#540-#536

 #540. Amy Shark - Blood Brothers (#83, 2017)

50th of 2017

The tough part of a follow up is all of a sudden needing to create a new bank of songs and also make them under newfound expectations on what your music is supposed to be like. This is not that story, but instead we're looking at the curiosity that comes with the first release. I'm willing to say that the massive success of "Adore" (#871) was not entirely expected, but I do think that Amy Shark had a lot of songs ready to go by the time that happened. Less than 3 months after "Adore" stormed the ARIA Charts, she had the "Night Thinker" EP out and making a good impression in its own right, reaching #2 on the ARIA Chart during the brief remaining window before streaming would be added to the chart and start to seriously hamper EPs due to their limited capacity to accumulate streams. I'm not sure it would have cost her much, as sales tend to trump streams at the pointy end of the chart, but it's worth noting. Also worth noting that it was Ed Sheeran hogging the top spot again after double-blocking Amy on the singles chart earlier that year.

Still, I find this first EP quite interesting because of how early along the ride it arrived. It feels like more of a starter package of songs she already had made before without too much thought into what the future would hold. A year later her debut album "Love Monster" comes out, and "Adore" features on it again. Maybe that's where streaming being factored in starts to matter, but it sticks out more with what it means for the rest of this EP, as none of the rest of the songs on it got to pop up on the album again. There's an element of shamelessness that comes with tacking on older singles to buff the numbers. Recently Alex Warren & Teddy Swims have utilised self-branded 'Part 1' albums as an excuse to put them all together and hack the system. It's something I think labels and/or artists are extremely aware of and always wanting to do it, but aware of how scummy it looks. In Amy Shark's case, you could probably get some value out of sneaking "Weekends" (#948) on, as it holds up just as popular as most of the tracks that aren't "Adore", but she didn't need to do that anyway, the album still got to #1.

"Blood Brothers" is probably the best example of the way Amy Shark's sound changed to cater a bit closer to what was succeeding for her, as there's nothing else quite like it that she's put out since. It swaps out the slow and moody style she's become known for and presents an alternate timeline where she's shifted into CHVRCHES-style electro-pop. Taken on those terms it's a bit of a black sheep in her discography, but it had enough approval to show up here so I wouldn't call it a failed experiment or anything like that.

The easiest way for me to look at it is that this is just Amy Shark catering her sound so deliberately to me, and me being happy to accept it for what it is. It's a solid opportunity for her to flex the ability to write an incredibly catchy hook in a way that she's not known to do. It's a sound bed that thrives on echola-la-laliah and it's an opportunity she seizes to the fullest. I don't remember being super invested in this song when it came out, but it was a surprise playlist addition that I couldn't really have any reason to deny. Maybe I still prefer the genuine article, but I won't turn my nose up at this.

#539. Sticky Fingers - Our Town (#29, 2016)

59th of 2016

"Our Town" is probably one of the most obvious singles that Sticky Fingers have ever put out. I frequently forget that "Outcast At Last" (#650) was actually the lead single from this album, which makes it all the more impressive that "Our Town" actually snuck onto the ARIA Chart, one of only 3 Sticky Fingers songs to do so. With that in mind, it's interesting that it couldn't make more of a pace ahead of the pack when it came to voting. It landed just 7 places ahead of "Sad Songs" (#705), although maybe that in itself is revealing of the reality of the poll.

Every year since I've ever listened to triple j and the Hottest 100, I've never been particularly great at predicting it, but I have been able to trust it. There's a certain vibe to the results that just generally makes sense when you look at it, if you're trying to quantify what's a big triple j hit, and how they all stack up. Everything in the bottom 50 feels noteworthy, but once you get up to around the top 40, that's when the heavy hitters start to show, and so on. It's one of the most effective ways the countdown holds up as a time capsule, because if I can trust it in years where I'm very much across the world of triple j, then I can also extrapolate that to years I'm less strong on, and get a good idea of what it would be like to be a listener in that year.

The reality is that it's just a music poll, and while that can be a happy outcome that it provides, it's always going to be subject to all sorts of bias depending on what kinds of people vote, and what their intentions are. Sticky Fingers are one of the most obvious examples of this where their fanbase really got a hold of things for a few years. This has been true since the dawn of the poll, but it stands out more when you're a band that doesn't really have a huge mainstream presence. The plausible deniability of literally being The Cure or Powderfinger. In 2014, a whole bunch of Sticky Fingers album tracks infiltrated the top 200 results, and in 2016, even more managed it. The main thing that sticks out about it all is the relative positions. They landed at #177, #180, #181 & #183. That's a level of proximity that doesn't really feel like it's being driven by individuals picking out their favourite songs, but rather there being enough people who voted for all 8 Sticky Fingers songs that were on the voting list. Let me be clear by saying that this is all entirely valid, but it does go some ways to breaking the illusion that the poll is serving a coalesced general opinion. This is just the Sticky Fingers army making sure we get to enjoy the full experience. But it also makes you want to expand that same voting portion into the genuine hits, because everyone who voted for "Flight 101" or "Something Strange" probably also voted for "Our Town". Based on my own data collecting in 2016, I can estimate that all those album tracks probably got about 25% as many votes as "Our Town", and if you removed them, this song might drop from #29 to around #45. That's not a lot admittedly, but "Outcast At Last" on the other hand, goes from #51 to being right on the cusp of the top 100, which is a very different outcome. Still, at the end of the day, it's a democracy, and it's on all the fans of bands that aren't Sticky Fingers for not being as prudent in submitting votes. triple j can only count the votes they actually get.

You can apply a similar logic with anything that relates to music charts. Yes, we're measuring the number of people listening to something and hopefully with a degree of accuracy, but what of pre-programmed playlists. Does the in-the-moment validity of the individual streams get ruled out when the outside observer just sees a pre-ordained boost that coincides with a deliberate tipping of the scales? The beauty of it is that when the dust settles, you tend to forget about it all and take it at face value. In the case of Sticky Fingers, they're a touch unlucky that they wound up the way they did. Bump all those album tracks down about 25 spots and suddenly it's completely out of sight, out of mind. This is also in fairness a similar thing that happens when a Taylor Swift song like "Anti-Hero" debuts at #1, you can't really assess it on its own values because she's probably debuted 9 other songs in the top 10 that week on a shared curiosity factor. I find it inherently interesting, but it makes trying to decipher the neutral bystander's opinion just that little bit trickier.

As a mostly neutral bystander, I do think it all just clicks into place with this one. Sticky Fingers can occasionally come off as a bit too abrasive but they rein themselves in here. There's just a still admittedly potent guitar riff poking its way through, but it's just the delivery method for some very relaxing moments of relief. It's a song that takes the Britpop worship of DMA'S and gives them a run for their money. I do find myself wondering if they weren't really sure how to end it. After the soaring guitar solo it just meanders on for a little bit, but the cheque has already been cashed in at that point, so it's no big deal.

#538. Halsey - Ghost (#94, 2015)

56th of 2015

When approaching the topic of 'Why is Artist X popular but Artist Y isn't?', it's easy to trot out the answer that it's all down to marketing. I'm probably guilty of doing it myself too. Anything short of that is making you liable for falling into the trap of becoming a mouthpiece for those very label machinations that put it all in place to begin with. The truth can sometimes just land somewhere in the middle. The idea that the pecking order is accurate, it just becomes exaggerated because the most viable option has naturally presented itself, and that becomes the catalyst to push it further over the top.

Halsey's star started rising in early 2015, or at least that's when people visibly started Googling their name. At that point they had just a single release, the "Room 93" EP to their name. The most notable songs on that EP are "Hurricane" and "Ghost". Big enough that they warranted inclusion on their debut album later in 2015, but also not exactly the world-beating songs they had up their sleeve. It sure is convenient that so many people backed them early, or horrifying if any of them were not at all impressed by the pop star turn that followed. It's just a weird thing to look back on because these feel like songs that would only get big if they were attached to an established star's name, and that's only true in hindsight. No one listening to "Ghost" could possibly know that it was one of the first dominoes in a chain that would lead to multiple Billboard Hot 100 #1 hits. Okay maybe some people had that belief, fandoms can get very passionate, very quickly.

To me, "Ghost" feels akin to another song that'll eventually appear here. A song that sounds pleasant on the radio, but doesn't necessarily make me think of any grand ideals for the artist in question. This will probably seem silly just because that other song is one of the biggest and most important hit songs of the decade, but before it inherited all of that, it was just a pleasant song like "Ghost".

