#555-#551

#555. CHVRCHES - Get Away (#85, 2014)

60th of 2014

In November 2014, the ARIA Charts officially added streaming to their calculations, from places like Spotify and Apple Music. YouTube wouldn't be part of the equation until 2022. In theory this was a big shake up to the charts with an impact immediately felt. In reality, it would just be a slow acting change, and it came at one of the strangest times, where 3 of the top 4 singles of the week registered zero streams on the board. Taylor Swift had removed her music from streaming and "Blank Space" had just hit #1, replacing Ed Sheeran's streaming monster "Thinking Out Loud". Debuting at #3 was Band Aid 30's "Do They Know It's Christmas?" and at #4 was Will Sparks' "Ah Yeah So What". I can't confirm their status on streaming platforms at the time, but I do know looking at the data that no streams were counted. In the case of Will Sparks, his song didn't arrive on the Spotify chart until the week after, so whatever he might have had wouldn't have amounted to much. That song's also a weird trivia question if you ever need to know Wiley's only top 10 hit in Australia.

The only reason I remember which week streaming got put onto the charts is my prevailing memory that Alesso & Tove Lo's then hit "Heroes (we could be)" got completely shafted by the system update. No one seemed to double check the data and realise it was getting severely undercounted and there's a very noticeable dip in its chart run when this starts taking place, immediately falling from #13 to #26. The only real sign of things to come on that chart is Hozier's "Take Me To Church" climbing up a little faster than it was pacing to do so, a streaming monster both then and now.

The changes were coming, showing themselves at the bottom of the chart. While the top 10 barely changes with the marginal additions, the bottom end got upended very quickly. I sometimes look at the charts in 2014 and am utterly amused at just how easy it was to get in there compared to nowadays, and you'd have so many jarring (though admittedly fun) appearances. Much like the last gasp of physical sales producing a top 10 hit for The Butterfly Effect in 2006, it becomes impossible to compare these incongruent chart peaks to different eras because they don't line up at all. CHVRCHES managed to prove it very quickly.

As a lead artist, CHVRCHES have made the ARIA top 100 just 3 times. Two of them are songs I'll eventually tackle here ("The Mother We Share" does not belong to either of these groups), and the other is their song "Dead Air", a song only remembered because it's attached to a Hunger Games soundtrack. "Dead Air" debuted at #94 on the last week before streaming was added to the chart, but certainly would not have made the cut after that, as the next week's #100 outperformed that week's #80. A couple of weeks later, "Get Away" falls a touch short of the mark at #115, but moves more units than "Dead Air" did to get into the chart. One of the first things streaming took away was the idea that CHVRCHES were popular enough to have any loose single they want reach the top 100. Now it's hard to imagine them even getting remotely close.

Still the situation creates a juxtaposition here because "Get Away" is the one that didn't chart, but made the Hottest 100. "Dead Air" was nowhere to be seen, living off its own false valour. This is the part where I ruin the narrative to say that I always preferred "Dead Air", and I now see that it has twice as many Spotify streams as "Get Away". We're talking about what people wanted to hear in that time though so it's still worth examining.

At the time, "Get Away" wasn't really clicking. CHVRCHES to me were about big, soaring pop melodies that you could always find on their big singles. "Get Away" was a more low key affair that felt more like an album track. I ended up buying a version of their second album "Every Open Eye" that includes it as one of a few bonus tracks. This does something to justify the allegations, but it did also allow me to appreciate the song in the presence of greatness (I like this album a lot). In the years since this, my favourite CHVRCHES songs have only continued to get bigger in scope (seriously, where did "How Not To Drown" come from?), but I've also been able to enjoy more perspectives. When I listen to "Get Away", I hear a finely constructed song that marches very smoothly into its chorus. I have my reservations of building a hook out of some of Martin's vocals which I've never been keen on, but it feels more like a creative decision rather than 'okay let's give the keyboard player a song on the album'.

#554. The Jungle Giants - Used to Be in Love (#59, 2017)

51st of 2017

A couple of months ago, I mentioned how girl in red had a major divide between her performance on Spotify and YouTube. She'd get maybe 10% as many views on the latter. The Jungle Giants take this concept and absolutely run away with it. Their biggest hits on YouTube can sometimes limp over the one million mark. Their biggest is "She's a Riot" which has 2.8 million at the time of writing. On Spotify, they're often comfortably in the tens of millions, and that's where their biggest hit actually is "Used to Be in Love", which has passed 110 million streams this year. So far on YouTube it has about 700 thousand views. That's a ratio of around 1:150. If you find yourself suspicious of the streaming numbers some Australian artists are able to pull off, then these numbers might be call for concern. It could well explain why this of all songs is the best beneficiary.

I will now come to the defence of "Used to Be in Love" against my own attack. You can look at that year's Hottest 100 and note that it is the lowest polling of their 4 singles that year, though only marginally at that. The Jungle Giants had basically been in medium to high rotation for 10 straight months in 2017, and "Used to Be in Love" was simply the last cab off the rank. In the past I've considered that late singles that just happen to be in rotation while voting is going on can outperform expectations, but I don't really think that's the case anymore. Or at least, it seems possible that this song overperformed because it was still just beginning to reveal its full power. This is the song the band told fans to focus on in voting for in the Australian Hottest 100, they must believe in it too.

It's definitely the most low key of all their 2017 singles. I had to check and make sure I didn't also say that about "Bad Dream" (#588) but I think this one has a steadier waft to it. The guitar noodling might stand out a bit more, but it doesn't interrupt from the main chords in the same way its cousin 'ahhhh' does. I guess I leave it a little puzzled too because I can understand liking it, but imagining it as anyone's favourite song feels strange to me.

