#485-#481

 #485. The Wombats - If You Ever Leave, I'm Coming With You (#32, 2021)

51st of 2021

It does feel like an endless cavalcade of songs by The Wombats when they're well past the expected expiration date. You tend to get used to it, but you also wonder what it's like to be in that universe where they're still an exciting part of the zeitgeist. It's actually surprisingly easy to do that for me because I am part of the situation. They've remained with me this whole time, and 2021 is actually one of the years I've spent the most time listening to them.

It's all part of my usual process. I wasn't seeking out The Wombats, but I did my weekly listening session for new music, and The Wombats just left a good impression on me. The lead single they put out in particular, "Method to the Madness". It'll come back again because there's a certain recent Ball Park Music song that did something similar, but it's a song that had me re-assessing what The Wombats were capable of. I wasn't obsessed with the song or anything but I respected it a lot.

That was just the prelude though, because on the other side of this song I'm supposed to be talking about was the 3rd single "Ready For The High", and while I wouldn't call it ambitious in the same way, it felt like quintessential Wombats. A little rough around the edges but with the confidence to lean into power pop dramatics. They just kill it with all the little transitions and it's a very special song to me that I completely imagine registers nothing to most people.

Listening to the full album that all this comes from has me thinking about a weird mental poisoning that can occur from listening to too much music. What I mean by that is that you can get so obsessed with catching those undeniable moments that you rubbish anything else. There's a version of me who used to listen to dozens of new albums a year and I suspect from that, I'd be more underwhelmed by this album. While it's not without those charming moments, you're mostly getting what you expect, and on what is not a great night for me, it's oddly what I'm after. Maybe they're a little too into this idea of putting contradictory terms together in their song titles, or just over-stimulating ones. I don't dislike it on principle but it's basically every second song here, including this one.

Taken on its own terms though, I'll get behind this one. It feels like very old school Wombats, which might be a good thing because it means that the guys who wrote "Moving To New York" and "Tokyo (Vampires & Wolves)" can't possibly sue them. It's just a nice bit of fun with a lot of energy. Shout out to the random shout out, though unlike with the Drake one, I can't say who it is yet.

#484. RÜFÜS DU SOL - Next to Me (#25, 2021)

50th of 2021

Forget "When I Dream" (#492), here's your "Runaway". It's an octave lower, but they're hitting that E note with no shame at all. What I wouldn't do to hear Tyrone's take on it, tell me how he isn't really coming alive tonight (#693), or how he knows there's no place he'd rather be (#541) and that you need to maintain the greatest possible distance from it. Then Jon jumps in with an incredibly hedonistic verse for contrast, and they just play all 9 minutes of "Innerbloom" through a pitch shifter. Critics are saying it's the best thing this side of Ariel Pink.

This is our first taste of RÜFÜS DU SOL's 4th album "Surrender". When you look at all the stats we've got here, it feels almost like a triumphant comeback for the band. Arguably their best Hottest 100 haul, and it performed considerably better on the ARIA Chart than its predecessor. This song landed at #25 and it's the lowest of their entries, from a band who often struggles to crack the top 20 on a good day.

One of the more trifling bits of information we've lost ever since the ARIA Charts changed a couple of months ago is an inability to check in on the RÜFÜS DU SOL pecking order on any given week. It's a peculiar sorting, one that surprisingly has tended to put "Solace" ahead of the rest, despite being the aforementioned dip in success at the time. Just a reminder I suppose that you can't really measure an album's impact until it's been several years, it's no longer the artist's latest album and people are still listening to it constantly. "Surrender" actually lands right near the back of the pack despite having one of their biggest recurring hits, a song I'll cover one day.

I don't want to wear out all my "Surrender" content now because we've got to take two more trips to the well, but "Next to Me" has never been my pick of the litter. That's more credit to the other singles though. I think they tapped into something special in general, and it does help "Next to Me" a little bit too. You know how it is. The first single is good, it primes you into liking the one that came after, whereas if you didn't like the first one, you're less likely to even bother trying it. "Next to Me" has some very nice friends.