This probably sounds like a lot of negging when in reality I've always had a soft spot for this particular Halsey song. I was never particularly impressed by their debut album "BADLANDS", which I felt was lacking for inspired moments of songwriting. At a time when it felt like Halsey was just a major label version of indie pop trends, you're left with a lot of the bare minimum which can be the most frustrating of crimes. I didn't think it was a total wash though. "Ghost" is a good one, and funnily enough, I had time for "Haunting" too, a slick electro-pop angle that convincingly sells the stakes while packaging it in a friendly setting. The Halloween Halsey song title pattern was not lost on me at the time.

When it comes to "Ghost" specifically, it operates on a different level, where its best success comes from how quickly it pops in and out to do its thing. It's a brisk two and a half minutes with a lot of downtime that still doesn't leave you feeling short-changed. The success is in the conflicting chorus & pre-chorus that both distinguish each other enough to heighten the pay off. Even the pre-chorus has a build up to that, so you get a song whose pace is always changing that does leave you with a layer of intrigue. I just still find it weird because this all sounds like I'm describing an obscure favourite of mine, not one of the biggest stars of the 2010s. There's very little precedent that says people lap this one up, but I enjoy being surprised like that.

#537. Violent Soho - How to Taste (#92, 2016)

58th of 2016

In 2016, my feelings on Violent Soho's 4th album "WACO" were that it had an undeniable run of hits packed at the front. Every one of those songs was a solid injection of energy while not compromising the pop appeal, something that's important even in Violent Soho's line of approach. There was an exception to this that I struggled to come to terms with, opening track "How to Taste". On one level I felt vindicated that it polled the worst of those 6 songs, but I also felt frustrated that it made the cut anyway. "How to Taste" was a late bloomer that only started getting regularly spun on triple j in December of that year. The dreaded quandary of wondering how much help it got from any opportunity that it was the last Violent Soho song someone heard before deciding to vote. That pairs it with the fortune of being Track 1 on the album and all of a sudden you have a song that's very lucky to be here on its own terms.

That's how I felt at the time anyway. I'm not entirely sure when I started to flip this opinion because now I appreciate it a great deal more. Allegations of this song being a total directionless mess are a slight bit exaggerated, and now I think that those brief moments of instability are the glue that holds it all together. We've seen both sides of the coin from Violent Soho in the past: the band who can write catchy alternative rock tunes, and the band who can throw those inhibitions out the window and go crazy. Candid observers will note that it's the latter that got them to their greatest heights, but that's a story for another day. I think it's very important for an artist to play to both of these sides. Sometimes it can be flagrantly obvious but still get the job done. Whether it's Ed Sheeran releasing "Shape of You" and "Castle on the Hill" on the same day, or it's Drake releasing "One Dance" (#796) and "Pop Style" on the same day. The dichotomy can get people talking and reinforce both of them, as long as they meet the expectations of their respective audiences. Violent Soho benefit a lot by having a song that's not gonna soar up any kind of charts, but steadies the ship in a re-assured way. Not feeding into any of these perspectives can quickly kill them off, as former fans flock to someone more willing to do so.

In this sense as well, it's the perfect opening track to the album. There are times when that can singlehandedly set the tone so strongly that it creates a misconception in the long run (this is me gesturing to a critically acclaimed album released in the year 2000). The first thing you hear on "WACO" is a relatively calm guitar melody. This lasts about 12 seconds until the drums kick in and we get our first of many 'yeah' utterances, a fully guttural 5 seconds of it. Luke dives deep into his most uncompromised register, the kind of slurring/growling hybrid that sounds uniquely Australian. Moments of clear singing on this song are brief, and often quickly interrupted. The spontaneity is the best feature though. Here we've got a rare song that can capture some of the off kilter energy from a live performance and translate it to a studio recording.

#536. Josh Pyke - Leeward Side (#88, 2013)

60th of 2013

My early years of listening to triple j was accompanied by watching jtv Saturday. It greatly heightened my perspective on things given that it was a publicly voted chart, but it also gave me a small weekly window to answer my occasionally pressing question of 'What does this musician even look like?'. I was a couple of years away from having free reign on the internet where I could answer it all for myself. This was never perfect of course, not every musician appeared in their own videos, and even sometimes they'd pull a prank on you, that's the bass player who's doing the lip syncing in OK Go's "Here It Goes Again" for instance. This whole phenomenon was decades old at this point anyway. MTV answered a lot of those questions already, but the world of triple j was one where you'd hear dozens upon dozens of less recognisable artists who wouldn't get that same exposure.

Josh Pyke threw me for a loop a couple of times. I narrowly missed the jtv Saturday tenure of his single "Memories and Dust" so he was just a radio guy for me for several months. Two very immediate things happen: firstly his name invokes a medieval weapon and sounds brutal, and then you hear him sing and he's the gentlest acoustic guitar folk guy going around. It took him a few years to get around to exploiting the former part, his lyric 'They can keep you around like a head on a stake, I guess the industry found a use for my namesake' from "Fed and Watered" runs through my mind constantly. He shouldn't feel so bad, it took that once rapper from A Tribe Called Quest and future entrant on this blog two decades before he did something similar. Maybe he got the idea from listening to Josh Pyke. In any case, he sounds like a totally formal clean-cut dude and then you eventually find out that he's spent his whole career before and since then sporting all manner of handsome beards, and just generally not looking quite as wimpy as you could imagine. Maybe this comes with a realisation that I grew up just not knowingly encountering many people in their late 20s, just no intermediary between high school student and parent of a student.

In any case, Josh Pyke was a pretty big wheel in the triple j scene for a number of years. His staggered release pace and quick follow up meant that he polled in 4 consecutive years for the Hottest 100, including a full trio of entries in 2007. He took a longer break after that, putting out his 3rd album in 2011. He still polled in that year's Hottest 100 through a collaboration with 360, but his own lead single "No One Wants A Lover" could only get to #112. That's usually a sign that you've been put out to pasture except when album #4 came around in 2013, he managed to get back onto the winner's list with this one, to date his last appearance.

If the progressing of the years weren't going to kick him out, there was a more dramatic nail in the coffin in 2014: the official launch of the digital sister station Double J. Double J is effectively a version of triple j that sounds like the one you remember when you were younger. It targets an older demographic of music listeners who are still interested in hearing new music, something that isn't really being catered. triple j will break these new artists into the fold, and they'll probably inevitably age into being Double J-core. It's a welcome solution to the inevitable problem of there just being too many artists to play.

This has a pretty clear effect on the Hottest 100, as now there are many artists who might have gotten playlisted on triple j but instead are more easily slotted onto Double J. That's cutting into audience reach immensely and probably meaning that one's Hottest 100 days are over. I don't think this is the end of the world on the surface, but as a lover of these kinds of lists, there isn't really any equivalent that allows these older artists to still get their flowers. People have often suggested that there needs to be a Double J Hottest 100, but I'm not convinced it would be smooth sailing. They'd be put in a position where they'd need to promote the vote in order to get contributors, but not do it too much that it doesn't just end up shaped by a triple j voter mindset. Given that technically anything is eligible in the Hottest 100 provided release dates are okay, it might cause an identity crisis, or just come across as the snobby elitist version of the original countdown. I'm sure they've thought about it at the station and come to similar conclusions.

Josh Pyke inevitable ended up in this world. In 2015 he released his 5th album and actually achieved his highest ever position on the ARIA Chart, when it debuted at #2. It's funny how time can make fools of our memory because for so long, the first thing I've thought about with Josh Pyke lately is a recollection of him being bitter towards triple j for no longer playlisting him. 10 years later I've found the actual article this comes from and I was pleasantly surprised at how level-headed his response actually was. This is very good for retaining my image of Josh Pyke as one of the nicest guys in Australian music. Well there's that, there's his philanthropy, and the fact that he now balances his music career with writing children's books. He's put out two more albums and continues to get plenty of airplay on Double J. All things considered, he's had a good ride.

This entry here is not a song that will produce many surprises if you're familiar with his work. This is just Josh Pyke doing what he's been doing for years now. In that regard it does feel a bit quaint in the countdown. We're hearing RÜFÜS DU SOL and Bring Me The Horizon, but also here's Josh Pyke still hanging around (note: this is not a tremendously good example because in 2013 he landed between John Butler Trio at #87 and The Cat Empire at #89). It can be one of the most brutal ways artists are shoved aside because you know there's nothing stopping a newer, younger artist from coming along and all of a sudden being the trendy alternative even if they're doing the same thing. Maybe Josh is a bit daggy bringing out the harmonica in 2013, but 8 years later and Adam Newling is thriving. This is how Superintendent Chalmers feels when his jokes don't land as well as Ned Flanders' (I'm not sure which of the two is older though). Also this song is good for me remembering the cool word 'leeward', a word they love to ask about on Jeopardy!, and I never need to remember which direction it actually means, because its opposite, 'windward' is much less cool and much less likely to be asked about. It does mean on the opposite side of a wind's origin though, in case you were wondering.

