#885-#881

 #885. Vance Joy - Riptide (#1, 2013)

92nd of 2013

Probably the most inexplicable song of my lifetime. This isn't even necessarily an insult. I'd probably subject any song with the same amount of longevity to the same scrutiny. There is admittedly the famous band that from Las Vegas that isn't Imagine Dragons who will eventually appear on this list though. I have a slightly easier time wrapping my head around that one. But even then, that's a song that's had peaks & valleys, it comes in and out of its cage. Ever since early 2013, outside of Christmas, you can never look at Australia's Spotify chart and not see this song jumping around with zero sign of fatigue. This song reached its highest ever daily streaming total in Australia in September of 2024, there's a very solid chance I'll have to edit this by the time it's posted because it'll probably peak again (Note: I did not).

If you're into it, there's a solid fairytale charm in this. In 2013, there were two distinct moments of 'well, this song is winning the Hottest 100'. The first was when Daft Punk dropped the sound of the summer, and the second was when Lorde took the world by storm. These two songs are not forgotten by any stretch (and will eventually appear in this list), but after all that pressure & anticipation, ended up falling short of just some guy who used to play in the VFL but wasn't good enough to play for Richmond during their late 2000s slump (maybe they could call him up now in their new 2020s slump, he's only a month older than the AFL's oldest current player). You can look at it as a standard affair of getting behind the Australian underdog, but clearly the voters were onto something. At the time I'm writing this, "Riptide" is outperforming those other two songs combined on global daily streams by 50%. You can point to the plethora of TV commercials it was on at the time, but the billions of listens it has gotten from people far afield of that influence means that Vance Joy has more than justified his placing, not that he ever needed to.

But there's only so long I can spend analysing music as if it's not something I actually listen to. "Riptide" as a song itself does not offer very much to dig into. When it comes down to it, it's just another stomp & holler song. Between Mumford & Sons, and Of Monsters and Men, we very nearly had 3 of them topping the Hottest 100 in the space of 5 years. But this feels like a regression compared to those two, where the only apparent ambition this time around is in making a silly music video that seems to be making fun of itself.

The best compliment I can really think of is that it pairs the awkwardness of the lyrics with Vance Joy's wavering, breaking voice. He's not in any position to be confident, nor does he pretend to. I'd say it's part of the song's charm but I don't really know. I know that there definitely were times when I was more engaged in this song but it's been a long time now. The fact that I've never been able to go more than a week in history without having to be reminded of this song and its perpetuity really just doesn't give me a chance to grow that fondness back up. You cannot be nostalgic for something that's never gone away.

#884. The Cat Empire - Wolves (#79, 2015)

88th of 2015

It's so hard to get back on the horse. It's called the Hottest 100 for good reason. Plenty of artists right now are racking up entries while they're hot. Have an off year though, and it feels so difficult to fight back against that momentum. The Cat Empire's first two albums were huge. The third still did very well. The fourth sold well but didn't have a hit, and didn't crack the Hottest 100 in 2010. They felt like old news going forward. They inexplicably snuck into the 2013 list, and it felt like a last hurrah. But then they did it again 2 years later and it just felt so strange.

If you live in Australia, it's hard not to encounter The Cat Empire in some form. "Hello" never stops popping up (it's been on a TV commercial not so long ago). Whenever I hear the belter that is the GWS Giants theme song, I have to remember that it's a Harry James Angus composition. When I was young, I remember getting excited to hear "The Chariot" on the radio, as it just felt so ambitious and out there. Maybe I was born about half a decade late to have a ska phase.

Truth be told though, I do think as a band, they bring more to the table than just fulfilling their template of being on the Bluesfest line up every 2 years and phoning it in. Most of their popular songs over the years don't sound a lot like each other. From their past Hottest 100 entries I'd say "So Many Nights" feels like a bit of a rehash, but that's it.

"Wolves" leaves me without much to say though. It just feels a bit devoid of character from them at this point. That's all fine really, but it just feels like the jumping off point where they shouldn't still be polling like this. Even sneaking into the top 200 is a bit much for a song like this. It's tightly wound but there's not much to seek out in it. Frankly it's odd that this song has a 'gonna run like wolves' chorus, and the next song on the album is called "Bulls". That came 20 spots short of making the 2016 Hottest 100, which would be the finally ridiculous cherry on this long-preserved cake, but I do think I prefer that song. The ska life chose me I guess.

#883. Post Malone - Circles (#11, 2019)

86th of 2019

As a long time follower of music charts, I've often felt fairly estranged by what feel like consensus picks. They're the songs that everyone can agree on as being good. It really has me questioning how people assess music because so consistently, it feels less about having outstanding qualities, and more about lacking anything that would make anyone get angry or annoyed. 

It's why I don't often have much interest in giving music scores and aggregating it. You always hear about how a 5/10 is worse than a 0/10 because at least the latter evokes a feeling, and yet these systems have a habit of empowering those 5/10s because they can never get a little bit of the vitriol required to put them in their place. I remember seeing people make fun of Anthony Fantano for not liking this song. Like it's so obviously good that anyone who thinks otherwise must be crazy. But it's for this song? Lionel Hutz would say 'There's a 5/10 >:(, and there's a 5/10 :)'.

Post Malone was riding a fair amount of good will and positive momentum at this point in time. His previous single "Goodbyes" wasn't astoundingly well received but it still spent 2 whole months in the top 10. Then "Circles" comes along. The cynical part of me wants to say that after years of straddling the line between rapper & pop star, "Circles" is the first one that goes all the way. No rapping, no guest rapper, no trap production.

It's not fair to dismiss it all in that way. In reality, I think I liked this song for a few months. Actually thanks to my obsessive cataloguing, I know that I did. I want to say it's because it sounded fairly fresh at the time, but then didn't offer much in return so it burned out on me quickly. It's another one of those songs that feel stuck in one tempo. The chorus is no longer cathartic, but induces a sense of tedium to dread. Seasons change, but this song is just running in circles.

The other thing to note is that this is probably the forerunner to one of my least favourite subsets of music, which is songs that sound thoroughly indebted to That One Tame Impala Song I Will Eventually Talk About. It's a trend that's suspiciously cropped up in the wake of That One Tame Impala Song I Will Eventually Talk About becoming a huge hit in every aspect except top 40 radio. Every time it always just feels like a hollow shell of what's being imitated, like getting a pass mark for hitting a similar bass line is all that's required. Until 2023, this was Post Malone's highest ever finisher in the Hottest 100, I guess it is all that was needed (Note: In hindsight I think I wrote this in a vague way with the assumption that he'd surpass this position again in 2024 but then he didn't end up doing so, so this is still his second highest position behind "Chemical").

#882. Alex The Astronaut - I Think You're Great (#55, 2020)

88th of 2020

This is Alex The Astronaut's second and to date, final Hottest 100 entry. If you thought that "Not Worth Hiding" got over the line with flying colours thanks to its direct subject matter, then it's surprising that this less distinct song still managed a fairly good finish. Maybe 2020 is just a strange year and it meant that a lot of different artists filled the void.

If there is a void to be filled with this song, it's that of a certain slacker rock artist from Melbourne who will eventually appear in this list. She didn't stop making music, but she did stop polling in the Hottest 100 sooner than you might have expected. This song doesn't have the dry witticisms that this comparison suggests, it's a fairly straight forward love song.

