#785-#781

#785. Meg Mac - Something Tells Me (#76, 2019)

73rd of 2019

You saw the numbers here, this is only slightly less popular than "Blinding Lights" (#786). That's the unmentioned part of the equation there, that song being released right at the end of November makes for terrible Hottest 100 timing. By the time the countdown aired, everyone and their mother knew that it was way too low. But still, that gives a lot of artists bragging rights that they beat The Weeknd. Not Meg Mac, but she's not far off.

"Something Tells Me" has the sound of Meg Mac with a bigger budget. There's a charm to her early hits, but a voice like this needs the right setting to pull off the gravitas. This song was written with the songwriter we previously called Paige IV, but more often Sarah Aarons, and has more of her instinct for pacing. Not one that stands out a lot in the Meg Mac catalogue but it all mostly works. Really it's just the slight wordless clunk of a hook I have a problem with, sounding like she's either filling time, or can't remember the err uhh next line.

#784. Ocean Alley - Happy Sad (#100, 2018)

82nd of 2018

I didn't properly get to hear this on Hottest 100 day. For whatever reason, the Perth broadcast took several minutes to go live and by then the song was just about over. I grew a little spiteful of this song later on when I found out that King Princess's "Talia" landed at #101. I prefer that song over the two that made it, and it's funny to think that Ocean Alley & King Princess could've been tied at 3 entries each if the votes went a little differently, rather than 4 and 2. That being said, if it was the #100 song instead, then it certainly would've been over before I even got to hear it, so you just can't win sometimes.

Ocean Alley are an extremely easy band to make fun of because it's such low hanging fruit, and who's honestly going to come at you for it? This song even serves it up for you, 'It could've been good, it could've been great', your words, not mine, Ocean Alley. This five and a half minute slow jam is doing nothing to convince any doubters. At the same time, it's hardly their most prominent song so it's not gonna catch any specific heat, but me personally, I had a lot of my ire specifically towards this one.

I couldn't tell you when in my dozen or so listens that this started to click a bit with me, just that hey, the system works. I guess I appreciate that "Happy Sad" straddles between being a jam session and a functional pop song. Maybe both of those aspects come at odds with each other, but there's a decent enough effort on both sides of the fence to give me something to look forward to.

#783. G Flip (feat Lauren Sanderson) - GAY 4 ME (#11, 2022)

80th of 2022

I hate to have to make this the preface but it's probably important context. I'm a cis straight man. There's no getting around it. I tend to find that in a lot of the groups I hang out with online, this default character profile is something of a novelty, and I do find a lot of the time that my general interests line up a lot with those of people on the LGBTQI+ spectrum. I also recognise that a lot of them are generally younger than me and maybe then the thought occurs that times have changed a lot since I was growing up, and maybe a younger version of myself would have spent more time mulling over this particular identity dilemma. But the person I am now? No dysphoria, no reason to think of myself as the wrong version of my true identity.

But actually the more damning problem I have is a complete lack of romantic experience. I've got a bad hand and I accept that. Maybe one day the right person will come into my life and change that, but I'm pretty doubtful. It means I have no space for commentary on any songs about relationships that go beyond obvious platitudes. I hear a song like future Hottest 100 #1 "Good Luck, Babe!" and to me it sounds like toxic, desperate gaslighting, but I have to defer to everyone else who loves it to assure me that it's describing a very real phenomenon. If there was something wrong with it, I sure would have heard about it by now.

Case in point, the only time I ever see this particular song brought up is to point out what a horrible misfire it is. A song calling out a supposedly straight person for not accepting their actual identity. Management is frantically trying to tell me that these are two drastically different pictures and I'm so confused.

If the only problem people had with this song was the way it sounds, that's something I can understand better. I'm not fully on that train of thought but I can see where they're coming from. This is a drastically different sound for G Flip than I'm used to. Post-dubstep pop rock that's as much 360's "Impossible" as it is Imagine Dragons' "Radioactive". G Flip had made a lot of songs that didn't stand out much before this (feel like in general there's a lot more to dig into with their huge 2023 haul than the few years before it), so I was taken aback by it. Listening to it now, I wish they went a bit harder on the guitars. Just fully commit to this sludgy mess of a sound. Also Lauren Sanderson is here. I don't know much about them except that they don't sound different enough to G Flip to really stand out when their verse starts. You could've convinced me that she's just the text-to-speech voice near the end of the song. Still, it's just a weird song to listen to when I'm clearly listening to a conversation where I have nothing to add to it.

