#710-#706

#710. Japanese Wallpaper (feat Jesse Davidson) - Between Friends (#97, 2014)

72nd of 2014

If your primary goal is to link every single post to every single other post, I have some exciting news. I alluded to Japanese Wallpaper back when I was talking about KIAN's "Waiting" (#739). He won triple j Unearthed High in 2014, a real signalling point that he'd made it if we ignore the fact that in 2013 he'd already landed on the soundtrack of a feature film in "Wish I Was Here". That song features another singer who will eventually appear on this list. I've also inadvertently seen him perform live, as part of the backing band for another triple j Unearthed High winner. You guessed it, they'll be on the list eventually too.

It's somewhat interesting the way the voting worked out for this one. That first single "Breathe In" managed to skirt the release date rules even though triple j themselves played the song in October 2013. It received simultaneous airplay with "Between Friends" and even managed to reach the ARIA top 100 ("Between Friends" did not), but at the end of the day, "Between Friends" is the one that just snuck onto the list, while "Breathe In" only managed #146. Still a similar stratosphere for the two of them, my rough estimate puts it at "Between Friends" receiving roughly 50% more votes.

If I was to compare the two on a sonic level, "Between Friends" is probably the more pop friendly song. The tempo picks up a bit and it's a more lightweight sound. I wouldn't say it betrays the expectations of "Breathe In" because the instrumentation on its own is still very light and pretty. It's a battle between the xylophone and synths but they come together very nicely on the chorus. I'm not the biggest fan of Jesse Davidson on the track. He's mostly got a slow drawl that blends in with the music rather than ascending above it. Once again the artist that has a low key feature credit doesn't have much else of note outside of it, and hasn't released any new music in 10 years. You'd think Japanese Wallpaper would want to cook with him again, glasses gang got to stick together. Instead, Japanese Wallpaper teamed up with some higher profile singers, and will land a couple more entries to come.

#709. Parkway Drive - Glitch (#86, 2022)

73rd of 2022

I'm writing this a day after I finished playing the video game "Split Fiction". If you're at all familiar with "It Takes Two" (the video game, not the song), it's made by the same developers and basically ramps up all the spectacle. I've never caught myself saying 'That's so cool!' out loud so often because of all the creative ideas packed into a game about...creativity. I'm just saying all of this because I don't know how else to start or if I have that much to say about "Glitch", just that the word in question shows up often in the game. It might just be a nifty word. Parkway Drive got their song out only a month before future Hottest 100 entrant Taylor Swift released her own song of the same name. The gap in Spotify streams between the two songs is way less than you'd expect (it's a 2:7 ratio).

Parkway Drive are relative veterans at this point, continuing to poll 17 years after their debut album. At least, I thought this but there are surprisingly many artists who predate them that still managed to poll that year, and it's not just the regular cast of Hilltop Hoods & Bring Me The Horizon. Once again it's just weird to see Parkway Drive cross over like this, especially with what is not a particularly well received track.

If you thought "Vice Grip" (#780) was cheesy, then this song isn't going to change your mind very much. It's once again a very different kind of Parkway Drive. The only resemblance you get to the past is the very telegraphed breakdown towards the end, and the only time you really hear Winston start growling is on one single delivery of the word 'me' (or 'MOI'). It would be more accurate to say that he raps for a lot of this track. It sure is a choice to be made. Musically, the song feels pretty radio friendly, all things considered. This all sounds like I'm making fun of it, and maybe I am, but it is a fun time.

#708. Dillon Francis (feat Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs) - Without You (#99, 2013)

76th of 2013

I have a lot of fondness for the 2013 Hottest 100 that may be beginning to show itself in the relative progress of all of the respective lists, racing each other to be the first (or last) to each mini milestone. Actually 2013 just got bumped into 2nd place because there are still 76 to go from the 2021 countdown, but 2020 is already down to 62...or 61 if you scroll through the rest of this post. It might feel like it matters that it's the last countdown where I felt familiar with all 100 songs before the countdown started, although that's not true for two reasons. Firstly that's something I could apply to many of the previous lists that I still didn't feel as strongly about, and also it's still not even something I can apply to it because where did this song come from?