I don't want to leave this off with the impression that I'm extremely negative on Alex The Astronaut's music. I've always loved the song "Waste Of Time" from 2018, which in hindsight taps really well into that Pony Up! or Camera Obscura mould. At times you can just hit a certain chord progression and I'll go bananas for it. Other times, I don't have any particularly strong reaction.

#881. Vance Joy - Mess Is Mine (#13, 2014)

87th of 2014

Like many before him, Vance Joy landed in the spot of releasing a career-defining single right away with "Riptide" (#885), and having the task of following it up. It answers the question of whether "Riptide" was so popular because he's here to stay, or if it's all we'll need from him. As is often the case, the answer is somewhere in the middle. "Mess Is Mine" was successful, but not quite enough that you could imagine it being a hit without the one before it.

As a music and chart fan, it puts me in an odd position. If you ever feel like a hit song in the charts is just coasting by on an artist's good will, it can be more irritating than just something you dislike. At least people like those songs, this one's just limping over the line by default. That's how I felt with "Mess Is Mine" at the time.

It's a bit different to look back at this song with the context of a decade long career alongside it. It's easier to look at it on its own terms. Vance Joy has been accused at times of trying to catch another "Riptide" in a bottle. I don't think that's the case of this song though. If anything, this is the closest to a proto-typical Vance Joy song other than "Riptide". A modest bit of tempo that builds to the chorus and then just launching those horns at you.

That's a style that's drawn criticism in a different way. Ever since I had it pointed out to me, I've never been able to escape how much Vance Joy's entire schtick is reminiscent of Beirut. Beirut's only Hottest 100 entry, "Santa Fe" landed in 2011. I suspect a big reason why this similarity was noticed is because that song comes from an album called "The Rip Tide". There's a little bit of Vance Joy in that song, but not enough to really notice. I'm most fond of the 2006 song "Postcards From Italy" and that song is fully Vance Joy. Everything from the ukulele, the slightly garbled singing and it being drowned out by horns. It's a song I really love, and one that makes me have a high ceiling for expectations in Vance Joy because I'm sure he can hit the mark doing what he does. Maybe he already has. He's still got 6 more songs to appear here.

#890-#886

#890. Flight Facilities - Down to Earth (Radio Edit) (#83, 2015)

91st of 2015

There's an interesting rule in the Hottest 100 vote that's been there since at least 2015. They clamped down hard on release dates around that point, ensuring that everything in the list was released between December and November, 2-13 months before the countdown airs. With one glaring exception I can think of that we'll get to eventually, this has been followed pretty well. The additional clause that very occasionally pops up is the exception to this rule, where significantly altered versions of older songs will be allowed into the list. There are some edge cases, but only two times from 2013 to 2022 that triple j actively acknowledged the radio edit on the website. By some stroke of chance, both were Flight Facilities songs that landed only two spots apart in the same list.

We'll get to the other one eventually on this list, but what I find most peculiar is how much legwork this one isn't doing to justify itself. The original version of "Down to Earth" is 4:30, this one trims it just slightly to 3:11. It's like the opposite form of when fragments of songs blow up on TikTok and get an extended version that's 3 minutes long. This edit is certainly brisker in its pace, but compared to the other Flight Facilities example, it's a lot harder to notice. I bought the album when it came out and knew this song well, but I don't think I even realised triple j were playing a shorter version of it at the time.

I've never really been a fan of this song as a single. It's got some marketing power as the title track to the album, but it has the unescapable sound of a deep cut. I mentioned when I was talking about "Sunshine" (#905) that one of the Flight Facilities entries could be argued as abrasive and this is it. One can only be pounded into submission so many times by that hook before getting a tad sick of hearing it.

What it does have going for it is a pretty nice music video. I didn't know at the time who Sam Rockwell was, but I was led to believe that it's a big deal. When I went to type 'down to earth' into YouTube, his name came up in the auto-complete before Flight Facilities. They even give him a feature credit despite not performing on the song. It's pretty stylish. Easy to compare to that famous music video with Christopher Walken, for a song by that British DJ who implausibly will appear in this list eventually. I've spent several years getting a bit better with watching movies, so I know who Sam Rockwell is now, but he'll probably always be 'that guy in the Flight Facilities video' to me.

#889. Matt Corby - Monday (#53, 2015)

90th of 2015

This is a song that is performed a cappella. The entire song is just Matt Corby's voice and hand sounds. That's the gimmick here. Astute Hottest 100 followers know that this provided a very strange coincidence in the countdown, but that's another story for another blurb.

There are 5 artists who have competed on Australian Idol and made triple j's Hottest 100. Of those, Matt Corby feels like he should have had the best run on the countdown. Arguably he still has, "Brother"'s #3 finish in 2011 pulls a lot of weight here. But in the years since this entry, he has done nothing but repeatedly fail to get over the line, despite still having a strong following. In terms of entries, he remains locked in an eternal tie on 4 with Lisa Mitchell and another who will eventually appear on this list. To Matt's credit, all of his entries are as a lead artist (he also has an additional co-write, something the unmentioned artist barely missed out on), but he peaked so early that I'll only be talking about him twice here.

"Monday" polling makes for a solid showing in just how popular Matt Corby was at the time, and how he responded to that. Very few artists would be able and willing to do what he did here, and even fewer would get away with it. This was wedged between One Direction & Delta Goodrem on the ARIA Chart for a week, it's just got no business being there. It's a song that doesn't have a chorus, the only part of it that sounds like a hook doesn't have any words in it, and the title doesn't even appear in the song. It's a level of audacity I can respect, while never really wanting to ever listen to the song.

#888. benny blanco with Halsey & Khalid - Eastside (#68, 2018)

87th of 2018

This is one of the biggest hit songs of all time in Australia. It never actually hit #1 as "Be Alright" (#986) and George Ezra's "Shotgun" kept it at bay for 4 weeks each, but the stranglehold this song had on the charts for the 18 months that followed had me feeling like it might never leave. By the time it finally left the top 40, it still had another 22 weeks left in the tank, riding out through about half of both Halsey & Khalid's imperial phases. Khalid had 10 hits come and go entirely before this song was finished. Even years later, this song spent all of 2023 either in, or just outside of the Spotify top 200 chart. The possibility of another "Eastside" renaissance can never be discounted.

I have to preface with all of that because it's vital context to talking about this song for me. It could easily be just a middling hit that's vaguely remembered, and its low Hottest 100 position goes some ways to selling that fantasy, but this is one of the big guns.

I spent all of this time struggling to make sense of this. It's easy to say that sticking two of the biggest names in music on the same song is an easy recipe, but it can only last so long before it needs to stand up on its own merit. I wonder how many people just think of this as a Halsey & Khalid duet. One of those aspects that had me having a tough time putting this all together was the fact that Benny Blanco inexplicably put his own name at the front of this.

Benny Blanco is not a remotely unknown name. I was very familiar with him at this point because he had spent a decade racking up writer and producer credits on absolutely massive hit songs. He had a huge start in 2008 when he co-produced "I Kissed A Girl" and "Hot N Cold" for Katy Perry and never slowed down.