#782. Meg Mac - Give Me My Name Back (#59, 2018)

81st of 2018

It might surprise you to know that Meg Mac's entire discography barely makes it over the 2 hour mark. That's with 3 albums, an EP, and various loose singles here and there. The reality is that she really doesn't stuff her albums at all. Both "Give Me My Name Back" and "Something Tells Me" come from her second album that's barely an album at all, with just 7 tracks. Her two full length albums are not much longer either. It's amusing to imagine that the #9 debut on the ARIA Charts for this project was a blip due to it being stunted from this distinction (her other two albums debuted at #2 & #1). With nothing on "Matter Of Time" getting over the line, these two songs may well be her final Hottest 100 entries.

Me ranking both songs very close together is not some admission of them being cut from a similar cloth. They're back to back on the album but it could hardly be less true in this case. "Something Tells Me" was a jaunty, upbeat affair. Here it's dark and brooding, befitting of the song's harrowing message of empowerment to victims of abuse.

I want to say it mostly succeeds but I think the production holds it back a little bit. There's a touch too much emphasis on the fuzzy bass that makes it somewhat reminiscent of that Lorde song I've half talked about (#955). It feels a little dated in 2018 to be trying that out. With this, all I can think about is how I know Meg Mac has had this worked out better elsewhere in that slim discography.

#781. Spacey Jane - It's Been a Long Day (#5, 2022)

79th of 2022

We've finally made it to the real deal Spacey Jane material. I'd say welcome to the incomprehensible ranking show, but maybe I should be the one judging the lists. A lot of how their songs have ranked over the years doesn't have much coherence to me, and maybe they're the wrong ones. In 2022 they polled six different songs, mostly all singles with an especially rare standing to get three of them in the top 10. There must be something special with those entries in particular. It's like in 2005 when Wolfmother polled six songs, and right up the top were obviously "Mind's Eye" and "Joker and the Thief"...but also "Apple Tree". Never really made sense of that one but perhaps you needed to be there. I feel the same about "It's Been a Long Day".

Well maybe not to the same degree as "Apple Tree", I just don't think it does quite enough to make it stand out in the Spacey Jane catalogue. We're docked points straight away for the title drop that opens the song. This is where I gesture loudly to what I said about Panama's "Always" (#856). I'm not always a fan of Caleb's lightweight singing style, and that's probably the worst second of it on display.

There's definitely some merit to the lyrics. It's a song where someone's identified their own downward spiral, and potential desire for assistance, but also doesn't want to be a burden or to bring the other person down with them. The video does a decent job at visualising it. I wonder if it was partially inspired by "Better Call Saul", because I'm strongly reminded of the cold open to the episode "Something Stupid". Sharing screen time for mundane actions like brushing teeth but feeling so distant at the same time. Some of the cuts jumble it up a little, but when it works, it's really effective. Also any excuse to bring up one of the 10 TV shows I know.

#790-#786

#790. Tash Sultana - Notion (#32, 2016)

81st of 2016

It's difficult to escape the comparisons to the John Butler Trio career arc. In 2016 Tash Sultana polls two songs, both fairly drawn out but catchy enough to defy the rules. The higher of the two becomes something of a signature song, and in the years that follow, we get numerous attempts to re-capture that hit in a more radio friendly way. We're talking about two songs where it takes roughly 2 minutes before any vocals appear on the record. It's something I suspect might be streaming poison to keep doing. I'm just imagining having "Notion" come on and someone could easily believe that it's a deep cut by Daughter, or more likely, jump out early because it just appears to be an instrumental for quite some time.

