#630-#626

#630. Something for Kate - Sweet Nothing - Like A Version (#68, 2013)

68th of 2013

I'm feeling like a thespian right now. The arbitrary rule I set upon myself to never utter the name of any artist yet to make their first appearance in this list. It's been about 8 months now and I still can't utter the Scottish DJ. It's all just in the service of a single entry as well, just one that's frustratingly good enough to be avoided again and again. Maybe later this week?

"Sweet Nothing" is a song that fills out the charts but maybe doesn't go further than that. Think that sweet spot around #25 to #50 on a Billboard Year End list ("Sweet Nothing" landed at #44), so I wouldn't necessarily assume the average person even still remembers it at this point. To be clear and still slightly vague, Scottish DJ gets Florence sans her Machine to belt over a huge EDM record. Thanks to some strong airplay prior to release, it managed to debut at #2 in Australia (behind "Gangnam Style"), putting it in another weird chart run perspective where it basically spent its entire life falling down the chart and rarely stabilising, the kind that makes something look unconvincing as a hit. It was voted in at #11 in the Hottest 100 for 2012, it was a hit. It was enough of a hit that a year later, we got another helping of it, from a very different source, one of Australia's stalwart '90s bands.

Something For Kate have been going strong for over 30 years now, 27 of those years with the same lineup, fronted by...I forget his name, let's just say a very tall man with a gravelly voice. They've released 7 albums now and for me there's at least one stunner of a single on every one of them. They've got songs like "Monsters" and "Hallways" that touch on isolation, paranoia and existentialism that you really don't see elsewhere in any realm of popular rock. As has often been the case, just me writing all of this has gotten me stuck listening to "Hallways" again, what a perfect song.

They scored their last #1 album in 2006 and then slid away from mainstream attention into just serving their fans, though only scarcely as they've only put out two more albums since then. They narrowly missed the Hottest 100 in 2012 with another great track in "Survival Expert" (it finished at #103), so it seemed like their time in the spotlight was up, but they came back just a little bit stronger a year later, covering one of the 102 songs that they fell short of in 2012. Maybe they could've kept this up, I'd love to see a cover of "Bangarang" or "Internet Friends".

That sounds facetious but honestly I'm sure they could pull it off. If Something For Kate aren't known just for their songwriting, they've also got a great reputation for pulling off cover versions. Their Best Of album has several of them tacked on at the end, and they've since gone and done Like A Version several times. This won't even be the last instance here because the lead singer was also properly appraised when he came in on his own, hence my awkward introduction. Getting Something For Kate to cover you should be a rite of passage like when "Weird Al" makes a parody of someone.

So yeah, this is a pretty rollicking cover! I'm not really interested on whether or not it's better than the original, and for all convenient purposes, I don't even need to figure that out. I do think there's inherently more to be expressed through an extended instrumental break than a looping EDM drop, but there's certainly a place in this world for both options. Shout out also to the singer for enunciating it all far clearer than Florence ever did. You won't be making any 'sexy gherkin' jokes with this one.

#629. Omar Apollo - Evergreen (You Didn't Deserve Me At All) (#95, 2022)

60th of 2022

Some of the cynicism that comes with TikTok hits is the difficulty in shaking the perception that songs are picked out to set a mood for just a brief spell. There might be another 3 or 4 minutes beyond that. You can debate whether or not the whole song is good but it's like you're not even operating on the same measure as the people who are taking it to the stratosphere. I've said before that I don't think this is overly different from the way generations prior have interacted with their favourite hits of yesteryear, just that you probably can have more trust that they have heard the whole song in its original version, as opposed to the frequent sped up recordings that muddy the understanding of what the 'popular' version is.

"Evergreen (You Didn't Deserve Me At All)" has all the makings of a TikTok hit. A talented artist without a likely route to pop stardom, and a song that would never be picked out to get a push for success under normal circumstances because it just doesn't sound modern enough, outside of a few memorable choices in vocal mixing (namely the chirping response vocals and the shift in tone on the bridge).

That bridge is the important thing to look out for. If you're as largely absent from the TikTok hit factory as me, then you might not realise that it's the focused part of the song. Not any of the chorus with all the title drops, but the spiteful retort. The clue is in the added parenthetical, but it's very easy to miss the fact that those are actual lyrics from the song given the clashing inflections on how the line comes out. It also tends to be sped up, no alarms and no surprises.

But if it's on me to assess the whole song that was voted in for 2022, then I can't really complain with what's been given a spotlight. I think Omar Apollo does a great job with the anguish in his delivery. At times he reminds me of a certain contemporary R&B artist that I sometimes forget technically does have an entry to come here. It might not be wall to wall excitement, but if you've only ever heard 20 seconds of it, the surrounding minutes are worthwhile as well.

#628. G Flip - Lady Marmalade - Like A Version (#78, 2020)

57th of 2020

I really considered doing it. This blurbing adventure has already tricked me into watching two Baz Luhrmann films, as he keeps finding ways to get soundtrack hits into this countdown. This isn't really the same thing, but I'm definitely in the age bracket for whom "Lady Marmalade" is that mega collaboration between Christina Aguilera, Lil' Kim, Mýa & P!nk, from Baz's 2001 film "Moulin Rouge". No disrespect to Patti LaBelle of course, but G Flip is definitely drawing from the remake and the idea that the song is made to be a posse cut with a rap verse. The only reason I'm not doing it is because I ended up sick for a few days and no longer have the spare time to do it. If at some point in the next 2 months I change my mind and end up watching it, I'll append some more to this (this did not end up happening, sorry).

For the time I can always retell a moment of internal embarrassment for me. Back in 2001 I would watch Channel [V] quite a bit. The combination of that & So Fresh compilations gave me a supreme knowledge of popular music at the time. I don't remember what the programming was like, but I remember one of their music shows tended to always play "My Way" by Limp Bizkit to close it out. Then one day the host said they were going to play the #1 song, and that it was the same as last week. I confidently declared that I knew what it was going to be, and then I was blindsided when they played "Lady Marmalade". I'm uncertain if this was a made up chart or not, but it would pin it to sometime around June, just before Limp Bizkit debuted on the ARIA Chart ("My Way" peaked at #57), when "Lady Marmalade" was finishing its 3 week run at #1. If nothing else, it was a reality check for me in how the charts reflected a strikingly different picture of what was popular that wasn't just whatever I liked. That can go a long way to enjoying the pageantry of it all and not getting hung up on difference in taste. Or it would if I knew much of anything about how music charts worked then. Later that year (or possibly in 2002), my music teacher showed us a chart show in parts that was my first and only proper exposure to charts for years. I know it had to be after my initial gaffe because Michael Jackson's "You Rock My World" was in it.

This cover was aired in March 2020, 2 days before International Women's Day, and it truly is the Avengers of antipodean women. Alongside G Flip you've got the main vocal duty shared with Thandi Phoenix, Jess Kent and two other artists who will eventually appear on this list. This is maintained with an all women instrumental section as well. Impossible not to shout out Alex The Astronaut on the cowbell here. It's a shame I can't yet name her because the New Zealand rapper makes an absolute show of cosplaying Lil' Kim here. When you're going back to this to look for something fresh, she's delivering.

It might have been lingering spite from 2001 but I never did much like the song in the first place. It's served me wonderfully in trivia for decades because I've seen few questions come back over and over, more than having to name all the artists on the "Moulin Rouge" cover. At some point I stopped having to hear the song and must have gotten over it. Having a likeable cover version doing the rounds in my library might help too, as does spending 15 of the last 45 minutes listening to multiple different versions of it. Pop music is a lot more fun when you just let it be fun.

#627. Sam Fender - Seventeen Going Under (#16, 2021)

66th of 2021

I mentioned the BBC Sound Of... poll some weeks back when I was talking about Jack Garratt (#687), and made a note to myself to bring it up again when I got to Sam Fender, only to completely forget about it and write an entirely different spiel. So this is me, unable to slot it in the middle of all of this and mentioning it at the start. Sam Fender made the shortlist in 2018. That's an incredibly stacked year which includes Billie Eilish, Lewis Capaldi, Nilüfer Yanya, Superorganism & Tom Walker among others. None of those names even cracked the top 5, which does boast another star in Khalid in 4th place. The winner for that year was Sigrid, who I'm not going to besmirch, certainly not years later as I fell in love with her discography clearing single "It Gets Dark", but it is a reminder of just how hard it is to pick out future stars. Even when they're right there in the front, people can't help but chase the wrong leads instead. Anyway, onto the completely unrelated blurb I wrote a few days prior to this.