#545-#541

#545. Sofi Tukker & Gorgon City - House Arrest (#77, 2020)

47th of 2020

Greek mythology is getting quite a rinse in the world of house music. We've already had MEDUZA here, and from the specific to the general we've got Gorgon City. I was trying to see if there was any association between the two and all I found is a lot of offhand groupings of them together that mostly don't seem aware of the coincidence. Let's drop another coincidence on here, because the video game "Hades" also came out in 2020 and Medusa is a character in that.

I should be fair and acknowledge though that Gorgon City came quite a while before MEDUZA. They're another artist I got to be very aware of through listening to the UK Charts, especially in 2014 when they had 4 consecutive top 20 hits. The biggest of those was "Ready For Your Love" which peaked at #4 and introduced the UK to MNEK, before he'd go on to have some pretty big worldwide hits afterwards. MNEK has never made a Hottest 100 but back in 2014 he got a bit of airplay for his single "Every Little Word" and I saw a very small handful of votes for it when I was counting votes that year.

There's probably more to say about Sofi Tukker on another occasion, as they'll show up here a couple more times. Suffice to say that if their previous entries were borderline novelty crossover hits, then this is the first time it feels they're polling as an extension of their brand as Sofi Tukker, a band you expect to hear on the Hottest 100. They haven't made it in since then though, so maybe novelty would have to be the way to go. They most recently snuck in at #199 in 2022 with "Summer in New York", one of many songs to interpolate "Tom's Diner". Maybe that's just not novel anymore.

You might see the name of this song and also the year of release and draw some connections, but you'd be wrong. The real reason Sofi Tukker made a song called "House Arrest" is because Sophie broke her leg while playing in Australia at Groovin' The Moo in 2019 and got to be stuck inside almost a year before everyone else, which is what the song was born from. Sofi Tukker did actually make a lockdown song in 2020 though for triple j as part of a 'quarantune' gimmick. That song was called "When The Rona's Over" and it's not clear if it was initially a Billie Eilish pun (#809) but the actual song has no resemblance. "House Arrest" actually has 6 writers though, both sets of duos, plus two lesser known names in Roland Garcia and Nick Sarazen, who I don't know much about except that Sarazen has numerous writing credits across Sofi Tukker's discography. It's also through him that I learnt that this song got used in the latest season of The White Lotus.

I wish there was more to say about the song itself, which is a rather serviceable house record. I guess I'd love to know how many re-writes it went through, and whether the release was at all affected by the real world events (while they didn't write it because of COVID-19, it's totally possible that they prioritised it for that reason). I imagine this works better outside of the house, but it's very tasteful. Genuinely sounds like two different productions going on together near the end but they mesh pretty well.

#544. blink-182 - Bored to Death (#54, 2016)

60th of 2016

I've never been sure I was quite in the right age demographic for blink-182. Certainly I knew kids at school who were into them, but they were slightly older than me and might have had a different first reference point. I think of how whenever triple j did special Hottest 100s that allowed for it, the representation for blink-182 was always "Dammit", a song that passed me by when it came out because it was either not quite big enough or not quite new enough or both. If it is a nostalgic touching point, the kind that says you're going to follow this band to the ends of the earth, then I just missed it. In some regard though they might just be the definitive millennial band, considering just how much coverage they continue to get for everything they do, or how they're one of the most modern bands where every member is individually recognised and famous. From the same time frame, I'm one of those weirdos who actually can name every member of Coldplay, but can you name a member of Linkin Park that isn't Chester, Mike or Emily? Feel like I'm seeing them all for the first time just looking at it.

It's not like they entirely passed me by. Flash back to the year 2000 and the one song I knew, "All The Small Things" rated very highly for me, even if my number one concern about it was confusion at why he was talking about windmills. Otherwise they didn't interest me much out of that. Pop-punk falling short of the ceilings of both its component genres is a constant issue. It tends to land most successfully once it's so ingrained that it becomes a singular point of reference for the era by itself. That's something you can say about a lot of blink-182 songs.

You can divide it further, but there are two distinct phases of blink-182, before and after the hiatus. The first one is the part of the story everyone remembers, all the classic hits and albums, and a steady release schedule. The latter portion is filled with instability and long periods of silence allowing for the thrill of the comeback yet again. The former time period charted singles quite a bit lower than you'd probably expect, and the latter time period charted singles quite a bit higher than you'd probably expect. It's something I'd probably not think about much if not for the persistence of their fandom.

One of my favourite tangential memories to all of this is that in 2011, I came up with a forum game where I'd break up all of the ARIA Chart debuts from the calendar year and do a vote on them, setting it up so that at least one song from each week, plus 12 extras from cluttered weeks would go into a tournament with more voting ahead. It was a fun system that allowed a surprising amount of variation in voting performance making it genuinely possible to seed all of the entries with a fair amount of accuracy.

It was not without its hiccups. Some entries would have their chances improved if their competition was a cluttering of Glee covers, and some would get brutally grouped up together with no room to spare. It's all the result of the ostensibly random groupings this gave me. For 50 straight weeks, there were between 3 and 12 debuts every single week with one single exception in the middle of the year, with only 2 debuts. They were the similar pairing of bands way past their prime, Red Hot Chili Peppers' "The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie", and blink-182's "Up All Night". Red Hot Chili Peppers won in such a landslide that they single-handedly ruined the seeds, lazily seeding at #2. Championship bound except they ended up losing in the first round to a song that automatically qualified, the equivalent of losing to England in Eurovision. This is the first thing I always think about when I think about the late career of either of these two bands.

If I continued this game into 2016, we would have nearly managed a rematch because both bands returned to the chart a single week apart, first blink-182's #50 hit "Bored To Death", and then Red Hot Chili Peppers' #52 hit "Dark Necessities". Given the monster hits they both debuted alongside, there's no chance they'd get through, but I have to put some respect on "Dark Necessities" which is stealthily one of their most streamed songs ever.

"Bored To Death" isn't quite on that level but it's not doing too badly itself. Mostly I just find it amusing how they barely managed to make the top 50 at #50, something they'd do again 6 years later with "EDGING". Luck ran out in 2023 when "One More Time" got the dubious #51 peak, proving that they couldn't keep getting away with it.

When it comes to the Hottest 100, blink-182's history is a bit different, where they were well received initially, but they've been much less consistent in converting results in the last 20 years. That whole time period has just given them two entries, "Bored To Death", and the 2023 single "MORE THAN YOU KNOW". It's probably better off this way, not being guaranteed success and only converting it when the song itself justifies it.

As an addition to the canon, I can get behind "Bored to Death". It feels like a natural progression from the blink-182 of old. Relies on the wordless hooks of old at times, but also comes with a big blast of sound. Maybe it's lacking in subtlety as a result, but it gives me something to lean onto, which I don't always find with this band.

#543. Hopium (feat Phoebe Lou) - Dreamers (#82, 2014)

58th of 2014

If you're talking about band names that are fun to say, then you can't ever leave out Snakadaktal. They didn't last very long but they made a solid impression while they were around. They won triple j's Unearthed High competition in 2011 and had Hottest 100 entries in back to back years, followed by a debut album in 2013 that reached the ARIA top 10. By 2014 they were done, and there's still never been an official word on what happened. Just months after this, Phoebe from the band turned up on a minor hit single, reaching the ARIA Singles Chart, which Snakadaktal never managed to do.

Hopium came and went just as quickly. His last EP was released in 2019, and now his Spotify page is getting progressively cluttered up with background music by some other Hopium with very dull cover art. For an artist with a genuine (if minor) hit, his under 9,000 listeners has to rank especially low on this list. Certainly it wouldn't threaten Vegeta.

It's very easy to make some comment here with regards to the lyrics of this song. This song confronts someone whose high aspirations are offset by their sheer inability to do anything about it. There's an effective thesis statement slotted into the chorus, 'You said this would be your year, but you f**ked around, now December's here, you must be one of the dreamers'. I don't necessarily think of this song when it comes into play, but it is a mindset that reminds me to put myself out there more often, and it's allowed some very exciting things to happen in my life. Oh hey, I'll be at the AFL Grand Final tomorrow.