#553. Bring Me The Horizon - Throne (#45, 2015)

57th of 2015

If we believe 2015 to be the peak of Bring Me The Horizon's powers, then this song is the big monolith to stand from it. They'd get adept at doing it more regularly, but this is the song that took them from perennial lower appearances to finally cracking the top 50. It's also their most streamed song that's on this countdown (it's only behind "Can You Feel My Heart"), so it seems to have stuck the landing 10 years later.

I've mentioned "Can You Feel My Heart" before, but I never said that it's one of my favourite Bring Me The Horizon songs. I won't say I was instantly on board because to my younger ears it was a little confronting at the time, so at best I had a begrudging fascination with it. It's aged well though and now reaps the benefit of being associated with a meme. It's unironically one of the most popular rock songs, and one of the most popular dubstep songs of the 2010s.

"Throne" isn't fully cut from the same cloth as that song, but it has a similar balance of intensity. The one big thing I notice between the two songs is way the two choruses both smash into a brick wall and then navigate a more playful melody on top of it. "Throne" feels like an evolution on this idea as Oli's initial vocals head straight into it and give you the sense that it's still that same recording that's being pushed up and down onto other notes. I don't know if that's an intentional move but it gives the song something to stand on its own with. I also find myself comparing it to "Drown" (#658) and immediately appreciating how much more clarity comes through in Matt Nicholls' drumming on the mix. It really gives the track that extra needed punch.

#552. Vance Joy - Play With Fire (#95, 2013)

62nd of 2013

For a while I was holding onto a contrarian opinion that this was my favourite Vance Joy song. I'm not sure how often I'd actually said it but I'd certainly thought about it a lot, often wondering how sincere I really was. If you're keeping track, I clearly haven't held onto this, but it'll also tell you that I did maintain it for a fairly long time.

"Play With Fire" is a funny choice for this. Technically it's Vance Joy's first ever appearance in a Hottest 100, and so the only song that canonised itself without the significance or stigma of Vance Joy being a Hottest 100 winner. It's the only one of his entries that didn't have the burden of existing in the preceding shadow of "Riptide"'s (#885) success, or being "Riptide" itself. This song comes from the same EP, when he's still figuring out what he's trying to do, or rather hasn't had the public assert him in a certain direction.

Here's how you know that's true: "Riptide" wasn't even the lead single from that EP. Officially, Vance Joy's debut single is "From Afar". For lack of an easier way to explain things, that song is like The Lumineers' "Ho Hey" if it didn't have any 'ho hey's in it. I mostly just remember it because the lead actor in the music video also appeared in another music video later that year, one where he finally gets to be in the water but still doesn't take his shirt off.

"Play With Fire" also got a music video that has one of the directors from the "From Afar" video and also the same cinematographer. "Riptide" in the middle does not which is why that video is nothing like the other two. My favourite thing about the "Play With Fire" video is that there's a brief spike on the YouTube upload where viewers seem to compulsively go back to see details. I had a laugh when I saw what they were all looking at. "Play With Fire" is officially a period piece.

This is a side of Vance Joy I wish we got a bit more of. It's very much in the world of Beirut cosplay, to the point where I'm wanting the brass section to jump out even more, but it does bolster the emotional lift. I can't think of any other Vance Joy song that wants to show off an instrumental section like this one does on the bridge. That might be a symptom of Vance Joy The Singer being more prioritised as he got famous. Honestly though this is one of his best vocal performances anyway alongside it. There's a lot to like in this one, no jokes.

#551. Thelma Plum - Homecoming Queen (#65, 2019)

50th of 2019

The world of streaming has opened up an ecosystem that's impossible to keep up with. Genuine hits that elude the charts. Non-starters that actually never stop, and outrun the hits of their days. As I write this, "The Night We Met" by Lord Huron is the 22nd most streamed song of all time on Spotify. As was pointed out by Steven Hyden in an article for Uproxx, it is not even one of the top 500 most streamed songs on Apple Music, leaving it isolated to what is admittedly the world's biggest streaming platform. It was a minor chart hit and prominently featured in the first season of 13 Reasons Why, but otherwise it's a song that you would not expect the average person to recognise despite the sheer number of streams it continues to rack up. Maybe about a thousand people have started listening to it since you started reading this paragraph. It's interesting to consider when this song isn't really ironed down for popular consumption as I suspect it would have felt when the band wrote the song.

We live in a post-"The Night We Met" world now though, so it's easier to imagine someone writing a song more like it with the intent of getting a hit. I don't think Thelma Plum is that cynical, but it just ends up being the song I think of when I hear "Homecoming Queen". They've both got a similar steady guitar melody. They're both in either 3/4 or 6/8 time, and the BPM is nearly identical. On a skeletal level, it's a natural link.

That's pretty much where the similarities end though, as I have to draw attention to the lyrical content of the song, where Thelma Plum reminisces on growing up as an Aboriginal woman in a country that reinforces beauty standards that seem to shun her on principle. The most striking part of it is in the song's bridge, where she acknowledges the 1967 referendum that only then allowed Aboriginals to be acknowledged in the census. It's only 27 years before she was born, it's genuinely not that long ago that our country was doing unspeakable things to the people who belonged here first. It's a powerful passage that doesn't disrupt the flow of the song at all, which ends up focusing on her own positive self-reflection, as well as yours. External reinforcement is good, but your most important critic is yourself. I love getting feedback, but often times if I know I've done a good job, that can be good enough for me too.

It's a song that really warmed up to me over the years. I was far more familiar with her other two entries in 2019, so this one snuck up on me a bit. It left me a bit unimpressed just because I didn't want a song that dragged its heels like this one does. I still don't think it reaches the heights of those other entries, but it's definitely a song worth having around.