#525-#521

 #525. Lana Del Rey - High By The Beach (#89, 2015)

54th of 2015

Every masterpiece has its cheaper-by-the-smallest-margin copy. I had to keep myself from saying about "Solar Power" (#526) that probably all Lorde wanted to do was get high by the beach. That's only a superficial thing though, but in reality there was a bit of talk on the subject. "Stoned At The Nail Salon" (#941) was accused of ripping off Lana Del Rey, specifically "hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it", which is great for me if I like word padding, but not so great for me as someone who does not endorse that side of music drama. The boring solution is just that Jack Antonoff was involved with both songs, Lana Del Rey did in fact not invent being sad, or getting high.

"High By The Beach" lives forever for me as an unintentional bit of music chart trivia. On its first week of release, some faulty data received by Billboard had them declare that the song had debuted at #7 on the Hot 100, an absolutely crazy feat for someone who'd only ever made the top 10 before via the remix of "Summertime Sadness". They fixed it up a day later and it actually debuted at #51, meaning the song instead has the misfortune of hitting that undesired peak in the US and Australia. She would eventually get back in the top 10 for real, still on the beach when she supported Taylor Swift on "Snow on the Beach", although many will remember being underwhelmed by how small her contribution was, resulting in the "More Lana Del Rey" version being released a year later.

This is an interesting phase for her career. She's up to her 3rd album and is no longer the fascinating new product. We largely know what we're gonna get at this point. On the other hand, we're still a while away from the point where she gets a critical re-assessment that fully takes her to cult-mainstream star. She certainly had a steady fanbase, continuing to debut at #1 with every new album for a little while longer, but as mentioned, she couldn't quite crack the ARIA top 50 anymore, and only barely snuck in on this list. 2 years later and it'd be the opposite, she'd generate some minor chart success, but fell short of the Hottest 100 for the first time. I'm not sure what the general feeling is on "Honeymoon", the album this is from, but it seems like overall it's one of her least popular albums, only pulling up numbers that could be compared to her more recent ones, when she put out three albums in two years. "Art Deco" and "Salvatore" have strong streaming numbers, actually pushing ahead of this one, so maybe it was just a bad single choice in hindsight.

I find myself re-assessing "High By The Beach" more positively in the long run. If you just think of it as the song where she says the title lyric over and over again, it's probably not gonna conjure up a lot of excitement. That's why whenever I do go back to it, I'm constantly surprised at how much it does have going for it. The spooky way the vocals first come in at the start, and the moments when Lana Del Rey comes in at a different register, as if she's having a conversation with herself. It's this weird kitchen sink approach that I'm fascinated by. If you find yourself missing the style of her earlier music, the song's brief bridge feels like a call back to that. She lands in a strange middle point where she's simultaneously belting, but with a husky, reserved performance befitting of the rest of this song. It's like she was trying out this style for the time being and landed on a successful use case for it.

#524. CHVRCHES - Do I Wanna Know? - Like A Version (#54, 2014)

55th of 2014

Here we go again with Like A Version spoiling the list. We will eventually arrive upon the original version of this song, but for the time being, if you're ever of the mindset that the Like A Version polling prospects are very proportionate to how much people like the song in the first place then this example isn't going to change your mind. In fact the single year transition is one of the most common incidents, while the song is still fresh but absolutely not eligible. If you're willing to include Illy's "Ausmusic Month Medley" (#566) for covering Flume's "On Top", then this follows a 4 year streak of Like A Version entries that were covering songs that polled just the year before, starting with a certain artist covering "Pumped Up Kicks", and polling higher than the original did.

I was one of those naysayers at the time. I think it came about from disappointment. Here was one of my favourite new bands, covering a song...that you would imagine I had positive feelings about at this point, should be a slam dunk. I could get to be one of those people reaping it. What we got was this strange, sluggish cover that doesn't feel like it plays to the strengths of either. The palette swap removing a lot of the power of the original, but being tied down to it and lacking those intricate CHVRCHES melodies we've come to expect. I wanted nothing to do with this.