Most of the song is directed at Phoebe's character who echoes it back as if to gawk the notion of self-reflection, despite the laundry list of observations she fails to address. It only comes to a head at the end of the song, where she gives a lengthy spoken word monologue, which draws the image of some of her failings without admitting to them directly. It's only once she receives news about Hopium getting a job that it finally settles in that she's a wreck. After all, imagine waking up at 12pm? That's the kind of madness that makes me want to not look at the time I publish these posts.

If I ever found out down the track that The Chainsmokers heard this song and started to model their catalogue after it, I wouldn't be especially surprised. In a similar sense, I don't find myself fully convinced by Hopium as a singer. When comparing the two on this track, he falls a little short of the mark, but he gives it a good go. In case you are wondering what's going on in the world of Hopium lately, he wasn't cheesy enough to say that 2024 was his year, but he did have his first son, so it's been a big one.

#542. Ocean Alley - Baby Come Back - Like A Version (#16, 2018)

58th of 2018

There's an American video game journalism website called The Escapist. In the late 2000s to early 2010s, it became fairly popular and won awards thanks to its weekly production of news articles, reviews and the like. If you weren't aware of it back then (I wasn't), then it's possible that like me, you only know it as the website/YouTube channel that hosted Zero Punctuation. That's the game review show hosted by Yahtzee with prominently yellow backgrounds, crude animation and a lot of fast talking. It's fun to binge sometimes.

Over time, there were numerous disputes with The Escapist that severely reduced its staff, which was a large contribution to that warped perception of the site. It reached a point where Zero Punctuation was just about the only thing on the website, and it felt like a strange technicality that the series was tied down with this random association. Anything else they did publish got significantly less attention. Does this sound familiar?

It's easy to forget how slow the process of normalising Like A Version was. In its early years it felt more spontaneous, just a cute thing to do while artists were around. You might get a jarring reaction if you look up the earliest years of the segment and it's quite often just one person, one guitar and one take. For years it was locked away during the Drive timeslot and might generate some interest on a week by week basis, but everyone would mostly just move on week by week.

In 2008, when presenter Robbie Buck was moved to the breakfast slot, he took the Like A Version segment with him, and it started to get a lot more traction in its new slot. I'm always thinking about how old radio ads used to cite the power of early morning advertising because people are active and going about their day when they hear them, rather than retiring for the night, doomed to forget about it. In any case, it started to get a bit more attention. Segments started getting pre-recorded and more professionally produced, while the CD compilations started to make a serious dent on the ARIA Charts. 2010's compilation made a huge splash by reaching #2 on the charts, and it paved the way for a 4 year stretch of the Like A Version compilations going all the way to #1 from 2014 to 2017. By 2020 it fizzled out and they stopped producing the CDs altogether, but it lives on in the internet age as a perennial talking point. To get back to my original statement, there have been times where Like A Version related content is the only thing triple j puts on its YouTube channel anymore. When it comes to international music fans who might see their favourite artists pop up there, it does make me wonder if triple j is to them just a vehicle for this segment and nothing else.

This unique perspective of engaging with triple j did however lead to one of my favourite moments in Like A Version history, something that could potentially become indecipherable to future generations. Ocean Alley's cover of "Baby Come Back" ends with a brief drum lick that is potentially meaningless to anyone who just listens to the radio, but would come with frightening familiarity to YouTube viewers, because it's a re-creation of the very sting that triple j used to put at the end of every Like A Version video. In 2024, triple j updated some of their sound beds and have a new one with a distorted voice saying 'triple j', so the only lasting piece of this quirky sting is through however long the original YouTube uploads stay around, as well as this cover. Thelma Plum's cover of "Bitch" by Meredith Brooks in September of 2024 is the last one uploaded that still has it.

"Baby Come Back" is of course the 1977 yacht rock classic from American band Player. A #1 hit over there which reached #15 in Australia. The song obviously lives on through that one time it was used on The Simpsons, and more recently even The Kid LAROI scored a hit through sampling it. Ocean Alley nearly play it straight but they do slip in a bit of that one song I cannot mention but can say is primarily sung by Frank Ocean.

This is pure trophy room Like A Version, slotting into the top 20 when it wasn't even the main course for Ocean Alley. As is often the case, that still translates very well, whether it's just a product of the band's popularity or not. When triple j polled the Hottest 100 Like A Versions, it landed all the way up at #3, also known as being the highest song behind those two that everyone knew were gonna finish up top. "Believe" (#987) is one of those. If my recollection of events is correct, this cover made a small piece of history by being the first Like A Version to ever reach the ARIA Charts, peaking at #91 just after the countdown aired. I must acknowledge the technicality that Regina Spektor did previously perform a Like A Version covering a 1997 song by a very popular British band, and that same week reached the ARIA Charts with a different recording of that same song. Like A Version recordings being released to DSPs around the same time they're recorded is a relatively new situation.

I will give this cover its flowers though. Like the last time I brought up Ocean Alley in a Like A Version context (#590), I think there is definitely credit to be paid for where they're digging for their source material. "Baby Come Back" is not an obscure song by any stretch, but it doesn't fit so easily into the trendy kinds of throwbacks we're used to getting. That might just be because this slightly pre-dates TikTok as a trend setter, but it feels much more genuine than opportunistic as a result. I think it's a song that Ocean Alley can easily fit themselves into, and that in itself is an interesting look at converting old music trends to those of today. Sometimes there can be something close to like for like, and if I'm about to say that Ocean Alley is yacht rock for young millennials and older zoomers, who's gonna stop me?

#541. RÜFÜS DU SOL - No Place (#50, 2018)

57th of 2018

When Roald Dahl's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" was first adapted to film in 1971, it was re-titled as "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory". There are numerous reports as to why exactly this was done but the easiest way to see it is that it puts more emphasis on Wonka the character (with the star actor) and also Wonka the brand. Decades later we got a second film based on the book that did get the correct title. Maybe at this point it's just a no-brainer. The novel was less than a decade old when the first film came out, now it's a woven part of culture that most people are familiar with, so the expected title is perfectly fine. It is funny though when you look at the two films side by side and the liberties they take. I find myself thinking of "Willy Wonka..." as the film that focuses more on Charlie (adding an additional scene & subplot that aren't in the book), while "Charlie..." gives Wonka more focus by fleshing out his back story. A very silly reverse mnemonic. I also just want to note that in 2018, the original actor who played Mike in the 1971 film just turned up as a contestant on Jeopardy!. He didn't win and they didn't bring it up, but I love things like that.

In 2014, UK group Clean Bandit released the song "Rather Be", and in 2018, RÜFÜS DU SOL released "No Place". Neither song sounds particularly similar but they both build up to the same title lyric, and I find myself wondering if they've also Wonka'd each other in hindsight. Clean Bandit are very aggressive on additional 'no's, while RÜFÜS DU SOL lift the most emphasis on the word 'rather'. It's not a perfect reversal though, thinking about it this way makes me want to hear a much more elongated 'be' in "No Place" that never really shows up. I'm imagining a song that doesn't exist now.

I have to make my fun in here somewhere. At this point we're up to album #3 for RÜFÜS DU SOL and we're very aware of what we're going to get. Aside from a late charger, this ended up being the trio's last ARIA top 50 entry on debut, suggesting they lost the intrigue factor somewhere around this point. I don't think it's an indictment on the single or album as a whole, and in fact it's been resting pretty consistently as the de facto #1 Australian Dance Album on the charts every week since June 2025, and ahead of the always contesting prior album "Bloom" since December 2024.

To me, "No Place" represents a slight evolution in the group's sound. One that's still clinging to the old style, where you can hear the breezy clicking of their first album. Poking its head out is a bigger stadium sound, one that doesn't feel like a betrayal of their roots, but one that opens up more possibilities that we will hear on later entries. For now on this one, it's rather serviceable, but it's easy to see why as the lead single it fell short in the polling towards the more distinctive singles that followed it.

#550-#546

#550. BRONSON (feat lau.ra) - HEART ATTACK (#88, 2020)

48th of 2020

You might be wondering who BRONSON is. I can tell you that it's not a rapper who potentially gets confused for Ghostface Killah or Don Cheadle, and we're certainly not looking at the grown up youngest son of the Twist family (although the age profile for the later seasons is about right). The much less fun but much more accurate answer is that we're looking at a supergroup consisting of Golden Features and ODESZA.