Ranking 1,000 songs takes a really long time. I did it all one at a time and was meticulous so as not to overlook anything along the way. It took months. By the time you're seeing this, it'll have been at least 2 years since I started. Even that doesn't feel real to me and the only reason I remember is because I took a break around the end of 2023, both because I was pre-occupied, and also because I went on holiday to England at the start of 2024. All the time I was there, I remembered that this was the last song I had ranked. Everything after this point has been shaped by the changed person I became when I got really sick and still had to take a solo commute back home for 20 or so hours. I did not allow my firsthand experiences with the general misery that living in England during the winter entails allow me any extra sympathy for the plight of Sam Fender. Or maybe I did, he's still got another song to come after this one.

I'd never really thought about it before but it's possible I have some slight biases that come into play when you get into the world of artists who are hugely popular just in the UK. There's something of an older sibling relationship going on, a chain from the US, to the UK, to Australia and then to New Zealand (I don't know where Canada goes), where everyone demands acknowledgement from those below us in population, but has very little interest in returning the favour. It might just be petulance on my part, with regard to how routinely Australian music gets the short end of discussion because we just don't have enough seats in music parliament to have any sway. It makes me not want to give them the time of day either.

I dunno though, I'm not beyond listening to music from the UK by any stretch, just sometimes the vibe is off. In the case of Sam Fender, it's probably just the name. It's his real name and I just can't take it seriously. It's always made me think of the Peggy Lee song "Johnny Guitar", a song I've now heard so many times thanks to "Fallout: New Vegas" (a video game I've never played). I can't even think of a logical extreme of the joke because I feel like we're already at it. Great Quiplash prompt, but you won't catch me listening to his music.

If you think this is incredibly unfair, I agree with you, and it's something I venture to try and improve on. I never really had to deal with it until he suddenly hit a new level of popularity on his second album and I wasn't able to just ignore him anymore. The fact I've taken so long to get to him now is hopefully a sign that I've sufficiently taken to the task seriously, but I also recognise that to some, this might be about 600 places too low to the point of sacrilege. Maybe I am overselling that to an extent. I had a conversation a few months ago that put some of my insecurities of my misgivings in perspective. To me the idea of just saying 'nah, stupid name, dated genre, stick it in the bottom 10' is so implausible and yet deep down I see so many people make even more dismissive responses without a shred of regret. So compared to that, maybe I do apologise too much, but I just want to lay all that on the table as a starting point for why I am not obsessed with Sam Fender or the song "Seventeen Going Under".

I didn't set it up this way or even realise when I was talking about TikTok hits two entries ago that this was on the pipeline. I think it's an interesting continuation on the thought though because this 5 minute rock revival song about bottled up anguish with life actually did become a surprise TikTok hit. Specifically, it was used to soundtrack victims of abuse, using the lyric 'I was far too scared to hit him, but I would hit him in a heartbeat now' as a means of catharsis and moving forward. Next to all of the 'hey, silly dance' and 'hey, funny beat switch punchline' trends, that's genuinely powerful, and goes some ways to acknowledging the way music can change your life with meaning. Who knows, there might just be a mental health healing block somewhere at the pointy end of this list, I ranked it so long ago and I haven't checked. This song's message doesn't connect to me on any specific level, but I do appreciate how meaningful it is to others.

You can tell it was a big viral hit because in addition to charting endlessly in the UK, the song even made a charge in Australia. It peaked at #69 and dropped out pretty quickly which doesn't seem like much, but I think that was just unlucky timing. The song rose rapidly and took just a few days to crack the Spotify top 50. The next day Taylor Swift dropped "Red (Taylor's Version)" and swallowed up all the attention from there, completely draining all of the 'next big thing' momentum as it was pushed back in the queue. I can't say it never recovered because Hottest 100 voters still backed it very strongly, but it does make me wonder if it could have been a much bigger hit. At least it got to be counted on the ARIA Chart, not everyone's that lucky.

On a sonic level, I get it. If it's the kind of rock music you like and want to hear more of, then this is probably the platonic ideal. It's firing on all cylinders, instantly locking into that riff and building momentum like a runaway train. It's got those great horns too, hard to know what else you could want. It's a bit of a tired sound for me (probably something to cover in a later entry), but I can appreciate what's going on here on at least a few levels. But put yourself in my shoes. What do you do when you can recognise something as objectively good, never want to engage with it, but also don't want to come across as disrespectful or obnoxiously above it (i.e. the 'yep, I understand their entire schtick and offhandedly dismiss them and move on' kind of music fan)? Sometimes I might ramble on because I have so much trouble articulating my thoughts without them getting misconstrued, especially if it's to be unintentionally rude. I guess that's why Akon just gives up and calls her a sexy bitch.

#626. Cub Sport - Sometimes (#30, 2018)

68th of 2018

It's 3am. Firstly, of course I'm lonely Mr. Rob Thomas, but also it's June 1st, 2025, the first day of Pride Month, and I'm sitting at my computer so I can write about one of the most outwardly queer bands in Australia writing a song about the emotional turmoil that comes with being public about that status and also serving as spokespeople and role models for others. I'm still tragically very cis and straight. I'm not trying to say I'm oppressed or anything, but when it comes to articulating on the topic, this is so not my wheelhouse.

What is in my wheelhouse is talking about Cub Sport, because I've been listening to them for a lot longer than most people. They're one of the longest thriving bands in the scene of early 2010s Australian twee indie pop. Back then they were called Cub Scouts. Entirely inoffensive, unless you were associated with actual Cub Scouts which is why they had to change the name, but for all intents and purposes, a band without necessarily high ambitions, or at least they didn't really show them. There's nothing wrong with this though, I maintain a very high opinion for their song "Told You So" from 2012. Some of the best layered harmonies for such a dreamy sound. Instant good books for that.

It's a story for another entry, but Cub Sport basically re-invented themselves in 2016, arguably shooting themselves to the A-list on the back of one highly beloved single, and many more along the way. This band went from having two albums that couldn't quite crack the Australian top 50, to having a #1 album in 2023. They'd become stars, and doing so means a whole new layer of scrutiny that not all are willing to confront, much less internalise and then express in the form of a song.

On those grounds, I think "Sometimes" is great. I often like the idea of introspective writing more than the actual result (I'm not going to cause an endless feedback loop by reflecting on my own writing right now), but this is one that nails the concept and gets it across. The big emotional swells and shifting pace tell a story on their own, it accomplishes what it sets out to do.

I've never been fully in love with actually listening to it. There is possibly a recurring theme where I can recognise significance in writing but it's simply impossible, and wouldn't be right for me to connect with it on the same level as the minorities for whom (and by whom) they're written. So it never fully connected with me and I was always distracted by the components I didn't love. The verses sound strangely reminiscent of "Arty Boy" (#760) and I wasn't enthused with the set up then either. The song wasn't unmemorable but also never made me feel like I was rushing out to hear it more than I already was. It certainly sounds better looking back, but it just wasn't anything I was ever able to relate to.

#635-#631

#635. San Cisco - Get Lucky - Like A Version (#39, 2013)

69th of 2013

There's a magic trick to getting a lot of upvotes in any discussion about Like A Version. Depending on what the current topic is, you can probably just get away with saying something like 'I prefer when artists cover something into their own style, there's no need to listen to this when the original already exists'. Or the polar opposite of 'Why did they even cover this song? They changed it so much I can hardly recognise it.' Both sound thoughtful and measured. Putting them down but providing reasonable feedback so it doesn't sound like trolling. Variations on the two get said so often that it's all become meaningless noise to me.

At some point in time, you just hear so many cover versions that you're bound to be less susceptible to them. The older you get, the more likely you know the songs that are likely to be covered, and the more likely you're going to have specific memories tied to them that you're not interested in overwriting or adding a new chapter to. In the age of music streaming, it's also even more likely that it's not even going to be a throwback to you, because promotion metrics beg for artists to tackle songs that you likely just heard. No one's keeping tabs on those streaming numbers more than anyone who wants to make a setlist and wants proven data that says people know and like these songs. Two of the biggest Australian hits of this decade so far have just been safe house covers of '70s songs that had recently gone viral on TikTok ("Dreams" and "Stumblin' In"). You can try to object but mathematics ensure it'll get rewarded.

I'm up all night to talk about "Get Lucky". Possibly not for the last time because it's another song that I'll be talking about twice here. This isn't one of those 'oh my god, it's already a throwback' type situations. This song polled in the same year as the original song. People were pondering in real time how they felt about this cover before the original had been fully canonised. Granted, the fact that they did this goes some ways to showing what the "Get Lucky" fervour was like in 2013, but damn guys, don't try and siphon votes in one of the most hotly contested finishes we've ever had.

I should probably talk about San Cisco at some point, but they've also got lots more entries to come as we cover just about everything except their early hits (which are arguably their biggest). For a band whose success peaked so quickly, they sure did manage to coast it out for a long time, going from plucky teenagers to unexpected elder statesmen.