Often times you can get a cynical success story and the whole world knows it. It'll get clouded out by nature of not getting to hear both sides of the story, but over time I've found that this word of mouth vibe contributes greatly to an artist or song's longevity. Alex Warren is hot property right now and just had a 17 week running #1 hit, with a song that's difficult to find enthusiasm for anywhere. Obviously it exists, but when the fandom is so hidden away, so rarely making themselves known, they're likely to slip by the wayside. Maybe this is an awful prediction, but don't be surprised if "Ordinary" doesn't really live up to being the biggest hit of 2025 in the long run. I'm saying this to contrast with this cover version, because even now over a decade on, whenever I see discussions about the best Like A Versions, this one always comes up. For the Hottest 100 of Like A Versions, it landed at #29. Maybe that sounds underwhelming, but with the huge recency bias that came with that poll, it's one of the oldest ones to make it over the line.

I am a very steadfast person with my opinions so I'm not sure that a bunch of online opinions got me to change my tone, but at some point in time it clicked with me and I found it easier to understand the perspective. I don't know what an ideal version of 'CHVRCHES cover "Do I Wanna Know?"' should sound like, but I like how they approached it. They've got a couple of synth tones that sound a little jarring, but work well in tandem. Maybe I'm used to something a little more bright & shiny, but I've got many other CHVRCHES songs for that purpose. This spooky rendition where everything sounds just a little bit unnatural has an odd appeal to it. Stop me before I accidentally say 'I like that they put their own spin on it'.

#523. The Jungle Giants - On Your Way Down (#50, 2017)

49th of 2017

A little known secret of this blog is that behind most spells of writer's block is the inevitably part where I'm staring at my Notepad with a song by The Jungle Giants in front of me. They've truly cooked the ability for me to dole out fresh thoughts when they boasted so many entries from the same album that have thus far landed reasonably close on this list too. There's still one to go, so we'll see how it all turns out when my general impression was always 'The one obvious hit and the three other ones'. The only thing that slightly ruins the illusion is that this song did sneak into the top 50, despite having bottom half vibes all throughout.

There are means to consider this song as a bit of an outlier though. The main one I'm drawn to is that it feels more like old school Jungle Giants than the others. Everything about it is just echoes of the early 2010s. The youthful exuberance of the hook, and the vocals in the pre-chorus. If you're lamenting the more sluggish, groove-driven version of the band you're getting now, then this song is like an alternate version of events, one where they pushed their sound forward but kept the same songwriting ideas. I imagine that a lot of people are nostalgic for this kind of triple j sound but don't realise it because it's that scrappy style that by nature doesn't really have a famous name to attach itself to. I certainly remember "I Woke Up Today" by Port O'Brien, and it's probably the perfect reference point here, but if it were particularly famous then it probably wouldn't be anymore. There's your Joseph Heller novel.

When it comes down to it, I do think the modern sheen works to this song's favour. They manage to cram a lot into it and keep it as a fun rollercoaster ride. Points have to be acknowledged for them doing something similar to what The Wombats have done a couple of times; a bridge soaked in reverb where it gets a little softer and you're waiting for it to snap out. There's no angelic choir this time but it still carries across, and confirms that it's almost certainly a cheat code for my approval.

#522. G Flip - Lover (#58, 2019)

46th of 2019

If you're trying to get me to come up with artists who've pulled off 4 song hauls in the Hottest 100, I'm certainly not going to forget about G Flip because 2023 is just that big of a moment. On the other hand, I always forget that they did it in 2019. It's one that snuck up on me because I don't really remember taking much notice of the 'stat-padding' entries this time around. Maybe it's the true foreshadowing moment of them getting 7 entries with the next album because there were also 2 more entries that landed in the previous year. More than half of G Flip's debut album made the Hottest 100.

What I would love to know is how "Lover" enters the fold. It was not released as a single, but started getting played on triple j right around when voting opened in December. Actual single "Bring Me Home" got a bit shafted on the radio and landed at #129, but this song that might not have been on anyone's radar when the eligibility window closed managed to be G Flip's second highest polling song. Maybe this was all planned. It just so happens that in that same month, G Flip put out a live video of "Lover" complete with a horn section, with a pretty good view count. Still, that's an incredibly late voting campaign to pull off, especially since G Flip was almost certainly pushing a different song which I'll get to in the future.