This song is not streaming poison at all, and I might go so far as to say it's the proto-typical Tash Sultana song. Helps that it's the title track to their first EP, all 6 tracks and 40 minutes of it. The only thing really holding it back is that it doesn't strike me as very ambitious once it gets going. The mood-setting intro is immediately the highlight and it just mostly stagnates until a guitar solo towards the end. Other than that, the main thing I remember is another instance of a very unsatisfying rhyme (gestures towards "Fire and the Flood" (#988)). Maybe there's a case I'm not thinking of where it works, but I look at notions/ocean rhyme on the chorus and it just feels unsatisfying. Like, you're just feeding us back the first word with a letter chopped off. Sheer stupid pedantry, but it's not a payoff to me.

#789. London Grammar - Baby It's You (#76, 2020)

74th of 2020

As time has gone by, one of the most peculiar aspects of popular music is the way that the albums chart has gone from a definitive popularity measure, to some sort of rout, to a vague combination of the two that's become even more confusing. If something is genuinely ruling the country, it'll get its flowers in perpetuity, but it'll be mixed in with two whole different breeds at the same time. In Australia and the UK, The Weeknd has possibly the biggest album of the decade, a hits package that's since gotten an expansion pack and charts in the top 10 pretty much every week. On raw numbers, it's justifying itself. It makes a decent showing on vinyl sales but in general, it's there because a lot of people are streaming The Weeknd's most popular songs every day. Ironically though, it's never gotten to #1, often because it's being blocked by albums that sell a lot of copies in one week (or even one day), and immediately drop off the face of the earth. These kinds of pseudo-popularity forms are always at battle, and the latter usually wins. I say they win because the shorthand for judging success continues to be peak positions. So much effort is expended to immortalise it, regardless of what happens in the long run.

With that in mind, the difference between a successful campaign and otherwise is massive, and with London Grammar we've seen it first-hand. You might not realise it, but their 3rd album "Californian Soil", which this song would eventually appear on is the band's only Australian #1. Their debut album spent 10 times longer in the chart but suffered from releasing alongside an album that might have a genuine case for being the most popular of the decade. What's more startling though is that London Grammar's next album, released last year, peaked at #79 in Australia. Sometimes this can be the result of a staggered campaign, for instance a late vinyl release (Here I am looking at the Lizzy McAlpine album last year), but it's not the case here. Something must have gone wrong in the promotion because London Grammar did about 1/5th the numbers of the previous album in pretty much all metrics. In saying all that, "Californian Soil" only debuted at #54 on the Spotify album chart despite being the #1 album in the country, dropping to #139 on the second week. You could argue that it's a more accurate showing without the mighty sales buffer. Still, in a world where many artists chug along with no new hits but a cozy #1 debut every few years, it's hard to fathom a harder, more random collapse.

For all that being said, it's not even the first big drop off that London Grammar had. They had everyone in the palm of their hand with their first album. Lots of songs I'll eventually be talking about. If that's not enough, they even complimented that with one of those songs becoming a very big crossover hit in Australia. They had every opportunity to continue being the next big thing and then just didn't. Their second album came out 4 years later and sold quite well, but for the Hottest 100, they barely slid in at #197, the kind of decline that suggests they were just done serving the general population. Luck was on their side in 2019 that they got to work with Flume and score a surprise new hit, and it seems that helped bring them enough favour to return to the Hottest 100 one last time with this song a year later.

Working with Flume may have influenced the sound on this song. Really it sounds a lot like a Vallis Alps throwback, but it's leaning into the band's electronic side in a way you don't usually see. In the context of the album, it sticks out a little bit, but the song never really goes overboard with it so it's not especially jarring. Listening to the album in full, there have always been a couple of songs I took away from it but it's hard to escape the feeling of stagnation, like outside of "Baby It's You", they're not sure where to take their sound and it's a lot of rehashing familiar ground.

One of the riskiest things you can do for your career is to take a very long time between albums. The moment people realise they can go on just fine without your music, is the moment that you've permanently shed a fanbase. For me it's worked well with London Grammar. Every new album cycle, I get re-introduced and get at least some morsel of a treat to enjoy. Hannah's vocal prowess is obviously the main event of the group and she has more than a few ways of making it catch you off guard. "Baby It's You" I don't think does it full justice. Another song that's permanently stuck in first and second gear and never really reaches the wow factor.