There's a reason I opened with that spiel about covers, and it's that I don't really know where this one is supposed to land in all of that. You could easily say that yes, this is just "Get Lucky" with all the hooks still in their same place, and hardly anything surprising will ever happen during this run time. Jordi doesn't try to put a new spin on the mystery vocalist (haha, but you know) and their inflections, just making a very competent karaoke rendition. Except that's not entirely true either, because the bridge of this cover slows things down to insert some lyrics from the song "Hypnotize U" by a rap rock band who are obviously strongly linked to this song and will also surprisingly appear in the flesh in this list. No robot voices either, just a little bit of what could maybe be considered beatboxing. Scarlett, who we've seen here before (#964) also performs double duties, constantly switching between bongos and drums. It's a cute gimmick and gives it a better dynamic shift when the chorus comes around. This is right before the era where Like A Version covers would come off the conveyer belt feeling like professionally produced studio works, so it's something that can be better appreciated in that context.

It's self-evident that I prefer the original version of this song, the degree to which this is the case will slowly reveal itself. For this sort of briefing though, you can do a lot worse. It's not so much a jump scare if this version comes up on shuffle instead. It's a really difficult task for me to find a cover version and think that it really is adding to a song's story rather than leeching off of it. This one comes pretty close. Anyway, it's a Friday, so check it out if you get the chance, sound of the summer.

#634. Kendrick Lamar (feat Rihanna) - LOYALTY. (#97, 2017)

61st of 2017

It must be strange to compete against yourself. Did you know that during the 1977 Emmy Awards, the ABC mini-series "Roots" received so many nominations that at least one category gave it a clean sweep of every nomination. Not often that you've already got a guaranteed win. I could segue into the fact that Kendrick Lamar stopped his own song from going to #1 in Australia, when "Not Like Us" got to #1 ahead of "luther" at #2, which never managed to snag a week despite eventually outlasting the former. Something similar did happen at the GRAMMY Awards in 2018 though, when "LOYALTY." sampled the song "24K Magic", from the album of the same. That album would end up beating "DAMN." for Album Of The Year. Everyone can say that Kendrick was robbed, but imagine what it would be like for that guy if he got beaten by someone who just played part of his album in reverse, whoever that guy is.

This is Kendrick's song obviously but it's really Rihanna who gets the highlight. You can put this down as one step in a long line of re-assessment that her career has gotten now that we've been able to take a step back and look at it. She was not short on having fans at any point, but her rapid release pattern meant for only incremental change. There's a point in time that she must have gone from a faceless B-lister to a genuine superstar. Some might even say that it's right around when the song "Umbrella" was released, but if you were a detractor, you never really got a chance to see it that way, or you might have even evolved into one just out of over-exposure. I know because I'm one of those people.

Rihanna released 7 albums in 7 years. There was a slight gap in 2008 but it didn't really feel like that because she released a deluxe version of "Good Girl Gone Bad" that added another year's worth of Rihanna hits to the catalogue. She was never far away from the charts, and at one point managed to overlap her cycles. "We Found Love" is recognised as a classic now, but at the time it came out when her previous album's single "Cheers (Drink To That)" was still at its peak. It was a wink and a nod to her own ubiquity to do something like that and it put me in no mindset to want to like the song. Another album cycle came and went like clockwork 12 months later and it was probably more irritating that I found myself liking the lead single "Diamonds". It's the kind of exception that proves the rule that I really wasn't having pretty much anything she was putting out in the past 4 years.

The tale of the tape after this is that she went on a long break after this. That's technically true on an album release front, but she never really disappeared. Between these two albums, she had two big #1 hits, one with Eminem, and the other with Kanye West & Paul McCartney, with several other smaller hits on the side. Her output at this time did start to show a different side of things, "FourFiveSeconds" is just about a campfire guitar song, and it was quickly followed by "Bitch Better Have My Money", a trap song co-written & co-produced by an up and coming Travis Scott, that's also responsible for an amazing quote by Mads Mikkelsen describing his role in the music video. I didn't go all-in for it at the time but it was the most I had liked a Rihanna song in such a long time.

I'd say it was a signal for what was to come but I can't really say that with a straight face. Rihanna released "ANTI" in 2016 and it's still her last album to date. It leans more heavily into dancehall and even rock. The big hits "Work" and "Needed Me" were pretty palatable to the trends of the time, but they were hiding away some real oddities, like a 6 minute remake of a Tame Impala song that's basically just Rihanna singing over the original. Just a complete script flip that left a lot of people unsure how to respond to Rihanna's trajectory. I remember liking the album quite a bit, and it's the only Rihanna album I own, but I haven't heard it in a while.

When you have left turns like this, it takes a while for popular consensus to really set in. There's a knee-jerk reaction to anything that's not what it's expected to be at first that takes a long time to get sifted out. So once everyone got used to the fact that it's a pretty different Rihanna album, only then can it be properly appreciated for what it's trying to do. If you can find yourself accepting that Rihanna made a good album, it's easier to look back and appreciate what she's always been bringing to the table. It's an easy trap with music to fall into a dichotomy of heroes & villains, or that certain artists are so clearly bad and incapable of ever making a good song. Discourse even encourages it because it's so much easier to say 'Imagine Dragons = bad' rather than say 'oh, but they have this one song that you may or may not have heard that I think deserves a pass'. There's too much emotional stake to back down even the slightest.

So it may have taken a very long time, but I'm pretty on board with Rihanna now. Unfortunately that doesn't matter anymore because she almost never releases music anymore. The past 8 years have amounted to about 3 throwaway singles that I don't think she's remotely invested it. I can anticipate the potential for a comeback one day, but if it doesn't happen, that's fine too.

There's more reason to appreciate that Kendrick was one of the last people to get Rihanna to do something, and it's no small part either. With her interjections and short verse, she manages to be all over this song. Just absolute aura farming really, and arguably a prequel to the next time I'll get to talk about her.

#633. Spacey Jane - Pulling Through (#25, 2022)

61st of 2022

Whistling has got to be up there as one of the most contentious things in all of music. Just this seemingly innocuous element added on a whim that can either define a song or horribly derail it. In my head I don't think I have strong feelings about it, but then I think of that particular famous example from 2006, by a band who will actually show up here, and how I just don't get excited to hear it anymore. I suppose there isn't much you can do to shake up the formula so every "Moves Like Jagger", "I Ain't Worried" or Telstra ad that comes along is just gonna beat the same thing into submission. Ah well.

So I hear "Pulling Through" and the first thing that's going through my head is always going to be that it's the whistling song. That's how it starts anyway. It drifts elsewhere after that but it probably is still the most recognisable part of the song. Maybe I'm trapping myself in a box but I do think it's a relatively tasteful whistle. It simply would be out of character for me to not try to weigh up even the most minor differentials.

It is a minor thing though, because elsewhere I think you get a really solid example of the kind of nostalgic meandering that Spacey Jane love to focus on. Well really, the song is about that difficult situation of trying to correctly approach someone in a state of grief, where there often isn't an answer for what to do, but sometimes it's just the act of being present that's the best thing you can do. I want to add in a joke about another Spacey Jane song that's inadvertently mentioned here but that'd be jumping the gun, and that's probably failure for me.

Something I think this song does deserve further credit for though is how cathartic it is. I don't know if you've ever flicked through the track list for "Here Comes Everybody", but I can tell you that it's almost wall to wall songs about depression and anxiety. This song that sits at the very end of the album is a welcome bit of catharsis that the band are aware of the negative energy being exerted and trying to come out of it with a bit of hope.

#632. D.D Dumbo - Satan (#44, 2016)

66th of 2016

As someone who's gotten especially lazy when it comes to checking out new albums in the last 5 or so years, my constant desire to pad out these entries by exploring the accompanying albums keeps being met with the surprising realisation that I'd already listened to the album, I just forgot about it. It's kind of why I rarely catalogue these things publicly, because I never want to put on the impression of my own opinion that ranges from meaningless to an untruth. It only serves to weaken the surrounding opinions I have that are more informed or fully formed. I can't rightly accuse anyone of talking out of their own arse but I know when to stay in my own lane. Better to just stick with what I know, like say 1,000 songs I've listened to loads of times each, novel I know.

This is the last D.D Dumbo entry so what better opportunity to (re-)explore his entire discography? Well, it's not quite everything because he did release an EP in 2014. You can see shades of what his music would become later on. "Tropical Oceans" has a sprinkling of Big Scary bombast to it, and there's even an early version of "Alihukwe" that sounds quite different to the one that ended up on the album. Alright I guess I did listen to the whole discography after all. 