He stood out to me because for the most part, I really didn't like his production. It was a clicking moment when I realised that so many songs I didn't like all had this common link. I generally think of that overly compressed sound on Maroon 5 songs like "Payphone" and "Maps" to be his doing, and something that did not sit well with me at all. Over time I've warmed to his work a bit more, including some stuff I didn't like at all initially. I remember finding it funny that at the same time I wasn't understanding this song, one of my favourite songs of 2018 was Kids See Ghosts' "Reborn", a song produced by Benny Blanco.

I guess I just found it peculiar that this is the first song he decided to stick his own name in front of because it just feels like one of the last songs I would prioritise the production on. I'll give him credit though; it's a song that doesn't fall into the traps I'd criticised him for before. This song sounds crisp and clean. It also sounds a lot like another song that polled closely by it on the 2018 list, in case you want to study voting preferences to a science.

All of this is to say that I have at least partially come around to this song. I still can't quite grasp having a strong investment in it, something about the song's chorus feels half-baked, like if the catchiest part is the word 'eastside', you need another draft. It's a pleasant enough song to not bother turning off. The vocal chemistry is fine, but it creates a new problem with it being a Benny Blanco song that it all feels like mercenary work, which detracts from it again. Halsey & Khalid didn't come together to reminisce, Benny Blanco used his executive producer powers to make it happen. Also this is that other song here that Ed Sheeran co-wrote, if there wasn't enough hitmaking pedigree.

#887. Chet Faker - Gold (#7, 2014)

88th of 2014

I'll probably say this again, but Chet Faker was far too powerful in 2014. He has a world-beating performance locking down the #1 spot and another 2 in the top 10. That's a stat line that has never been matched in the history of the Hottest 100. It's the kind of thing where you want to dismiss it as a fanbase thing. Like you've got a pretty standard performance that gets juiced up by irregular influence and now it's unrivalled. I've never been able to figure it out with Chet Faker though. It's a path that makes sense on paper with his gradual rise in the 2010s, but the songs just don't seem to really validate it. It's like we were in search of an Australian auteur and rode the closest match to the stars.

I'll be fair though; his hits aren't thoroughly unappealing or anything. It just feels like he coasts off a fairly low bar. I just feel like I'm supposed to like these songs more. The mindset appears to be that he's obviously a fairly astute musician, and I'll hear a little catchy bit and think 'well, that's good enough for me, 3 votes'. On an unrelated note, this song was released one day before Patrick Cripps made his AFL debut.

If the previous two entries of his I've talked about were novelties, we're into the world of pure Chet Faker with this one, and most of the rest of the way. "Gold" fares the worst because it's so plainly announced going in. He puts on some different inflections to mix it up. The general atmosphere is not bad either, I think the various handclaps mesh well. I just always find myself incredibly bored when I get to the chorus. It's just a lot of thrown out lines that don't break up the sentence at the right times. Breaking up 'I'll never love another one', and closing it off with 'love I said it' which doesn't even rhyme. If you read it as an attempt to write 4 lines of lyrics in a pre-determined space, it just looks worse the more I think about it.

#886. Tame Impala - Eventually (2015, #34)

89th of 2015

With the advances in streaming data allowing us to analyse listening patterns more than ever, it has me thinking back to something that's bothered me for so many years. How do people actually evaluate, rate & rank albums? The big thing that always comes to mind is that you're inevitably going to find a lot of albums that are stacked with the songs everyone likes and listens to, as well as the other tracks that are also just there. The measure of a great album seems to come down to a combined score across the whole picture which obviously sounds wrong immediately. I recently watched video compilations of the most streamed albums of each year, and for a lot of them, it's a game of picking out the one hit song that's carrying the rest of the team. Sometimes it's two or three, in which case it starts to feel like it might be a classic. It always feels like you're home at that point. Unless the album project is so blatantly full of artifice like DJ Khaled, I imagine that those big hits can paper over a lot of cracks. I feel like over time this has become a more common way of looking at albums. "Thriller" seemed like an album that used to cop a lot of flak for its deep cut duds, but over time has only gotten increasingly more untouchable. It's got "Billie Jean", "Beat It", "Thriller", "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'", "Human Nature", "P.Y.T.", it's more than passed the grade at that point.

Yes it's time for the obligatory '"Currents" is not that good' call out post. What about those big songs on it though? We'll get to them obviously, but take them away and it's just track after track of uninspired mush. I can still go back to "Lonerism" and be thrilled at every turn, but this (admittedly very successful) pivot leaves me just a touch cold.

"Eventually" is a solid barometer for the whole thing. It runs a whole 5 minutes and doesn't really deserve that much airtime. No number of fake outs can escape how much it just feels like listening to a small handful of 10 second loops over and over again. Is the sloppy drop alongside 'eventually, ahahahahah' in any way cathartic? The song peaks in the first two seconds when it tricks me into thinking it's "Omen" by The Prodigy, but afterwards I'm short of praise.

#895-#891

#895. The Rubens - Hoops (#1, 2015)

92nd of 2015

I'm going to get this out of the way immediately: Your informed take on why this didn't deserve to win the Hottest 100 is wrong. It's so frustrating to see the same misconceptions be repeated over and over again as a way to cope with this democratic injustice. It may seem like a bizarre result, but the Hottest 100 is filled with near misses that would've gotten the top spot if that other song wasn't there. There's an alternate history where "Rock It", "Parlez Vous Francais?" or "Stinkfist" got to #1 and it's strange to think about. The Rubens just happened to shoot their shot on a year with no "Big Jet Plane" or "Little Lion Man".

I've been intently following the ARIA Charts for over 16 years now, and if there's something I've learnt from doing so, it's that charts often exist to settle arguments. You can cast speculation on how popular something is based on anecdotal evidence, but the charts put those raw stats in front of you. They are obviously worthy of their own debate on a micro-level (something like 'oh, that's charting higher because it gets more airplay, because it's on a Spotify playlist, because it's on the iTunes front page'), but they really do a great job of highlighting all of the songs & artists who are completely off your radar, but doing serious numbers.

With that in mind, it's something that I think a lot of chart watchers need to remember. I find that for a lot of people, the charts reflect reality only as far as it's convenient. Afterwards, it becomes a game of mental gymnastics to rationalise the often harsh truth that people like music that you don't like. The Hottest 100 is a music chart too, and its followers observed a similar pattern when this came out on top.

I'll cite a specific example from the ARIA Charts now. When voting was being cast, "Hoops" had just finished up a 12 week run in the ARIA top 50, it had peaked at #25 at that point. The song's nearest competitor on this countdown charted earlier in the year. It had spent 10 weeks in the ARIA top 50 with a peak of #33. There's obviously going to be some variance to this, the #3 song in 2015's list was an ARIA #1 hit that was sitting cozily above both of these songs for most of the year. That's a matter of different audience overlaps. But if we're to believe that The Rubens are a band primarily popular on triple j (at least at this point), it doesn't seem unreasonable to say that any sort of ARIA Chart performance for them would bode strongly for the Hottest 100. We even have past performance to base this on, as 3 years prior, they had landed at #10 in the Hottest 100 with their song "My Gun", a #56 ARIA hit. It is once again very reasonable to believe that their new, bigger hit would perform better. If it landed at #5, it'd never face any scrutiny, so what's a handful more votes on top of that?

