#550-#546

#550. BRONSON (feat lau.ra) - HEART ATTACK (#88, 2020)

48th of 2020

You might be wondering who BRONSON is. I can tell you that it's not a rapper who potentially gets confused for Ghostface Killah or Don Cheadle, and we're certainly not looking at the grown up youngest son of the Twist family (although the age profile for the later seasons is about right). The much less fun but much more accurate answer is that we're looking at a supergroup consisting of Golden Features and ODESZA.

We're familiar with Golden Features in these parts, but this is the only time I get to bring up ODESZA, which is ironic because when we look at the bigger picture, they're clearly the bigger name in this team up. Internationally kind of famous as opposed to Australian kind of famous. By the time this collaboration happened, they'd had a similar amount of triple j airplay to Golden Features (both in the range of about 800 plays), though ODESZA weren't able to translate it to any Hottest 100 entries. I was rather fond of their song "Say My Name" which didn't get much airplay but went Gold in Australia after a few years, I suspect it's due for a Platinum update at the very least. Every time I open their Spotify page I'm tricked into believing that they had another career boon by producing the soundtrack for the Apple TV series Severance (which I regrettably have not seen because it's an Apple TV series), they just made an EP remixing the original score. I've done so well at avoiding spoilers that I can't even imagine the general vibe of the show. Maybe you, or I from the future are laughing at the notion that ODESZA made music for the show.

The final piece of our puzzle is lau.ra, a British producer and DJ who only occasionally provides vocals. She has a Wikipedia article that mostly hasn't been updated in about a decade save for updating with new releases, which also doesn't seem to have been updated in about 5 years. It largely only covers her music she released under the name FEMME, so if not for "I Just Wanna" sneaking in at the bottom, you'd be forgiven for thinking this is an entirely unrelated artist.

With what I know about these artists, I'd most readily believe that this was a largely Golden Features conceived track. Other tracks on the self-titled "BRONSON" album like "BLINE" or "CALL OUT", sure, they sound like ODESZA songs, but "HEART ATTACK" is so remarkably low key that they're really playing into Thomas Stell's world. It makes for an interesting hit. Mellow in a way that usually doesn't generate this much fanfare.

I found myself rooting against this song at the time for the childish reason that it's not the only low key Australian electronic song of this name to reach triple j notoriety. For my sake they've done me a solid by landing on the fairly low end of the list so I don't have to get frustrated by insignificant manners, but more on that another time. It might be why I came around to liking the song a decent amount too. I don't know if there is a solid base line for me with what Golden Features is doing, but I've been filtered out from reaching anything subpar, so it's a good effort again. Sometimes a simple house beat can be mind-numbingly empty when you're sitting at home and not at the club (to be fair that was almost everyone when this came out), but this one is very agreeable to me. Even if it's not her #1 trick of the trade, lau.ra's definitely a good performer on this one, very silky.

#549. Florence + The Machine - Hunger (#82, 2018)

59th of 2018

In my early years of looking at the charts, there were certain accepted truths about the way things operated. The one in particular that interests me today is the way that certain artists were ordained to take the #1 spot whenever they released a new album. The way that the album purchasing market seemed to age up only served to help this, as it was a chart that perpetually served the same demographic. That took a serious hit once streaming became part of the equation, but more importantly, part of our music listening experience.

You could retain all those fans who used to buy your album on day one, but now they're streaming it instead, cutting their chart contribution down by about 99%. There's serious value to having those die-hards, but very few have managed to retain them, and so many of those perennial chart toppers have started to really struggle to maintain it. There's some leeway with labels controlling release dates to spread things out, but so many are built on the expectations of a particular country's charts, and they can run into trouble elsewhere. I don't think Jay-Z considered the perils of releasing "Magna Carta... Holy Grail" in the middle of the Australian chart week (back when the US didn't line up with us) and have to contend with the might of The Voice Australia winner Harrison Craig in his 3rd week on sale. Jay-Z's still never had a #1 album in Australia.

