. Technically he has a 4th also but that's getting ahead of ourselves.

He's become a pretty big name in the Australian electronic music scene, but it's hard not to acknowledge the other big ticket for this entry, as it's also the first of 3 entries for much bigger titans The Presets. The lion's share of their success was prior to my original list cut off, and after some shaky years it didn't look like they'd ever poll again, but they managed to steady the ship a few more times. This is the most recent entry for both artists.

"Paradise" makes a strong case for one of the most common song titles in my music library. This is one of 6 songs I've got with that exact name, and that's not including the slight variations that have also appeared. The surprise contender in all of this is probably my favourite, a Norah Jones song from 2024 that really impressed me.

This must be a dream collaboration for Golden Features, who saw The Presets live back in 2008, and had one of his first ever releases be a remix of their song "No Fun" in 2014. "Paradise" comes from a collaborative EP between them, with differing amounts of influence across it. You can definitely feel a strong Presets vibe with the title track "Raka", while this is song intended to feel more like Golden Features' work. I can definitely feel that, although in saying this, The Presets have been known to make music like this before too, it's just more often spotted through their deep cuts.

"Paradise" is a nice bit of sophisticated dance music. Just real lo-fi beats to relax and or study to. Maybe I go into it wanting something bigger, but it's not without its hooks either. All up, it's well crafted from a bunch of folk who are all too familiar with the process at this point.

#625-#621

#625. Gang of Youths - Blood - Like A Version (#41, 2017)

60th of 2017

Once upon a time there was a band called The Middle East. I have to start it like that because talking about them without context has to chance to not scan correctly. They were fairly short-lived, blowing up in 2009, and then breaking up in 2011 just a few months after their debut album came out. They've occasionally reunited to play shows here and there, but have released no music since the one and only album.

I was never a particularly big fan of them. You can point back at 2009 and consider the amount of Muse and other particularly bombastic bands I was listening to, and probably connect the dots for why this very delicate folk-rock project was not to my liking. That's my cover although I don't think I was necessarily opposed to what they were doing, just the end product. The songs I heard from The Middle East tended to meander and never settle on a strong foundational tune. In general, a band I saw lauded but never really wanted to be part of the hype train. Sometimes this happens and the artist in question never really has a commercial break, so it really is media hoopla to an extent, but The Middle East did make the Hottest 100 a couple of times (and #101 once), with an album that sold pretty well, so people were definitely on board.

"Blood" is probably the song that makes them stick around to this day. It gets used in a lot of movies as a musical sting, and why wouldn't it? It's like our own home grown Sigur Rós, in a slightly more pop friendly disguise. They've even got a whole 2 minute ending that sounds monstrous, with no lyrics to go along with it at all, just a cathartic release of energy, to go along with the gut punch of talking about a grandfather who lost the love of his life to cancer.

That one last verse is probably why this exists and it's here. You'll notice I haven't mentioned Gang of Youths once here and that's because I'm not adverse to doing that sort of thing, and also because they have 9 entries on this list. This is the first, and it's the only one that's not actually their song. They've actually done Like A Version three times, first covering LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends" in 2015, and most recently, Travis's "Why Does It Always Rain On Me?" in 2022. Big sweeping arrangements are basically their bread and butter, and these are perfect avenues for it, but it's understandable why this one in particular would resonate the most. Gang of Youths lead singer David Le'aupepe's former partner had a terminal cancer diagnosis and a lot came out in those years which was written about in length on the band's first album. We'll get to a song from that album eventually.

On all those grounds, it almost feels too obvious for Gang of Youths to cover this song. You can pretty much imagine exactly what they're going to do and not be surprised with any of it. It doesn't mean they shouldn't do it of course. There's a value for setting the record straight on what's probably a good idea to bring out, and I'll always appreciate shout outs to niche parts of Australian canon, hardly the last time I'll need to say something like that here. This is a song that so easily fits into what Gang of Youths are about that it could make you second guess yourself and think it was always their song.

Hearing "Blood" in this context definitely unlocked something in the song for me. It really made me appreciate what people were seeing in it in the first place. All that emotional swell was hard for me to fully lock into when the main sticking point were cutesy xylophones and a whole lot of 'ah ah ah'. Translating it to the Gang of Youths playbook lets me see it more as a template for what's going on in the song itself. I still don't love it, but it clicked into place so much more effectively after hearing this cover.