#788. SAFIA - Embracing Me (#23, 2015)

75th of 2015

Ignoring everything I just wrote, I don't feel the need to dive over the whole SAFIA history right here. As far as we're concerned, it's all contained in this time frame. A very exact one at that, from 2013 to 2016. The hits dried up very suddenly after that, but while they were making waves, they were very reliable. Maybe that was the SAFIA story all there anyway, we'll see.

Jumping back to 2015, SAFIA had not yet released an album, a very similar situation with their fellow Canberrans Peking Duk. A couple of Peking Duk & SAFIA collaborations will eventually appear on this list. Unlike them though, SAFIA did eventually release an album, and "Embracing Me" was the lead single from it, although I often forget that because it came out over a year earlier.

As someone who was pretty into them at the time, SAFIA had a way of turning every new single into an event around this time. Full support of the board in my eyes while having absolutely no idea what you were going to get. When songs are especially unique like that, I'm always going to remember hearing them the moment they were first unveiled to the listening public. Songs like "Born This Way" by Lady Gaga, or "The Last Man On Earth" by Wolf Alice. I can add "You Are The One" by SAFIA to that pile, and I can speak in high praise as it's the only SAFIA single from this era that didn't poll here. It's the song I most liken to "Embracing Me". Two songs that open up quietly, and let Ben show off his singing chops for about a minute before the drop finally comes in. It's not a total rehash, and on a good day, I might even say that "Embracing Me" pulls it off better. We've got a really solid 50 seconds going on...

I don't like the drop at all. It's a whole lot of bleeps and chopped vocals. It's not a disaster, I think they pulled off what they were trying to do without any metaphorical hiccups, but it's just not anything I want to hear. To make matters worse, it forms the skeleton of the track for most of the rest of it going forward. For such an exciting build up, we just get no real payoff. If you're willing to overlook the creepy lyrics, 'Like embracing me' just isn't a stunner of a hook. It sounds more desperate and cloying with how many times it's repeated.

#787. Haim - Want You Back (#47, 2017)

82nd of 2017

The Hottest 100 reinforces the idea that a lot of people jumped off the Haim ship after their debut album. This is the only song they've polled after that big year for them in 2013. Certainly if you were to compare them to, let's pick London Grammar and SAFIA as two random artists, the album by album stream decline they've got on Spotify is pretty respectable. Maybe it helps when you've gotten a piece of fortune in the stock of eventual Hottest 100 entrant Taylor Swift. As a band that never truly took control of the charts in their home country of America, the collaboration "no body, no crime" might be the only song a lot of people know from them.

I probably could have been one of those people who bought the debut album and then lost interest afterwards, but they have a habit of really catching me off guard sometimes. They're unlucky not to have another entry here collaborating with a certain Scottish DJ on a song I still have a lot of love for a decade later. They've got a small part with a cavalcade of very cool and random names on a "Hunger Games" soundtrack song I love, and then when I thought I'd heard everything from them, the song "3am" from their latest album just floors me. I don't think anyone ever asked for R&B Haim but it works so much better than you'd expect. It was their 7th most popular song in the past year on last.fm (even higher if you include the Thundercat remix probably), so it's not just me going rogue.

I don't have quite the same enthusiasm for "Want You Back". I can see why they went with it as a lead single but it feels almost a little too safe. I recall finding myself more drawn to the super catchy follow up single "Little of Your Love", but in general I feel like the middle section of the album gets into a pretty likeable groove. All the pieces are there for this one, it just doesn't stick the landing.

#786. The Weeknd - Blinding Lights (#71, 2019)

74th of 2019

Answering the question of what the biggest hit song of all time is, is a fruitless endeavour. You want there to be an answer. There are so many cases of two individual songs in isolation where one is objectively more popular without dispute, so a definitive answer must exist. All you can really do in the end though is pick a particular metric to measure. Whether it's sales, radio airplay, a well-sampled poll, you'll probably find something that feels right in that way, but wrong in another. To take sales as an example, you wind up with Elton John's "Candle In The Wind 1997" single usually. Makes sense contextually, but it's not a satisfying answer. Not a lot of people continue to rave about that record, it's hardly Elton's signature song, and realistically, isn't even his signature version of that particular song. If you're looking for something more agreeable, that ticks a wider variety of boxes, and actually feels like a satisfying answer to that question, "Blinding Lights" is not a bad option.

