#670-#666

#670. Meg Mac - Never Be (#11, 2015)

67th of 2015

At long last, it's a call back to 3 months ago. When I was talking about "Roll Up Your Sleeves" (#798), I mentioned that there was a second song Meg Mac performed at the 2023 Brownlow Medal ceremony. Give yourself a gold star if you remembered or figured that it had to be this song. This is another song I feel falls under a similar category to what I'd said about Boy & Bear (#732) and The Jezabels (#714). It's a song that's distinguished in hindsight by the fact that it reached the ARIA top 50, something no song of hers did before or since. At the time it makes you think that it's the inevitable reach of her rising stardom, but then in hindsight you have to start giving the song itself more credit. It's her highest polling song in the Hottest 100 by quite a distance, just missing the top 10 in what has to be seen as a pretty stacked year. Not to mention, look at some of the songs it beat!

The same thing always happens in these cases, where it takes quite a bit of effort to start assessing the song on its own merits. I've ended up more favourable to it than I initially expected. I don't think it necessarily has any fresh tricks up its sleeve, but it does feel like a strong culmination of what Meg Mac was doing at this point.

Definitely one of the funniest starts to a song even if it's unintentional. Just this incredibly nasal 'nah nah nah nah' before any music comes in. If you happen to have an mp3 copy of this song, try starting it at the 10.7 second mark and see just how much of a different impression you get going into it, because it's always the first thing I think of. It makes me forget how exciting the song actually is. Not the strongest hook, it lands a bit awkwardly with the unspoken semicolon before 'thank the lord'. I love the momentum rise on the way there though. Another one of those songs that spreads out its methods of attack and switches them up, giving you all the excitement of a house music drop except it's Meg Mac wailing about her past friend's mistakes or something like that. Really strong vocal runs too, and wouldn't you believe it, that first 10.7 seconds comes back on the final chorus and gives it some extra punch without being distracting.

#669. The Kid LAROI with Justin Bieber - STAY (#2, 2021)

73rd of 2021

Good to knock this one off. I would not have expected that my extended bit of never uttering the name of artists yet to appear on this list would clash with a surprisingly high need to reference Justin Bieber, but I'm freed from it at last. I'm nothing if not fallible so what you've seen up to this point is at least a handful of cases where I've forgotten the role he plays here for an instant and then gone back to fix it. Trust me though, it's very funny to go to my document that has everything I've ever written for this and have this be the very first hit for his name. Fret not as we've still no shortage of further cases just like it. I think in general I just totally forgot how high I ended up ranking this song.

Let's do the thing that I've apparently been pining to do for months and actually talk about Justin Bieber. This is to date his only appearance in the Hottest 100, and he's wasted no time by taking the runner up spot. Well, maybe he's wasted some time because it's taken 12 years of his music career to get to this point, but he's still plenty relevant up to now. The Justin Bieber story is one that's moved in all sorts of directions from year to year. It's only now that things have slowed down as he's having an extended period without releasing anything. As I'm writing this, he hasn't had a top 50 hit in 3 years, and outside of his annual 'shawty' stocking under the "Mistletoe" for Christmas, hasn't been in the chart for 2 years. "STAY" was his last to hold on because it's a song that very much lived up to its name.

I want to take it way back if only as a reminder of how far we've all come in this time. Go to 2009/2010. I've just finished high school, but I'm also still a child. Everyone who's ever topped the charts up to this point has been older than me, and it doesn't generally look like that's gonna change, until this precocious Canadian singer pops up and is immediately deemed to be a big deal. He's barely a year and a half younger than me but it's already enough of a sign that he's absolutely the enemy. Just the cherry on the top of awful music industry creations. It was a combination of herd mentality and a sheer visceral reaction to hearing his voice and the kinds of things that he sung but I hated him so immensely. For many people, that'll just amount to cringy social media posts, but for me, I made a (thankfully always obscure) website solely for making fun of him. I barely actually did do that on the website and it became more of an outlet for me to test out web development stuff, but it really is a time capsule of the moment. When I wasn't doing that, I was following a YouTuber's crusade against Justin Bieber, one who got into a hacking war with a pre-adolescent fan, which is an even higher level of stupid that might be best to be lost media although I can't help but want to re-experience something that was driving me that I'd absolutely never get involved with nowadays. You don't know how far you've veered off course until you actually measure out the accumulated distance. Or that's what I thought until just a few weeks ago that channel popped back up on my feed after over a decade of being suspended. I haven't dived into it, but that's another incredibly unlikely thing that's happened from me tempting fate.

Both I and Justin Bieber eventually became adults and it started to cool off a bit from there. I was highly anti-Bieber still for a few more years. In some respects it was more than that because I saw more and more people over time start to flip over to taking him seriously and thinking he was capable and delivering on actually making good music. I didn't really see it myself until occasionally in 2013, when he put out a more low key R&B project in such a way that we all ended up hearing it piece by piece. I thought some of those songs were actually pretty good. I suppose I was still cheating by only giving him credit when he was making music out of his wheelhouse, a classic way to rationalise dislike with an exception that still puts you above them.

It wouldn't be unreasonable to say that a lot of people had their Bieber conversion point at some time around 2015/2016. It was the point where on the charts, he went from something of an outsider from the Top 40 machine just boosted by his eager fanbase, to an artist with the general public completely ready to take him seriously, and a still active fanbase adding the numbers to take his smash hits and turn them into 'biggest hits of the year' kinds of smash hits. He probably should have had 3 straight #1 hits in this short span but the simultaneous release of Adele's "Hello" with his "Sorry" meant that he was stuck at #2 for one of them, not for any lack of trying. We've already tackled Halsey's cover of "Love Yourself" (#999), but I do think his takeover is best exemplified by his first #1 hit, "What Do You Mean?". It's the sound of him absolutely capturing the modern zeitgeist...arguably he was a little early to it, with a song that is so undeniably pleasant that it was probably the point in which I couldn't find myself to hate him anymore. He never ended up being the first artist with a #1 single that was younger than me, Reece Mastin beat him to it by about 4 years.

So I found myself pleasantly surprised with Justin Bieber's run of hits at that point, and it was a sign to be positive. Unfortunately, that combination of public approval and a strong fanbase also has its draw backs. From this point on, he was completely let loose on the charts with a level of ease that always made it feel like he had a handicap. After "Love Yourself", he's had 6 more #1 hits which includes two further stake-claimers for what becomes by far his biggest hit ever, eclipsing all else before it. First it was the "Despacito" remix, then it was "STAY".

My opinion on Justin Bieber soured in a different way. I didn't think that he was awful, spawn of Satan, that sort of thing. Instead I just felt like out of all the pop stars, he was the one who was prone to stinking up the charts the most due to his sheer regularity of putting out extremely mediocre singles that seemed to always chart higher than feels right. In 2020 it was probably an all-time low, where he had 6 pretty big hits and the most damning thing about it is that I might consider putting "Yummy" in the top half of those. "Stuck with U" is by a wide margin my least favourite of his big hits and really stinks up its own reputation as a charity single when you read the phrase 'all *net* profits'. I'd also say of those hits I think "Monster" is pretty good but then it's really Shawn Mendes' song and so I'm just deflecting the compliment again.

Apart from the lack of a break given, I didn't take as much issue with his run of hits in 2021. "Peaches" being the hit that it was, is still a bit strange to me but I like that he helped Daniel Caesar & Giveon get a #1 hit to their name. In general though if you ask me now, I don't have any issue with Justin Bieber in general. I can freely speak of him without coiling up. I can look back on some of his older stuff with more of an open mind. Teenage me would be mortified but I enjoyed "Baby" last time I heard it. I just wish he was held to a higher standard and he saw it through to make more stuff that's genuinely great, and less in the vein of just being a chart cheat code like his underwhelming contribution to the "Despacito" story that took a lot of limelight away from a song that was more than serviceable without him. There's a Billie Eilish moment that needs to be brought up at a later date with similar stakes, and honestly, there's also this song.

I am completely contributing to the very thing I was complaining about for spending so long talking about Justin Bieber on what is actually The Kid LAROI's song. My excuse is that this is Justin Bieber's only entry and The Kid LAROI has another one to come, so why not just get it out of my system. Even if I am being rational and optimistic, I don't think The Kid LAROI ever had quite the star power on his own to make this song as big as it ended up being. It might help that there isn't an original solo release of this song to compare it to, but I do think that Justin Bieber doesn't drag down the quality of this one. The two of them are fairly interchangeable so it's not quite the jump scare to hear Justin Bieber like it has been in the past.