I'm just continuing to spin this lie back and forth, because I had actually heard the song before, just briefly. Before Warm Tunas was the Warmest 100, the same concept of collecting votes posted online and collating them with what felt like alarming accuracy at the time given how little we had to go on beforehand. I avoid these info drops in the lead up for personal reasons I imagine I'll anecdotally explain in a future entry, but I was all over it in 2013, while simultaneously a little mad at how much it spoiled the excitement. On the other hand, it's never been a perfect voter sample. Over the years it's been a little easier to determine the extent of this, but there have always been songs that appear far higher or far lower than expected, and the occasional inability to discern these provides a whole different kind of surprise at times.

"Without You" belongs to the latter group, in quite a significant way. The list is fairly accurate to the extent that you have to go all the way down to #70 to find a predicted song that didn't make the list, but they were saved from a monstrous blunder when "Without You" snuck onto the list at #99. It was predicted to make it to #37! That's the only reason I ended up hearing it in advance, because I was so baffled that this song I hadn't encountered was doing so well. As it turns out, that's something of a litmus test. Any song like that is likely to be overpredicted because there's a whole generalised audience who aren't really going to bat for it, compared to the passionate fans who go so far as to post their votes online. The same artists then get overestimated year after year because it's largely a lot of the same subset of voters who are backing them.

I'll admit though that "Without You" is an odd song to fall under this circumstance. It wasn't exactly an unknown song the way I put it. It was in regular rotation on triple j in the months leading up, I just personally must have missed it every time, or not taken notice of it when it was playing. I'm not sure exactly how Dillon Francis ended up as the recipient either though. He's an artist I'd heard of at this point, but nothing about him or his discography, then or since, points to anything quirky or surprising. Same goes for Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs. He's the closest connection to having any of this make sense because he'd made the Hottest 100 before in 2012, reaching #78 with "Household Goods". I wouldn't think that's enough on its own, but maybe if you put together these two distinct but mildly thriving fanbases, you can make magic happen.

I'm not sure how much credit I gave to the song at the time. There's occasionally an element of betrayal when something seems to bust its way into your periphery without having done the hard yards. You feel like it hasn't earned its way there the way that even my least favourite songs in the countdown can at least take credit for doing. If it's anything short of amazing, you'll feel a bit robbed. I certainly felt that way about this song, and would've much preferred to see Jake Bugg's "What Doesn't Kill You", which landed at #101, make it instead. What an unexplainable banger.

It's what I'll say time and time again though. This is why I keep listening to these songs over and over again. Eventually you just assimilate them into your memory bank as if there was nothing untoward in the first place. It only slightly backfires because I can't help but feel like this is a song from 2014 since that's when I heard it the most, but it works, I find the song pretty likeable now. Just a pretty pleasant bit of electropop, and a clashing of different artists that feels natural.

#707. Flume (feat Tove Lo) - Say It (#8, 2016)

76th of 2016

Warning: This preamble takes a long time to even get to the song in question, or even feel like it's getting there

I've spent several years being fascinated by the list of the top 100 most streamed songs of all time on Spotify. I like all-time lists of this nature, where even the biggest hits of their time get humbled, like finding out via the annual Maths Competition how many kids my age who lived in Adelaide were better than me at maths. Often times though, they're a little unsatisfying because there's this feeling of it being stuck in a history that feels underwhelming. Like the Billboard Hot 100 list that completely disregards any success (or lack thereof) after that 5-15 month tenure. Andy Gibb has multiple solo songs in this list (as well as some Bee Gees ones). "Shadow Dancing" has 27 million Spotify streams worldwide. "505" by Arctic Monkeys has over half a billion streams in the United States alone and has never even touched the Billboard Hot 100, what's the more popular song? Side note: "Shadow Dancing" is pretty good but I'm not sure I'd ever heard it before.