Even then, despite the seemingly mapped out months of #1 debuts we often get, they're constantly running at odds with each other and so a lot of artists who feel primed to debut at #1 just keep on missing out. At this point Taylor Swift is just about the only artist I can trust to take the top spot reliably every time, and it's a word of warning for anyone who releases within two months of her.

This is just to say that I've eaten the plums, we all have a hunger etc. But really, I've been holding onto a peculiar chart stat for many months. With all the interest around the Drake & Kendrick Lamar beef in 2024, one artist with a unique position in it all is Florence + The Machine. Florence scored back to back #1 albums in 2011 & 2015 with the kind of massive sales that would suggest a lock on the top spot. She hasn't had a #1 album since because in 2018 she was blocked by Drake, and in 2022 she was blocked by Kendrick. She's the only artist with this distinction, and it compelled me to make a Venn diagram. Doing so made me realise that even if I include the singles chart, in all their time spent at #1, there are actually very few parties they've spoiled, which makes the Florence + The Machine trolling all the more surprising.

Florence's 4th album "High As Hope" actually managed pretty solid sales at #2, the 6,500 units it moved would be enough for an easy #1 most of the time nowadays. On the other hand though, it's probably a good stopping point for her taking the top spot as it's from this point on that her albums stopped having the monster legs they once had. She went from having the 10th best-selling album of the year in 2015 to just 79th in 2018. The album's first two singles both barely scraped into the top 100 in Australia, and this is the only Hottest 100 entry, just getting over the line when it used to be natural to expect multiple top 50s per album.

Is this just the point where we all feel like we've heard everything and there's nothing new to discover? It was how I felt at the time. I think the 3rd single "Patricia" is worthwhile, but not quite a patch on the highest highs of the past. "Hunger" is much the same. It's the obvious pop single, but it's not striving for a particularly high mark. Perhaps one day on here I'll reach a Florence single that makes me say 'ah, nailed it', but I'm still waiting for that.

#548. Bliss N Eso - House of Dreams (#94, 2013)

61st of 2013

I don't know if everyone encountering Bliss N Eso is aware of the fact that Bliss comes from America. He moved to Australia as a teenager and met Eso at school, but despite the decades that have proceeded, he's never fully lost that American accent. It's from this we get his all-time corny bar where he manages to mention D.C., Marvel, comic and superheroes in the space of 13 words. It's just so brazen I have to respect it.

There's a surprisingly common trend that I've encountered when writing these that something I just encountered is able to segue into the material here. Sometimes it's forced, sometimes it's just very coincidental and yet relevant all the same. About a month ago I saw the film "Jerry Maguire", not realising that Bliss also references it at the end of his verse, and then it gets sampled. Cuba Gooding Jr. has an Oscar and a Hottest 100 appearance, is there anything he can't do? In all seriousness, he's the most compelling part of that movie, and watching it with the lens of knowing that the Academy were into it is fascinating. That and the fact that since this song was released, the word 'quan' found its way into popular hip-hop in multiple ways.

I've always had a soft spot for this one. Despite "Addicted" being their most popular song, Bliss N Eso don't usually get a lot of love when they get more confronting and energetic. Usually it's their slower tracks, or just the ones with samples that get the attention. So you see this just barely scraping over the line despite being a lead single and it feels like it deserves better. Just that combination of booming drums and borderline horror score strings works excellently to set the stage. Eso definitely comes out with the better verse overall, but has the advantage of going first. Once Bliss gets about halfway in, he gets a bit swamped by the music for a moment, almost like it's the Academy Awards gesturing for him to wrap it up. Who doesn't love a tender piano bridge either?

#547. Dune Rats - No Plans (#100, 2019)

49th of 2019

Dune Rats had only been appearing in the Hottest 100 for a few years at this point but I still felt a bit perplexed at their showing in 2019 where they only barely scraped over the line. It has the makings of being the end of the line but they managed to turn things around afterwards. It's another slight misnomer anyway, they also landed at #103 with "Crazy" and #163 with "Rubber Arm". That in itself is surprising because "Crazy" had not been out for very long when voting happened, and "No Plans" feels primed for crossover appeal.