While I'm making fun of my past transgressions, I've got another one. I heard this pretty much as soon as it came out on a New Music Friday playlist. I wasn't able to find any old tweets I had on the matter, but I distinctly recall posting something online to the effect of saying that I thought "STAY" being under two and a half minutes meant that it was a non-event that probably wouldn't trouble the charts. In case you forget what the winter, spring & summer of 2021/2022 were like, then I have to note that "STAY" managed 17 weeks at #1, making it the second longest running #1 hit of all time. It's only just recently been bumped down to having the 4th longest top 10 tenure of all time. "STAY" looked like it was done, but was still hanging around close enough that this Hottest 100 finish helped add the last 3 weeks to its reign. The Kid LAROI's next single "THOUSAND MILES" (#812) barely managed to outchart "STAY" for just its first 4 weeks, despite the fact that "STAY" debuted at #1 10 months prior to that song's release. Even to this day, "STAY" will occasionally get overtaken on the Australian Hip-Hop/Rap Singles Chart (I wouldn't really call it either of those things but alas), but anything that does it is always living on borrowed time. 4 years on from its release and "STAY" is still topping that chart. "STAY" even went to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, making The Kid LAROI still the last Australian artist to do so, you have to go back to Sia's "Cheap Thrills" in 2016 to find another one. We've all made bad predictions from time to time, but this one of mine really takes the cake, attempts to throw it in the bin from point blank range, and ends up eating it instead.

"STAY" comes at the end of an extensive campaign of promoting The Kid LAROI's first mixtape "F*CK LOVE". It was released, then extended and re-released two more times after that. Once it all wrapped up, it ended at 35 tracks long, but a little under 80 minutes, which if nothing else, makes my issue with the length of "STAY" a bit of a non-concern. It's actually longer than the average track here. It's situations like this that practically beg for a sophomore slump. I can't technically use that in the literal sense because The Kid LAROI released "The First Time" in late 2023 and that's technically his debut album, but it certainly feels like "F*CK LOVE" is his debut album in everything but the paperwork, and its stretched out release means that it's loaded with hits. You can't keep doing that because you have to start from scratch the next time and it'll never succeed to the same degree, especially since it's hard to imagine him ever having a hit of this stature ever again.

"STAY" is a very brushed up version of The Kid LAROI. No trap beats or endearingly unpolished drums, we're fully in the world of synth pop here. It's really tempting to draw the comparison to The Weeknd's "Blinding Lights" (#786) as two songs that operate in a similar lane, trying to create the next iconic synth riff. When the general public make similar songs into the biggest hits of 2020, 2021 and 2022 (I am dragging Harry Styles' "As It Was" into this conversation), you want to ignore the individual merits and read it as a solved formula.

I like "STAY" a bit more because I think it utilises its two vocalists a bit better. They get caught up into the higher tempo and play along with it well. Chopping a minute off the run time of "Blinding Lights" makes it harder to wear out on it, especially as it goes a little bit further to shift things around. The best part of the song is just after Justin Bieber's verse where we get a break from the synth line and instead just have The Kid LAROI multi-tracking himself in front of the drums. Then they bring the synth back and it's a satisfying release.

#668. Catfish and the Bottlemen - 7 (#19, 2016)

69th of 2016

I live in the most common time zone in the world. That's thanks in large part to China's universal time but it covers a lot of Southeast Asia as well. This is the case all year round as I also live in one of the two Australian states that don't observe daylight savings. The most drastic thing it's done in my life since moving here is that I usually don't know how to program my watch. I've even found when taking trips to different parts of the world that I'm just used to not adjusting the time and doing the calculation in my head. I used to have a watch that ran too fast by about 15 minutes and I adjusted for that too. It actually proved a great motivator to hurry up because that initial shock before the realisation kicks in can get you on your feet.

As someone who mostly engages online with people in different time zones, I almost never get to enjoy the fruits of my stubborn electorate. I'm either converting to Australian EST, American EST, or British time, and it's on me to keep track of when each country shifts back and forward an hour. I like this time of year because everyone's a little bit closer to me, but it would be much easier if I could safely keep track of it. I can't always trust looking things up because people have a habit of using the two names interchangeably, or you can find an accurate time online without it being made clear that it's not actually being observed at the moment. Ideally I would just schedule everything by saying it's in 'x' hours, although I understand few are as willing as me to do the mental maths.

In that regard, I've never related to Vann McCann more than the one line of this song that'd be a throwaway if it's not where the song got its peculiar title from. A song about long distance relationships and struggling to find a good time to call because of the sometimes forgotten time distance. I am incredibly bad at responding to direct messages I get while I'm sleeping and try to avoid doing the same to others, but I'll also admit that it becomes very likely that I'll just forget to send the thing waiting for a better time. I promise I'm not intentionally ghosting anyone; I just don't usually have my head straight immediately after waking up.

Pretty good song though. I do find myself docking points because it does my least favourite Catfish and the Bottlemen trick by breaking out of the singing cadence to make an aside. I just get unnaturally bothered by the 'I never want you' type lines that feel like they undercut the whole thing by association. Otherwise there's a good balance of tempo to this one. They also tease the chorus by offering a little bit more of it each time and I think it keeps the song sounding pretty fresh. I feel like my seemingly random preferences feel like contrarianism at times so it's refreshing to go out on an artist with what is their biggest hit in this context.

#667. Baker Boy (feat Bernard Fanning) - Wish You Well (#31, 2022)

67th of 2022

It's not something I'm usually interested in talking about, but if you had to ask me what my least favourite Hottest 100 winning song is, I will probably always say "Wish You Well". I came into triple j in 2006 and got engrossed in the sound of it at that time, so there might be some unfair bias against 2005 there, but I look at that result and it just feels so antithetical to what I'd grown accustomed to. I got into triple j because it offered a world of music I'd never encountered before that felt unique and intriguing. The winning song that year was Augie March's "One Crowded Hour", an odd literary musing that never loses its shine no matter how many times I hear it. It's just so much of a buzzkill to see that 12 months prior, the voting public couldn't get less adventurous. Awarding the lead singer of the band that already topped the poll twice before as he sets out to make the most instantly stale acoustic guitar jam. One that would easily take the mantle away from "Wonderwall" or "Taylor" if it was at all known overseas. No winning song feels quite as devoid of ambition as "Wish You Well" with its nauseating riff that never goes away. Generally I've liked Bernard Fanning's solo work otherwise, I think he has a gift for melody, finding those little nuggets that take the songs to the next level. Even as recently as last year he put out an album collaborating with another '90s triple j stalwart who will find his way onto this list at some point and I thought he still had everything working there. "Wish You Well" is just the weird one that doesn't evoke anything and yet is just about the most popular song he's ever written. It's hard to get a good measure on this because it wasn't eligible to chart in 2005, but according to a radio countdown on Nova in 2011, it was the 3rd best selling song of all time on iTunes from 2005, which suggests to me that it was probably a monster that never got its official flowers on the ARIA Chart. Powderfinger never charted higher than #4, and with how the charts operated then, I strongly suspect he could have surpassed that.

Anyway, I was forced to reface my demons in 2022 because Baker Boy decided to sample "Wish You Well" in his song of the same name. I had my hat of skepticism firmly on but I ended up being pretty content with the result of it. What really helps in all this is that it sounds like the result of me being on the committee for how the sample was utilised. It doesn't swallow up the song at all, which really is just feels like a Baker Boy song with a guest hook. All you get from the original song is the pre-chorus that comes in like a sudden plot twist, and then the chorus itself which graciously removes the grating guitar riff altogether. It's just such a thrill to isolate the problem in this way, remove it, and instantly fix most of my issues with the song. Maybe Bernard should have always recorded it with a band, I can think of 4 guys who'd go great with him.

It's also just a great fit in general for Baker Boy with his eternally good vibes. He's someone who I could never get annoyed at for wishing me well, and he remains a likeable presence all throughout this one. It might be a cheap saving throw from an artist who was struggling to poll at this point, but it works a lot better than a mission briefing of this kind tends to suggest.

#666. The Wombats - Greek Tragedy (#29, 2015)

66th of 2015

At some point in time this became The Wombats' most popular song. I'm not entirely sure when. Most clues point to a moment it had on TikTok 4 years ago, but there were signs before that. Still that's weird isn't it? This song came out a solid 8 years after a most popular Wombats song should have come out. That's like if Kaiser Chiefs had a huge in 2012, or Arctic Monkeys' most popular song was from...actually let's hold that thought. 