That's what I love about the Spotify list. It's a version of history that's constantly being re-written. We're not completely stuck with the oddities of the past as it's always self-correcting. A song that will eventually appear on this list was the most streamed song of all time on Spotify 9 years ago. Unless it finds some new nostalgia cycle, it's getting close to falling out of the top 100 now. That's such a decline for a song that's still being listened to by hundreds of thousands of people every day, but in the game of constantly shifting margins, it's just not enough to hang around.

For a few years now, I've been running tabs on a specific aspect of this Spotify list, that being the way that the average release dates of the 100 songs have been shifting over time. It went from a very focused list on just the biggest hits of right now, to slowly welcoming in some older songs, and it being harder and harder for new songs to break in. With an unprecedented reign atop the global charts, it still took 7 whole months for Lady Gaga's "Die With A Smile" to crack the top 100. The bar just keeps climbing and you have to wonder if it'll ever get too high for the new hits. We're already seeing this with the YouTube all time list. For the time being though, it's an interesting mix of the old and the new, while the holdovers of dominance from the mid to late 2010s keep losing more of their former soldiers in the process.

A point of amusement in all of this is the sheer misfortune that's been set upon Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child O' Mine". This is a song that has been consistently getting 1.1 million streams a day. Last year's numbers suggest that in order to maintain a place in the top 100 list, you need to manage 0.9 million streams a day. And yet without fail, every time "Sweet Child O' Mine" finds an opening to break into the list, some faster moving whipper-snapper leap frogs it right at the finish line. Multiple times now it's happened on the very day that Guns N' Roses were otherwise due to sneak into the top 100. They've just been stuck with a near permanent residence at #101 and occasionally #102 with still no end in sight to the misery.

This is all just an arbitrary threshold in this instance, but that's not always the case. A lot of significance sometimes gets placed upon these markers, top 10, top 50, that sort of thing. There's very little proof to say that anyone outside of chart following communities could possibly act upon such things, let alone be aware of them. It has happened before though.

In terms of musical engagement that affects the charts, for a long time the iTunes Store was king. I would spend every week and sometimes every day examining it with a fine-toothed comb to try and spot what was going on with it, as it so often directly affected the charts. Shocking to hear this, but having something advertised on the front page makes people buy something that they otherwise wouldn't. The holy grail was the constantly updating top 10 list. It was possible to look at the whole top 120 (or top 200, depending on the era), but nothing compared to that top 10. It was an advertisement that not only told you something existed, but that it was objectively proving itself by beating the competition. It became known as the top 10 spike, the immediate secondary boost something would get when it made it in there. Simultaneously, leaving the top 10 could be brutal. Enrique Iglesias had a huge hit in 2011 with the song "Tonight (I'm Lovin' You)", this was in some part influenced by the existence of an explicit version of the song that replaced the word 'lovin'' with something else. Not the last song to do that in 2011. In both cases, the early adopters leant into the explicit version, but once the song started getting more radio airplay, that clean version became more familiar to many. You had this interesting set up where the moment those explicit versions dropped out of the top 10, the previously lingering clean versions started to get a whole lot more of the pie, suggesting that this was the natural order of things that one iTunes store chart was able to upset.

Spotify has its own version of this. For as long as I've been able to use the app, it's had a chart of its own. This has gone through the occasional shift which has both increased and decreased its reach. At its peak, it operated in a different way but achieved a similar goal. I think a lot of people would simply listen to these playlists on shuffle, so making it onto those lists would be an instant bolt regardless of how many people actually wanted to hear it. When Tool released their album "Fear Inoculum" in 2019, a few songs managed to briefly sneak into the top 50 playlist, and I remember seeing their day to day streaming numbers which let me determine that thousands of people in Australia listened to some very long Tool songs amongst The Jonas Brothers & Shawn Mendes for a single day. Would love to be a fly on the wall for that.