I don't mean top 40 crossover really, but the kind where someone hears it and gets instantly warped back to the late '90s or early '00s, when something like this could have been a top 40 hit. The only thing that breaks that particular immersion is the Jack Johnson reference in one of the spoken word sections, which I just want to leave at that because it's a very bizarre sentence to put to print if you aren't familiar.

Maybe there just wasn't enough excitement when it came to Dune Rats so blatantly recycling the same concept. Ever since I wrote the entry about "Braindead" (#702), I've just been thinking how I knew deep down that they had another song about having no greater aspirations and choosing to revel in under-achieving. Of course, that sentiment would work better if they really were an especially underground punk adjacent band, but this song comes from their second consecutive #1 album which puts them in strangely elite company even though it comes with the caveat that I believe they made history with the first ever #1 album to spend only 1 week in the top 50 (it fell to #52). It took about a year for it to happen again after that (Illy in early 2021) but now it's reasonably common.

#546. Highasakite - Since Last Wednesday (#77, 2014)

59th of 2014

I'm sure this happens in other parts of the world. A band who is reasonably popular in their homeland of Norway, and inexplicably found some love just in Australia, where they'd stop by and tour on three separate occasions. They also toured in the US & UK a few times, but those were harder markets to crack, and they're closer anyway, so it doesn't have quite the same intrigue about it. If setlist.fm is to be believed, they've played more shows in Australia than in Sweden. What they have to show for it is a #100 charting single in Australia, a #24 charting album, and this Hottest 100 entry that came a couple of years before those.

The boring answer to all of this, as it often can be, is that they were getting promoted on a major label here. You'd be surprised at how often all of the indie flagbearers of yesterday and today are touting that status while reaping the promotion & distribution benefits provided by one of the big 3. triple j almost certainly lean into this as well. Their symbiotic relationship with the major labels almost certainly controls a lot of what ends up on the hitlist, and there's a strong correlation between leaving the majors and no longer making these polls. I've spent the last 6 years looking at press releases and typing up new release schedules with a keen eye on label semantics. It's probably ruined some of my enjoyment seeing how the sausage gets made, but it does give me some reassurance when my new favourite artists aren't generating fanfare, even when triple j is giving them the required exposure. The labels just always win.

The amusing part of this is that Highasakite's relationship with Australia is largely with two songs that aren't especially noteworthy in their catalogue. Their global streaming figures aren't bad, and they're leading the pack on YouTube views, but overall, their charting single "Someone Who'll Get It" and this song here just stand as reasonably popular, nothing close to the two hit wonder we've made them into. I'll also note that "Someone Who'll Get It" did not even reach the Hottest 200, and my Instagram vote counting at the time saw it projecting about half as many votes as their other single "Golden Ticket". These projections are sketchy at best, but feel free to think of the two songs as landing at roughly #400 and #239 respectively. I did my part because I voted for "Someone Who'll Get It", a song that really blew me away when it sounded nothing like what I'd heard from them before, with a compelling sense of foreboding (if the title didn't tip you off). It probably just came out far too long ago and lost all traction by the end of the year. We think of bands' popularity shifting on a year by year basis, but really it's happening every single day, and someone will get more than a few bad dice rolls in a row.

It'll vary then when it was that you last saw or heard of Highasakite. They're still putting out new music in the year 2025, though with a slight change in personnel, leaving only original members Ingrid & Trond as consistent parts of the puzzle. I kept up with them for a little while and they've left me with an eclectic bunch of singles that I can still go back to and enjoy. They feel a little like Methyl Ethel to me, in that the first single I heard from them suggested a different trajectory than where we ended up, and also that it wasn't a song I especially gravitated to at the time.

Depending on your tolerance levels for the stylings of alternative rock in the 2010s, you might be able to paint a picture. At its worst, "Since Last Wednesday" is running through similar tropes to Imagine Dragons, Of Monsters and Men or Bastille. Maybe you like the big drums and 'oh' chanting in this one but it feels a little on the nose. The song works best when it's leaning on the more striking ideas that sound like a band inspired. When the rest of the band gets more involved, you get a song that builds up to a beautiful climax that's not unlike Sigur Rós. There's a lot going on in what might just seem like pleasant playlist fodder on the surface.