Still, we have this polling as a time capsule to suggest that it was well received at the time but not reaching its full potential. When it comes to belated virality, it's easy to be on the outside and decide 'oh, strange TikTok quirk', but I think it's too easy and unproductive to dismiss things on that level. I do think that the platform has made this sort of thing happen with greater regularity. In the past you had Chris Isaak's "Baby Did A Bad Bad Thing" going from a #27 hit in 1995 to a #9 hit in 1999 after it was remixed and included in Stanley Kubrick's last film "Eyes Wide Shut". It just took so many people working behind the scenes to set up these situations that it was a rarity. Now we've got older songs reaching new audiences every day to varying degrees. Most people won't even notice something on the scale of "Greek Tragedy" because it never reached any belated chart positions, but it's still notable in its own right.

With all that in mind though, it's simply a case where it has become a lot easier for songs old and new to reach a lot of ears simultaneously, and easier for that moment to be capitalised on. If you're on the outside, it's going to look like the mysterious past song ghoul is just picking things out of a claw machine at random (if you asked me a month ago which old Black Eyed Peas song was gonna be in the charts, I might need 15 guesses to get it), but I posit that it's always been like that. If you could manage to divorce yourself from the radio and TV cycles that drove hits in the past, it doesn't look much different. The picking and choosing feels just as random, and sometimes the timing is just bizarre. I see Regina Spektor's song "Fidelity" having a minor spell on the ARIA Chart about a year too late and it makes little sense other than it roughly coinciding with her being in the country. That feels no different to a TikTok moment for me.

The way I usually see it is that we're more likely to unlock potential out of these songs. That's especially obvious in the case of anything that no one in their right mind would think it was destined for big things (like say a "Space Song" by Beach House). It just creates a different kind of puzzle. For The Wombats, maybe "Greek Tragedy" always had this potential and it was just held back by people even more dismissive than me about the idea of listening to The Wombats in 2015 (I mean, I still did), keeping them in their late 2000s niche. This just flips the script where now "Let's Dance To Joy Division" is filling that role for anyone who heard this but isn't interested in diving deeper in their discography. You can have a winner, but it'll always feel transient because we can't make everyone listen to every song.

Anyway, "Greek Tragedy" is a pleasant track. A bit Wombats by the numbers but they know how to string you along for the runtime. Actually with that in mind it's surprising the vocals take a whole 40 seconds to even come through. I haven't checked their whole discography but it's a considerably longer wait than any of their other Hottest 100 entries. It also has a memorable music video starring April Pearson of "Skins" fame. I won't spoil it if you haven't seen it just that there's a content warning at the start of the video and it's not just because you get to see Murph taking a bath.

#675-#671

#675. The Amity Affliction - Soak Me In Bleach (#64, 2020)

60th of 2020

Every now and then you get those songs that just seem like realised versions of dumb jokes. You've got the budget and resources to get access to a classic song, why not just juxtapose the familiar tune with slightly different lyrics. A day before I wrote all this, I was made aware of LoCash's song "Isn't She Country", and I gotta say, it's no "Gangsta's Paradise". I'm so used to this that I find it hard to say they're really ruining a song. I knew two different commercial jingles that riffed on The Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice" before I ever knew that song, and it doesn't stop it from being an all-time classic. I've just been beaten into submission by so many "Act Your Age" (#990) equivalents at this point.

This is all irrelevant because "Soak Me In Bleach" isn't really that sort of thing. It certainly reminds me of "The Stroke" by Billy Squier, but it's not quite a match. Depending on your interpretations on that song's lyrics, this would be at most a rebranded kind of edginess. Not even the edgiest song title on the album though, as it's preceded by the previous single "All My Friends Are Dead" that came out in 2019 and finished at #132 for these polling purposes. I wouldn't mind having that one come up, I think the blistering wall of noise that crashes through is a welcome addition to the formula. I guess we'll have to make do with this and also that other completely unrelated song with the same lyrics.

"Soak Me In Bleach" takes us to familiar territory. Specifically that "Don't Lean On Me" (#921) and "The Weigh Down" (#843) formula where it starts with gentle piano, only this one really commits to the bit. It only really picks up the pace on the chorus, and the highly telegraphed 'rock' breakdown near the end. Doesn't really lift to the higher highs I think they're capable of, but I've got less to complain about as well.

#674. FISHER - You Little Beauty (#53, 2019)

63rd of 2019

We've got to talk about it now. There are three credited writers on "You Little Beauty". First is Dan Hartman, musician for hire in the 1970s and 1980s. The important part here is that he wrote the song "Love Sensation" for Loleatta Holloway, which you either know on its own, or you know via its various samples over the year, like "Ride On Time" by Black Box, "Good Vibrations" by Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, "Blind Faith" by future Hottest 100 entrants Chase & Status, "World Of Our Love" (#924) by Client Liaison, or this. FISHER also has a writing credit, and lastly you've got a man named Thomas Earnshaw. It's a twist of irony that out of all the songs I just listed, it's only "Ride On Time" and this that actually credit Dan Hartman (although "Good Vibrations" does credit Loleatta Holloway's voice). Black Box only did so after using the sample without permission. This was before they were in the business of doing a Milli Vanilli with their on-record vocalists. I can't technically say that it's certainly the case, but it's very likely that FISHER is thriving on a different lie, that being that he had any hand in the production of this song, or many others for that matter.

Thomas Earnshaw is almost certainly Chris Lake. He's been making music for decades now without quite getting the recognition that FISHER gets. I'm not an expert on his music but I get the feeling that he wasn't generally making music quite like FISHER at the time. His newer music is a different story, and he's getting better streaming numbers at the same time. I really love his song "Beggin'", whose vocalist will appear on this list a couple of times.

I don't believe there's anything nefarious about this arrangement. As far as I can tell, Chris Lake & FISHER are both friends, and while Chris Lake has been in this game for a long time, FISHER was a professional surfer into most of his 20s before taking up a career in music. I get the impression that he's much more in it for the fame and applause than Chris Lake, and is absolutely prepared to sell it during his own shows. It's possible that FISHER does contribute to the songs but I've never seen him admit to any collaboration in interviews. Even when talking about his song "Take It Off", which has vocals from Chris Lake's actual wife Gita. I just have to assume both of them are cool with the symbiotic relationship. It looks like they're both having fun when they played at Coachella together in 2023.

What gets especially tricky in all of this is that you can't even rely on official credits all the time. I wanted to say that FISHER's last couple of singles haven't involved Chris Lake, but he's also not credited in any capacity on several previous singles, including FISHER's most famous single that usually begs the question. It's hard to know how much of it is calculated or if it's just inconsistency driven by the tedium that is filling in the whole form when submitting a musical work. I probably won't bring up the Chris Lake thing again after this, except maybe to point out those counter examples where they exist further up this list.

"You Little Beauty" was the first new release following that particularly popular breakout single FISHER had in 2018. At the time I felt like it was a little underwhelming by comparison, relying too heavily on what is an already pretty overexposed sample. With nearly a decade of FISHER to come since, I can appreciate this a bit more with where it sits in his (or someone's) realm of ideas. I'm a fiend for a hypnotic bass line, and the typical build ups do what they're there to do. I think it sounds pretty at times, like with the intrusive synth that clashes with the main production. Almost sounds like something Magdalena Bay would put in one of their songs, there's the comparison no one's ever been thinking of.

#673. Tkay Maidza - Simulation (#83, 2016)

70th of 2016

This is the first of three times I'll be talking about Tkay Maidza here, but it's also her most recent Hottest 100 entry to date. I'm not alone in thinking this to be one of the most disappointing tragedies of the Hottest 100 history books. In the many years since, she's continued to make music that's gotten a solid amount of attention, even internationally. By most accounts (mine included), it's pretty great, but she just can't seem to convert it here no matter what happens. It's crazy to think that with such an impressive catalogue behind her, her latest entry is a song she released when she was only 20, just a kid.

What's peculiar about this is that on the whole she has gotten more popular in those ensuing years. It's a common joke to say that a lot of people think "Last Year Was Weird. Vol 2" was her debut release because it's just so much more popular than anything else, but more people have listened to her latest album than the self-titled one that this song comes from. I'll admit it is something I'm often guilty of. It takes a really strong forged bond to discover a new artist and dive their entire back catalogue.

It only feels strange because it felt like at the time, there was a much more concerted effort from Tkay's label to grow her into a star. She's been signed to Dew Process, a subsidiary of Universal since 2014, and back then she was getting high profile international collaborations but also visible pushes for digital sales and crossover radio play. She never quite made it to that level but she's done well enough to stay signed for all these years, not many last quite that long.