Mostly only being familiar with "Satan" and "Walrus" (#750) beforehand, it's hard not to hear the album and want to put everything on a sliding spectrum for which of the two they more closely resemble. You'll just constantly hear things that resemble the main "Walrus" riff, or otherwise the general percussion from "Satan". The lesser known third single "Brother" is like a bizarre hybrid of the two, but otherwise stands out as a highlight.

"Satan" calls to mind being a young, fresh-faced music fan. You're absorbing all of these strange and wonderful ideas with little regard for if it makes sense, because you can concede not understanding how it all works and going with the flow. Maybe all you can hear in this song is a bunch of attempts at Two Sentence Horror, but it's been put in front of you, why not just go along with it? In all honesty though it took until now for me to realise the word 'Satan' actually appears in the lyrics at all, he's just a hard guy to follow at the best of times. The three big evils are definitely eating people, watching TV and worshipping Satan.

A specific nostalgic itch that "Satan" does scratch is that it calls to mind two music videos from 2007. Firstly "Earth Intruders" by Björk, and also that Australian electro-pop banger that's actually about asylum seekers, you know the one. Both have similar videos that could loosely be described as a bunch of body doubles moving from one side of the screen to the other in a slightly intimidating way that fits with the song. Did you know that's actually Björk's highest charting song on the Billboard Hot 100? I guess that guy from Weezer was right about Timbaland. In any case, that's the vibe I get once "Satan" gets going. The actual music video for the song doesn't really match that description, although it has some brief moments like that. Considering that I made this observation before I could remember anything about this video, I would be incredibly suspicious if the resemblance was any greater. But then maybe that'd just be a sign that my memory is better than I give it credit for.

#631. Dom Dolla - San Frandisco (#33, 2019)

59th of 2019

It's not particularly novel to figure out that 'San Francisco' rhymes with 'disco'. The Vengaboys figured it out, Pauline Pantsdown figured it out. It's the kind of marketing for your city that you can't buy. I don't know if anyone's previously tried to make a stronger link than that, credit to Dom Dolla for getting actual San Francisco DJ Justin Martin to deliver the spoken word part of this song that does just that. He ties it further to the hippie culture of the '60s & '70s, and while it's hard to be certain that there's any truth in it, a lot changes in the space of two generations, it's a pretty reasonable hypothesis. It also reminds me of the spoken word delivered in Kenneth Bager's "Fragment Seven (Les Fleurs)" that mentions the hippie days, and it's delivered by Julee Cruise of "Twin Peaks" association. Shout out to all my brethren who were listening to triple j obsessively in 2007.

I took a reasonably quick liking to this song I think. It's pretty common to get hit house records that aren't necessarily playing for pop crossover. They're usually simplistic and better suited for a club than me sitting at my desk, to the point that it feels reductive and pointless to even try to assess them. Still, it's a sound I can potentially appreciate even in this limited capacity. "San Frandisco" doesn't have many thrills, but what it does have is a very telegraphed drop that gets the job done. Also shout out to the programmed drums that come in and out, it all feels surprisingly lively.

#640-#636

#640. Courtney Barnett - Pickles From The Jar (#51, 2014)

67th of 2014

A phrase to live by is that if you find yourself baffled at something's popularity, then it probably holds that it's popular for the very thing you don't like about it. Well, there might be a more succinct way to get it across, but it's probably also appropriate that I deliver it in a sort of clumsy way when I'm talking about Courtney Barnett. We're looking at her first time entry here, so there's no better time to address that aspect about her.

You can probably tell immediately upon listening to her music that it's divisive. She's the kind of artist that didn't even need to fully blow up to get that sort of reaction. It could be years before this point and you don't even have to ask. Just get inundated with a deluge of 'Am I the only person who thinks this is the worst song on triple j?'.

In many cases it's the biggest thing that separates triple j from most other radio stations locally and abroad. It's a complete hesitation to shy away from Australian music that embraces our local accents; there's just an all-in approach to embracing the chaos. I wouldn't say Courtney Barnett is the first, there's quite a lot of Australian hip-hop and even bands like Eddy Current Suppression Ring that come before her, but once she did break through, we did see a wave of more artists in that vein follow suit and garner similarly Marmite reactions.

I felt like this for a while myself. It wasn't necessarily just the way that she sung, but how it was accompanied by a brand of rock that didn't necessarily explode out of the gate. It was like you were being punished to listening to this distracting stream-of-consciousness that didn't even provide a form of catharsis. I'd say it was the natural reaction of hearing something I wasn't used to, except it really did take quite a while to get over that step. I think largely of her song "History Eraser", not her first song to get played on the national broadcaster ("Lance Jr." got there first) but one that was hard to ignore with its constantly building tension that seemed to only partly get disarmed by malformed punchlines. It also has what might be one of the most skewed aspect ratios I've ever seen for a music video on YouTube, just another aspect of her going out of her way to disarm and discomfort me.

"Pickles From The Jar" is a slight step forward to more popular appeal. I think the general lyrical conceit is easier to follow. It might still be off-putting for its low stakes and odd tangents that don't really follow the pre-established pattern of 'You say X, I say Y'. Or rather, they do, but not in a way that makes any sense. I do admire a shameless brand of Australian rock namedropping. On "History Eraser" she mentions The Triffids, and here she manages to sneak in You Am I. It feels honest, and I love it when Australian music reinforces and canonises itself like this. Given her international popularity, she might be reaching a lot of listeners who've never heard of these bands, so she's doing more for them than any dismissive gatekeeper ever has.

I do come back to this with the perspective of her having multiple albums under her belt now, and having her general aesthetic click with me quite a bit better. Maybe the me of 2012 would be mortified at the degree to which I've grown to admire a lot of her music. Well, the low budget sound hasn't gone all the way for me either, so a lot of her earlier music does still have a scrappy quality to it that I can't fully ignore. I can still mostly appreciate this song for what it is though.

#639. ZHU x Skrillex x THEY. - Working For It (#54, 2015)

64th of 2015

I think I alluded to ZHU recently in an entry for his big breakout hit that felt like it came out of nowhere. Whenever I think about that song, I constantly forget that ZHU actually did have a second, pretty decent-sized hit after it. One of those unlikely things like when Baauer had another minor hit in Australia after "Harlem Shake".

Maybe it helps that it's not entirely a ZHU song. We're also coming face to face with Skrillex, an artist with a few big hits both just before and just after the cutoff of this list, so it's just this one song for him here. As for THEY., I know so little about them. They're a duo, and one of them had a minor hit with The Chainsmokers, while I also latched onto one of their songs in 2024 called "Diamonds and Pearls", a song that sounds absolutely nothing like this one and made it even more difficult to determine where they come into this song.

I think of this as a ZHU song more than anything else though. Not just because his name comes first, but because it felt like an establishing shot of what his music really sounded like beyond the first hit. That initial hit felt like the work of an electronic producer who was just singing for lack of mercenaries to hire, but so often since then it's become clear that ZHU does just want to sing on his own songs. His voice is pretty unmistakeable because of how distracting it is, sounding oddly childish and high-pitched.

"Working For It" is a very clear example of this. I can't always tell with some of the pitched vocals whether it's THEY. or him, but there's a certain telltale register that comes through so clearly as ZHU that just makes me wonder what he's trying to go for here. It's a catchy vocal melody but it really goes overboard sometimes. It's a fun song still, I think musically there's an alluring bounce to it that makes the general appeal clear. It just ends up with a 'too many cooks' vibe sometimes that can be overwhelming.

#638. Lil Nas X - STAR WALKIN' (League of Legends Worlds Anthem) (#49, 2022)

62nd of 2022

Lil Nas X can have his turn later, why don't I talk about League of Legends? I've never played it, and luck willing, I never will, but it has inundated me for many years. There's a case to be made that it's one of the most enduring video games of all time. We're not talking about franchises here, just a singular video game that was released way back in 2009, and through constant updates remains remarkably popular to this day. Only really Minecraft competes on this scale.

If you fall in the range of not knowing, but wanting to know, League of Legends is a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA), where teams of 5 work together to traverse a map, killing minions, towers & their opponents to get stronger so they can traverse all the way to the enemy base and destroy their nexus, the winning condition. Players initially select from a list of around 100 champions who all have unique pros & cons. To play around with the meta, players also initially ban champions during selection, potentially forcing players to think on their feet. Back when I was more prone to writing Jeopardy! boards about music, I toyed with making a category about hit musicians who share their names with League champions, because there are quite a few (Annie, Ashe, AURORA, Jax, Lulu etc). Games take around 30 minutes, give or take. It's a reasonable investment and so quitting, poor play, and 'intentionally feeding' the opposition is highly frowned upon.

