#820-#816

#820. Thundamentals - I Miss You (#25, 2018)

85th of 2018

2018 was a fairly significant shifting point in the way that I discovered and listened to music. I'd graduated from university at this point and no longer needed to wake myself up with a triple j alarm every week. I kept up with triple j in every capacity except actually listening to it. I'd go down my own rabbit holes by that point and get flabbergasted when I missed the bigger picture. I mention this on a Thundamentals blurb as a prime example. I'd found my own comfort in their song "All I See Is Music", a song I still highly endorse as being extremely cozy. Hottest 100 comes around and two songs I'd barely noticed that year are the ones that get in for them, funny that.

I'll give it this though, I'm a fairly optimistic person about uncovering missed hits. My best reading of the sorts of people who get up in arms about the slowed down nature of the charts is something similar: You want there to be gems that you can dig out and enjoy. The very process of them getting this far is through the collective approval of thousands, so there's gotta be something in it.

"I Miss You" is my less preferred one of the two, but I can certainly see the appeal in it. It's very bouncy and quirky, with a chorus that more than passes the mark of having a hook every 6 seconds. I don't know if it was seen as an overly pop pivot but everything I've heard from this Thundamentals album strikes me with the desire to test the limits of their sound. It's not always going to work, I could give that acronym rhyming verse a miss, but it's a pass mark on the whole I think.

#819. Florence + The Machine - Ship To Wreck (#40, 2015)

81st of 2015

Between varying levels of success in different countries, and also the way that streaming has re-constructed the pecking order, it's hard to say what the most popular Florence + The Machine songs are across each album. The only thing I can say for sure is that I'm probably at odds with it in most cases. Not extremely so, otherwise we'd be breaking this suit sooner, but you tend to get more frustrated from artists you expect higher highs from.

Florence feels like a side character in this list. The vastly more revered parts of her catalogue are largely on the first two albums that come before, and we're left with the occasional remnants on the three albums that came after. Maybe this album shouldn't be seen that way, it was definitely a huge success at the time, but it doesn't seem to have gone the same distance over time. I don't think it's a bad album, and I have nothing but reverence for "Queen Of Peace" which regrettably does not appear on this list. I just can't imagine hearing "Ship To Wreck" and getting very excited about it.

The previous album "Ceremonials" set the stage for how it was going to play out. The first song out didn't really play as a single and was more for promotion, the second song was the clear single. Ironically, "What The Water Gave Me" actually slightly out-peaked "Shake It Out" although it's been vastly outsold since then. It felt like something similar was going on with this album. The first song (which will eventually be on this list) felt like a teaser and then the obvious single came out after. Once again, that first single charted higher.

"Ship To Wreck" feels almost too obvious. You're hit immediately with the glockenspiel hook and it's almost frustratingly cutesy. It drags the song back quite a few years with the sounds that it's emulating. It's balanced out by the usual excess you'd expect in a Florence + The Machine record but it's in support of something that never fully gelled with me. The chorus isn't super inspired either, with enough turns around to make you first think that 'Towreck' is a word, and then have it no longer sound like one.

#818. Ruel - GROWING UP IS _____ (#47, 2022)

84th of 2022

By remarkable coincidence I just watched "Sorry To Bother You" last night and the underscores have found a new way to amuse me. Maybe there needs to be a version of this song where he bleeps it out every time. The most fun I had with this song is when it was released and getting into debate about how many underscores are officially in the title and whether or not Ruel even consistently applied it. Five underscores seems to be the trick. In the song itself, the word that follows is either 'weird' or 'strange', until he gets to the end and doesn't finish it, so it could be any synonym you want. Bizarre, uncanny, abnormal, outlandish, madcap, the underscore's your oyster.

I've already mentioned Tame Impala not long ago and I wish I could get off of that, and this time I think I can. We're falling under the further subspecies where you'd categorise songs as sounding more akin to Post Malone's "Circles" (#883). Given my feelings on that song, it's not ideal, and it ruins everything in proximity of it. It's a surefire recipe to allow me to get sick of a song before I've even finished listening to it once. For what's supposed to be one of the Ruel songs that are acceptable to like, it really just isn't the recipe for me.