But a lot of people will scoff at this suggestion for the simple reason that it doesn't pass the smell test. You listen to "Hoops" and think there's no way this is anyone's favourite song of the year. The competition in 2015 is bold, daring, exciting, and this limp soft rock dribbles past all of it. That's where we get the biggest fallacy to be repeated over and over again, the idea that The Rubens only won because everyone gets 10 votes, and that it's everyone's 10th favourite vote.

Firstly, a vote is a vote. No one was complaining about this system before. Secondly, I don't know how everyone else goes about their Hottest 100 voting, but my 10th favourite song is not remotely something I'd describe as filler. For a lot of people, chopping down their Hottest 100 vote to just 10 songs is the hardest task they'll do all year. Thirdly, I do not think that this is a circumstance that strongly applies to The Rubens.

I had a phase around the 2010s where I got really interested in predicting the Hottest 100. It predates Warm Tunas in fact though I won't claim to have come up with the idea. Plenty before me drew the correlation of people posting their votes online to make for a sample, which can be extrapolated to fairly accurate results. I couldn't tell you what compelled me to do this, but for several years, even though Warm Tunas was around, I started manually counting Instagram votes. Thousands of them. My list was never especially different to Warm Tunas, but I did get a good feel for how things progressed, and even a rough version of what's going on below the top 100, or the top 200, that's valuable information you can't get anywhere else.

What's also interesting is that you get to see more than just the votes. You get to feel out what the mood is with the poll. People have something to say beyond just doing their annual vote dump. There are many apologies given to 11th place votes, many people skirting the system and voting multiple times, and given that it's encouraged by the Golden Ticket competition, many people professing their love of their #1 song.

I never counted this, but what I will say is that I felt like I witnessed a very similar outpouring of love, and a very similar outpouring of 'I hope this wins' for both "Hoops" and the 2015 runner up hit. If you do want to accuse a song of being a filler vote, you really should level it at the #3 song. "Hoops" may not have done especially well in the Hottest 100 of the 2010s, but it absolutely annihilated that song, and sure did get a lot of votes for what is apparently everyone's 10th favourite song of 2015. Actually I'm someone who voted for that runner up song in 2015, but not in 2020. At the time it was only my 6th favourite song of the year, so I guess it was just a filler vote for me.

I'll also always remember that towards the end of the voting period, someone made a montage video of their life in 2015. They soundtracked it to their favourite song of the year: "Hoops". The Rubens shared this post on social media at the time and I remember there being a slight vote bump that day. I suspect if the voting result was closer, we'd have gotten a number, but that did probably help seal the deal for them.

"Hoops" was always destined to be a winning song that doesn't age particularly well. I've seen in the 2020s that Australian artists who don't make it big outside of Australia have their cards stacked against them, even in Australia. If you look just a little bit lower in the 2015 Hottest 100 results, you'll see another song that has hit a new level beyond the stratosphere compared to "Hoops". It'll only serve to make the result feel even more fraudulent, but in the end, votes are cast in the present. It serves as a time capsule to remind us that circa 2015, "Hoops" really was bigger than those songs. We were even forewarned of this. In triple j's annual album poll, "Hoops" (the album) finished at #5, rubbing shoulders with all those more esteemed artists. It's made more interesting by the fact that the title track is the only song on the album that made the Hottest 100. Everyone else was splitting their votes and The Rubens had the monopoly on a single crop.

With that in mind, it's the only good time I have to talk about "Hoops" (the album). I very much did not like it, at the time, and re-listening to it almost a decade later. I often said at the time that part of why "Hoops" (the song) did so well is because it was clearly the best song on the album. I spent so many of the months surrounding this album just baffled at what had happened to this band. "Hallelujah" is probably my least favourite song they've ever made. It's just a right mess that never sounded good on the radio. The rest of the album isn't that bad but a lot of it does fall into a similar blues rock muck. It just sounds tiresome to get through because you're so rarely rewarded anything to break it up. "Hold Me Back" has a nice little piano line, and "The Original" has a menacing guitar riff towards the end. "Things About To Change" also mixes up the dynamics enough to suffice, and "Battles" is pretty solid in general. But that's me doing aural gymnastics to find things to like, it's so thoroughly not gelling with me.

"Hoops" (the song) does feel like it's cut from a slightly different cloth. The guitar is still a little muddy, but it's not overwhelming in the mix. The drums are a little flat but they give the song a bit of character. It's not especially hard for me to see why people gravitated to this song.

The main problem I've always had is in the lyrics & delivery. As I'll say with "Kiss Me More" (#996), this is a song where the syllables and my ears don't agree with each other. More so than that song though, this just runs them into the ground. The hook is so clearly designed to be an earworm but it just loses all meaning with how many times they say it. The bridge is a worse offender though, and doubles down because we're also subject to backing vocals that get too much space to breathe and become the centre of attention. The Rubens would keep doing this on later singles and it just sounds really bad.

This probably sounds like the most negative blurb I've written in a while but the position is still accurate I promise. I tend to fall back on the fact that the song is fairly short, and catchy enough in a way that I can see the appeal. It doesn't bore me I guess, even if it is ostensibly a non-event of a song. Yes, it's my least favourite of the 10 Hottest 100 winning songs in this time period, but it has to be one of the most interesting results we've seen.

#894. Tame Impala - Is It True (#17, 2020)

89th of 2020

The last blurb could have been just a slight bit easier to work through if I hadn't banished myself from saying the words Tame Impala until right after the finish line. Tame Impala. Tame Impala. Eventually these words will be rapped confusingly, and appear on this list. Even though two of them pre-date this time frame, every Tame Impala album will impact this list in some way or another. Primarily we're going through the latter two, firstly "The Slow Rush".

It's Tame Impala so I shouldn't be that surprised, but I was a bit taken aback with how high this particular song landed in the list. It doesn't even have the individual hype of being a pre-album single, it did this all on its own merits I guess.

I've never really been able to figure out why though. The Tame Impala sound certainly has changed quite a bit over the better part of more than a decade, but it's never sounded more tired than it does here. The bouncy bass line feels like it's trying to re-capture some past glory, but it's filled with half-hearted efforts to stand out beside it. I live so close to where Tame Impala started up that I can basically say the gargling synth is like 'we have Daft Punk at home', and then the chorus just never lifts anything up for the song. There's only a release of tension in the last minute when things chill out but I've usually just lost interest by that point.

#893. Peach PRC - Josh (#35, 2021)

90th of 2021

Peach PRC occupies a fairly unique space here at this point. Australia's music scene just cannot keep up with TikTok's content algorithms, the effect of which may come to haunt the Hottest 100 in years to come. Meanwhile in that wild west that I dare not interact with unless absolutely necessary, we've got an Australian pop star doing huge numbers, I think. She has 2 million followers on the platform, that's almost 10 times as many as triple j itself has. She's so much bigger than this list.

Evidently, I cannot say for sure how well that all translates to the bigger picture. She's not topping the Hottest 100 any time soon, and as far as commercial success goes, she's had this one song crack the ARIA top 50 on release hype and that's it. That is how low the bar is to be one of the biggest artists in the country though, so it's not her fault.