I think Tkay's debut album is pretty good. It only feels a bit quaint in hindsight given that I'm more aware of what she's capable of. "Simulation" screams of being the obvious hit, with its very timely production choices. At the time I was often making jokes about songs I considered to be reminiscent of the Rugrats theme tune. Just a lot of overly cutesy percussion that felt like adherence to a formula more than a stroke of creativity. This veers pretty close to that but fortunately rides more on Tkay's natural charisma than anything else.

#672. Flume (feat London Grammar) - Let You Know (#81, 2019)

62nd of 2019

Flume may as well have released an album in 2019. He instead just put out 3 singles, 2 of which never ended up on any larger release outside of it, but all of them polled in the Hottest 100. By comparison, his latest album has just 1 Hottest 100 entry on it (but it is a notable one). "Let You Know" is one of those completely loose ones, just 'Here's a song with London Grammar, see you next time'. Except it's not really London Grammar. It's another one of those awkward collaboration marketing decisions where a singer is famous from being in a band, but not so famous that their name alone is very well known. Even if they are, you're always going to have at least a certain subset who benefit from the clarity, as ugly as credits like 'Brendon Urie from Panic! At The Disco', or B.o.B's "Airplanes" end up being. If you're not on that level of fame, it's just easier to do it like this. Flume featuring Hannah Reid might click into place when you hear it, but the band name itself is a more recognisable brand, and it goes some ways into making more interesting statistics. London Grammar finally got a second ARIA top 50 hit, 6 years after the first. They didn't really, but we're letting them have this one.

"Let You Know" feels like a slight development on what Flume was doing on "Skin" in 2016. It's very vocally driven (obviously, why else do you recruit Hannah Reid?) while Flume just provides a warm bass line and the occasional stabbing synths. I listen to this and I can just picture him hammering away at a drum machine, doing the exaggerated recoil that everyone loves to do. It's an interesting balancing act between a fairly conventional song and all these added effects that put it on the cusp of chaos at any given moment.

#671. alt-J - In Cold Blood (#72, 2017)

64th of 2017

A lot has been said about the merits of true crime media. It's not really the place to talk about it but I will say that I find the production pace fascinating at times. Truman Capote released the novel "In Cold Blood" in 1966, detailing a 1959 robbery that didn't go to plan and resulted in the murder of an entire family. The movie based on it came out just one year later. By sheer coincidence I ended up watching "Dog Day Afternoon" just before I started writing this. Great film, and it came out only 3 years after the real life bank robbery that it's based on. Only complaint is that I wish Dominic Chianese could have more than two lines of dialogue, what a legend.

I have no idea why alt-J named this song after that book. Loosely there's mention of a killer but with an unrelated name. It is a fairly old song that had its start back when the band were still in Leeds University, which puts it around the late 2000s. If I know anything about humanities students (I don't, I was in STEM), then don't we all love showing off our awareness of classic media and the like? I mean I'm self-aware about it and I still brought up a famous movie that's older than me just a paragraph ago. I can only imagine how much alt-J live and breathe this sort of thing. Maybe the title came later though, referencing old stuff you know is one thing, but it's way more likely to happen with something you only just came across, the classic trivia adage of asking someone if they know something you only learnt 10 minutes ago. If I read something 10 years ago, I'm going to just assume everyone knows it at this point.

Anyway speaking of contradicting myself, this song could otherwise be known as the song where they start reading out binary numbers for no clear reason. As far as I understand, the number sequence they read is completely meaningless. If they did make this song so long ago, maybe they too were thinking of things like the first Futurama movie where a binary sequence is an important plot MacGuffin, or that one Flight of the Conchords song with a binary solo.

I'm not going to pretend that alt-J are operating on a level I can fully see eye to eye with. It is a fairly catchy tune and that's about as far as I go with it. I felt more attuned to some other tracks on this album at the time, like the lead single "3WW", which felt like a very natural continuation from their last album. It never quite made the Hottest 100 (it stalled out at #163), which is probably because it features uncredited vocals from Ellie Rowsell, and if there's one consistent truth, it's that Wolf Alice just cannot make a Hottest 100.

#680-#676

#680. Violent Soho - So Sentimental (#69, 2016)

72nd of 2016

It feels like we're making some headway in this game of Hearts. About a third of the way through and someone's already used up all of their spades, time to break hearts. It feels miraculous to say that Violent Soho have not made it to double digits for Hottest 100 entries, possibly they'll be forever stuck at 9. It's been roughly 3 years since they announced their hiatus. I think a comeback could stir up some excitement with the right amount of time. They managed to tap into a certain kind of alternative rock that stood them above their peers.

The real surprise of it all is that of their 9 entries, 6 of them all come from the same album. If you're looking for a top heavy album, look no further than "WACO" which stacks them all at the front, followed by 5 other songs that exist (I think "Evergreen" is pretty great but I don't really remember the rest. "Low" is worth a listen if you want to hear something a bit different from them. There's a cheeky reference to past Hottest 100 hit "Every Morning" by Sugar Ray in it. Actually, there's another 1999 Hottest 100 reference on "Slow Wave" by a band that's still yet to show up here).

If I struggle on Violent Soho, bear with me. I have a history of it. Back when I used to live blog the Hottest 100 as it happened with pre-written blurbs for just about every song, I took the big 2016 haul for Violent Soho to make a cheap running joke where I wrote the same bare-bones commentary that looked okay at first but increasingly silly the subsequent 4 times it re-appeared. I'll never think of anything else whenever I see the phrase 'hotly tipped' ever again.

"So Sentimental" is basically a slow burner (by Violent Soho standards) that sticks to the same pace all the way through. You've got hints of intrigue like on the chorus where it briefly sounds like the song is about socioeconomics and they're about to tackle the wealthy elite (the chorus does technically contain the line 'it's who, you know'), but it's more a nostalgia trip. Kind of like what I'm doing now, reminiscing when in the mid '10s, I could hear a lot of these mid '90s throwbacks getting some valid attention.

#679. Lorde - Liability (#81, 2017)

65th of 2017

Lorde's "Melodrama" generally has a heightened reputation compared to her debut. You'd hope so given that it took 4 years to come out compared to an album that felt like a rush job to announce in the wake of a hit that got bigger than anyone could've planned (eventually I might even add to the discourse pile here). Easier to get more attached when Lorde gets demoted back to underdog status too. In my head, I think of it as a heightened synth pop or dance pop experience compared to the moody default setting of her debut. I suspect in reality I'm being influenced by the respective album covers and a handful of isolated songs because I'm not really seeing a huge amount of difference. If there is one for certain, it's in the other direction, as "Liability" provides Lorde's first piano ballad.

Maybe that's familiar territory here, although I posit that despite the very similar aesthetics, "Stoned at the Nail Salon" (#941) is strictly an acoustic guitar ballad. I have more time for this one anyway. I think the arrangement goes some ways to making for a more engaging experience, it's like you're being strung along for all the highs and lows.

I know I don't talk about lyrics too often here but I have to in this case because blimey if this isn't a relatable one. The feeling of rejection from those who you think are close to you but in actual fact have their own plans that don't involve you. The second verse hits so hard as it's a rare piece of relatability that can fit a multi-millionaire pop star or just a regular person, the idea of being a brief novelty to explore until they're done with you. The charts just reinforce this when you can look at any particular old time frame and find any number of artists who seemed on top of the world who suddenly stopped making any impact. Many of whom are still making music. It's the kind of thing that I personally try to keep from happening amidst my various unconnected social circles, but it's challenging to fit it all together. I'd like to think I haven't rejected anyone in the same way, but I suspect it's not fully true either. Realistically though, it's that fear of rejection that strips me of so many opportunities. What a rough deal for everyone though.

#678. DMA'S - Step Up the Morphine (#39, 2016)

71st of 2016

I apologise for any confusion caused by the sudden prevalence of Touch Sensitive, DMA'S, and songs called "Lay Down" by either Touch Sensitive or DMA'S. As far as I can tell, there's no second song called "Step Up the Morphine" so we should be in the clear going forward.

The intriguing title is probably the most distinctive thing about this song. Johnny Took revealed in an interview that it's a song about the death of his grandmother, and it's filled with lyrics of malaise. I think though it's a job that Tommy O'Dell (not the "Another Love" guy) comes through with pretty flying colours. The core of the track isn't soaring to exciting places, but his vocal delivery really manages to elevate it. I am a sucker for the minor fall when it's preceded by a major lift.