This is all to say that the game has a persistent reputation as one of the most toxic games around. For years I used to see ads for the game with a cheerful disposition that tried to encourage people that they would immediately have a fun time with this game and I never believed them. I've been within earshot of so much League gameplay that I comfortably know the accuracy of the reputation. There's a version of me who got in earlier with the game and got really hooked on the gameplay loop I'm sure (I remember really enjoying a multiplayer mode in a Ratchet & Clank game that pre-dates League, but is conceptually very similar), but I just have no interest in getting involved with it now. I think my time is better spent doing things that bring happiness to me, and it's not something I can believe can come for me from League.

It's also a video game that's popular enough to have its own TV spinoff, "Arcane". It's a show that's touted so highly that you can enjoy it even with very little knowledge or experience with the games themselves. There is no crossover between the soundtrack and the Hottest 100 (oh, the misery), but they did include the Ashnikko song from season 2 on the most recent voting list.

I binged the whole show late last year. It's been so long that I can't remember if I did it for the purpose of writing about it on this list, or if I could finally vanquish the great foe of being told to watch it over and over again. I thought it was alright. I never felt incredibly invested in the plot or the stakes of it, but it usually managed to fall back on looking gorgeous (or, gritty in a very pretty way). Quality animation is something that's not often appreciated, as it very rarely seems to turn the success needle, as if to encourage lazy work. I have to give kudos when it's done well, there's something aspirational about seeing things come to life with artistic intent. It's very funny that one of the most acclaimed series of all-time also has "Enemy" by Imagine Dragons as its theme song, but you won't hear a bad word about that from me.

But hang on, that gratuitous parenthetical says "(League of Legends Worlds Anthem)". Worlds is simply a major e-sports tournament for the game. It might just be the biggest e-sports event in the world. It's so big that even I'm across it, and I know that the Korean team T1 has won it two years in a row. You might have heard the story of how BTS became so popular that they got the South Korean government to change their laws on mandatory military service to keep eldest member Jin out for a little longer. The same also applies here, with perennial e-sports champion Faker (from T1, not the "This Heart Attack" band) was able to avoid military service, because he's so good at this video game.

This is all to say that in case you thought any different, the two notable League of Legends-related hit songs in the early 2020s are not actually cut from the same cloth. One promotes a TV show, the other, a tournament. I remember looking to try and find any evidence that Lil Nas X had any interest in League before this song came out and I had no luck. I could readily believe his online persona was forged on Summoner's Rift, but in the promotional video Riot put out for it, I got an even heightened impression that he'd never heard of the things he was talking about. The funniest thing about it all for me was when the game itself started showing incredibly immersion-breaking ads for Worlds and the song.

Also "STAR WALKIN'" is a song. Just another moderately big hit for Lil Nas X at the time but currently it's his last song to make any sort of major chart impact. It's possible he won't get another one after this, which is not very becoming of the song's boastful nature. It does show that life does in fact come at you fast though.

At its best moments, the song is pretty great. It languishes a bit during the verses, but it certainly builds to an anthemic chorus. Given his musical origins, it's striking to hear something from him that sounds so big and imposing, even passing the 3 minute mark which is rare for him. Great little outro too, a 20 second piano reprise that recalls "Epic" by Faith No More. Even if Lil Nas X's stardom turns out to be brief, he's certainly made the most of it, but he's still breathing, so I shouldn't ever say it's over.

#637. Flume (feat Andrew Wyatt) - Some Minds (#24, 2015)

63rd of 2015

I want to do an extremely laboured bit that isolates examples and suggests that Flume is very good at picking collaborators on their way up. After all, he teamed up with Chet Faker back in 2012, and more recently, with Ravyn Lenae in the wake of her commercial breakthrough. The most laboured of all of these is to suggest that he made Andrew Wyatt a star. Now, he may have already written a #1 hit back in 2010 (whose artist will show up here eventually), but on the other hand, his yet to be named band will also show up here when they belatedly scored their biggest hit in 2016. Also he won a GRAMMY and an Academy Award in 2019. That's right, since working with Flume, this unlikely musician is now halfway to an EGOT, like a lizard in a chair.

But also check out this unlikely song! Flume was still yet to reach his big commercial peak, but he had enough clout to take this spacious song with a delayed and incongruent payoff to be a reasonable hit. What is it doing at #27 on the ARIA Chart, what is it doing at #24 in the Hottest 100? The Flume fans were fiending temporarily before truly eating about 8 months later.

It's probably the most unconventional hit Flume has ever had. Maybe he's had some that are more outwardly playful and off kilter, but he has a certain general formula that can be trusted. There's a reliable structure and a payoff when it gets to the chorus. Either the chorus precedes the release, or it is the release. "Some Minds" leaves you hanging on its 'old air conditioner in an empty room' feeling for a whole 3 minutes, basically the whole song. It shifts a bit during the chorus but there's no release, just an awkward return. I say the payoff is incongruent because it holds very little resemblance to its starting point. It's just an extra minute of Flume playing around with bleeps & bloops. It's a fun extra minute, and the YouTube analytics make me believe it's the star of the show, but it's so rare to see songs get singled out for sections like this when they have to be considered a full package. I wish I could see similar information for "Spaceman" by Babylon Zoo because it's the closest comparison I can think of. A peculiar two-for-one package.

#636. Lil Nas X - THATS WHAT I WANT (#29, 2021)

67th of 2021

I didn't have much to say about Lil Nas X in the last post. It was very easy coverage for the fact that I knew this post was coming so soon after, but also because I wrote the post very soon after Stereogum's The Number Ones column got to tackling "Old Town Road", and anything I could possibly say on the subject is so thoroughly swamped by it in both depth and detail. It doesn't help me knowing that Lil Nas X's other two entries will also be covered there, possibly before I get to them too.

Then again, maybe the most interesting part of this side of the story is how that doesn't figure into it. Depending on when you come into the story, it might not be obvious of the extent at the time that Lil Nas X was an outsider to the whole pop process. Every now and then you'd get some fluke viral hit that sputters out without enough mass appeal, or just not the right marketing to fully capitalise on it, but Lil Nas X had something special on his hands, a goofy country-rap hybrid that was irresistibly catchy.

I suspect nowadays, it's something that triple j might even latch onto, as they seem more in tune with what's making waves on TikTok, "Old Town Road" was a harbinger for the future of pop music but we just weren't fully ready for it. It was the biggest hit of 2019, but there are no Hottest 100 kudos for Lil Nas X in that moment. That changes in 2021 when suddenly he backs up his initial success to briefly become one of the most bankable stars in the world and triple j do take notice. He landed two songs in the top 10 that year, and a little lower down he had this song, an unlikely contender to break his Hottest 100 virginity, considering it's technically his last top 10 hit in Australia.

"THATS WHAT I WANT" feels unassuming, maybe even forgettable compared to Lil Nas X's other hits, but it was undeniably huge. It spent so long hovering around the top 10 in Australia that its chart run with a Christmas dip makes it look like two hit songs stitched together. Maybe at the time it felt like he was just running on his own fumes, but the fact that he hasn't really been able to do it again since then, it suggests that he was onto something here.

(Remember the remix that made it a hit again? Wait never mind)

A notable part of the "Old Town Road" story is that at some point during his long reign at the top of the charts, Lil Nas X came out as gay. That's not very common prior to this and speaks some volumes to how much society has progressed in several decades. It's become an inescapable part of his identity, largely because of songs like this that don't even pretend to hide it. The entire first verse is him telling us how much he needs a boy to cuddle, again, very unusual to hear on a song that would get blasted on the radio everywhere. Representation like this is good, and a song like this can go a long way in proving how little it will affect the cis straight folk like me if it becomes part of the cultural tapestry.

Helps that the song is just undeniably fun and catchy once again. I only dock a few excitement points because it's always stood to me as a slight retread of the sound of another song I'll eventually get to here. Maybe some people voted for both songs, but for canonisation, you hate to have it feel like something's been overwritten and forgotten in place of the new and shiny model. I want the deep cuts to live on, that's what I really and/or f**kin' want.

#645-#641

#645. Billie Eilish - TV (#32, 2022)

63rd of 2022

Billie Eilish's popularity soaring the way it has leads to a lot of unwarranted generalisations. It just gets a lot easier to sift through popular media if you can sum it up like that, but it's wrong so often. She'll have a crossover hit with a poppier number, and all the cynics will point to that as the only side of her that exists. It's impossible to be considerably popular without drawing in this viewpoint. Whether it's a worthwhile one or not, the need to prove an aversion to the mainstream is a personality trait. But there's a certain irony that you can't do it justice without having fully done the work to prove you're not talking out of your arse. It's why often the greatest criticisms come from former fans, who have both the investment and requisite knowledge to hit the mark.