We're familiar with Golden Features in these parts, but this is the only time I get to bring up ODESZA, which is ironic because when we look at the bigger picture, they're clearly the bigger name in this team up. Internationally kind of famous as opposed to Australian kind of famous. By the time this collaboration happened, they'd had a similar amount of triple j airplay to Golden Features (both in the range of about 800 plays), though ODESZA weren't able to translate it to any Hottest 100 entries. I was rather fond of their song "Say My Name" which didn't get much airplay but went Gold in Australia after a few years, I suspect it's due for a Platinum update at the very least. Every time I open their Spotify page I'm tricked into believing that they had another career boon by producing the soundtrack for the Apple TV series Severance (which I regrettably have not seen because it's an Apple TV series), they just made an EP remixing the original score. I've done so well at avoiding spoilers that I can't even imagine the general vibe of the show. Maybe you, or I from the future are laughing at the notion that ODESZA made music for the show.

The final piece of our puzzle is lau.ra, a British producer and DJ who only occasionally provides vocals. She has a Wikipedia article that mostly hasn't been updated in about a decade save for updating with new releases, which also doesn't seem to have been updated in about 5 years. It largely only covers her music she released under the name FEMME, so if not for "I Just Wanna" sneaking in at the bottom, you'd be forgiven for thinking this is an entirely unrelated artist.

With what I know about these artists, I'd most readily believe that this was a largely Golden Features conceived track. Other tracks on the self-titled "BRONSON" album like "BLINE" or "CALL OUT", sure, they sound like ODESZA songs, but "HEART ATTACK" is so remarkably low key that they're really playing into Thomas Stell's world. It makes for an interesting hit. Mellow in a way that usually doesn't generate this much fanfare.

I found myself rooting against this song at the time for the childish reason that it's not the only low key Australian electronic song of this name to reach triple j notoriety. For my sake they've done me a solid by landing on the fairly low end of the list so I don't have to get frustrated by insignificant manners, but more on that another time. It might be why I came around to liking the song a decent amount too. I don't know if there is a solid base line for me with what Golden Features is doing, but I've been filtered out from reaching anything subpar, so it's a good effort again. Sometimes a simple house beat can be mind-numbingly empty when you're sitting at home and not at the club (to be fair that was almost everyone when this came out), but this one is very agreeable to me. Even if it's not her #1 trick of the trade, lau.ra's definitely a good performer on this one, very silky.

#549. Florence + The Machine - Hunger (#82, 2018)

59th of 2018

In my early years of looking at the charts, there were certain accepted truths about the way things operated. The one in particular that interests me today is the way that certain artists were ordained to take the #1 spot whenever they released a new album. The way that the album purchasing market seemed to age up only served to help this, as it was a chart that perpetually served the same demographic. That took a serious hit once streaming became part of the equation, but more importantly, part of our music listening experience.

You could retain all those fans who used to buy your album on day one, but now they're streaming it instead, cutting their chart contribution down by about 99%. There's serious value to having those die-hards, but very few have managed to retain them, and so many of those perennial chart toppers have started to really struggle to maintain it. There's some leeway with labels controlling release dates to spread things out, but so many are built on the expectations of a particular country's charts, and they can run into trouble elsewhere. I don't think Jay-Z considered the perils of releasing "Magna Carta... Holy Grail" in the middle of the Australian chart week (back when the US didn't line up with us) and have to contend with the might of The Voice Australia winner Harrison Craig in his 3rd week on sale. Jay-Z's still never had a #1 album in Australia.

Even then, despite the seemingly mapped out months of #1 debuts we often get, they're constantly running at odds with each other and so a lot of artists who feel primed to debut at #1 just keep on missing out. At this point Taylor Swift is just about the only artist I can trust to take the top spot reliably every time, and it's a word of warning for anyone who releases within two months of her.

This is just to say that I've eaten the plums, we all have a hunger etc. But really, I've been holding onto a peculiar chart stat for many months. With all the interest around the Drake & Kendrick Lamar beef in 2024, one artist with a unique position in it all is Florence + The Machine. Florence scored back to back #1 albums in 2011 & 2015 with the kind of massive sales that would suggest a lock on the top spot. She hasn't had a #1 album since because in 2018 she was blocked by Drake, and in 2022 she was blocked by Kendrick. She's the only artist with this distinction, and it compelled me to make a Venn diagram. Doing so made me realise that even if I include the singles chart, in all their time spent at #1, there are actually very few parties they've spoiled, which makes the Florence + The Machine trolling all the more surprising.

Florence's 4th album "High As Hope" actually managed pretty solid sales at #2, the 6,500 units it moved would be enough for an easy #1 most of the time nowadays. On the other hand though, it's probably a good stopping point for her taking the top spot as it's from this point on that her albums stopped having the monster legs they once had. She went from having the 10th best-selling album of the year in 2015 to just 79th in 2018. The album's first two singles both barely scraped into the top 100 in Australia, and this is the only Hottest 100 entry, just getting over the line when it used to be natural to expect multiple top 50s per album.

Is this just the point where we all feel like we've heard everything and there's nothing new to discover? It was how I felt at the time. I think the 3rd single "Patricia" is worthwhile, but not quite a patch on the highest highs of the past. "Hunger" is much the same. It's the obvious pop single, but it's not striving for a particularly high mark. Perhaps one day on here I'll reach a Florence single that makes me say 'ah, nailed it', but I'm still waiting for that.

#548. Bliss N Eso - House of Dreams (#94, 2013)

61st of 2013

I don't know if everyone encountering Bliss N Eso is aware of the fact that Bliss comes from America. He moved to Australia as a teenager and met Eso at school, but despite the decades that have proceeded, he's never fully lost that American accent. It's from this we get his all-time corny bar where he manages to mention D.C., Marvel, comic and superheroes in the space of 13 words. It's just so brazen I have to respect it.

There's a surprisingly common trend that I've encountered when writing these that something I just encountered is able to segue into the material here. Sometimes it's forced, sometimes it's just very coincidental and yet relevant all the same. About a month ago I saw the film "Jerry Maguire", not realising that Bliss also references it at the end of his verse, and then it gets sampled. Cuba Gooding Jr. has an Oscar and a Hottest 100 appearance, is there anything he can't do? In all seriousness, he's the most compelling part of that movie, and watching it with the lens of knowing that the Academy were into it is fascinating. That and the fact that since this song was released, the word 'quan' found its way into popular hip-hop in multiple ways.

I've always had a soft spot for this one. Despite "Addicted" being their most popular song, Bliss N Eso don't usually get a lot of love when they get more confronting and energetic. Usually it's their slower tracks, or just the ones with samples that get the attention. So you see this just barely scraping over the line despite being a lead single and it feels like it deserves better. Just that combination of booming drums and borderline horror score strings works excellently to set the stage. Eso definitely comes out with the better verse overall, but has the advantage of going first. Once Bliss gets about halfway in, he gets a bit swamped by the music for a moment, almost like it's the Academy Awards gesturing for him to wrap it up. Who doesn't love a tender piano bridge either?

#547. Dune Rats - No Plans (#100, 2019)

49th of 2019

Dune Rats had only been appearing in the Hottest 100 for a few years at this point but I still felt a bit perplexed at their showing in 2019 where they only barely scraped over the line. It has the makings of being the end of the line but they managed to turn things around afterwards. It's another slight misnomer anyway, they also landed at #103 with "Crazy" and #163 with "Rubber Arm". That in itself is surprising because "Crazy" had not been out for very long when voting happened, and "No Plans" feels primed for crossover appeal.

I don't mean top 40 crossover really, but the kind where someone hears it and gets instantly warped back to the late '90s or early '00s, when something like this could have been a top 40 hit. The only thing that breaks that particular immersion is the Jack Johnson reference in one of the spoken word sections, which I just want to leave at that because it's a very bizarre sentence to put to print if you aren't familiar.

Maybe there just wasn't enough excitement when it came to Dune Rats so blatantly recycling the same concept. Ever since I wrote the entry about "Braindead" (#702), I've just been thinking how I knew deep down that they had another song about having no greater aspirations and choosing to revel in under-achieving. Of course, that sentiment would work better if they really were an especially underground punk adjacent band, but this song comes from their second consecutive #1 album which puts them in strangely elite company even though it comes with the caveat that I believe they made history with the first ever #1 album to spend only 1 week in the top 50 (it fell to #52). It took about a year for it to happen again after that (Illy in early 2021) but now it's reasonably common.

#546. Highasakite - Since Last Wednesday (#77, 2014)

59th of 2014

I'm sure this happens in other parts of the world. A band who is reasonably popular in their homeland of Norway, and inexplicably found some love just in Australia, where they'd stop by and tour on three separate occasions. They also toured in the US & UK a few times, but those were harder markets to crack, and they're closer anyway, so it doesn't have quite the same intrigue about it. If setlist.fm is to be believed, they've played more shows in Australia than in Sweden. What they have to show for it is a #100 charting single in Australia, a #24 charting album, and this Hottest 100 entry that came a couple of years before those.