You're probably aware of this one. Released in late 2019, sounded like a hit, and when the Christmas season got out of the way, it very much lived up to that, decimating the charts everywhere as almost undoubtedly the biggest hit of 2020. For about half a century, the biggest hit song of all time on the Billboard Hot 100 was Chubby Checker's version of "The Twist". It had two runs at being the hottest dance craze of the time which allowed for it to unthinkably become a #1 smash hit in two separate runs. Billboard weights its all-time lists with respect to different eras' standards, so while "The Twist" may have only spent 39 weeks on the Hot 100, it was so ahead of the pack that every record breaking smash hit in the '90s/'00s/'10s just could not compete. This was until "Blinding Lights" became the song to unseat it. Surprisingly it only spent 4 weeks at #1 on the Hot 100, due to an utterly tumultuous period for the chart where anyone and everyone was making a joke of the top spot with sales gimmicks taking over for what probably should have been months upon months of domination for The Weeknd. A better way to visualise the domination though is to say that previously the record for weeks in the top 5 was 27, tied by The Chainsmokers' "Closer" and Ed Sheeran's "Shape Of You". "Blinding Lights managed 43 weeks. Australia did manage to let it run rampant for 11 weeks at the top. Smash hits either side of it from Tones And I and Glass Animals (both will appear on this list eventually) slightly overshadow it, but it's a fairly strong innings. Oh and it's also comfortably the most streamed song of all time on Spotify, that's got to give it some credit in the 'This is the song that is liked by the most people' stakes. Its 500 million play lead only extends every single day, so for the time being, it's not going to change any time soon.

The song is fine. Can you tell I find it more interesting talking about chart achievements than about this song in particular? I've always preferred "Heartless", the song he put out a couple of days before this one. More Metro Boomin & Illangelo team ups in my Weeknd discography please. Love the video too, just oozes with chaotic fun. "Blinding Lights" is a more standard procedure kind of fun. Max Martin ticking the boxes of carefully planned fun that just don't stand out quite as much as his earlier masterpieces as pop music has come to better form itself around his standard. Not to mention, a-ha already created the most iconic synth riff of all time, anything else that comes for the crown in such an obvious way as this does, is gonna be viewed relatively unfavourably. With a few exceptions, I'm surprised more people don't see The Weeknd as an extremely generic pop star. So many of his biggest hits are songs that anyone could have made. His Hottest 100 catalogue is extremely frustrating as a result.

#795-#791

#795. PNAU - Go Bang (#7, 2017)

83rd of 2017

Since early on in 2017, Australian songs have had a hard time reaching the ARIA top 10. The last one to do so just squeaked over the line at #10 for a single week before quickly falling back in line. That's been a common pattern too. Occasionally you'll have outliers like "Be Alright" (#986) but even they've become so few and far between that on most weeks, the best-selling Australian single is "Riptide" (#885) once again. There are just so few opportunities now for local artists to amass the staggering concurrent audience size needed to reach that level. triple j's Hottest 100 is one of the very few things we've got, and it's why "Go Bang" reached the ARIA top 10 for a single week. Not counting a guest feature on a ZAYN single by an artist who will eventually appear on this list a couple of times, the last Australian song in the top 10 was "Chameleon" (#851) almost a year prior. PNAU were doing some seriously heavy lifting for the rest of the team.

The title of 'Highest polling PNAU song' has changed hands 4 times. It was a real shock when "Embrace" was finally unseated by "Chameleon", but then perhaps a bigger one when this song went just that little bit higher, netting them their only ever top 10 finish. It's weird because this is the follow-up hit which lives to be in the shadows, but maybe "Chameleon" achieving further success beyond the polling cut off re-installed the drive to vote for PNAU in these things. Or maybe like me, people just like this one more. You can protest and point to the Hottest 100 of the 2010s, where "Chameleon" polled at #149 and "Go Bang" didn't make an appearance, but I'd argue that given the nostalgic lean of those poll results, it wasn't a fair fight to begin with.