#677. Sycco - Ripple (prod. Flume & Chrome Sparks) (#46, 2022)

68th of 2022

If it's a new name to you, it's pronounced the same as the word 'psycho'. In any case, get moderately used to it because she is going to appear one more time on this list. All things considered, it's an impressive showing to come through a second time. The lack of appearance between her two entries in 2021 made it look like it'd be a one-off. I suppose in the year 2022, getting Flume attached to your song is a handy thing to do.

It makes more sense to talk about the start of her career with the other entry, but it is worth noting the intrigue that has come since. Last year Sycco finally put out her debut album "Zorb". I'm only just now listening to it and learning that "Ripple" is actually on the track list. It hasn't been a commercial monster, in fact it missed the ARIA top 100 completely, but the reception has been pretty positive for those who checked it out. For one, it won the J Award for Album Of The Year. Richard Kingsmill doesn't work at the ABC anymore but he also found space for it on his lengthier-than-usual 2024 albums list. The chart nerd in me also wants to point out that it's the first J Award winner to not reach the ARIA top 50, but to be fair, there are considerably fewer Australian albums managing that bar nowadays.

I thought the album was pretty enjoyable. I found in general when I kept hearing new singles coming out that they weren't really clicking with me, but as a full product, it feels more locked in together. Sycco tends to very liberally use vocal manipulation that can be jarring at first, but there's a method to the "Monkey Madness". It's all just a fun sort of sound that doesn't really sound like anything else.

"Ripple" has never been one I've tried to seek out. It still embodies some of those ideas that I mentioned, but it doesn't feel like it quite sticks the landing. Those initial synths? Great, sounds instantly familiar as if someone had to have already come up with it. The pre-chorus? Really exciting, a logical progression from some recent drum & bass adjacent Flume material (I'll get to it eventually), and provides an outlet for Sycco to go a little off the rails. Then you get to the chorus and it squanders it all a touch, where Sycco is too drowned out to sell it with a hook. I'm mostly stuck trying to hear what sounds like her saying her own name, although I believe it to not actually be the case. Hard not to be a little underwhelmed when it basically rhymes with her previous hit but comes up a touch short in the process.

#676. Spacey Jane - Booster Seat (#2, 2020)

61st of 2020

I remember one day in late 2021, I was at the movies to see a film that actually shows up in this list via its title theme. Just before it started I checked my phone because the ARIA Awards were on. I'd put a small wager on Sam Fischer & Demi Lovato to win Song Of The Year for "What Other People Say", simply because it wasn't a big hit and was paying pretty high odds for something I thought had an outside chance to win. Song Of The Year since 2012 has been a publicly voted award, so it's been subject to the sorts of quirks that happen when the public is limited to the kinds of people who are willing to bother voting. Many early winners since the change were former Australian Idol contestants like Matt Corby, but you also had multiple wins for 5 Seconds Of Summer. They're the kinds of artists with that sort of fanbase, or who literally got famous because of that sort of fanbase. The biggest Australian hit of the year may well have been "Astronaut in the Ocean" by Masked Wolf, but who's gonna vote for it?

I fleeced an online betting website years back through this same logic. They were offering odds on Best International Artist, an award that was for a while based on Twitter engagements. One Direction's once a year album release schedule meant they would conveniently win it every year. Enter 2016, they'd just released their final album late last year, the one after ZAYN left the group. It was still very successful, it gave them their only Australian #1 single in "Drag Me Down", and only missed the top spot on the album chart because they released it on the same week as...him again?! One Direction announced their hiatus at the start of the year, and time moves fast as they very much felt like yesterday's news in a flash, with no looming album and solo careers popping up instead. However, the nomination process for this award is based on sales, and even if they declined in the wake of the split, they still notched up more than enough to get onto the nominations again. Next to some big names like Adele and Taylor Swift, they looked like a tacked on inclusion that had no right winning, and they were priced accordingly. I made about $500 on this oversight and that's only because I wasn't allowed to bet any more.

Luck didn't strike twice in 2021, however. Beating out some high profile artists and singles was some small fry band from Western Australia, that being Spacey Jane with their song "Booster Seat". Now granted, maybe there is proof in it for Spacey Jane given that a big chunk of their fame owes to an extensive voting effort that got this song to land at #2 in the Hottest 100, but it's not a voter base I expected to overlap much with the ARIA Awards voting. Since then the award has continued to not make a lot of sense to me. Tones And I kept losing 3 years in a row until "Cloudy Day" (#863) got her the win. Troye Sivan won in 2023 but then neither he, nor Kylie Minogue could overcome a G Flip song that barely charted in 2024. The 2021 result blindsided me so much that I could no longer justify betting on the ARIA Awards, I can't predict it anymore. This is a very good thing of course, and I strongly encourage anyone reading to stay away from the world of gambling. I got lucky that I found an avenue where my expertise and resources far surpass the average person, but it's a game you're designed to lose, and almost everyone will. You're not built different.

So I guess thanks to Spacey Jane for getting that out of my life. This is an interesting one though. For a band of their stature to chart so high, so early in their career. It's very similar to the Amy Shark story with "Adore" (#871). I don't have any background observations to ruin this one. I guess I'd love to know what the state by state voting count was like, because one thing I do know about the Western Australian music scene is that it's all very close-knit. If everyone within a few degrees of separation got behind them, I can see how that would spiral out. There's a funny aside in line with what I said about "Say It" (#707), because "Heat Waves" (#741) actually jumped into the Global Spotify top 50 after the Hottest 100, simply because of how much its streams increased just in Australia. So the world-conquering run for Glass Animals would probably play out a touch different if Spacey Jane were able to put together a bunch more votes.

Spacey Jane had their own slightly different run on the charts that intrigued me. Something that's utterly bizarre about it is that it actually reached the Australian Spotify top 200 on the day the album came out, I genuinely can't think of another Australian artist who's managed to do so without some past success. The album did manage good streams though and it was just low sales that kept them sandwiched between a very close top 3 battle with Vika & Linda, and The McClymonts. The three albums were separated by less than 200 sales. The interesting thing that happened though is that "Booster Seat" returned to the chart in January. Not after the Hottest 100, but a couple of weeks before. It's another thing that I'm not really certain has happened since, but it seems like the Hottest 100 hype really put a jolt under them. In some respects that's way more important than just getting a big one day jump after the countdown. They were ironing on long-time listeners with this one, and that's the result they got. "Booster Seat" managed to reach #8 on the ARIA Chart, but it also stuck around for 11 weeks in the top 50 without commercial radio really getting on board, and without an international presence either. The album that originally dropped out of the top 50 in 3 weeks, came back, and lasted 37 weeks in the top 50. Maybe you'd want the #1 Hottest 100 finish, but I think Spacey Jane and "Booster Seat" came out of it a lot better than many of those winning songs ever did.

But is "Booster Seat" really that special? Fortunately not enough for anyone to write fanfiction around it, as far as I can tell. If anything has taken the shine off of it, it's Spacey Jane's persistent success. The huge #2 finish in the Hottest 100 just looks a little less special when the band polled at #3 in both of the following years (with two songs that I at least seem to prefer). So far in 2025, Spacey Jane have been big beneficiaries of triple j's new playlist rotation rate, that's seeing higher weekly spins than at least the last 20 years for the biggest tracks of the moment. That in combination with a potential knee-jerk reaction to a poor showing for Australian artists last year could pay serious dividends to Spacey Jane. You'd have to expect some of their songs to do some serious damage. "Booster Seat" will probably always remain their most popular song, but it could just be another knock against its Hottest 100 credentials.

One of the clearest signs I've experienced when aging out of music is an inherent feeling of pessimism. You become aware of what the kids are listening to and can't help but think that all the hyperbole is overblown, or at the very least, won't align to what you're interested in. Maybe it's heightened for me in this case because of my past experience with Spacey Jane, but I do see a goofy song title like "Booster Seat" and it sets off a red flag in me that they probably don't deserve.

Repeated exposure is my best medicine for fighting this off and I can say pretty confidently that it gets results sometimes. If the placement hadn't locked it in for you, I do think that "Booster Seat" is pretty good! I do have my reservations in that I physically coil at the delivery of the line 'well it feels like that again'. Even if all the words did come out properly, it's just a Chet Faker style awkward landing, or I suppose, awkward hover above the ground. Nice ideas in general, they just get a little more locked into the car motif than anything else.