#624. Hayden James (feat Running Touch) - Better Together (#78, 2018)

67th of 2018

It's possible that someone who has made the Hottest 100 has the same birthday as me. It would be in the realm of 'Not very famous birthdays' and probably just be a member of Loon Lake or something. It's hard to hunt these things down because a lot of musicians just don't have public profiles for that sort of thing, and even with those who do, it's not always easy or possible to have enough information. As far as confirmed birthdays go, I don't have a match, and the closest I've got is an unlikely pop star who will eventually appear on this list. This could possibly be improved if the stars align to allow Jin from BTS to contribute somewhere (which I honestly can't rule out). He's less than a week older than me. Possibly the same age as him because of time zones is JT from City Girls who has already gotten somewhat close, as she is on Drake's song "In My Feelings" that landed at #135.

I thought I was onto something with Hayden James when I saw his birthday listed as November 28th, 1992. As far as I can tell, this is a Wikipedia fabrication brought about by one bizarre editor who spent a couple of hours one day in 2023 inserting a bunch of missing birthdays for mostly a bunch of African female soccer players and British media people. Almost all of them were given plausible birthdays and almost all of them were November 28th. This is the Wikipedia vandalism I find most interesting because what is their endgame and what is their targeting strategy. Anyway, Hayden James' birthday is probably in the middle of August. I'm seeing a listing for August 15th, 1992, but Hayden James himself did an Instagram post last year for his birthday on August 16th (he posted from Spain so there might be time zone shenanigans), while Dom Dolla shouted out his birthday several years back in a tweet on August 13th. Maybe the 1992 part of it is just completely wrong as well. Maybe Hayden James is a birth week kind of guy. This post is going live a few weeks before his supposed birthday. Depending on when it is, maybe I'll check back in for more conflicting evidence for the next Hayden James entry.

Who is Hayden James you ask? He's a producer guy from Sydney. He's signed to Future Classic and is one of the biggest beneficiaries from when Flume's heightened success did a lot to draw attention to the rest of their roster (think Kendrick Lamar with TDE). He's done very well for himself with numerous Platinum singles. They haven't been updated in a while, but it wouldn't surprise me if nearly all of his 6 Hottest 100 entries I'm talking about have reached Platinum sales (just the last one I'm not certain about).

This song features Running Touch. As a solo artist, he's been a perennial fixture below the Hottest 100, appearing most years from 2017 to 2021, with this being his only entry into the main list. He's also a member of the group Ocean Grove who made the top 200 once themselves. Running Touch serves as both the vocalist and a co-producer on this track.

This was coming off a bigger hit, but it was still quite popular in its own right. The #78 finish it managed is possibly a misnomer, an underperformance given its late release, in November, while the song didn't actually peak on the ARIA Charts until after voting had already closed. There's proof positive since it won an APRA Award for Most Performed Dance Work in 2020, implying that 2019 was the real year of "Better Together".

If you know Hayden James, you have a good idea of what you're going to get here. It's a lot of moody beats with crisp, clean sounding synths layered together very tastefully. Running Touch's voice occasionally gets chopped up and layered with different focal points. The chorus turns him into another component of the music, and in general provides a strong contrast between light and dark. I think Hayden James is quite good at packing in more hooks than you'd expect, often in a way that makes the whole set up feel misleading, in a fun way.

#623. Frank Ocean - Solo (#59, 2016)

65th of 2016

Is this what is known as a cultural reset? There are plenty of albums just as old as "Blonde" that have stuck around for a long time on the charts (note: not ARIA because they've never been counting it since the streaming era. It probably should be in the top 50 but I really don't know), but I get the impression that few are as life-affirming or personality-defining as this one. A lot of people are going to declare it their favourite album of all time today, and listen to the whole thing in full, again. Quite a lasting legacy for an album that has zero crossover chart hits.