The boring answer to all of this, as it often can be, is that they were getting promoted on a major label here. You'd be surprised at how often all of the indie flagbearers of yesterday and today are touting that status while reaping the promotion & distribution benefits provided by one of the big 3. triple j almost certainly lean into this as well. Their symbiotic relationship with the major labels almost certainly controls a lot of what ends up on the hitlist, and there's a strong correlation between leaving the majors and no longer making these polls. I've spent the last 6 years looking at press releases and typing up new release schedules with a keen eye on label semantics. It's probably ruined some of my enjoyment seeing how the sausage gets made, but it does give me some reassurance when my new favourite artists aren't generating fanfare, even when triple j is giving them the required exposure. The labels just always win.

The amusing part of this is that Highasakite's relationship with Australia is largely with two songs that aren't especially noteworthy in their catalogue. Their global streaming figures aren't bad, and they're leading the pack on YouTube views, but overall, their charting single "Someone Who'll Get It" and this song here just stand as reasonably popular, nothing close to the two hit wonder we've made them into. I'll also note that "Someone Who'll Get It" did not even reach the Hottest 200, and my Instagram vote counting at the time saw it projecting about half as many votes as their other single "Golden Ticket". These projections are sketchy at best, but feel free to think of the two songs as landing at roughly #400 and #239 respectively. I did my part because I voted for "Someone Who'll Get It", a song that really blew me away when it sounded nothing like what I'd heard from them before, with a compelling sense of foreboding (if the title didn't tip you off). It probably just came out far too long ago and lost all traction by the end of the year. We think of bands' popularity shifting on a year by year basis, but really it's happening every single day, and someone will get more than a few bad dice rolls in a row.

It'll vary then when it was that you last saw or heard of Highasakite. They're still putting out new music in the year 2025, though with a slight change in personnel, leaving only original members Ingrid & Trond as consistent parts of the puzzle. I kept up with them for a little while and they've left me with an eclectic bunch of singles that I can still go back to and enjoy. They feel a little like Methyl Ethel to me, in that the first single I heard from them suggested a different trajectory than where we ended up, and also that it wasn't a song I especially gravitated to at the time.

Depending on your tolerance levels for the stylings of alternative rock in the 2010s, you might be able to paint a picture. At its worst, "Since Last Wednesday" is running through similar tropes to Imagine Dragons, Of Monsters and Men or Bastille. Maybe you like the big drums and 'oh' chanting in this one but it feels a little on the nose. The song works best when it's leaning on the more striking ideas that sound like a band inspired. When the rest of the band gets more involved, you get a song that builds up to a beautiful climax that's not unlike Sigur Rós. There's a lot going on in what might just seem like pleasant playlist fodder on the surface.

To fit in, or not fit in

Felt strangely emotional at the Sarah Blasko show last night. It's a good kind of emotional. The kind that feels like catharsis when you've lived a life like mine. I also couldn't sleep last night so I got out of bed and wrote this instead.

I don't fit in. I never have. It's the natural result of being steadfast in your preferences, but also having it thrust upon you. Whether it's being the youngest person at school, the interstate person at university that doesn't know anyone, or the only Australian (or West Australian) in so many group chats. I support a football team from a state I've never set foot in, and I take to my own learning mnemonics that tend to put a ceiling on how proficient I can be, but never in a way that's strictly clear. I could adapt muscle memory for learning piano but I could never read sheet music very well or attain a natural rhythm that made key signatures feel like anything less than an arbitrary difficulty constraint. I'll play competitive online video games like Tetris or Rocket League and become an irritant as I match win rates with players who seem objectively more capable of doing it by the book. Even in a game like Furi where I hold world records and thus the meta should be formed around what I'm doing, I still have quirks about my process that nobody emulates. I have very strong opinions about the way music charts should work, rooted in my self-taught statistical background that most will strongly disagree with. In all these cases, it's like there was a meeting that everyone but me attended on what the proper way to do everything is. Alternatively, it's just the lot in life of being on the autism spectrum.

If this isn't part of your life experience, let me tell you that it's weird. It's being prescribed to a journey where you can't fully relay your way of thinking to anyone else, because it's always different. This is true even regarding other people on the spectrum. I'd often attend groups that were for people just like me, except they weren't really. It's an experience that only makes you feel more isolated because instead of making you feel like you belong, it reinforces that there are even less likeminded people out there than you were led to believe.

Some of my biggest challenges growing up have come from the fact that it's not even apparent on first glance that there's anything atypical about me. I'd get majorly stressed out by certain tasks in school, but was often an afterthought because I was getting straight A's in most of my other classes, and wasn't the typical 'problem child'. I developed an early feeling of being a burden when I'd have to ask a teacher multiple times for alternative assessment because I was so good at masking when I was internally screaming. One time in high school I had to attend a seminar on understanding and treating autistic people with kindness, and the people running it were talking down to me because they thought I was a neurotypical bully who didn't know what it was like. One time in university, it was pouring down with rain and as a result I arrived late, drenched, and miserable about the fact, and my lecturer just glared at me like I'd run over their dog, I could never feel comfortable approaching them again. Another time I got put into an online group assignment and had to meet up at the other ECU campus I'd never been to. Instructions were unclear and I just wandered around like a lost soul for an hour until I eventually left, never exchanging another word online with these people and I think I had to just can the entire unit for mental health reasons, something I repeatedly did.

I'll admit that it's something I hadn't really come to terms with growing up either. How can you, after all? It's taxing enough to come to terms with everything about how the world works, only to find out that you're taking a different test to everyone else, and there aren't any readily available resources on the topic that can fully capture how things work. I even spent a lot of my teens with undiagnosed anxiety, and left them feeling like I missed out on so many formative experiences because I was unable to open up about anything. I sincerely apologise to anyone for whom time spent with me has been annoying, tedious, or frustrating, because I know I could be a handful at times. One of the painful parts of it all that I did manage to internalise at a young age was that intrusive thought that everyone around me was only courteous because of praxis. It's a strangely dehumanising feeling that has you feeling stripped of any soul.

Even well into adulthood, these kinds of feelings still arise. I live on disability allowance. I've never worked a day in my life. It's not the party it sounds like. It's a feeling of constant persecution, like just saying the fact is going to earn me ire to some percentage of people who see it. The kind who think the solution to mental health is to just get over it. Meanwhile, you're just isolated from everyone in your life. Everyone else goes out, works a job, meets people, falls in love, gets married, has children. I just sit at home most days. Chuck in the fact that I don't drink, don't have a driver's licence and am always hyper fixated on any manner of niche topics (that I am often not willing to talk about), and it's a miracle I can ever hold a conversation.

There's a positive side to all of this. I am extremely lucky to be surrounded by friends and family who largely understand my limitations and value my unique input. I'm not always good at expressing my gratitude for this, but I'm saying right now here that you're much appreciated. Having a lot of time to myself has allowed me to thoroughly nourish myself in things that interest me, with the belief that the next fixation is right around the corner. My speedrunning achievements earned me a certain respect among peers that gave me the confidence to open up more online, and subsequently meet so many friends around the world. I still sometimes feel like a gimmick character, but one who is better respected and understood for it. Even if I don't get out much, I've still amassed some eccentric anecdotes, enough to fill out a solid winning streak full of the dreaded interview segment on Jeopardy! Remember that time I got called up to be on national radio?

I see my fortune as a means to be happy, and it's something that gives me reason to reciprocate it. In a world riddled with conflict, misinformation, and conflict over that misinformation, I find it most satisfying to do things with kindness. It's one of those things that sounds hokey, but I can't overstate just how much better my mental health has been ever since I stopped trying to compete with anyone in some imaginary competition to be the most correct or to live the best life. It's possible to correct or inform someone without sounding smug. Alternatively, it's looking at my own intrusive thoughts where everyone hates me, and responding by putting forward a version of yourself such that you don't feel like there's a good reason to be attacked, or it's one that makes the other person come off in a bad light if so.

I'm not perfect, I never will be. What I can be though, is someone with a strict personal morale code on what is just, and to follow that to the fullest. It's probably something I've always stood by. I remember when I was younger I'd sometimes do the wrong thing and I'd have these full on episodes where I'd start crying and struggle to breathe correctly for a few minutes (I still don't know what it's called?). It wasn't necessarily me being upset that I'd been punished, but rather that I'd failed to do the right thing and let myself down.