Peach is an odd pop star to me though. Her most striking asset to me is her voice on record. It's definitely unique in a way I can't really place. It feels though like something that helps make her stand out, but too much to the point that it probably puts a limit on how far she can go with it. With some more polish, this could be a massive hit Zedd song that would've dominated the radio at the time, though I might just be saying that because of the ticking clock.

She has another noteworthy element though, and that's her lyrics. I can say the same thing about her other two entries when they show up here, but she really has that provocative TikTok soundbite thing down. I'm not a big fan of using an 'insert name' to go viral. It feels like it's just preying on the fact that we all know enough people that we probably know a Josh and now we can make fun of them by promoting this song! It did get me wondering if Josh was even still a common name because to me it's someone born in the late '80s. Peach is pretty much the same age as football stars Josh Allen and Josh Dunkley though (all between 1996-1997), so maybe it still checks out. It definitely won't be the last time I ponder on these lines. Congrats to the Buffalo Bills for not getting knocked out before this post went live.

I guess I don't find name bullying very fun, even if they are the villain in question. I could get over this and rank the song higher but I don't really enjoy the production. The drop just sounds really bad.

#892. Empire of the Sun - Alive (#30, 2013)

93rd of 2013

I was really into that first Empire of the Sun album. I have memories both fond & specific of playing it on loop on an iPod Mini while role playing on the floor in my room with Jenga, marbles & toy cars. What a time to be alive. In some respects, Empire of the Sun were very lucky to take off as much as they did. They managed at least two fairly notable hit songs that have managed to endure. They've even got at least two fairly notable American mixtape rap songs sampling songs on that album (one of said rappers will eventually appear on this list, the other is Wiz Khalifa). What was initially just a fascinating side-project from The Sleepy Jackson (and another group who will eventually appear on this list) has gone well beyond that. Empire of the Sun *is* the project. They're lucky, but the songs being that good helped a lot too.

I fell off on them at some point and I can't exactly recall when or why. I remember making my last.fm account in late 2010 and being somewhat startled at how highly ranked Empire of the Sun were, and it became something of a mission to slip them down to a more reasonable ranking. They used to be #22, now they're #184, so mission accomplished I think.

That's all to say that maybe I had some negative bias going into their next album. I can't say for sure how much it's affected my feelings on this song and how much is its own doing. They'll have another entry in this list with an even later song so maybe that'll be the exception that proves the rule. Maybe this song just is a bit of a dud.

It's a song that feels like it's just doing the bare minimum. The general vibe is there, but it never reveals any interesting tricks. Listening to the verses is just the sinking feeling that the whole song is gonna be like this, and the chorus is just playing a Simpsons joke from nearly 20 years ago completely straight. It did plenty well enough but it's always made Empire of the Sun feel like a gimmick that had run its course.

#891. Thundamentals - Quit Your Job (#78, 2014)

89th of 2014

There was a point in time where Thundamentals were the fresh face in Australian hip-hop making a big name for themselves. It was a fairly big market that could pull some impressive numbers in all aspects despite not always having full commercial viability as a rule. Arguably, that point in time is still now because after Thundamentals hit it big, there hasn't been very much in their wake. The one elephant in the room feels increasingly tenuous at best.

I mentioned previously when I talked about Tuka's cover of "Big Jet Plane" (#933) how he was in rare company for only charting with his Like A Version. As it turns out, it wasn't even the first time he'd done this. With Thundamentals, his first Hottest 100 entry was in 2012 with a Like A Version. That's the only Thundamentals entry that doesn't fit this time frame, and this is the first of 9 that do.

This entry comes from their album "So We Can Remember". To me it feels like it's their commercial peak and it has almost half of their entries on it, but they had bigger hits on the next album so it's a bit of a toss-up. In any case, this and another 2014 entry of theirs just snuck into the bottom part of the list so they're on the right side of embellishing the history.

This song is fairly standard Thundamentals. Tuka & Jeswon are not abrasive rappers by any stretch so they're pretty easy to listen to. It's a vibe that works pretty well in their music generally, but not quite as much on this one. I'll grant that I'm not the target audience for this, but it's just the same as I mentioned on "Josh" (#893) where it's taking an easy, agreeable statement and shouting it for virality. Shout out to those who hate their boss and hate their job, there can't be many of those. In 2003 Butterfingers made the song "I Love Work" and it manages to stay engaging for over 4 minutes on a similar concept. This isn't much over 3 minutes and it overstays the welcome.

#900-#896

#900. Grouplove - Ways To Go (#33, 2013)

94th of 2013

I hopped on the Grouplove train fairly early. It's fun to think about in hindsight as it really is one of those wholesome snapshots of being young and into music. You get sucked into the idea of the next big thing, and circle around anything that gets even a hint of promise. If I looked at every artist I regularly listen to and specifically what year I first discovered them, you'll see a very large peak around the late 2000s to early 2010s. Eventually you run that gambit enough times that you kind of accept that not everyone is gonna make it.

Grouplove did make it, kind of. This might be their best testament to the fact. Having a big debut (3 entries in 2011) is one thing, but actually following it up and not completely disappearing is impressive. Grouplove nearly had a second song in this list too, as "Borderlines and Aliens" landed at #111 that year. They also came close again in 2016, but "Welcome To Your Life" could only get to #123. Not a bad innings really, but definitely in nostalgia world now.

Regrettably this song has fallen on the other side for me now. Over time I've just not really wanted to go back to it compared to other Grouplove songs. Something about the production just doesn't land right, and it's not compelling enough to get around that. But I just hear nothing but the cheap synths and poorly mixed drums. The whole song, but especially the chorus is smothered by it. I contrast this with "Didn't Have To Go", also on this album. That's a song being propped up by these very same elements, and one I still have a lot of fondness for. There's a recipe to make it work here and they just didn't follow it this time.

#899. Halsey - Graveyard (#40, 2019)

87th of 2019

In 2019 Halsey was coming off the biggest solo hit of their career and could probably do anything they wanted to. This is largely what happened. There was a collaboration with Travis Barker and another pop punk artist who will eventually appear in this list. Shortly after there was a team up with BTS landing on the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Halsey's own music would take a darker turn again though, at least based on the song titles. Well I can't talk about the first one yet, but the second one has the ominous name "Graveyard". It's fallen a bit in favour since, but this was Halsey's major hit at the time.

This song does not live up to the ominous title. I can almost see it in the synths that bubble around in the background. It's a decent foundation that's fairly drowned out by the constant handclaps and an occasionally chirpy vocal performance. I'm not saying that Halsey needed to lean into it, but I end up left with something that doesn't that doesn't really stand out. Hard to muster much of anything to respond to this with.

#898. Lime Cordiale & Idris Elba - What's Not To Like (#41, 2021)

91st of 2021

Listening to this song is like looking into a mirror. Just the sentence 'I'm a lover, not a fighter sort of thing' is so painfully in tune with the kinda of filler phrases I find myself using often when talking, and sometimes when writing. It's like, so jarring to hear that sort of thing in an actual, what's it called, song, y'know.

Lime Cordiale can't help but just sound silly a lot of the time. At least in this instance it's not entirely on them. But when I hear this song, I'm always going to get to that one bit just before the chorus where Idris Elba starts singing like he's doing an advertising jingle. It just sounds goofy to me. At least this time it doesn't extend to the main hook of the song, because after the song sounds like it's gonna end on a snappy "Is This It"-like riff, we're subjected to a 15 second self-deprecating skit, and then the song crawls over to a pretty standard 3:15 length after that. When Louis says that there are probably a few things not to like, I tend to agree.