#685-#681

#685. Touch Sensitive - Lay Down (#31, 2017)

67th of 2017

See now this is a much easier Touch Sensitive song to talk about. Instead of having no words, it has roughly 7 of them! Actually the pedantic part of me that refuses to outright lie has to correct that and say that there are 16 words in this song, just two different lyrics uttered over and over again. That being said, I bet you never would have guessed that both lines of the song come up 12 times each. It really feels like he tells us to lay down for a while but it's really not that much after the opening salvo. I've always had trouble remembering when to use lie and when to use lay. On different occasions I've probably taught myself that this song is doing it correctly, while simultaneously, Eminem & Rihanna's "Love The Way You Lie" can be chosen to be interpreted as a song about taking a nap. They're both correct really. Also I always thought Snow Patrol used both of them on "Chasing Cars" but apparently I was just hearing it incorrectly, I like my version more.

Once again there isn't much insight to put into the Touch Sensitive song. In a pinch it's probably more gratifying than "Pizza Guy" (#689), but I have this recollection of getting worn down by it. It's slick and catchy for sure, but it really just beats you into submission sometimes. Every time I say that a song is repetitive in its lyric, a thought about questioning haircuts comes up that I find increasingly difficult to justify, but that's a problem for future me.

#684. Pacific Avenue - Leaving For London (#57, 2022)

69th of 2022

Dear Mr. President, there are too many bands named after oceans nowadays, please eliminate three. I am not a crackpot. Pacific Avenue probably fare the worst out of these. Really, they're named after a road in their native Gerringong in New South Wales, but it can't help but sound like an off-brand Yellowcard knock-off.

Mostly it just feels a bit strange to be talking about them at all. They feel so new to me that it's like going back and discovering a cameo you paid no mind to initially. Like either rapper on Destiny's Child's "Soldier", or when future Hottest 100 entrant Noah Kahan had a hit single in 2018. This isn't quite as drastic, just a curious 'oh, I guess they just made the cut off in time'. If you look below the 2022 top 100, you'll also have early sightings of Royel Otis and Old Mervs. Still, Pacific Avenue didn't even have an album out at this point.

I'm not totally sure where this band sit in all of this. They're definitely part of the story as one of the few Australian bands to get some heightened attention in the 2020s, but it's the kind where it starts to make sense why there's a lot less excitement for what's going on with our local scene. They're not remotely re-inventing the wheel, or even pretending to do so by emulating a more niche underground movement. They're just making pretty unobjectionable pop rock that doesn't even lean especially hard into either of those two directions.

This is the only one I'll get to. They've got 4 Hottest 100 entries now, the only thing they're missing is the stock standard obligatory Like A Version. They did one of ABBA's "Dancing Queen" in 2023 and it got to #130. I want to say that it's pretty good. It has the standard issue where the translation loses some of the dynamic range and thus the thrills (I am pointing in the direction of Royel Otis in this present moment), but they do a decent job at finding substitutes on the original (like playing the synth line that comes through on the verse on a guitar, or getting back up singers for those lines that Agnetha & Frida pause on. It sounds so strange when they emulate the chorus intro though, I think only ABBA can really pull that off.

I'm just getting distracted though, the thing I wanted to say is that their Hottest 100 catalogue largely sounds distinct from one another...when the songs start off. They have a habit of writing fairly similar choruses on every run around. Fairly catchy all the same, but I don't want to feel like them trying out new things is just going to be a fake out every time. "Spin Me Like Your Records" is probably my favourite because it knows what it's doing and doesn't muck around. This one's pretty good too, just doesn't jump out too much. I keep expecting to hear a cowbell on the chorus though.

#683. Lizzo (feat Cardi B) - Rumors (#73, 2021)

74th of 2021

Hey, it's me from 6 weeks ago when I was talking about "Saved" (#749), talk about foreshadowing, I even gave you the artist and everything. You probably haven't thought about this song in years but it constantly comes to mind for me, solely because it immortalised itself here.

It's basically an expanded version of what I was saying about "Big City Life" (#692), starting to follow the music charts gives you a definitive pecking order of what the biggest hits are. If you look at it with the crasser system that the discourse sometimes devolves into, you can instead say that it sorts out the hits from the flops. But what is a hit and what is a flop? I feel like there often are attempted definitions using chart credentials to accomplish this but it never really works out. If a new Taylor Swift single enters the charts at #38 and drops out after a month, that's not a glowing endorsement for it, but if your local pub band for some reason got millions of streams and snuck onto the charts in the 90s (position, not decade) for a couple of weeks, you could not under any circumstances call that a flop. The most successful flop is bigger than the least successful hit, and thus any formula breaks down immediately.

Chart positions are also their own can of worms because there are two kinds of hits that live side by side. You've got the parabolic climbers, usually from lesser known artists, and then you've got the hyped debuts that rapidly decline. In most cases, if these two songs have the same peak, you'd have to give more credit to the former as it spends longer accumulating an audience while the latter feels like it's shedding an audience it was never supposed to have. It becomes really difficult to tell whether or not these hyped up debuts have actually 'made it' when they are declining every week. Just feels like you have to feel it out on vibes. "Holy" by...wait I STILL can't say his name?! Obviously a hit, it spent 7 months in the top 50 after debuting in the top 5. "Pink Venom" by BLACKPINK? You could convince me it's a hit but it's hard to say that its own #1 peak isn't just a touch overstated.

I have done an act of deception with choosing those two songs. You might be moderately surprised to learn that "Pink Venom" recently overtook "Holy" in Spotify streams. It's doing this despite not really making any strong chart impression in the past year or so, but just doing a little better at accumulating the numbers and having that add up over a significant period of time. Yes, it's another roundabout way of me saying that everything is doing numbers in perpetuity. I feel like the mentality to label everything a flop gets in the way of seeing the bigger picture. It's this distracting desire to want to push everything out of your periphery as soon as possible so you can forget about it and assume that everyone else has done the same.

"Rumors" felt like a flop of some kind to me. It lived only in freefall while never ascending to especially remarkable heights, and vanished from all the charts in about 2 months. In Australia that means a #16 debut and out of the top 50 after 3 weeks. That's instant landfill territory, destined to be forgotten about. Lizzo didn't even put out a deluxe version of her last album to put it on, even though the numbers look pretty okay in the long run. This is a song that feels like it was made to be an event and just wasn't.

Except when you put all that together, you just have to remember that all of those weeks that it is on the decline, it still has a lot of people listening to it. Tens of thousands of people did just yesterday, even as Lizzo stock is at an all-time low. I'll bet a large chunk of those listeners aren't aware of the chart machinations at all, to them it's just a catchy song they like. That's what it is to me at least. I find the flows very sticky, and there's a very satisfying build up. Also hello Cardi B. We'll encounter her on her own songs eventually in this list, but for now I just have to say that she does a great job when she's on her auto-biographical raps, like putting out a last word you can't really rebut.

The short version of it all is that when this landed in the Hottest 100, it re-asserted to me that a lot of people do really hitch their wagons up to these so-called flop songs and we shouldn't put them all down to a binary status. As well as that, I feel it really represents a shift in the Hottest 100 paradigm as far as top 40 crossover hits go. Normally a certain level of ubiquity would net you a chance of getting a look-in, but "Rumors" proves that the bar for that notoriety is so much lower than it was before, especially when it comes to artists who are in most people's good graces at the time. Of course, that's seemingly ended up being a short term deal for Lizzo, whether or not the rumours were true.

#682. Thundamentals (feat Hilltop Hoods) - 21 Grams (#61, 2017)

66th of 2017

This song feels like it would've been forgotten over time if not for its role in one of the greatest philosophical debates of all time. I'm not talking about Duncan Macdougall's study from 1907 about trying to weigh the human soul's depletion upon death, which is where the song gets its title. If you haven't read into that, it's probably not worth it unless you want to learn about sample size and methods of scientific study (the short version is that he didn't do a very good job in this and it's all pretty meaningless despite its ubiquity in pop culture). No, this is about the immortal discussion of how much emphasis we put on feature credits when we're acknowledging achievements and milestones in music lists.

As it stands, Hilltop Hoods have the equal most Hottest 100 entries ever. It might change in the future with the rate that a small handful are racking them up (Billie Eilish just tied them). They became outright leaders in 2022 when they polled "A Whole Day's Night" (#919) and "Show Business" (#897). Arguably they were tied for the lead before that, which is a question of whether or not "21 Grams" counts to the tally, but at the very least, by polling two songs in the same year, they managed to let everyone agree on it for the time being.