I don't want to go through the whole story because this won't be the last time I talk about Frank Ocean or this album, but naturally I was pretty on board all of the way. Like a lot of people, I discovered his music through his association with a certain collective whose most famous member (if it isn't Frank Ocean) will eventually appear on this list. I was there for his mixtape with all its strange sample flips and video game interludes alongside classic cuts like "Novacane" and "Swim Good". I was there for his debut album, the thing that really took him to the top with so many classics. "Thinkin Bout You", "Sweet Life", "Super Rich Kids", "Pyramids", "Lost", "Monks", "Pink Matter", hardly a dip in sight. It was accidentally how I ended up giving Kendrick Lamar a proper chance, because Metacritic's aggregate was favouring "good kid, m.A.A.d city" over "channel ORANGE" and that just sounded impossible for me to believe that there was a better album. He was primed to be an absolute star though.

Things got weird after that. I've honestly never really kept up with the details, but Frank Ocean finally released his second album in 2016 and I've never listened to it. It's reportedly a visual album called "Endless" that shows footage of Frank Ocean building a staircase. The supposed theory is that he released the album to fulfil a contract with Def Jam, and then immediately trolled them by releasing his proper follow up album "Blonde" one day later. It all just seems too funny and satisfying to be real, so I'm always imagining the full details are much more mundane. In any case, Frank Ocean extended the trolling to everyone else by releasing next to nothing over the next 9 years, just a handful of (admittedly great) singles here and there. I'd love to be glazing "Biking" or "Chanel" on this blog but they didn't quite make the cut, "Chanel" is another one of those unlucky #101 finishers. Maybe there's a small chance that he pulls off a surprise release by the time this goes live, but nah, we have a better chance of seeing "Silksong" before that happens.

This Hottest 100 countdown makes for an interesting time capsule. One where "Blonde" hadn't fully gotten over its awkward release and occasionally unexpected new ideas that not everyone was ready for. There are some very inconsequential albums that were nonetheless getting more votes at this time. The other oddity is that in this time capsule, the most popular song on "Blonde" was apparently "Solo". Admittedly this is all a story that continues to develop, and every now and then a new song from this album seems to capture the world's attention, but I can pretty confidently say in this moment that "Solo" is not really one of those songs. There are 7 tracks that have more streams than it on Spotify right now, and many of them are beating it by a mighty margin.

I have my own favourites from this album and "Solo" has never really been one of them. I was used to this from the previous album cycle. triple j latched heavily onto "Lost" in 2012, pretty much singlehandedly making it a hit and I was so underwhelmed with it. It took a long time for me to properly come around and appreciate it, so I like it a lot now. I won't say it's impossible for "Solo" to go the same way, and I'm at a better starting point with it, but it is lacking those adventurous moments that other tracks have in spades.

I do still think "Solo" is good, I just have high standards for Frank Ocean. I really like the vocal production, it really lets the different vocal ideas stick out and hit their mark. Something I've come to expect from Frank Ocean is a lot of clever wordplay and double entendres. Just the title of the song is a sneaky way to fit in feelings of both loneliness and depression into one word. Maybe I just long for something more than an organ for the whole song as it starts to get a bit dry. That organ is actually being played by a possibly unexpected British singer, who we'll see on this list one day.

#622. London Grammar - Hey Now (#35, 2013)

67th of 2013

There is probably a certain age you reach where something snaps in your brain and your willingness to go ride or die for artists you'd never heard of before just vanishes. There are certain points in time I can think back to and look at how many artists whom I had not heard of before, but I was able to quickly assimilate them as if they'd always been there. 2009 and 2013 certainly come to mind. Technically it's still something I experience. Four of my five favourite songs of last year were by artists I had scarce to zero knowledge of prior to that year. But plucking out stuff like that is honestly a lot easier than going along with the popular crowd, which is probably why more people are doing this, and fewer new artists seem to be able to break out in a big way as a result. Because if you're left with backing up just the artists who are having their big break, you get so few options. A more jaded person than me would've never bought into the London Grammar hype for one second.

I can't vividly remember my introduction to London Grammar, just that I slowly heard successive singles and found myself liking each one more than the last. A comment I left early on suggests that I thought going into it that 'London Grammar' sounded like the name of a rap group. I'm not entirely sure where I pulled that from (maybe the Australian hip-hop group Astronomy Class) but it's very amusing in hindsight.