This song feels to me like they found a successful formula with Kira Divine, and now figure they can build off of that into something new. "Chameleon" is a song that largely settles into its own groove and lets Kira take it from there. This takes the sometimes stale piano house trend and gives it a real kick into action. So much of it is the same chord played over and over again but it really elevates things. I did end up rating all of the PNAU entries pretty close to each other, it's really a matter of finding those slight variations on the formula and weighing them up. On a positive note that I didn't get around to mentioning before, Kira Divine actually is credited on all the relevant songs on most of the relevant platforms (YouTube remains unchanged). Better late than never.

#794. FISHER (feat MERYLL) - Yeah The Girls (#68, 2022)

81st of 2022

Speaking of formulae, FISHER mixed it up this time. No, the music still sounds like what you'd expect, but in 2022 he managed to poll two songs at the same time. This means I can look at their respective positions as an examination of their individual merits, rather than just an annual check-in with how FISHER stock is trending. I like this one less, ergo the polling position makes sense to me.

It did have me wondering about the titular phrase. Usually when you get these sorts of things immortalised in song titles, they're somewhat fresh and current, but it was pretty antiquated by the time this song came out. From what I can see, people have been using the phrase 'yeah the boys' for a very long time, but it was specifically around late 2016, with the proliferation of a Facebook group of the same name that the phrase really took hold in Australia. It really captures a certain set of low effort lad culture memes that I feel the internet has collectively moved away from. In any case, the gender flipped term here showed up shortly after with slightly less negative connotations.

I'm uncertain if MERYLL, the Dutch singer on this song, was familiar with the phrase before recording it. It appears that she didn't actually meet FISHER in person until 2023, and she wrote the song as a topline with the UK producer Bad Milk, and then it just ended up in FISHER's hands (or maybe someone else's? Let's save that story for a FISHER blurb I'm having trouble filling out) afterwards. MERYLL is typically a hardstyle vocalist and said in advance of the release that this was her branching out into something totally different. She's not so much singing on this song as she is regaling us with a mundane story. There's probably a shout out to "Can't Feel My Face" (#839). That song only peaked at #12 in Spain where the song takes place, so maybe it's just slightly more novel to hear it in that setting. The Weeknd's only #1 hit in Spain is "La Fama", his 2021 collaboration with Rosalía. The last actual line of the song is 'Girls on the game'. That's a phrase I can't see having been picked up outside of video games, but I wonder if FISHER extrapolated the title from it, giving the song a more viral launching point.

It's a solid groove but it doesn't move me much. Eventually I'll be able to pinpoint the little parts of FISHER songs that really click with me, but we're doing the bare minimum at the moment.

#793. Halsey - Hold Me Down (#42, 2015)

76th of 2015

Halsey was always destined for big things. Anyone who's managed to lock down a considerable audience before playing the radio game just has a huge head start. This song comes from Halsey's debut album which entered the ARIA Albums Chart at #2, this was months before Halsey ever had a top 50 single as a guest, and years before they had one as a lead artist. That's a big pulsating sign that's telling the record label 'Hey, this is a good investment you've got here'.

triple j had hopped onto the Halsey train a few months before that, so they may have played a part in that strong opening. It's where the station's idiosyncrasies come into play here. This song was Halsey's highest entry that year. It's because it's one of just two songs that got played substantially at the time. Whatever you think about "New Americana" or "Gasoline", they didn't really get a shot here. It makes this feel like a temporary stop gap. Halsey's on weighted training clothes until they go on to bigger things. For whatever reason, that didn't especially happen. A couple more of their songs in later years would end up in a similar position to this, but only one Halsey song landed substantially higher, in the top 20. So the dust has settled and this is still one of their biggest entries. Odd, that.

It's not a song that's felt like it's a star maker. If you're already into Halsey, then sure, but there's very little in the way of mind-blowing charisma or intrigue to it. It all feels very cold, slow and mechanical. I'll admit I had prerequisite disadvantage here. About a year before this song came out, there was a minor Australian hit song by KYA & LDN Noise, called "What I Live For". That song has the exact same hook at the end of its chorus as this, and with it being rather pulsating, just adds to this song feeling sluggish and tired by comparison. This gets a fairly standard passing grade.