This is where it gets increasingly messy because triple j published an article this year congratulating Billie Eilish on breaking the record, when she secured her 25th entry to date. All good for her but it's including a questionable leap in logic where this song does not count, but the Charli XCX song "Guess" counts to Billie's tally. When the actual meta-data of the song includes the word 'featuring' in it, it's a reminder that all of this is splitting unnecessary hairs. You should probably either count both of them, or neither, and it'd be a tie either way in the end. On the other hand, maybe Billie deserves it because she also has an uncredited appearance alongside Labrinth on "Never Felt So Alone" in 2023 that isn't insubstantial. I think what probably happened is that because Hilltop Hoods landed this entry back in 2017 when it didn't mean anything, no one raised noise about it, and it doesn't actively appear under their name in triple j's own archive. If it was the record breaking entry, there's a stronger case they'd get the same treatment.

I used to be very much against counting these sorts of cases. It might stem back to my own biases of the past (I can recall writing something dumb about it at the time) where it was so far afield of my own listening most of the time that it was at no expense to me to leave them out. At the same time, you'd get a bunch of other artists I didn't listen to, who were double dipping and so I felt like the only logical solution was to either not count them, or split the kudos in half (where applicable).

A key reason why I don't think this way anymore is because not all feature credits are created equally. For ever feature that feels unnecessary, there are always going to be some where they're the driving force behind the whole track, probably more worthy of the lead artist status than the one who's there. Sometimes they're not even credited at all and I feel like I want to shout them out. I may be doing this a lot for various Kanye West songs in the pipeline given how rarely they're properly labelled. At the end of the day though, it's still their work to an extent. They're part of it, and it wouldn't be the same without them. The word 'featuring' might feel like it's putting them to the side, but when it's used so interchangeably with other credits like '&', 'vs.' or 'with', it just doesn't feel worth it to make an arbitrary split. A good philosophy in general is that when in doubt, just give out credit.

In the case of "21 Grams", it always feels pertinent because I just don't think I'd be talking about it if Hilltop Hoods weren't on this song. Thundamentals are certainly popular on their own, and this is from the same year that "Sally" (#861) got to #8 with a much lower profile collaboration (actually, Mataya can be heard on this song too). We're talking about a feature credit where the Hoods get two whole verses, and no one's voice comes out louder than Suffa & Pressure during the hook. You could easily flip the names around and feel justified in doing so. In another world, it's just grouped up as a posse cut, and to be fair it's a pretty good one.

#681. DMA'S - Lay Down (#77, 2015)

68th of 2015

You'll have to cast your mind back to last year because with three entries in the first 20 slots, DMA'S really turned into the main character for a while, you may have forgotten about them because it's been over 5 months since I last dived into them. I'm doing so just in time to deliver them some misfortune because they were one and a half weeks away from having an above average selection of entries remaining to go. Now they'll have at most 7/12 entries making it into the top two-thirds, a pretty solid outcome given where we started.

"Lay Down" is very solidly back in time to baby DMA'S. They hadn't even put out their first album by this point. It's in this period of their career that they were not even trying to break the allegations. While it's in a completely different gear to "Delete" (#994), it's just a slightly different brand of Oasis worship. More "Morning Glory" than "Stand By Me" in other words.

I suspect I wasn't overly impressed at the time. The last way you're ever going to succeed to naysayers is to do the exact thing you're accused of, even if there's validity to the approach. That's where I've found myself landing in hindsight. I don't want to just say the same obvious thing that everyone else says, I'd rather ask myself if their version of this is worthwhile. I think the best endorsement is that I really had to stretch my thinking to even think of an Oasis song to put in that last paragraph because (at least in the capacity I'm familiar with them), they really don't have big up-tempo songs like this. In hindsight it's probably why I'm so fond of their late career single "The Shock of the Lightning", which sounds quintessentially Oasis but I can't really point to specific examples.

Maybe it's worth exploring how much of this is self-imposed and how much is a potentially solved game of knowing what the audience wants. I say that because in the years since, DMA'S have seemingly been stuck in that same situation as Oasis, so be prepared for a long of slow jams to come. It's not all DMA'S can do, but it's all that seems to get them the votes. Anyway, "Lay Down" is a pretty nice change of pace. Maybe not the most exciting of choruses, but the guitar & drums both sound great.

#690-#686

#690. Seth Sentry - Hell Boy (#100, 2015)

70th of 2015

The canon of songs to finish at #100 is eternally random but sometimes in the best ways. Impossible to curate so you just have to hope that you get something that fits the mood. Very difficult to beat the high bar set by The Cat Empire when they told us to 'get the party started' in 2005. When I'm in the mood to clutch at straws, I might rep for "Hell Boy", as I suspect it's the #100 song that utters the phrase 'let's go' the most times.

Seth Sentry could easily just be someone else's Adam Newling. He's a very unassuming looking guy, and most of the time very understated in his performance. He's a rapper, but treats it pretty casually on the surface with his biggest hits, frequently either singing, or getting into a relaxed conversational flow. His breakout hit "The Waitress Song" was built on breakfast, and this. It's a song that wears its amateur status on its sleeve, and it's probably why so many people love it. This entire premise about going to a café every day just to briefly interact with the waitress, but spending most of his time detailing the failings of the establishment. He comes off as this plucky underdog you want to root for, for some reason.

I think a key part of it all and how it works is that underneath the complete lack of pretence is the fact that he genuinely is a really good rapper. You can get disoriented by how mundane a lot of it is, but step back and realise how insanely memorable it all is, or how he just keeps filling these things with clever little internal rhymes that stick it all together. It's funny to think also that coming from the same EP as that song, I really gravitated to his song "Simple Game", which manages to up the production values significantly and fit in some oddly profound (to me, a 16 year old) lyrics about existentialism. It's like when Drapht followed up "Jimmy Recard" with "Falling".

Perhaps the surprising thing about all of this is that I'm only going to talk about Seth Sentry once. In 2012 he looked primed to go huge. He had a lot more promotion behind him, and was stringing together some bigger hits. His song "Dear Science" seemed to nail the memetic potential even more than "The Waitress Song", writing a silly song about "Back To The Future" failing to predict the future but framing it as a stitch-up that he still hasn't got a hoverboard, with the petulance of a child that didn't get the one Christmas present they wanted the most.

Things just never got bigger than that. With this barely scraping over the line, he only did the bare minimum in successfully following up his biggest album. Of course, it would be unfair to not mention the fact that he also finished at #111 with "Dumb" and #115 with "Run" in this same list, so it could've been a lot better or a lot worse. I think "Run" was my favourite one at the time, just a slick production for a catchy pop tune. Amusingly these three songs retain this very specific pecking order in Spotify streams to this day. There's a 5% difference between the three of them.

"Hell Boy" is a different kind of beast entirely. Seth Sentry can obviously rap, it's just not entirely his modus operandi. For "Hell Boy" he has moments of shifting into lyrical miracle speed rapping, which is usually not a compliment but it's all to serve a song where he's describing himself as an annoying little pest, so I think he gets away with it. It's filled with all these clever little one-liners that are sometimes so annoyingly simple that it's a wonder I've never heard them before. 'Ain't no one on my level of malevolence' is just a perfect encapsulation of the whole thing. I think it loses a little bit of steam after the first verse but only because he sets the bar so high. I have to hope Seth Sentry has seen the classic '80s film "The Wizard" because in the music video he's wearing a Nintendo Power Glove. Why? Because it's so bad. A very young Jenny Lewis co-stars in that film, and in the time between me writing this and it going live, Rilo Kiley have been playing their first shows in 17 years, amazing how these things work out.

#689. Touch Sensitive - Pizza Guy (#38, 2013)

72nd of 2013

At some point in time I forgot the Touch Sensitive story and believed him to be a new wunderkind. He didn't really pop up out of nowhere though, he was a member of the group Van She, who proved to be very prolific despite releasing very little music of their own. I have trouble remembering all of their old hits because they frequently have simple titles, similar titles, or titles that remind me of other songs instead. You can't do "Changes" and "Strangers", it's too confusing. Nonetheless they were quite successful, reaching the ARIA top 10 with their first album. The follow up album 4 years later only made it to #28 which is lower than their previous second week position. It makes me wonder if that downward slide is why they never released any more original music after that, and further makes me wonder how they feel about the fact that the two main singles from that second album are by far their most streamed songs on Spotify now. Belated gratification? In any case, Touch Sensitive, particularly his two big songs I'll be talking about, has soared to far greater heights on his own. Truly, he's Sydney's own Caroline Polachek.

Look, sometimes I'm not sure what you could possibly want from me. I am tasking myself with writing about "Pizza Guy", the instrumental track that runs for nearly 6 minutes of 'ooh ooh ooh yeaaaaaah' and occasionally some other farty mouth sounds. There's more to it than that but the slow tempo will leave you stuck in one place for a decent while. Yeah it sounds good, though I can't say it inspires anything specific out of me. You go, dude, deliver that pizza, or something.