My condition is still very debilitating. While I am fairly active in various parts of the web, I still lack the brazen confidence to say anything & everything that's on my mind, lest I be overbearing and annoying, or just accidentally slip out the wrong take without enough nuance. I still can't do eye contact. I'm always either stimming or thinking about stimming. I can't attend any sort of outside activity or location with someone without staying still in one place, lest the computations of everything get overwhelming. I still struggle to address people by name or sometimes even gendered pronouns as I just get strangely embarrassed by the whole thing (this is the unusual apolitical route to wanting to use they/them pronouns for others as much as possible). I'll have therapy sessions or just normal conversations where I am either unable to talk, or simply cannot stop talking and there's no good middle ground (who could possibly count how many times I was told to be quiet in Year 12 Specialist Maths, only to do the same thing again a day later?). I'm one of the worst people to be shown something to react to because so often my reaction is just quiet contemplation. I might come across as an emotionless husk at times but I'm anything but.

Anyway I think I was supposed to be talking about music.

My journey of musical rediscovery in 2006 is something I can never stop talking about, and in fact I did so less than a week ago on this blog. Not to repeat myself too much (though I will), but there were times when music felt like my closest friend. I'd listen to triple j every morning, and every night and just be engulfed by this seemingly never ending world of ideas. People like to make fun of triple j presenters and listeners nowadays, but I have to express just how fundamentally important it was for me to have this source of positivity and have it reinforced by all these voices on the other end. When you're filled with reassuring voices, it's easier to believe in the good of it, just like how surrounding yourself with wise-cracking pessimism will do nothing but sink you to that level. Utilise absolute caution when reading the comment section anywhere, those crabs are always more content with filling the bucket rather than even trying to get out.

I could hardly talk about this to anyone. Even if I felt brave enough to do so, I'd never believed in myself to have the social cache to convince anyone that this thing I like that's outside of their zone of interest is worth adding to it. As time has gone by, my musical interests have only gotten more specific and isolated, not in a deluded 'I'm the only one who listens to Mitski' way, but the kind where my favourite song of last year gets less hits per day than I do. Depending on who you ask, I have a reputation for having arcane knowledge about music (I wouldn't completely agree and the frequency in which I miss trivia questions would back this up). It's usually buffed by my concentrated knowledge in isolated areas, and that's derived from the positive feelings I've gotten from it. I will never understand the pissing contest that music fandom turns into, where everyone has to put anyone else down for not having the objectively correct takes, which no one can agree on. It's this exhausting experience where I'll feel out of the loop for not having heard a particular indie album, and then somewhere else I'll find someone suggesting that this same indie album is a red flag that makes the world worse by existing. It's a world where not knowing an artist who has billions of streams is somehow a badge of honour and the bare minimum of curiosity is scoffed at. I derive no joy for bringing people down over preferences. When I listen to obscure music, it's not to brag that I'm the best crate-digger, it's just me liking what I like. Maybe I'll get mentally lumped in with snobbish listeners for saying that, but I'll never exhibit that behaviour, and more likely chide others for doing it. The real best reason for listening to obscure music is that it's often immune to the discourse. Like oh, there's an archetype for being a man who likes Clairo, but I've never heard a word about what it means to listen to GAZAL. It's much more fun that way.

Where does Sarah Blasko come into this? Well we're in what Homer Simpson would call the creamy middles. The sort of fame that's hard to quantify as it's localised entirely within one country. We're talking about albums that sold in the tens of thousands but didn't generate any crossover top 40 hits, making it all very easy to avoid if you're not looking for it. That's why I hadn't heard any of her music until that one fateful day in 2006 when the music video for "[explain]" came on TV. It's something I grew a soft spot for but I don't think I could even admit to myself how I felt, because it just didn't seem like my wheelhouse. Nowadays I listen to a lot of music that could be described as 'girly', but taking that first step is very difficult.

Australian music is in a difficult place right now. It's absolutely still being made and heard (often quite good too), but it's being pit against an algorithm that doesn't want it to succeed, and it feels like every year on the ARIA Charts, the ceiling for Australian music that hasn't hit it big overseas gets increasingly lowered, and those instances of Australians hitting it big overseas are also shrinking. It's increasingly normal to look at the ARIA Singles Chart and see no Australian music in it.

This is a cycle that fuels itself. If nothing gets big, no one talks about it. If no one talks about it, nothing gets big. Not only that, but you start to look at past successes that have left the discourse machine, and they feel as though they're fading away too. Just from doing this blog, it's shockingly common to find artists that were once briefly very popular, whose monthly listener stats are pitiful in a way a blackball or boycott could only dream of managing. As I get older, this gets increasingly true for artists who were core to my upbringing, and I can't even be surprised. You often have to be my age to have come across it in the first place, so younger listeners are writing them out of the canon, not out of malicious ignorance, but because they're not being exposed to the same channels I once was.

It's why in all of this, I am so glad when I'm able to experience something that can be described as a popular agreement. Finding out that not only was Sarah touring, not only was it a nostalgic celebration, but that it was specifically those very two albums I adored in full and in sequence, is one of the closest moments I've come to literally jumping for joy. It's not often you get to see something that is genuinely catered specifically to your interests, specifically to your moment in time, one that feels increasingly fleeting. But then you get there, and not only is it sold out, but everyone is respectful. There's no one getting up in my face about me wearing a mask or looking like a scrawny weirdo, no one bumping me every 30 seconds without even the slightest inclination to apologise, no one ruining the experience for anyone else. It was just the ideal way to experience some songs I've adored for close to two decades, with solemn respect and politeness. It goes without saying that the show was excellent, better than I could have imagined even, and a big part of that was through attaining that rare comfort. For once in my life, I felt like I fit in.

(this post will not affect my bi-weekly posting here, expect the usual affair of music, charts & life minutiae on Monday, thanks for reading if you got this far)

#555-#551

#555. CHVRCHES - Get Away (#85, 2014)

60th of 2014

In November 2014, the ARIA Charts officially added streaming to their calculations, from places like Spotify and Apple Music. YouTube wouldn't be part of the equation until 2022. In theory this was a big shake up to the charts with an impact immediately felt. In reality, it would just be a slow acting change, and it came at one of the strangest times, where 3 of the top 4 singles of the week registered zero streams on the board. Taylor Swift had removed her music from streaming and "Blank Space" had just hit #1, replacing Ed Sheeran's streaming monster "Thinking Out Loud". Debuting at #3 was Band Aid 30's "Do They Know It's Christmas?" and at #4 was Will Sparks' "Ah Yeah So What". I can't confirm their status on streaming platforms at the time, but I do know looking at the data that no streams were counted. In the case of Will Sparks, his song didn't arrive on the Spotify chart until the week after, so whatever he might have had wouldn't have amounted to much. That song's also a weird trivia question if you ever need to know Wiley's only top 10 hit in Australia.

The only reason I remember which week streaming got put onto the charts is my prevailing memory that Alesso & Tove Lo's then hit "Heroes (we could be)" got completely shafted by the system update. No one seemed to double check the data and realise it was getting severely undercounted and there's a very noticeable dip in its chart run when this starts taking place, immediately falling from #13 to #26. The only real sign of things to come on that chart is Hozier's "Take Me To Church" climbing up a little faster than it was pacing to do so, a streaming monster both then and now.

The changes were coming, showing themselves at the bottom of the chart. While the top 10 barely changes with the marginal additions, the bottom end got upended very quickly. I sometimes look at the charts in 2014 and am utterly amused at just how easy it was to get in there compared to nowadays, and you'd have so many jarring (though admittedly fun) appearances. Much like the last gasp of physical sales producing a top 10 hit for The Butterfly Effect in 2006, it becomes impossible to compare these incongruent chart peaks to different eras because they don't line up at all. CHVRCHES managed to prove it very quickly.

As a lead artist, CHVRCHES have made the ARIA top 100 just 3 times. Two of them are songs I'll eventually tackle here ("The Mother We Share" does not belong to either of these groups), and the other is their song "Dead Air", a song only remembered because it's attached to a Hunger Games soundtrack. "Dead Air" debuted at #94 on the last week before streaming was added to the chart, but certainly would not have made the cut after that, as the next week's #100 outperformed that week's #80. A couple of weeks later, "Get Away" falls a touch short of the mark at #115, but moves more units than "Dead Air" did to get into the chart. One of the first things streaming took away was the idea that CHVRCHES were popular enough to have any loose single they want reach the top 100. Now it's hard to imagine them even getting remotely close.