I think it's largely been diminished in the years since. The chart is often more tucked away on the app even when you're looking for it. It's spread between a daily and weekly chart which muddies up the impact, there's even a global and local chart which splits the audience again. Also I think it's easy to be permanently put off of it once you catch yourself in all of the conflicting cultures of it. Sometimes Indian songs just make the global Spotify chart briefly and it probably feels like a sign for a lot of people that the playlist isn't for them.

The Guns N' Roses story has a prequel, and it's the 27 years more recent song "Say It" by Flume. On the global Spotify chart, "Say It" spent a whole 4 straight months in the top 60. Its daily peak was #51. That's about 120 attempts to reach the cherry on the top branch and never quite getting there. Week after week of being the bridesmaid. Getting just 1 day in the top 50 would often be enough to stick the landing and hover around even higher. Maybe causing a ripple effect where it gets the song into some other national top 50 charts and they boost it even further. We'll never know what possibly could've happened with "Say It" because it's a song for which the threshold for something much greater was visibly just inches away from it.

I should be fair on the other perspective of this. To even get to that point is a stroke of extreme fortune for Flume. He released his 2nd album in 2016 at the perfect time to capitalise on a massive boon for future bass and associated genres. He brought with it some of his most pop friendly singles he's ever released setting up the dream scenario where he kind of goes for world domination. "Say It" even briefly fluked its way onto the Billboard Hot 100, giving Flume a technical second hit on his ledger.

Tove Lo is the featured vocalist on this song. She's had a spotty history on triple j where she's more likely to get played now, but at the time fell in with the crowd of artists with top 40 success that the station didn't look into. I could definitely imagine her breakout hit "Habits (Stay High)" getting played on triple j but it wasn't the case. A year later she scored another writing credit in the Hottest 100 canon with "Homemade Dynamite" (#864), and last year another Australian producer gave her a look-in to get a second very highly ranked Hottest 100 hit and nothing in-between.

There are things to like about this song. When she's in full singing mode and elongating her delivery, Tove Lo sounds great here. Flume doesn't full take centre stage but has his moments. Sometimes I think the drums are a bit overbearing, as is the synth line that occasionally pops its head in. There's something resembling a bridge near the end where everything gets space to breathe and it all feels like it's in order. It's something I never really gave it credit for at the time. I've just never loved the hook on this one. The echolalia doesn't quite click, and it's got a snappy expletive that doesn't fit what it's going for, so it sounds silly.

#706. Tame Impala - Lost in Yesterday (#5, 2020)

62nd of 2020

Tame Impala was gifted a chance to get away with taking things slow when "Currents" started catching various spells of virality in 2019. It's mostly due to that one song, but honestly several songs on it have caught some attention with it, helping it turn into one of those classic 2010 albums that exist to be a poster or a vinyl record that acts like a poster. Look, it's a good cover, I get it. If you look at the ARIA End Of Year Australian Albums chart, you can see a downward trend for a few years until "Currents" climbs back up the ranks in 2019, this continues to the point of finally going so high as to be the 2nd biggest Australian album of the year in 2023. It wasn't even that high in 2015. By the time LP5 comes out, Tame Impala will be all we have left.

With that in mind, it almost feels like Tame Impala never got more overzealously glazed here than during "The Slow Rush". Historically, sophomore slump has been very readily displayed in Hottest 100 voting results. You can afford curiosity but landing in the fabled top 10 voting list is not taken lightly. With momentum to afford however, there's barely a step missed for this album, and "Lost in Yesterday" landed nearly as high as its instant classic counterparts from 2015, quite peculiar.

"Lost In Yesterday" burnt out on me pretty quickly. It uses all of its best tricks up pretty quickly and then just feels like it's passing time. That bass line? Pretty good, but probably not enough to sit around on it for the whole song. Kevin sneaking in the falsetto runs at the end of the first verse, pretty good. Guitar riff at the end of the chorus feels like classic Tame Impala as a nice bonus. I just think the song needs a better chorus. You're always coming back to this up and down melody that feels like a nursery rhyme. Spoils the rest of a pretty good tune.