#688. Lime Cordiale - Robbery (#7, 2019)

64th of 2019

This song permanently lives in the shadow of two other songs. One that it sounds remarkably similar to, and another it shares both its title and its central premise of referring to heartbreak in similar terms to a burglary. I can't share what either of these two songs are yet, otherwise this wouldn't be in their shadow. In the real world it's also considerably outmatched in popularity, but in Hottest 100 world, Lime Cordiale's on top. This is their best polling song to date, and arguably their most popular one.

I made the observation elsewhere recently, but it's very interesting the extent to which the charts around the world are just unable to capture everything that's going on. This is Lime Cordiale's only charting song in Australia, and the world in general. It debuted at #63 as a result of the publicity of this polling result, lasted one more week and was gone. The rest of the band's catalogue can be detailed on Spotify charts with having spent 3 weeks in the top 200 in Australia ("Inappropriate Behaviour" (#771)), 2 weeks in the top 200 in Australia ("I Touch Myself - Like A Version (#969)), and a handful of other songs that never lasted more than 2 days in a row. I'm not saying this to punch down on Lime Cordiale as if they're a failure, it's quite the opposite. This band has 7 songs that just on Spotify, have streaming totals that surpass the entire population of Australia. "Robbery" and "Temper Temper" have done it threefold. It's implying an entirely unsung international performance for a band who only ever debut their albums in the 30s in New Zealand and nowhere else. They have played plenty of shows in the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, but I genuinely don't think I've ever heard conversations outside of Australia ever acknowledge this clearly popular band. It must just go under the radar of anyone who uses chart metrics to find out about these things. You could see them debuting at #1 on the album chart with huge first week sales and just dismiss it as an Australian thing, but it's just not possible. "Robbery" would be an "Espresso"-sized hit here if only Australians were running up these numbers.

What else is there to say except that of course this is their biggest hit. They knew they had something with that hook and they ride it into the sunset. Maybe the song runs a bit out of steam along the way (it's a 3 minutes 40 song that feels like it could be safely trimmed down to 2 minutes 40), but it gets the job done well enough. As a nice bonus, there's nothing in here I'd consider a classic Lime Cordiale-ism, where it's dragged down by a strange moment to be included.

#687. Jack Garratt - Weathered (#78, 2015)

69th of 2015

Jack Garratt feels a bit like a case of unlucky timing. He's an artist that to me is always going to be recalled as a BBC Sound of... winner, that being their annual poll to find the next big thing. It's a title that carries with it some pretty heavy hitters. 50 Cent, Adele, Jessie J, Haim, a couple of still unmentionables. Whether it's a case of successfully picking the winners, or having enough credibility to steer it into reality, it's hard to say it didn't do a good job. Jack Garratt was the winner for 2016, announced right at the start of the year, meaning he was just about the first winner when streaming became the dominant force of the future. That's done a lot to dictate a different future in the charts, and as such, Jack Garratt became the first Sound of... winner to never have a UK top 40 hit. He can't even save face with longevity because his second album fell a little short. The 3rd album is supposed to be released soon but with a change in label I don't have high expectations for it.

It's a pattern he started that's starting to become more common. Many of the 9 winning artists since have the same situation, and if there is some success, it also feels short-lived and it's usually hard to say they made the best choice. PinkPantheress is a respectable choice for 2022, but then you see that #1 hitmakers Lola Young & Central Cee were behind her, and it just reinforces how unpredictable the future is. It gives it all the feeling of a dartboard.

The poll drew further criticism this year when the 2025 win was given to Chappell Roan. It's one of those decisions that will ironically age well in public perception because even if her career dries up, it's still been a solid innings so far. That's the problem right there. All those artists I mentioned before had not really blown up to their fullest extent when they won the poll. There are some edge cases, 2014's winner was already attached to two huge hits at that point, one of which was a #1 hit, but then they still went on to become an even bigger solo star in the next year so you can cut some slack. If anything they were one of the most obvious breakout stars to be found. Chappell Roan would have been an excellent shout if it were the 2024 poll. The album had just come out, wasn't doing big numbers but was received positively. Industry insiders might have known she had the right connections to go big, but no one seemed willing to stake the claim. She had that monster year of success in 2024 as it turns out, and so the BBC poll went out of their way to celebrate an artist who had already made it. The best way I can rationalise it is the fact that since the bulk of her success kicked off around May 2024, she only had 8 months in the spotlight that year, and so it's very likely she will technically sell more records or accrue more streams in 2025 than in 2024. They can also save face because she technically only scored her first #1 hit in 2025, with the 5 year old single "Pink Pony Club" getting a belated look-in.

The reason I say the decision will age well is because as time goes forward, the average person will totally forget when this breakout success happened. She'll just become a standout name in some random 2020s year that makes it appear as though the BBC nailed it, and frankly amongst other winners like Pa Saileu or FLO, they need a household name to restore their own credibility. There are many such cases that public perception is so fragmented and built upon snappy headlines that it's easier to get away with selling a farce than to play everything by the book. Imagine the narratives I could spin if I just disregarded any information that didn't suit. I'd say something like, Jack Garratt is a flop artist who never amounted to anything, except here he is and I'm talking about him. It's his only entry here yes, but he also very nearly polled with "Breathe Life" in 2015, and "Surprise Yourself" in 2016. Some of the artists he beat for the 2016 poll include Alessia Cara, Dua Lipa, J Hus & Mabel. Alessia Cara feels a little late to get that treatment, but on the other hand, she won Best New Artist at the GRAMMYs two whole years later, so there's no limit to the whiffs that can take place. This is where I also point out that Confidence Man, 3 albums deep, were also nominated for the poll in 2025.

In any case, I've never really been one to enjoy the mindset of dumping on artists when their careers don't take off to the fullest. I apologise to Jack Garratt if it feels like I was doing that, and either way, I generally liked what he was doing at the time. At a time when there was no shortage of guys with guitars reeling in the adult contemporary market, I can see the appeal in wanting to try and take it in another direction, which is what Jack Garratt did. He presented a similar aesthetic, but swallowed it up in synths that were mostly pretty tasteful.

"Weathered" has the makings of a big hit in it. It's probably one of his most approachable songs and finds a solid middle ground between James Bay intimacy on the verses and Coldplay bombast at the climax. I suspect the combination of him never quite hitting the big leagues, and his album release patterns of being 4-5 years apart from each other has done him no favours and squandered what little momentum he had. But as we have it here, it's a solid throwback to those hype cycles of a decade ago. At least he had his moment.

#686. The Wombats - Turn (#12, 2018)

72nd of 2018

The more control I give myself over what music I listen to, the less I'm able to feel particularly strong ire to anything. Historically there were two categories of this. You had songs that were dominating the charts, and also songs getting played a lot on triple j. Plenty of songs fit under both of those. My habitual listening of both would keep these songs in the forefront, and in the case of the former, there was always this growing sense of frustration as the ceiling for success seemed to keep growing. You want to convince yourself into coping with it knowing there's a limited time attached to it, but then that song singlehandedly breaks the record and it only serves to be more irritating.

At the same time, when it came to the latter group, I could mostly always fall back on the fact that a non-appearance on the actual charts meant that at most it was a mild bother. It wasn't as if the audience was responding to it in a way that suggested I was the odd one out for not being into it. Most of the time this is true, and then as soon as the song disappears from the airwaves, I can handily forget about it. On the other hand, you'll sometimes get cases like "Turn".

It might seem odd on the outside, but I really disliked "Turn" back in 2018. It was nothing more than a random late career single by The Wombats, just another cab off that rack, but this one just landed so poorly for me. I'd usually focus on the lyric 'I like the way your brain works', which I still think is a clunker, but even the song in general just felt completely lacking in thrills and a chore to get through. Just like "Grandma's Hands" (#713), I got a very unpleasant surprise when this wound up all the way at #12. That made it The Wombats' equal second highest entry to date, matching "Let's Dance To Joy Division" from 2007, and only beaten by "Tokyo (Vampires & Wolves)" from 2010, which landed at #8. They managed to poll higher than Drake has ever done so himself, with a song that shouts him out (not the last song to do this of course). Where on earth did that all come from?

Fortunately the story has a similar ending to "Grandma's Hands" in that the song eventually did grow on me. I like the way the guitar gives it a bit of momentum, I like the way that it sounds like a more mature version of The Wombats that doesn't rely on quick blasts of 'ooh's and 'ahh's. I still don't really like that one lyric but I find it easier to ignore now.