Still the situation creates a juxtaposition here because "Get Away" is the one that didn't chart, but made the Hottest 100. "Dead Air" was nowhere to be seen, living off its own false valour. This is the part where I ruin the narrative to say that I always preferred "Dead Air", and I now see that it has twice as many Spotify streams as "Get Away". We're talking about what people wanted to hear in that time though so it's still worth examining.

At the time, "Get Away" wasn't really clicking. CHVRCHES to me were about big, soaring pop melodies that you could always find on their big singles. "Get Away" was a more low key affair that felt more like an album track. I ended up buying a version of their second album "Every Open Eye" that includes it as one of a few bonus tracks. This does something to justify the allegations, but it did also allow me to appreciate the song in the presence of greatness (I like this album a lot). In the years since this, my favourite CHVRCHES songs have only continued to get bigger in scope (seriously, where did "How Not To Drown" come from?), but I've also been able to enjoy more perspectives. When I listen to "Get Away", I hear a finely constructed song that marches very smoothly into its chorus. I have my reservations of building a hook out of some of Martin's vocals which I've never been keen on, but it feels more like a creative decision rather than 'okay let's give the keyboard player a song on the album'.

#554. The Jungle Giants - Used to Be in Love (#59, 2017)

51st of 2017

A couple of months ago, I mentioned how girl in red had a major divide between her performance on Spotify and YouTube. She'd get maybe 10% as many views on the latter. The Jungle Giants take this concept and absolutely run away with it. Their biggest hits on YouTube can sometimes limp over the one million mark. Their biggest is "She's a Riot" which has 2.8 million at the time of writing. On Spotify, they're often comfortably in the tens of millions, and that's where their biggest hit actually is "Used to Be in Love", which has passed 110 million streams this year. So far on YouTube it has about 700 thousand views. That's a ratio of around 1:150. If you find yourself suspicious of the streaming numbers some Australian artists are able to pull off, then these numbers might be call for concern. It could well explain why this of all songs is the best beneficiary.

I will now come to the defence of "Used to Be in Love" against my own attack. You can look at that year's Hottest 100 and note that it is the lowest polling of their 4 singles that year, though only marginally at that. The Jungle Giants had basically been in medium to high rotation for 10 straight months in 2017, and "Used to Be in Love" was simply the last cab off the rank. In the past I've considered that late singles that just happen to be in rotation while voting is going on can outperform expectations, but I don't really think that's the case anymore. Or at least, it seems possible that this song overperformed because it was still just beginning to reveal its full power. This is the song the band told fans to focus on in voting for in the Australian Hottest 100, they must believe in it too.

It's definitely the most low key of all their 2017 singles. I had to check and make sure I didn't also say that about "Bad Dream" (#588) but I think this one has a steadier waft to it. The guitar noodling might stand out a bit more, but it doesn't interrupt from the main chords in the same way its cousin 'ahhhh' does. I guess I leave it a little puzzled too because I can understand liking it, but imagining it as anyone's favourite song feels strange to me.

#553. Bring Me The Horizon - Throne (#45, 2015)

57th of 2015

If we believe 2015 to be the peak of Bring Me The Horizon's powers, then this song is the big monolith to stand from it. They'd get adept at doing it more regularly, but this is the song that took them from perennial lower appearances to finally cracking the top 50. It's also their most streamed song that's on this countdown (it's only behind "Can You Feel My Heart"), so it seems to have stuck the landing 10 years later.

I've mentioned "Can You Feel My Heart" before, but I never said that it's one of my favourite Bring Me The Horizon songs. I won't say I was instantly on board because to my younger ears it was a little confronting at the time, so at best I had a begrudging fascination with it. It's aged well though and now reaps the benefit of being associated with a meme. It's unironically one of the most popular rock songs, and one of the most popular dubstep songs of the 2010s.

"Throne" isn't fully cut from the same cloth as that song, but it has a similar balance of intensity. The one big thing I notice between the two songs is way the two choruses both smash into a brick wall and then navigate a more playful melody on top of it. "Throne" feels like an evolution on this idea as Oli's initial vocals head straight into it and give you the sense that it's still that same recording that's being pushed up and down onto other notes. I don't know if that's an intentional move but it gives the song something to stand on its own with. I also find myself comparing it to "Drown" (#658) and immediately appreciating how much more clarity comes through in Matt Nicholls' drumming on the mix. It really gives the track that extra needed punch.

#552. Vance Joy - Play With Fire (#95, 2013)

62nd of 2013

For a while I was holding onto a contrarian opinion that this was my favourite Vance Joy song. I'm not sure how often I'd actually said it but I'd certainly thought about it a lot, often wondering how sincere I really was. If you're keeping track, I clearly haven't held onto this, but it'll also tell you that I did maintain it for a fairly long time.

"Play With Fire" is a funny choice for this. Technically it's Vance Joy's first ever appearance in a Hottest 100, and so the only song that canonised itself without the significance or stigma of Vance Joy being a Hottest 100 winner. It's the only one of his entries that didn't have the burden of existing in the preceding shadow of "Riptide"'s (#885) success, or being "Riptide" itself. This song comes from the same EP, when he's still figuring out what he's trying to do, or rather hasn't had the public assert him in a certain direction.

Here's how you know that's true: "Riptide" wasn't even the lead single from that EP. Officially, Vance Joy's debut single is "From Afar". For lack of an easier way to explain things, that song is like The Lumineers' "Ho Hey" if it didn't have any 'ho hey's in it. I mostly just remember it because the lead actor in the music video also appeared in another music video later that year, one where he finally gets to be in the water but still doesn't take his shirt off.

"Play With Fire" also got a music video that has one of the directors from the "From Afar" video and also the same cinematographer. "Riptide" in the middle does not which is why that video is nothing like the other two. My favourite thing about the "Play With Fire" video is that there's a brief spike on the YouTube upload where viewers seem to compulsively go back to see details. I had a laugh when I saw what they were all looking at. "Play With Fire" is officially a period piece.

This is a side of Vance Joy I wish we got a bit more of. It's very much in the world of Beirut cosplay, to the point where I'm wanting the brass section to jump out even more, but it does bolster the emotional lift. I can't think of any other Vance Joy song that wants to show off an instrumental section like this one does on the bridge. That might be a symptom of Vance Joy The Singer being more prioritised as he got famous. Honestly though this is one of his best vocal performances anyway alongside it. There's a lot to like in this one, no jokes.

#551. Thelma Plum - Homecoming Queen (#65, 2019)

50th of 2019

The world of streaming has opened up an ecosystem that's impossible to keep up with. Genuine hits that elude the charts. Non-starters that actually never stop, and outrun the hits of their days. As I write this, "The Night We Met" by Lord Huron is the 22nd most streamed song of all time on Spotify. As was pointed out by Steven Hyden in an article for Uproxx, it is not even one of the top 500 most streamed songs on Apple Music, leaving it isolated to what is admittedly the world's biggest streaming platform. It was a minor chart hit and prominently featured in the first season of 13 Reasons Why, but otherwise it's a song that you would not expect the average person to recognise despite the sheer number of streams it continues to rack up. Maybe about a thousand people have started listening to it since you started reading this paragraph. It's interesting to consider when this song isn't really ironed down for popular consumption as I suspect it would have felt when the band wrote the song.

We live in a post-"The Night We Met" world now though, so it's easier to imagine someone writing a song more like it with the intent of getting a hit. I don't think Thelma Plum is that cynical, but it just ends up being the song I think of when I hear "Homecoming Queen". They've both got a similar steady guitar melody. They're both in either 3/4 or 6/8 time, and the BPM is nearly identical. On a skeletal level, it's a natural link.

That's pretty much where the similarities end though, as I have to draw attention to the lyrical content of the song, where Thelma Plum reminisces on growing up as an Aboriginal woman in a country that reinforces beauty standards that seem to shun her on principle. The most striking part of it is in the song's bridge, where she acknowledges the 1967 referendum that only then allowed Aboriginals to be acknowledged in the census. It's only 27 years before she was born, it's genuinely not that long ago that our country was doing unspeakable things to the people who belonged here first. It's a powerful passage that doesn't disrupt the flow of the song at all, which ends up focusing on her own positive self-reflection, as well as yours. External reinforcement is good, but your most important critic is yourself. I love getting feedback, but often times if I know I've done a good job, that can be good enough for me too.

It's a song that really warmed up to me over the years. I was far more familiar with her other two entries in 2019, so this one snuck up on me a bit. It left me a bit unimpressed just because I didn't want a song that dragged its heels like this one does. I still don't think it reaches the heights of those other entries, but it's definitely a song worth having around.