Perhaps the best way to look at it is just on merit. While it can be fun to break it down to a science, the truth of the Hottest 100 is that it's just a whole lot of people choosing what they think are their favourite songs. A lot of people bought and streamed G Flip's debut album in 2019, and maybe the fairest thing to say is that they put it on and were just floored by Track 1, a song that shoots for a level of gravitas that we hadn't really seen from G Flip before. If instead you want to launch into dumb conspiracies, I'll offer you the carrot that this album was released just one week after Taylor Swift released her 7th album, "Lover", from which the title track was probably the most convincing hit at the time. Then it'll click that this is the same album "Cruel Summer" is on, which G Flip would later take into the Hottest 100 top 10, and now we're so far through the looking glass we're gonna find Pepe Silvia.

I prefer to romanticise the rational explanation because I think the song is worthwhile on its merits. We're now acquainted with the idea that INXS's "Never Tear Us Apart" is supposedly the greatest Australian song of all time, and here's a song that might not carry quite the same ambitions, but hits a similar emotional swell. Sorting through this list, it was a big bolter for me from previously being a song I'd never really paid much attention to before.

#521. Ocean Alley - Confidence (#1, 2018)

56th of 2018

I just want to unpack the UK Chart rules as concisely as possible. Once a song's been on the chart for 10 weeks (or is more than 3 years old), it's susceptible to receiving ACR (Accelerated Chart Ratio) which halves its streams going forward. It's possible to temporarily revert this through a strong (25%) gain that's now applied instantly, but once something has declined both individually and with respect to the overall market for 3 weeks in a row, it goes back to ACR. The way I understand it, the purpose of this is to help support new, rising hits as the bar for arrival has been significantly lowered. A new song that would be outside the top 100 on an unfiltered chart has the chance to reach the top 50, and an older song can be ousted from the whole chart while sitting in the top 40 once its ratio gets shunted. Regardless of how you feel about the methodology, I think it's hard to deny that it does at least somewhat succeed, the only problem being that it does very little to turn the tide. The suggestions of 'Double ACR' or changes of that nature only promise to turn it into an uphill battle that never settles. Often what happens nowadays is the arbitrary nature of the 3 weeks in a row of declines continually produces unsatisfying results, where relatively fresh hits get instantly shoved down the charts, while some clearly past use-by hits keep dodging it while lingering around. My favourite application of this was with Gracie Abrams' future Hottest 100 entry "Close To You", which hovered around for 6 months in 2024 before getting shoved out by Christmas music, only to return in January and ride out for another 23 weeks on the chart where it gradually fell from #37 to being out of the chart. It never suffered ACR, and it gave me a strange moment of clarity remembering that songs can just naturally fall out of the chart, but mostly it's funny because this song that spent 8 weeks in the Streaming Songs chart was essentially gifted 41 more weeks on the Official Chart because it was lucky.

If this was just another case of me disagreeing with the discourse, I might not even go this deeply into it. I do think that emotional, vibes based arguments can get in the way when people try to make rash decisions to fix the charts. I think arguably these chart rules are a result of that same train of thought. The memory of Ed Sheeran having 9 songs in the top 10 at once is too heavy a memory for some, even if it represents a culminated extreme he's never been able to match since then, even if many of those songs are absolutely sticking around in the public consciousness as notable hits, so it's not like this is just some short-lived moments of people sampling the new album. If that's what they've got to do to calm every down, sure, I'll go along with it.

On the other hand, 3 years later and one of those 9 Ed Sheeran songs becomes very relevant to this conversation again. I'm talking about "Perfect", a song that never disappeared by any stretch, but had a light resurgence in February 2020 that saw it start to hover around the top 50 and poke into the top 40 a couple of times. It didn't really have a resurgence, but it was a beneficiary of the volatile Christmas market briefly taking over all music consumption, and the subsequent week allowing basically everything to get off ACR (a rule they've tightened up since), the reason it re-entered in February is actually because Ed Sheeran's 2019 hits were blocking it via the 3 track limit rule, so once they were able to fall back into ACR, "Perfect" was waiting in the wings to...wait around. All this time the song wasn't visible in the Spotify chart but was helped as one of the oldest songs not on ACR, so it was this strange lingering phantom in the middle of the chart. Not dominating and very easy to ignore. This would come to its advantage, as its relative stability made it very difficult to record 3 consecutive weeks of declines. It just got stuck in place for months and months, and became a source of curiosity for me, how long could it keep all those plates spinning? This lasted until September when out of nowhere, the OCC decided to force it onto ACR without saying anything. There's never been any explanation for this. They do have stricter rules for songs over 3 years old, a birthday "Perfect" did pass during this 7 month span of craziness, but there's no sense to this particular week that it happened. It just feels like the OCC got fed up and angry about Ed Sheeran yet again and put an end to it all.