In July 2022, Billie Eilish released "Guitar Songs". It's billed as an EP but it's just the two songs, a light showing compared to her first EP that runs anywhere between 8 and 14 tracks depending on where you get it from. That first EP was released in 2017 and her music has made significant strides since then. For the purposes of blog continuity I can only highlight "Happier Than Ever" (#716), but that same album also has songs like "Oxytocin" and "Lost Cause" which also don't sound anything like the "ocean eyes" singer-songwriter many may have been introduced to before that. "Guitar Songs" feels like a concession to that notion. Beyond the bigger budget and the increased gimmicks, at the core of it, she and her brother are still musicians with something to say that can do it without artifice. "Guitar Songs" is what it says on the tin, two gentle songs delivered mostly just on guitar (well, there are bass & drums that come in at times). In a relatively lean year with nothing else out to her name, both of these songs polled and so I'll talk about the second one at a later date. For now it's the bigger hit, "TV".

I'll admit that I'm someone who is drawn to Billie and Finneas's brand of artifice. I also think though that you can't keep getting away with that if you don't have songwriting chops to back it up. "TV" never seeks to thrill, but it also doesn't sit around. There's a genuine feeling of emotion stirred up in it and it runs for a surprisingly brisk near 5 minute length without feeling tedious.

If you remember "TV" for one thing, it's probably the lyric in the second verse where Billie compares the relative attention given to the Depp v. Heard defamation trial, compared to the simultaneous US Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. It's easy to look at it the same way we might about New Radicals' "You Get What You Give", where the back end of the song's lyrics purposefully sparks a pointless celebrity feud to prove that it'll get more people talking than the political issues he lumped together next to it. I think it has a bit more poignancy nowadays when so much celebrity drama nowadays is steeped in a socio-political lens, even on the shallowest level of punditry. Much of the discourse around that celebrity trial boiled down to a debate on misogyny, where in a messy spattering of information, it became easier for a lot of men (and women) to believe in the idea of an opportunistic woman trying to defame the funny pirate man. The Supreme Court decision didn't go down quietly, but the relative attention given does speak to the fact that this sort of online chin-wagging will use the gravitas of feminism and the countermovement against it, all while not living up to it amidst serious implications for bodily autonomy. It's hard to tell if these discussions have gotten more cerebral, or it's just the latest in a line of swapping out terminology once it's no longer potent.

I want to highlight the rest of the song, because surrounding that line is a lot of personal reflection on depression. Maybe on some level we don't need to hear it from rich celebrities, but it does also serve as a reminder that there isn't necessarily a quick fix on mental turmoil. Money can help but it doesn't just magically make it all go away. It can actually create a new layer of anxiety, where you feel like your value as a commodity outweighs your value as a person. I get the feeling in this song that Billie's increased celebrity has created a distance from any friends she had previously. It's framed as being about a relationship but I think it works both ways. If you get drawn in by something like this, you'll find a conflict between what you think is best for you, and what others think. You'll probably trust your own judgement until it comes back to bite you. It's summed up succinctly with a lot of repetition of the same few words, starting with 'maybe I'm the problem', and ending up at 'baby, I'm the problem'. It's not necessarily my viewpoint (I think we all have our struggles and if you come across people who think they've figured it out, they're just better at hiding it), but it is a valid form of soul-searching. It can be a real struggle to figure out how the world works when we're simultaneously trying to recalculate ourselves, to both understand and to be the best version of ourselves we can be. I can't help but admire the fact that Billie is such an influential voice in music because how often do we get something as raw and honest as this?

#644. Horrorshow - Dead Star Shine (#98, 2013)

70th of 2013

A tragic loss brought about by algorithmic content pushing is that by aggregating all of the most shared opinions, you very safely reinforce those ones and shut down the fringe viewpoints. I don't mean that in the usual meaning of the term, but rather that it's very rare I see nostalgic posts that are so highly specific. We've had them all beaten out of us. If I wasn't writing this blog, it's really hard to justify even mentioning them a lot of the time, but my life is full of those ultra-specific touchstones.

You know what's a song that I've not seen mentioned in a decade but think about constantly? "The Rain" by Horrorshow. That's because it's a song whose popular culture imprint is merely that it was played a lot on triple j around 2009-2010. It didn't make the Hottest 100, so it may as well have disappeared after it stopped turning up on the radio. It's like a core memory being deleted, it can't come back unless someone of prominence brings it back with the right intonation of 'Remember this?'. Well, I guess I have to be that person sometimes.

I hated "The Rain". I struggle to think of another song that riled me up from hearing it on the radio so much at that time, and it was sharing airtime with "Home" by Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros. It was something to dread. Packed in its seemingly endless 4 and a half minutes, it reeked of pseudo-profound religious spirituality and a narrator who was too easily impressed by someone who looked like an older version of them saying it's gonna rain, and then it does. I don't think I realised it at the time, but it's like looking into my own attempts at creative writing, just an inability to pace things and put anything in between the forewarning of an action and then the action itself. Just hearing the phrase 'Hush child, from the joy to the pain, it'll all wash away in the rain' would be enough to set me off, and then the song has the gall to refuse to even end after all that.

It's the perfect sort of nostalgia packet because even if they don't remember, a lot of people heard this honestly kind of memorably bizarre song over and over again for a period of time. triple j have not actually removed it from rotation, but it's strictly in the realm of getting played once or twice a year in the middle of the night. I also don't really hate it anymore, because the sheer recollection of this moment in time 16 years ago is too profound to have a negative relation to it. That and I've become more accepting of Australian hip-hop in general, and when we're talking about the big names, it's hard to not give Horrorshow props.

I frequently forget that Horrorshow isn't a super group. It's just one rapper and one producer. That rapper is Solo, and he's showed up on this list before with Thundamentals on "Got Love" (#813). Horrorshow are in fact part of a super group, but that's a story to tell later. Still, they felt ahead of their peers in terms of production value. A lot of Australian hip-hop at this point thrived on a blatant DIY feeling, but wherever he got his inspiration from, DJ Adit really succeeded with modern production values that could easily fit right in with American counterparts. When they first started out, one of the honchos at Elefant Traks (who will also show up here in rapping capacity), drew a comparison to Atmosphere. I definitely hear a bit of Slug's inflection when I hear Solo doin' his think (note: this is a reference to a Horrorshow song called "Thoughtcrime (Doin' My Think)", now pretend you didn't read this part and appreciate my clever reference).

It was a slow rise for Horrorshow. Whatever acclaim they were getting wasn't translating to an audience. This all changed in 2013. I can only concede that "The Rain" must have won over a lot of listeners because their next album came 4 years after and it debuted at #2 on the ARIA Chart, just behind P!nk in the middle of one of her two and a half month residencies on tour in Australia (this is not an exaggeration, June 25th to September 8th, 46 shows, all sold out). That's the sort of success that would have you believe they're Hottest 100 bound, and they were, just barely, and never again after this song.

At the time I was a bit peeved. My feelings about "The Rain" had not yet washed away, and I felt that I just barely landed in the range of having to acknowledge this group when I didn't want to. I'd hear "Dead Star Shine" and hear the worst version of it in my head. I'd hear the way the title gets repeated over and over again and just see it as a lacklustre hook, something they should've tried harder on.

This one grew on me too. There's a bit of similarity to "The Rain" in this one, building its central thesis on a 'woah' moment. This one's talking about distant supernova. Once you start looking at things on a cosmic level, the speed of light isn't quite everything, and it's possible that you could be looking at a dead star without even realising it. If you look at the sun, you're just seeing what it looked like 500 seconds ago.

Either way, it's about recognising your brief time on this world and realising you should make the most of it. It doesn't matter how you come to this epiphany as long as it works. Does the song drag on just a little bit? Sure. But I do find Solo's stream of consciousness flow pretty compelling as well. Who am I if not a person who will start a topic with no clear sign of the end goal? Their name always made me think of Horrorshow as being abrasive in some way or another, but they can be pretty pleasant when they so desire.

#643. girl in red - Serotonin (#40, 2021)

69th of 2021

At some point in time, girl in red got really popular. Google trends point me to the middle of 2020 which pins it to a TikTok trend that suggested listening to girl in red was a shorthand for being a lesbian. I'm here to ruin that statistical data point because I was listening to her music quite a bit at that time. Her song "rue" in particular which dresses up her usually light sound with an unexpected layer of intensity. She was on a bit of a rock tear at that moment, the song "You Stupid Bitch" was also released as a single around then.

I first heard of her back in 2019. One of her earlier singles is called "dead girl in the pool." and trust me that you won't forget that fact after you hear it. By this point in time, her most popular song had already been released and I just wasn't aware of the fact. That one I'm talking about is "we fell in love in october", a song with a staggering total of about 1.4 billion streams on Spotify. It helps that the song has definitively entered the canon of songs that get an annual excuse to surge back up the charts and into our minds, but it persists strongly for the other 11 months as well.