#792. Olivia Rodrigo - traitor (#67, 2021)

82nd of 2021

2021 has always felt like a big turning point year for the Hottest 100. It's the year where TikTok solidified itself as the breaker of every hit song going forward, and it spilled through to triple j. A lot of the usual old suspects are shoved down the pecking order, and what we got to replace them were 5 Doja Cat songs and 5 Olivia Rodrigo songs. That alone is enough to leave a sour impression on some old heads hoping to have the pop hit machine filtered away from their periphery. Olivia Rodrigo especially might just be the breaking point. You can throw in past justifications for other artists where they made their name on triple j, but you really can't with Olivia. She's a former Disney star who had her first proper single (which I'll get to eventually) debut at #1 before she turned 18. There are no hard yards to be seen here.

Olivia tends to get a pass because most people seem to like at least some of her music. She's something of a genre hopping machine which in some cases has brought some very unexpected sounds to the top end of the charts. I've generally liked her music but I always find the albums a bit patchy. I do respect that she doesn't just bloat them for streaming stats. Thanks to this, you could make the argument that "SOUR" deserves commendation as the most streamed album of all time, because its least streamed song has over 350 million streams, more than any other album I think.

This was clearly demonstrated when the album was released, and Olivia's very small discography was vastly outweighed by the demand for her music, so people just kept listening to it over and over again. There are only a small handful of albums that have managed to land their entire track list in the ARIA top 50. Every song on "SOUR" charted for at least 4 weeks.

A lot of people don't like when whole albums dominate the singles chart. I think it's great. With so much general movement controlled by radio playlists, streaming playlists, algorithms, or in the past, the measurable visibility of a track on the iTunes front page, it's refreshing to see those mechanics interrupted by the true voice of the people. Most of those songs aren't part of that assembly line so you get to see something close to organic movement. Something it also does is gives you a chance to watch the relative popularity of different tracks in real time. It might start off being influenced by what's at the top of the track list, but before long, it's a question of how many people saved and replayed certain favourites, and the real picture shows itself.

It's why I found myself rooting for "traitor" at the time. Just like "Too Good" (#929), it was an album track that launched itself very high on the charts. In its second week, it climbed up to #5, overtaking one of Olivia's actual singles, and it stuck around in the top 10 for a good while after that too. Ironically it wasn't until it became a single that it started slipping out of the charts, and it makes sense. I've had times when I've owned an album, and a single release has shined a light on a deeper cut that I wasn't paying attention to at the time ("Teenagers" by My Chemical Romance comes to mind), but you just can't do it with this album. Everyone had already heard it all, the era of 'hey, here's the new single, start listening to that' has never felt more dead and buried.

Did I actually like "traitor" though? I think I did at the time. As was the case with most of her songs, it showed a new side that sounded fresh. It's all very silly and melodramatic. Taking a friend to task because they patiently waited until after Olivia broke it off to start dating her ex that there were clearly feelings for beforehand. It's the emotional maturity of Tony Soprano yelling to his therapist because his nephew started getting intimate with the woman he decided not to sleep with. Ain't it funny? I prefer to keep this one as a deep cut. The rest of her entries here have a bit more going for them.

#791. Kingswood - ICFTYDLM (#56, 2014)

77th of 2014

If you've never heard this song before and don't plan on changing that, I'll get it out of the way: It stands for 'I can feel that you don't love me'. Maybe you could figure that out anyway. Some conversational acronyms have a way of solving themselves, like we all have predictive text simmering inside of us. Actually I find it's much harder to decipher words when they're spelled out to you in quick fashion, it's too much to process when they spell out 'S-E-N-T-I mentality' in the first verse. But that's got nothing on "Party Started" by The Cat Empire, major props if you could keep up with the bridge on that song. I finally gave up this year and looked it up.

The Kingswood story is that of an occasionally raucous band who seemed to mostly only poll while at their most mellow. They've since taken that a step further and landed on a more country-twinged sound. The fandom hasn't quite followed with them, but they did manage to rack up 5 entries here along the way, so they've got a healthy showing.

As a fan of that raucous energy, this one puzzled me a bit. The most interesting thing about it is the title, while you're generally being robbed of any payoff to anything exciting here. Time has been a little kind to it. It reminds me a little of a 2013 song by a band that'll eventually appear here, operating on a similar scope of ideas. Not sure I'd ever want to try out the inferior product, but I suppose a little variety can be nice.