I hate this because it's very petulant. The fact that it's someone as perennially uncool as Ed Sheeran just makes it easier to put it forward because it's getting back at an agreed-upon pest. Lionel Hutz is currently teaching me the difference between breaking chart records and breaking chart records. I just get the feeling that personal opinions get in the way of making a rational judgement, once again letting minor personal victories cloud the fact that nothing has been accomplished. When "Perfect" was put on ACR, it didn't disappear from the chart, it just found a new steady ranking about 50 spots lower instead, meaning that the OCC broke their own rules for no good reason, and didn't generate any new top 40 or top 100 hits in that meantime for the effort. The way I've seen it is that ACR dodging hits is just part of the system, something that'll happen that isn't worth worrying about unless everything starts doing it. The mindset that allows this example to happen though, implies that the rules are less about allowing new hits in, and more about a feeling of spite to the bigger hits that won't go away. If even the OCC can't wrap their head around this, it's concerning to say the least. I feel the same way with the (admittedly less loud) discourse around the ARIA Charts. Constant vibes based complaining about older music, album tracks, Christmas music, The Voice singles, where it's scoring points on the agreeable notion that many would-be hits are being crowded out by them, but I never hear a peep about the constant omissions from the chart that leave us with an incomplete overview. It just feels like selfishness is the main motivator, and I don't like that. Charts are supposed to settle the score; you can't just tear it down because you don't agree with it.

Why did I say all of this when I'm supposed to be talking about "Confidence"? It's because to me, it's a victim of arbitrary systems in place and how their panning for otherwise missed hits isn't going to reach everything. "Confidence" fell victim to a ruling that I'm not sure the OCC even pay attention to, where in 2023/2024 it potentially had the necessary 25% gain but wasn't quite high enough when that happened, so it never got off ACR, and never charted in the UK. Ironically, it probably would have charted if none of these complicated rules are in place. While these situations are harder to spot, anyone worth their salt in chart analysis should be noticing them and spreading them around. It shouldn't get crowded out by pointless squabbles.

This is a hard argument to win though because at the heart of it, the songs that aren't making the charts are the ones that just aren't popular enough and won't generate that kind of fanfare. Like imagine saying all of that to someone because you want them to feel sympathetic to Ocean Alley and "Confidence". Either you're not Australian and you can't possibly care about them, or you are Australian and you are just so nonplussed or angry at this nothing of a band that got so unnecessarily popular that they've wormed their way into almost every single triple j related poll since 2017, and reached critical mass in 2018 when they won the whole thing. Few Hottest 100 winning songs will generate more of an underwhelming reaction out of those who aren't into it than this one. It's the prime example of a niche audience growing just big enough behind the scenes that it'll show up in spades to rain on everyone else's day. It doesn't even feel like it's a movement built around "Confidence", but Ocean Alley themselves, with this song just happening to be the one poised to handle it all. It's like what I said about "Chateau" (#743), if Ocean Alley managed to make a better song than "Confidence", they just don't have the momentum behind them anymore to pounce on it anymore.

I am once again projecting my internal thoughts onto a vague version of everything I've ever seen said about this band and this song. Looking back at some DMs I was sending at the time, I had pinned down "Confidence" as a likely winner very early on when voting had just opened, so it's an outcome I had time to come to terms with. In all fairness I didn't really have a horse in this race because a lot of the top end of that list ended up nothing like I expected. There's a whole lot of 'Wouldn't it be weird if this song won?' for everything except the song that ended up winning. I had no charitable thoughts for Ocean Alley at this point in time, and it holds somewhat true since I've now blazed through every single Hottest 100 entry they'd had up to this point. I hadn't yet come across any of the songs that would help me gain any appreciation for Ocean Alley and, for instance, help this song click for me.

It makes it difficult for me to elaborate on because nothing has changed with the song itself. It's still the same song that I spent all of 2018 getting zero emotion out of. I can say that the whole thing just comes together very neatly but I think in the least pretentious way possible, either you get it, or you don't. Sometimes I listen to it and don't fully get it either. It can just be a bit too sluggish sometimes. Best thing it has going for it is having a bit more meat to it, not sounding as light and spacious as Ocean Alley can be, and with all that in mind, the band is seriously locked in here. Just crisp and professional, which is hopefully a compliment, baby.