Still, girl in red's popularity has a curious turn to it. For most artists there's a clear pecking order in their catalogue that more or less stays the same over the years, but looking through girl in red's last.fm stats on the Wayback Machine during these formative years, you get peculiar shifts. "we fell in love in october" was her most popular song back in 2020, until it drastically got pushed aside and then came roaring back. Just in the space of a few months in 2021 it more than doubled in listeners while the rest of her catalogue didn't move very much. So many of those initially popular songs just got pushed to the wayside to make way for the new standard, which still includes some of them. "bad idea!" another 2019 single and one of the first I knew, lives on as possibly her second most popular song. I should also note that this is all a largely Spotify contained bubble. Her YouTube views are usually roughly a tenth of what she does on the streaming platform.

One of the songs that got pushed aside was "Serotonin", to date her only Hottest 100 entry. At the time it made sense as a capitalisation on her general popularity pooling together on this recent hit. Her recent singles aren't coming close to re-capturing her prior numbers, so it might end up being her only entry. You get the feeling that if the virality machine ever feels like doing its thing again, it's more likely going to prop up one of her older singles that won't be eligible for voting. She did manage a #183 finish this year with "You Need Me Now?" but that's a last gasp that had Sabrina Carpenter's name attached to it, so it doesn't bode well for future momentum.

You won't catch me thinking too deeply about "Serotonin". It is nice to see a second neurotransmitter song in here after "Dopamine" (#896), but it doesn't do me any good in trying to distinguish them in a trivia context. This one's a nice upbeat track. I mostly find myself recalling it for the verses that briefly takes the song in a trap direction, though it's never quite as long as it feels like it is. It's probably a good depiction of the mental health struggle she's talking about. Maybe my intrusive thoughts aren't quite as intense as her's, but that sort of mental anguish often does just flick in and out at the drop of the hat. Sometimes the best thing you can do is just be aware of it and don't let it consume you.

#642. The Weeknd - Take My Breath (#53, 2021)

68th of 2021

I think deep down a lot of people have the desire to be Commodus, watching over the Colosseum of music and having the final say on what is a hit and what is a flop. You tend to need an arbitrary case by case ruling because you tend to find holes in the system if you try to make a strict ruleset. Platinum sales is enormous success for one artist but a dismal failure for another, and even then, it might feel like a success down the track with the benefit of hindsight.

I remember reading an article years ago that was trying to mathematically determine the biggest flop albums, using a measure of decline from their predecessors. You do find some genuine examples in it, but some of the leading examples tend to be funny cases, like Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk", or Michael Jackson's "Bad". In fairness, it probably was the sentiment at the time, but it's so funny nowadays given how successful those albums were.

I mentioned when I was talking about "Arabella" (#748), where hit singles and chart positions have a habit of masking the reality of the situation. Chart analysts are probably guilty of leaning into it because it shapes our perception and we'll look back on it and think that it just feels right. Once that sets in, you're probably just going to see audiences self-perpetuate it, reinforcing a status quo that might have been shakier than initially perceived.

It has been funny over the years to see the threshold for flop albums change over the years. I remember 15 years ago when Christina Aguilera's "Bionic" was the flag-bearer for this, considerably missing the high mark that her first 3 albums achieved. In hindsight it didn't do too badly, hanging around on the chart for a couple of months, and even getting to #1 in the UK, while also having the curious trivia nook as a starting point for Sia's future pop dominance as she co-wrote several songs on it. Christina's next album "Lotus" was probably a better sign of this as it was pretty much dead on arrival, with the indignity that her next album 6 years later managed to out-chart it.

One of the more recent albums I've seen receive this treatment is The Weeknd's "Dawn FM". It followed the monster success of "After Hours", the album that housed two of his biggest hits, and two of everyone's biggest hits with "Blinding Lights" (#786) and "Save Your Tears". "Dawn FM" by comparison housed none of his absolute biggest hits, cranking the ubiquity down to less than zero, to the point that it was even overshadowed by a revival of an even earlier single in "Die For You". If that's not enough, then this is the only time I talk about the album, with a single that came and went before it had the full stink of association.

That's the prevailing narrative anyway. In reality, it was a fairly successful album that stuck around a lot longer on the charts than you'd probably think. It landed at #10 for the year in Australia, arguably outperforming The Weeknd's 2016 album (whose title track will eventually appear here) within the same time frame. The overall streaming numbers are lower, but outside of the lack of monster hits, not catastrophically so. A few tracks on it have accumulated pretty decent streaming numbers too, "Is There Someone Else?" has racked up close to a billion on Spotify now.

I think "Dawn FM" was just a solid, likeable album even without big standout tracks. Perfect study fodder from start to finish. Or maybe the best compliment I can give is that it feels like a better realised version of what "After Hours" was trying to do. It does have occasional narration from Jim Carrey and I would prefer if it was someone with just a slightly shorter rap sheet of stupid things to have said or done, but I can do my best to focus on the positive.

You don't have to think about it for "Take My Breath" at least. I can understand being a little worn out and not having much time for The Weeknd doing this again in 2021, but coming back to it with a bit of time apart and it is...I really apologise for saying this...a breath of fresh air. Love the dark synth breakdown on the bridge, just all crafted within an inch of its life.

#641. The Amity Affliction - Ivy (Doomsday) (#94, 2018)

69th of 2018

So in 2017 we missed out on getting Architects' song called "Doomsday" but it took only one more year to get a different metalcore band's song of just about the same name. It feels a little bit on the nose but I don't know the politics of the situation and no one seems to care about it. Maybe it's hard to find a Venn diagram of paying close attention to both a British band and an Australian one. The Football Club also released their song called "Ivy" in 2017 but I understand everyone forgot about that one. This is definitely one of those [Cool Title (Real Title)] situations although we do get a brief 'Ivy' in the first lyric of the song.

You know what you're getting here. It's a little bit back to basics in that it's less theatrical than they'd started getting on the last two albums. On the other hand, they adopt all of the chopped up vocal effects on the bridge that call to mind Bring Me The Horizon. Gotta do something to dress up the breakdowns and keep them fresh.

I think Ahren & Joel are both pretty good on this one. Mostly a case of restraint winning out, but it all rounds out as a pretty catchy radio single.

#650-#646

#650. Sticky Fingers - Outcast at Last (#51, 2016)

67th of 2016

How do we decide our opinions on music? It's got to be some spurious middle point between total biased favouritism and sheer mechanical enjoyment factors, right? I don't think I've ever seen anyone admit to being pulled by the former, and yet it's hard to escape the feeling that we're all a little closer to that than we care to admit.

I say all of this because there's a pattern that develops in the world of music discourse that is monumentally distracting from it all. Simply, the frightening ease it is to dislike the correct artists due to transgressions that always conveniently lines up with a lack of quality in the music. Because it is easy. You never have to feel guilty about liking their music because the worst people already make the worst music. All I can ever think at that point is that it's being propped up by people who don't like the music first and foremost, and now they've got a great argument to make for it. Or maybe they just don't even consider it, because the sheer personal Haterade sipping goes too deep to even give out the time of day. For anyone not part of this engagement, it's not exactly useful commentary.

I'm probably guilty of this myself all the time. One of many people for which the moment Kanye West stopped making music worth listening to lines up very closely with when his actions became irredeemable. Going against this principle is basically betraying your whole team by not putting your whole heart into it. You just can't say that stuff publicly, like admitting you like some Collingwood players.

So with all of that, I'm supposed to hate Sticky Fingers, and it should be easy to do so. Their music being all crass and out of step with more hip musical movements. I just don't though. "Outcast at Last" is no Steele Sidebottom, but it gets the job done all the same. We're gonna have to keep running into this issue too, because this is still the bottom half of entries for them.

Once again we're looking at their 3rd album, "Westway (The Glitter & the Slums)", and it's probably the toughest sell if you're not on board from that haul. I can just hear the sneer that the title drop comes packaged alongside. It's a nice little pocket of energy though. A very goofy guitar riff holds everything in place, but it gets replaced by some keys in the chorus and that brief moment turns it all into a pretty faithful Madchester/Britpop throwback. Get Bez from the Happy Mondays to just dance around while it's on and I might be onto something.

#649. Vance Joy - Georgia (#93, 2014)

68th of 2014

One of the more notable shifts we've seen with music in the past 15 years is a move away from the previous model of album shelf life. Albums still do have extended stays on the chart, more than ever before in fact, but it used to be demonstrated by way of a drawn out campaign on the radio. Labels pushing new singles every few months to keep the fire burning. It all used to be so standard, and it's the model that brought about the Michael Jackson record, when he had 5 Billboard Hot 100 #1 hits on his album "Bad". Katy Perry tied it in 2011 with her run of singles from "Teenage Dream", one of the last visible examples of this pattern.