I've also belatedly realised that they've probably just unintentionally remade "(If You're Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To" by Weezer, which is a long enough title to make it look like I finished this off with more than one sentence.

#897. Hilltop Hoods (feat Eamon) - Show Business (#71, 2022)

92nd of 2022

I gotta say, forget any state premiers who will eventually appear on this list. For my money, this has to be the weirdest collaboration partner to show up here. I can think back to how in 2019, Billy Ray Cyrus had a hand in the biggest hit of the year. Even Snow got resurrected with a second hit, sampling his first. But who, I ask, ever had the guy behind "F**k It (I Don't Want You Back)" returning to centre stage and playing it completely straight?

This is a fairly autobiographical song, but I suspect you could've subbed out Eamon for Adrian Eagle and get a fairly similar performance. That's why it fascinates me that he's here. But then it also functions as a reminder of the passage of time. No matter how long it's been since you last thought about Eamon, he was on some level, a contemporary of Hilltop Hoods, getting his big breakthrough just a year after them. Yes, they really have been around for that long.

That obviously lingers heavily over this track. It's the essence of the track. The whole thing is just riffing on the ups and downs of show business from people who are more than experienced enough to have stories to tell. I guess in that sense, that I wish they had told those stories. I don't doubt they're out there, but you don't get much to go off here. It must be tough to straddle the line of selling relatable content to people who have no way of properly relating, unless you fill it with easy platitudes. The one exception is in Suffa's verse where he mentions a stalker with some degree of detail. The whole thing doesn't really live up to the absurdity unfortunately.

#896. Bliss N Eso (feat Thief) - Dopamine (#86, 2016)

91st of 2016

This is fairly competent all around. I don't love the song's hook but it does work to a degree of being memorable. Thief's voice has a commanding presence to it, very much selling the mood. I haven't heard much else about him. It does seem though that he hasn't released any solo music since this song came out, just one collaboration with Fancy Feelings in 2018. His Soundcloud bio does have a reference to LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge" though so that's always a plus. LCD Soundsystem will not appear in this list but James Murphy will be involved in at least one entry.

I'm a little torn elsewhere on this song. I think performance-wise, Bliss N Eso are fine here, but content-wise it's a little off. Bliss's verse makes me think of all those Ja Rule songs where he acts tough in the verses but then he's a lover boy on the chorus. Here it feels like he's written a verse for a totally different song and then quickly puts in a line about his wife/girlfriend (I can't find any information about him having a partner so I'm not sure on this). Eso understands the assignment a fair bit better.

But then two verses are all you get here. Thief's hook gets stretched & re-arranged a whole lot to pad out the song, including more than a whole minute at the end, and that's the lasting impression the song leaves. Conceptually decent, but can't go the whole way.

#905-#901

#905. Flight Facilities (feat Reggie Watts) - Sunshine (#52, 2014)

90th of 2014

Unless I am mistaken, Reggie Watts has the extremely specific-to-me claim to fame as being the only person to have made the Hottest 100 and also appeared as a contestant on Celebrity Jeopardy!. I feel like there's a strong contrast at play there too, where on that show he let his personality run pretty wild, which is what I'm used to whenever I've encountered him in anything. This song always felt like a let down for being so devoid of personality. At least he's having fun in the video.

Flight Facilities have often made pleasant sounding music. I don't think I've ever heard a song from them that is even remotely abrasive (maybe one of their later entries I suppose). It can definitely work as well, but there's usually something more to dig into. This song feels like safe radio fodder. Fine to listen to, but I can't say I've ever sought it out.

#904. Peking Duk & Jack River - Sugar (#82, 2019)

88th of 2019

If "Wasted" was a fluke misfire, then "Sugar" was the song that set the trend going forward. It barely missed the ARIA top 50, and they've never charted at all since then. They would actually recover in terms of Hottest 100 positions in the next couple of years, possibly the very early January release for this single hurt it come voting time.

Like "Wasted", this isn't a remarkable departure from their usual affair but it comes out feeling like a lesser version. The mission statement with the song is to recall the late '90s. When interviewed about it, there are a lot of names of that era thrown around. The only one that sticks for me is LEN's "Steal My Sunshine". They've definitely succeeded on that one, I think Jack River's vocals in and around the chorus nail Sharon Costanzo's backing vocals on that song. I'm not even going to count that as a negative like I think some people might be anticipating. I just think the more typical Peking Duk template interrupts the nostalgia trip a bit. Those chirping synths in the chorus are here to remind you of so many other Peking Duk songs, and more importantly that it is not really 1999.

#903. Dune Rats - 6 Pack (#55, 2017)

90th of 2017

Dune Rats are staking their claim to be one of the harder artists to write about because there's only so many ways you can approach what is largely the same bit over and over again. You'd think this gets better as it starts to reach the ones I like a bit more but it's probably the opposite.

So anyway let's talk about the music video, because that's great. I'm not sure it fully achieves comedic timing from start to finish, but the sheer absurdity of choices they make for when and where the beer can is gonna turn up next is pretty fun. Surely there's no music video in the world that references both Adolf Hitler and Steven Bradbury. It may as well just be an ad for Dunies Lager. As a non-drinker I'm in no position to comment on it, other than make the obligatory mention that it has 4.20% ABV. They see an opportunity and they take it.

The song is fine I guess without there being much to it. I feel like if you're gonna make it like this, there should probably be a joke in it. It feels like they are setting up for jokes but they don't really land. They barely even rhyme so it's not like they were restricted by the format, but then I guess I'm not the only one who struggles to get a lot of material out of this concept.

#902. Peking Duk (feat Icona Pop) - Let You Down (#20, 2017)

89th of 2017

Australia has been very supportive of Icona Pop. If not for their homeland of Sweden, we'd be their biggest market. Not only were we very early to get to "I Love It" (to the extent that it made the 2012 ARIA End Of Year list, Sweden is the only other country that has this claim), but they have a further two multi-platinum collaborations. The first was with Hottest 100 alumni Chiddy Bang on "Mind Your Manners", a #11 hit here that charted in only a handful of other places, and then this one, that charted nowhere else, as you might expect.

I've never been able to get a solid confirmation on how it works, but I've been running on the theory that this is an ideal collaboration for local content quotas. By law, all of our local broadcasters are mandated to air a certain percentage of Australian content. That percentage varies depending on the format, but the relevant one tends to be either 20% or 25%. As for what counts as Australian music, the Commercial Radio Code of Practice states: "[works] shall be regarded as being performed by an Australian if the performance is predominantly by one or more Australians". A possible interpretation is that you just need 50% of the credited people on the song to be Australian, and wouldn't you know, we've got a duo featuring a duo.

I remember being a little annoyed by the success of this song at the time. It's another one where I can't help but notice the lingering shadow that is the success of The Chainsmokers in the mid-2010s. Particularly the song "Closer", which was the biggest hit of 2016 in Australia despite only having 5 months to accumulate those figures (hard to see that happening again). But it was one of those big hits that makes everyone reset their perception of what makes a song hit for the general public, like it's a hypnotic collection of elements. "Closer" was the first time Andrew Taggart fully committed to being a vocalist on one of his own songs (which would then happen quite frequently), and the same happened here with Adam Hyde. When I talked about "Wasted", the other song he sings on, I thought he was fine. Here it just feels like it's completely out of that Chainsmokers playbook, with minimalist production and finger snaps to boot.