But it's not a failure by any stretch. If we look at the template it's running through, there's a good job done that I can get behind. The consistent drum pattern gets some strong focus, and goes well with the bass as well. It's a warm and cozy song like that. If I'm gonna compare it to Post Malone as well, Ruel is clearly a better singer, and I'm far more engaged with his version of angst. It's served him well too. A lot of teen heartthrobs don't last because they don't have the material after they're the flavour of the month, and their audiences are often far more discerning than given credit. It makes you think there might be many more years for come for him.

#817. L D R U (feat Paige IV) - Keeping Score (#22, 2015)

80th of 2015

We've had L D R U in these parts before. He was one half of Carmada who had their big hit "Maybe" (#855) just a year before this song came out. A lot of solo ventures have artists coasting on their established fandoms and getting scraps in comparison, but this one song here turned out way bigger than anything Carmada ever did. Every now and then you'll get a song that's building up at the right time to get a serious stimulus package from appearing in the Hottest 100 and this is one of them.

I haven't gotten to talk about Paige IV yet. She's probably the most peculiar piece of the puzzle because you wouldn't assume hiding behind this serviceable feature credit on a dance song is one of this country's most prolific hitmakers of the century, but here we are. This is the first and last time we'll see the name Paige IV, so I'll go by calling her Sarah Aarons from this point on. She'll be singing on another two songs that appear on this list, one as a mononym and the other uncredited, which all feels like it's playing into her true calling for writing top lines.

For those who don't pay as much attention to this stuff, top lines are kind of like the first draft of a vocal for an unreleased song. Writers and performers will share them around in the hopes of selling them to more popular artists and producers, who will then generally touch them up and likely replace the vocals with someone else. There's a whole heap of notable hit songs that were originally written and sung by Sarah. The one that I always think of is "The Middle", a song credited to Zedd, Maren Morris & Grey, but you can find early versions she made before any of those people had heard it and it doesn't sound too dissimilar to the finished product. It's netted her some serious industry buzz and she's kept doing it for a decade at this point. There are at least 10 songs on this list that she has a writing credit for, including one that landed at #1 on the Hottest 100. Also she only has one leg.

These humble beginnings are the first of any of those songs to appear though. It wasn't a song that had an easy time for me getting into it. It's a song that sounds very of its time, both in structure and the sonic template it uses. As seems to happen once every month or so on Bandle, it's a mid-2010s song that so convincingly just sounds like it's "Turn Down For What". It even follows through with the drop that feels like it's chucking out everything it can think of to make the runtime. It'd be too obvious and mean to say that this sounds unfinished, but L D R U had one more entry after this that I think succeeds in the formula better, so I feel like a better version of this song could exist. In fact it does, but that's for another blurb.

#816. Dominic Fike - Chicken Tenders (#84, 2020)

77th of 2020

I'm writing this before the 2024 Hottest 100 has happened so I could be treading on ice saying this (Edit: It is March 17th, 2025 and I can confirm the ice broke), but Dominic Fike's abject inability to make the Hottest 100 with anything other than this song is something to behold. He has a critical issue with having his songs be popular within their Hottest 100 eligibility window, but then even when they are, he still manages to miss out. His most famous song "3 Nights" landed at #145 on the Hottest 100, and then 3 months later was sitting at #3 on the ARIA Chart. Just a completely wasted opportunity.

This would be where I say that this is such an unassuming song to make it over the line but that'd be a lie from what I know from his discography. When I listened to his EP, I thought that outside of "3 Nights", there wasn't much to see in the track listing, a lot of rough and seemingly unfinished songs. One of those songs is "Babydoll" which has over 600 million streams despite feeling like a fragment of a song. He still regularly deals in songs that struggle to hit the 2 minute mark though so it clearly wasn't just a phase.

With that in comparison, "Chicken Tenders" is a fairly polished song. There's a glossy sheen to it that sticks out next to his typical bedroom pop/rock style production. It's not a full slam dunk though, he puts on a fairly strained inflection with his voice at times that's distracting, and the song is unavoidably called "Chicken Tenders" which just completes the unserious vibe.