It's gotten so much harder to do this now because albums have gotten so accessible on streaming platforms. I was recently trying to determine with someone if it's possible that recent hit albums, like Ed Sheeran's "÷", or even Billie Eilish's "HIT ME HARD AND SOFT" are among the most heard albums of all time, due to the hundreds of millions of streams they amass across every track, well above the estimates of sales for albums like "Thriller" or "The Dark Side Of The Moon". Inevitably, there's no way of knowing because we can't measure how many times those copies got spun across their decades of existence, but I feel like modern albums are reaching a similar ballpark, and probably bridging the gap ever-so-slowly.

Occasionally you do see these post-album single pushes and it's often quaint. The irony of it all is that the artists who are best equipped to pull it off are often the ones who have little chance of surpassing their initial chart benchmarks. Billie Eilish's song "WILDFLOWER" has had a heck of a ride for the past 12 months, and yet in Australia, it's still beset with the #14 peak that it debuted with, a lot of curiosity streams from people who hadn't necessarily figured out it was a keeper. That's not to say the rest of its chart run is a waste, just a curious example of how the old method is getting less attention than the new one.

However, something to be considered with all of this is that when you do see a rare belated hit of this stature, you tend to have to view it as playing with a handicap, and adjust your reading accordingly. There are often examples of this where one of those singles has belatedly run away with the kudos suggesting that its place in the campaign was holding it off. Two Door Cinema Club's "What You Know" was a smash hit buried as a 5th single, and the signs were clearly there when it charted about as high as the singles that came before it.

"Georgia" is another one of these songs. Vance Joy's chart history is littered with two kinds of hits. The standalone/lead singles that vault into the top 20 and thrive for their moment in the sun, and also all the other singles that never had that initial burst, which are unable to emulate the bigger hits. The big exception to this rule is "Georgia", the song that popped up 6 months after the album came out to be a decent sized hit, clawing up to #15 after a few months. It's obviously never going to be Vance Joy's biggest hit, but it's certainly one of his biggest in the long run. That's even if its greatest societal impact is contributing to the death of Heardle, the music clip guessing game that lost the confidence of a lot of players when they kept putting in songs by Vance Joy and the like with massive streaming numbers but little cultural credit. I was pretty keen at the time because it's so rare that I get to flex my knowledge of Australian music to anyone abroad.

I think what takes "Georgia" over the line and made more people take notice is because it's clearly a different side of Vance Joy that we don't really see in the run of singles. There's clearly pressure to try and catch that "Riptide" (#885) (I really should have that number memorised by now) bug again, and so those jolly, upbeat numbers are just about the only songs that make it off the albums. He's still singing about a girl he likes, but for once it sounds like he wants to share a tender moment with her and not just have sex.

I like it. The guitar is gentle but impressively layered so it ends up being the song's strongest hook. You'd have to think that it was robbed of a better standing in the countdown. The vote took place before the song had gotten a proper push, so it had only just started getting played on the radio. Those early adopters must have known there was something in it and couldn't hide their enthusiasm.

#648. Florence + The Machine - Free (#91, 2022)

64th of 2022

Florence is thriving here on borrowed time it feels. There's a drastic decline on the chart fronts after album #3 in 2015 that's reflected in the Hottest 100, which is usually a tell-tale sign that we'll get it again on the next album, which we did. I just did not think there'd be enough force to will her onto the countdown again, and so the only conclusion to be made is that "Free" has the special sauce.

The 5th Florence + The Machine album was released in 2022 with the name "Dance Fever". You may be thinking the same thing I was, which is that it's not exactly the first thing you think of when Florence's music comes up. It doesn't change when you hear the lead single "King", arguably the most proto-typical Florence + The Machine single for not being that sort of thing. I have a very all-or-nothing approach to listening to new music which means that if it doesn't catch my ear right away, I might not ever hear it again. "Free" was such an oddity to me simply because it slipped past this process. When it snuck onto the poll it was like I was hearing a new song for the very first time, and introduced to a whole different perspective, as someone whose favourite song on the album, "Dream Girl Evil", was nowhere to be seen. "Free" wasn't alone though, the other two singles, "My Love" and "King", polled at #141 & #185 respectively. The former feels like it could easily have been the hit instead. It taps into something similar to the big success that came about with that very tall Scottish man on "Spectrum (Say My Name)".

The album does live up to the title to an extent though. The third track is called "Choreomania", which is a term for seemingly unexplainable spontaneous dancing from the renaissance era. What you get on the whole is a mix of what you've come to expect, but the upbeat moments are there, and "Free" probably exemplifies it best. If we're talking about urging some sort of uncontrollable movement, then "Free" just locks in immediately with its rapid tempo. I don't know how much attention it got beyond the Florence die-hards, but it's one of those entries that feels like everyone working their hardest to show those who tuned out that there's still something worth getting on board for.

#647. Architects - Animals (#47, 2020)

58th of 2020

I've known about Architects for a long time. It's partly because they share their name with a song I like a lot by a band I'm still surprised to say will appear in this list later on, but also just from music charts. One of the cheat codes of following the charts is that a lot of artists will get their brief moment in the spotlight. It's especially true of metal bands, who have some of the most loyal listeners ready to buy the new albums on the first week. It makes a quick impression and you can even track their increasing fortunes in real time, as they gain new fans between cycles and chart higher than ever before. Sometimes they get so big that they take on a level of mainstream acceptance. I wouldn't have expected this to happen to Architects but they also stopped following the normal trajectory a while ago as well.

Twins are relatively common in music I think. It's a fun marketing gimmick. It's brought us the likes of Bros, The Veronicas, Good Charlotte, Jedward, Tegan & Sara, you get the idea. Architects fall under this banner as well, founded by twin brothers Tom & Dan Searle (guitarist & drummer respectively). The band had gone through several lineup changes over the years until they were the only two original members left. In 2016, Tom died from cancer. The band had just released their 7th album, "All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us" and made a big leap in popularity, especially in Australia where the album debuted at #2, just behind Flume's album that came out on the same week. I always liked the album cover, simple but effective.

The band continued on, and it feels like in triple j's perspective, it was a big launching point where they started getting a bit more attention. It was certainly the case for me, when in 2017 they released the song "Doomsday", their first new song since Tom's death and directly addressing it. I love it, and really wish it had made it onto the countdown (it reached #139). Later single "Hereafter" made it to #161 the year after, and that one's quite effective too but it made it feel like that was their last shot, the curiosity being over after that.

It turned out that the next album after that was the big ticket. Their 9th album "For Those That Wish to Exist" was released in 2021 and it became their first ever #1 in Australia, and their native UK. By the time it was released, they'd also finally ticked off that Hottest 100 berth. I can think of very few artists that are still making an impression with the youth like this on their 9th album, let alone doing it for the first time. The lead single was probably the key.

Metal and adjacent genres often have a tough time gaining interest with the general public. In 2015 there was a terrorist attack in Paris during an Eagles of Death Metal concert that saw over 100 people killed. There was a charity campaign to try and push their cover of Duran Duran's "Save a Prayer" into the UK Chart afterwards, but it only got to #53. I can't help but think that the band's ironic name was off-putting in winning people over, because I remember seeing more than a few glib comments about the tragedy from people who clearly hadn't done their research. At the time, I felt like "Animals" was the compromise. If you want to support this band on an emotional level but can't handle their usual affair, this is a much more radio friendly track to get behind.

Songs about f**king animals, and animals f**king are pretty commonplace. We're due one every 6-7 years, so we've got to hand it to The Bloodhound Gang, Nickelback, Martin Garrix & Architects for keeping it up. It was a tough sell for me. It's still my least favourite part of this song because it just feels so out of place from a band that does sometimes include profanity, but not usually. It's why I gravitated more to "Dead Butterflies", a later single from the album that sounds pretty much the same but doesn't have to say that we're a bunch of f**king animals (it polled at #132 in 2021). But yes, the adage of the triple j voter picking the song with a rude word in it lives on forever.

#646. Mallrat (feat Allday) - UFO (#70, 2018)

70th of 2018

I feel like I always need to re-iterate to make it clear that the above numbers matching is not a typo. Actually Mallrat nearly matched those numbers just the other day when I was tackling "Nobody's Home" (#652). Given the recorded performance of Mallrat's other entries to come, that bodes for a pretty good showing if she can keep up this consistent pattern.

This occupies a similar space to me as "Nobody's Home" and so I'm once again not in a space to have much to say about it. They both live in the shadow of the more popular single released in the same year. This one does have the bonus of an Allday feature. He's pretty good here. He creates a curious gap in the song, which has both a chorus & a hook that feel readymade to go back to back, but they never do at any point...unless you were to cut Allday out of the song. That'd cut it down to a lean two and a half minutes and probably be all the more unsatisfying for it. I feel the same way when I end a post with one of those limp two paragraph efforts.