Fortunately there is a chorus to break that up a bit. That part feels more like the Peking Duk we're used to. It's not just jammed in their either, the song builds up appropriately into it. Not the catchiest thing they've done, and not the best drop either, but totally passable. You just have to sift through a lot of time wasted to get there.

#901. Glass Animals - Season 2 Episode 3 (#98, 2016)

92nd of 2016

There's an observation I remember seeing many years ago (before this song came out) that if you want to get a good feel on a TV show, you should watch the 3rd episode of the second season. The first season is never quite right, and any new season can sometimes take a little to get comfortable again. Now, it's possible that the numbers were a little bit different and that's why I can't find this quote. I also don't know if it was focused on serialised shows or status quo shows. I've always been one to watch everything in order so it doesn't really apply to me, but it really does emphasize how important it is to get things right quickly, lest you lose your audience to those early stumbles.

Maybe there's something in it when you talk about Glass Animals. Their first album had some hits, but the numbers tell us that way more people have been returning to "How To Be A Human Being", their season 2 as it were. This is track 3 on that album, so yes, I can see what they were doing there.

I quite liked this album at the time. I don't remember ever returning to their debut, but they clicked things into place better here. The passage of time has changed the pecking order a little bit. This song now stands as the 6th most popular on the album. The big one, "The Other Side Of Paradise" didn't register at all for this list. That's one of the songs that really made the album for me. Late in the track list, but with a hook that pops out quite nicely.

Can't say I've ever mustered much enthusiasm for this song though. It has the germination of what the band would become on their next album. A lot of those dorky, plucky synths and ruminating with nowhere to go. It's not a strong endorsement that the only thing I really ever remember about this song is the subtle vocal layering build up at the start of the chorus. It's not exaggerated, but it's just not gonna carry this up the hill on its own.

#910-#906

#910. Hilltop Hoods (feat Maverick Sabre) - Won't Let You Down (#36, 2014)

91st of 2014

I always found it fairly random that Hilltop Hoods teamed up with Maverick Sabre on this track. He's an artist that made a decent splash in the UK in the early 2010s with his first album, but the last time he ever made the UK singles chart was a couple of years before this song even came out. I feel like collaborations are more anything goes nowadays, but at the time it was kind of rare for these two paths to cross like this. It's not the only time too, he also sings the hook on "Live and Let Go", a later single from the same album that didn't make the cut. I think that one's a little better than this.

A lot does come down to how you find Maverick Sabre's voice. I think his big solo hit "I Need" is a good approximation of what he does, and it's a tad bit oversold. A lot of syllables that have a mind of their own and it distracts from the emotional core of the song. He's a bit more straightforward on this song. I'd give him a pass but the material he's working with isn't especially inspiring. I can certainly say that he won't let you down, but he might give you up. But Hilltop Hoods kinda did let me down with this one. Just a fairly uninspired way to mark their return in 2014. It's lucky that they had a saving throw to come on this album, otherwise they'd have probably killed all their momentum.

#909. Slowly Slowly - Jellyfish (#57, 2019)

89th of 2019

When I first heard Slowly Slowly, I definitely saw some promise in what they were doing. Largely a throwback to 2000s pop punk but doing more than just filling in the tropes. The songs "Aliens" and "Alchemy" specifically stood out to me. The former with its big build-up of momentum towards the end, and the latter which is more straightforward but passes the test with flying colours, sounding better than a lot of the stuff it'd be comparable to.

They lost me a bit with this one. It's a few things really. Instrumentally it just feels like their most boilerplate song I've heard. It occasionally gets out of first gear and into second but never really leaves a distinct impression. They usually have pretty engaging drum fills in their songs, but in this one it sounds afraid to overstep its boundary, you can't get in the way of those lyrics I guess.

I think the chorus is dumb. The whole song is all over the place in the lyrical department, but the one thing you're gonna remember from it is "Have you ever seen a jellyfish? Now that shit's crazy". Just a strange non-sequitur that's not ridiculous enough to stick the landing. Not just that though, but the surrounding lyrics don't really pay it off either. It goes from 'We're having sex in the car, that's weird' to 'what if we're a simulation for aliens, I bet they're getting a thrill out of mental breakdowns, but I love you...that's pretty weird'. The song is half love song, half deranged comments from someone I'd never want to talk to, and I don't think they mesh particularly well. Slowly Slowly have another entry to come so at least it's not a one-off.

#908. King Princess - Pussy Is God (#74, 2018)

88th of 2018

Mainly just feel a bit disappointed as it stands that this is one of only two entries she's had. There's more to say which I think segues better when talking about the other entry, but I've been quite fond of her sometimes eclectic output over the years.

This song makes me feel like a prude. It is certainly not the last 'pussy' song to make the list, but compared to that other one, it doesn't feel like this has much going for it beyond the shock value. It's just a fairly messy song where the drums & guitar don't seem to agree with each other very much, and it's constantly crowded out by odd backing vocals that have never added much for me.

#907. Lizzo - 2 Be Loved (Am I Ready) (#36, 2022)

93rd of 2022

If Tones And I generates the most irritating discourse of any artist in this list, then Lizzo is probably a close second. I'll spare Sticky Fingers in this one because at least there's something to talk about there and it's not just people livid that not all music is supposed to be marketed to them. At the time I'm writing this, Lizzo is still dealing with a lawsuit against her. I hesitate to comment on any of that, but more just feel frustrated at the voices coming out of the woodwork to point out that they were right all along. Don't ever do that.

For all of that though, she's only got 4 songs here. It obviously never helps when your biggest hits miss the eligibility window by several years on the route to becoming famous. She's also not had a top 50 hit in Australia since this one, a song that seemed to have fallen short on release, but went gangbusters on a second go around.

The song has never really worked for me. I probably liked it even less at the time and had a better idea of why. Best I can say now is that the main keyboard riff just doesn't carry as much energy as it wants to, and I feel like the whole thing is just built on a series of phrases that don't translate it into the anthem it wants to be. I never get the compulsion to scream 'Am I ready?!' because it just feels so uncommitted. For Lizzo, someone whose bread & butter is caption-worthy phrases, this one doesn't get over the line.

#906. The Weeknd (feat Daft Punk) - I Feel It Coming (#41, 2016)

93rd of 2016

Going beyond this list, when I think of my least favourite hit songs, I think of the kinds that just give me nothing to work with. Not necessarily irritating, but sheer flavourlessness that makes it a chore to listen to. I think of songs like "Love Lies" by Khalid & Normani, or "Scared To Be Lonely" by Martin Garrix & Dua Lipa. They're not badly performed or produced, but just bring me zero joy whatsoever.

I used to put "I Feel It Coming" in a similar camp. If I was going into this just purely on emotion, I probably would have ranked it a lot lower. I guess I just had to accept that there is a little bit of interest to get out of this song, even if the first thing I think of is always going to be that very boring chorus.