When a band is just starting out, I just find it so difficult to believe they're going to nail it on their debut album. It's usually the same with TV shows as well, the first season is always the one that hasn't fully clicked with what works and what doesn't, and feels like a stepping off point. Just like how we're littered with a lot of bands who nail it on the second try rather than the first. Prior to this album, London Grammar had only released one EP, and two of those songs, the title track "Metal & Dust", and also "Hey Now" ended up on the debut album. It's possible that the band would disagree with the assessment, but it's frightening just how much they had figured themselves out so early in their career. Early London Grammar just sounds right.

Maybe it's just the songwriting that needed work. I can't help but be self-conscious of the fact that there's a song called "Stay Awake" on the album, and a little further down the track listing is "Metal & Dust", a song that rams home the same hook. I can only imagine that they wrote the two songs so far apart in time that it just didn't even process, but it so quickly reveals itself and it's just such a weird blunder to make. It's not clever or interesting enough to be a motif.

"Hey Now" is also a fairly typical London Grammar song. A light moody instrumental that you might notice, but it all just exists to let Hannah occasionally do her thing which is to make us all look like ants as she sings to us from the mountaintops. That's always been their secret weapon and it always works. I bought the album around when it came out, and a few months later I even downloaded one of the bonus tracks because I was so stunned by what she was doing on the record.

"Hey Now" only isn't really a big favourite of mine because it's not fully committed to that bit. The big vocal moments are still there, but they're split up by slow verses. It makes for a contrast, but I look at this song title and I think of Hannah's huskier, lower register. For the other singles, I think of the high notes first and it's a much better place to be in. I guess I should also say that I really thought for a long time on the second verse that she was saying 'f**k you'. I'd say that misconception set me up a few years down the track when Dot Major (the one who looks like a young Harry Styles) did voice acting work on "Disco Elysium" as Cuno, the monumentally punchable kid with the most endearingly grating voice going around, saying all kinds of foul things. Or at least that was until they released the final version of the game and replaced him with a much less fun voice actor. Hannah finally did let out an f-bomb in 2021 on the song "Lord It's a Feeling". That's like getting me to swear without censoring myself, you need to have really f**ked up to managed that.

#621. Chet Faker (feat Kilo Kish) - Melt (#65, 2013)

66th of 2013

Firstly, "Melt" is a great title. It gives off a Mad Libs vibe with how it's put in the song, but if you're gonna do that, at least it's evocative. It's all backed up further by how good a stage name Kilo Kish is. Satisfying alliteration, syllable distribution is solid, and makes me think of delicious quiches. Did I get distracted for a moment? I dunno, but let's see Paul Allen's nom de plume.

"Melt" holds an interesting standing in that it was technically the first song released from Chet Faker's debut album "Built On Glass". To only land at #65 feels like a let-down, but maybe the sheer voting power of Chet Faker wouldn't be unleashed until the next year. Some say that the voters actually sat down at that other pond, feeding those ducks (this is me gesturing to the other thing Chet Faker put out in 2013), but it could be that there was just no room for a man and his collaboration with a budding New York singer. Hopefully me stripping Chet Faker of his last solo lead artist duck doesn't trigger a panic attack. Look at me chucking in all these roughly 1998 references on the Chet Faker post that isn't "1998" (#694). That post hasn't even gone live yet, there's still time for me to put them there. Maybe this is overbearing, but well that's just like, your opinion, man.

It might have helped that I got to sit on this song by itself for the longest because it really did end up being my favourite on the album. It feels like it's bridging the gap between old and new for Chet Faker, something you hear very blatantly in the first 20 seconds with an abrupt beat switch. When Chet Faker's delivery picks up and adds the backing vocals, I'm reminded of his cover of Blackstreet's "No Diggity" and almost want to sing that over it. It's a bit of a Frankenstein chorus that doesn't have a consistent melody or clear focus ('pew pew pew'). Maybe in that regard it's an accidental success, but I'd rather hear a concerted attempt to stick out rather than coasting on simplicity.

Outside of my novel introduction, I do think Kilo Kish is a great addition to this, and a sign that maybe Chet Faker should collaborate with more women to provide a contrasting verse. Her delivery is smooth with a welcome confidence for an artist who hadn't been making music for very long at this point. She has the most memorable line on the song when she admits her verse is only half-sung. This made me check out what she's been putting out lately and I have to say I like what I'm hearing. I have to make one last parting 1998 shot because she starts "digital emotional" by saying 'Kilo Kish wants to know', which has to be a response to the smash hit "Are You Jimmy Ray?".