I think I've been partially vindicated on this opinion over time. At the time of writing this, it's his 7th most streamed song on Spotify, but only in 19th place for current daily streams. This obvious second biggest hit on the album ranks only 5th in that regard. I'm further vindicated as "Die For You", my favourite deep cut on the album at the time, has thoroughly eclipsed it.

So I guess this is saved by the warm production touches more than anything else. I won't say that I am so easily swayed as to hear Daft Punk robot voices and that's enough, but it is accompanied with some pleasant shifts that keep the song from total monotony. Alternatively it's all just that I'm lucky "Save Your Tears" isn't here as well because I still rank that highly among songs I very much don't want to hear again for a very long time.

#915-#911

 #915. Client Liaison - The Real Thing (#92, 2019)

90th of 2019

There's an artist we'll get to eventually that feels unlucky to be a one hit wonder in Hottest 100 terms. Clearly they've got one song bigger than the rest, but they've had so many other contenders that it's unlucky none of them just happened to slip in. The opposite happened with Client Liaison. They easily could've had just the one solid placement with "World of Our Love", but they managed to just barely sneak in two more times.

This is the first of those which means I'm tackling their entries entirely in chronological order. This one has some of the same issues I brought up with for "World of Our Love". It's 4 and a half minutes long, the verses feel like padding, the hook is unsatisfying and Monte Morgan is still the one singing it. I can see why this isn't as popular but I do think it balances out a bit better. The chorus doesn't experiment as much, but it's tidy and catchy enough.

#914. Dune Rats - UP (#49, 2021)

93rd of 2021

We nearly had something incredible in the 2021 list. Two songs that share so little of their audience but have the same title, fighting a battle of popularity that makes no sense in the greater scheme of things, but is one of the great things about the Hottest 100. Dune Rats exist to bring chaotic energy and get Hottest 100 votes, and in this one metric, they slightly outperformed a Billboard Hot 100 #1 hit that shared the same name as their song. Really wish they could've been next to each other though.

Dune Rats have managed 8 Hottest 100 entries with the general premise of being a little bit silly. I think there's an interest in drugs too but I'll leave that to the imagination. This is a bright, summer song and absolutely makes sense to make the Hottest 100. A little different sounding for them but not extremely so. In the end though, it just falls a little flat on the execution. Credit for trying to make a chorus out of 'Should I get up?', but it never sounds as fun as it wants to be. The juxtaposition of this being a Dune Rats song that frequently mentions tax returns is a little charming but it can't carry us all the way.

#913. DMA'S - Dawning (#89, 2017)

91st of 2017

You've reached the DMA'S hotline. Here are some words that rhyme with dawning: warning, warning, warning, warning, warning

If I'm being honest, this album helped start to win me over with DMA'S. There's a handful more singles that made the list still to come, and I found the title track "For Now" to be a big stand out at the time. It's absolutely steeped in '90s nostalgia but it's the kind of re-creation that stands on its own with a lot to like about it.

This song is harder for me to extend the interest towards. In some regards it's more off-putting than something like "Criminal" because it's the sort of song that tries to tell me that they've got another dozen of these in their pocket and this was somehow the best one of them. I think the mixing is the biggest issue though. It probably sounds fine live, but the studio version is just flattened all the way through and it kills all the energy, you're just left with a deeply unsatisfying rhyme scheme in the chorus.

#912. 360 (feat Pez) - Live It Up (#75, 2014)

92nd of 2014

There's something quaint about this entry. Like if we're splitting up the Hottest 100 into 10 years sections, then 360 and Pez belong firmly in the back end of the 2003-2012 one. They both had their first entry together with "The Festival Song" in 2008, and then both had their last entry to date in 2014 with "Live It Up". It's like 360's last album was so big that he was destined to slip through like this on the next one. If you look back at it though, 360's 2014 album "Utopia" was a huge success. It debuted at #2 behind Lana Del Rey, and hung around in the top 50 for 14 weeks, that's way more than any Australian album has done in 2024. It actually had 3 top 40 singles, including the second run with Gossling, "Price Of Fame", which I think would've made this list if triple j played it more at the time.

The other single is probably the most interesting one. Much like Muse had done so a couple years ago, 360 made his big return with dubstep beats. But it wasn't just his return, because the single "Impossible" also featured Daniel Johns from Silverchair. He had done work behind the scenes in the interim, but hadn't put out anything with his voice on it since 2007 when Silverchair's last album came out. This would have been a huge single if it was at all well-received, which it wasn't. If it was just 360 on his own he might have been able to get away with it, but the Daniel Johns hype made it fall way too short of expectations. So I say that it's the first single from the album, but really it's one of those songs where the message was delivered and it got snuck away into the deluxe version. Most of the album tracks have more streams than it on Spotify.

If I'm being honest though, going back to "Impossible" nowadays, I have a slight bit more fondness for it. It's fascinating to see what gets thrown at the wall, but not quite as jarring as I remember at the time. It's preferable to this, where it's hard to imagine it having any less in the way of surprises. The last 360 & Pez collaboration of note (they've teamed up about 10 times now), "Just Got Started" was built on a Whitest Boy Alive sample and has one of Styalz Fuego's best hooks. It's a breezy, good time. This one just seems worse in every way. I recall being so disappointed when this made the cut because it just doesn't feel like there's anything to reward in this.

#911. Kanye West - Hurricane (#44, 2021)

92nd of 2021

This is the elephant in the list. There are so many Kanye West songs in this list, and depending on who you ask, most of them come after the fact that he became so far gone as to not be taken seriously, respected, tolerated or what have you. I'm writing this years later when he's managed to take that all even further and it's gotten to the point that I largely avoid acknowledging him. It sucks that it's come to this, because I've previously been a very outspoken fan of his music, and found a lot of strength through his lyrics of perseverance and self-empowerment. I cannot in good conscience endorse his music anymore. I'm more lenient than most people on these sorts of things, but there has to be a limit on giving benefit of the doubt.

I will still rank his entries as I see fit on this list. I don't see much value in say, dropping all of the problematic entries at the very bottom to make a point, because then it feels like you're ranking atrocities. I also considered just leaving all of his entries blank but that's not very interesting to me either. Compared to other artists with loads of entries, at the very least it's usually easy to write about Kanye's music. Whether for better or worse, it's provocative, it gets the people going, all that. I know me writing this doesn't change anything, but it would feel strange to just talk about Kanye West and not bring it up, as if to hide my shame and tacitly endorse it.

Anyway, Kanye has a lot of entries from "Donda" so it makes this first one easier to skim over quicker, even if it is the big hit from the album. None of the singles from this album have official credits, so it's touch & go if I'm even able to say what they are. This time I can, because it's The Weeknd & Lil Baby. A common trend with a lot of songs on "Donda" is that Kanye is not especially present on them, ironically giving way more airtime to his uncredited guests. He doesn't show up on this song until the 2 minute mark, halfway in, then after a minute long verse, he's gone and The Weeknd finishes it off.

It's easy to be cynical and say that the guest list is what made this a hit. The Weeknd & Lil Baby were both practically at the peak of their powers when this song came out. I can see how it would work for others though. The Weeknd comes in with a pretty powerful chorus that's backed well by the instrumental chords. It's just never clicked for me to enjoy it very much. Kanye has evoked this sort of church choir vibe (sometimes literally) so many times and it's something that has definitely worked for me. This one just has me pining for better options.