#483. The Jungle Giants - Feel the Way I Do (#16, 2017)

46th of 2017

Before I go to a live show, I like to do my research. I don't usually look up setlists, but try to take a stab at guessing what might come up and familiarising myself. It's a lot more fun to recognise songs rather than just hear them for the first time in that setting. After this album came out, I got a chance to see The Jungle Giants for free, so I was well on board even though I didn't really listen to them much. I listened to the new album in advance, so it worked out. All things considered, it was a pretty good time, and it probably helped me appreciate all of these "Quiet Ferocity" hits that I've been slowly getting through. Nothing could prepare me for the biggest shock of all.

I'm convinced this was the first time Sam revealed he had gone bald. It's a look he's been rocking ever since and it's working but I remember looking afterwards at all the band's press photos and he had spent basically all of that album cycle wearing hats, so I'm not sure how long he'd had it like that. It was amusing when I was looking up live videos for the last entry to see how many people have drawn attention to it, and the fact that he now looks unmistakably like Broden from Aunty Donna, just with a very different voice (discovering that they've done a panel together made me smile). I respect the look, and I always think of iconic bald frontmen like Michael Stipe or Billy Corgan, singers who had hair at the peak of their fame. Technically on numbers, this isn't quite the case for The Jungle Giants, but it's remarkable how different he used to look.

At last we've made it to the main event. Not for this list, there will be more opportunities for this band still, but this was the obvious single from "Quiet Ferocity" that stormed way ahead of the pack. At the time it almost felt too obvious for me. It's hard to explain but sometimes you get songs that so clearly sign-post their appealing parts that you can never grab onto it. It's when you've done everything right but it's not clicking. That might just be a sign of being disinterested on principle, maybe I was growing up and not super convinced that this band needed a second wind in their career. Seeing them live earned a lot of respect from me, so I'm getting more behind it. While the entries still to come will show that I probably prefer it the other way, it is nice in this moment to hear a song where they feel like a proper band.

#482. Hayden James & NAATIONS - Nowhere to Go (#74, 2019)

41st of 2019

I don't know what I've got for you. We're back with Hayden James again. I don't have any particular anecdote associated with this song, I think it sounds like some other songs he'd put out before this one, but different enough to give it some credibility to stand on. But what do you do here, we've got nowhere to go, but it doesn't matter. At the very least it hasn't stopped me before.

I guess I should highlight NAATIONS. They're the most interesting piece of the puzzle because of how much backstory there is. They're an Australian duo fronted by Nat Dunn. That might not be a familiar name, but she's been in the music industry for decades, scoring a top 40 hit in Australia called "Whatever" under the name Tali. It's so small scale in that era that even I don't remember hearing it growing up. I think I slightly prefer her follow up "Don't Be Sorry", a #85 smash. After that, she's been making a name for herself as a songwriter with a surprising list of artists she's written for: Chris Brown, Tiësto, Kygo, Charli XCX and BLACKPINK. The one particularly noteworthy song she worked on was "FRIENDS" by Marshmello & Anne-Marie.

The duo's other member is Nick Routledge, also known as Nicky Night Time. We've already had Touch Sensitive in this list and now he's the second member of Van She we're dealing with. The eponymous Matt Van Schie from Van She hasn't released any music for about 7 years now and seems to be working in IT now. The band's drummer Tomek Archer appears to believe in a twisted form of nominative determinism as he's now apparently an award winning architect. Nicky Night Time has been fairly successful on his own, even scoring a nomination one year in ARIA's tough to crack Best Dance Release category, but he's done even better working as NAATIONS. The duo had a top 40 hit in the UK back in 2017 with Duke Dumont & Gorgon City called "Real Life". I always thought Nat sounded a bit like Carly Rae Jepsen on that song, but it might be because she also had a song out at the time I was listening to. I guess they're both singers who are quite a bit older than you'd think if you never looked into it.

Just to highlight how hard it is to make that ARIA nomination list, even Hayden James has only been nominated for it twice, and both times early in his career, with "Just a Lover" and "Something About You" (#604). This song didn't get anything, although the album it's from, "Between Us", did get him to the higher echelon of Best Male nominations, in the second to last year before it was discontinued.

Nat & Nicky are both credited as songwriters here, and if Hayden James' background story on this is to be believed, then this song is genuinely the work of both of them. I'm not sure Nicky actually plays on it. It's possible Hayden James made it himself (alongside Cassian who also silently co-produced the whole album) outside of the NAATIONS top line on the song. It's nice to know that unlike Hayden James' birthday, there are some things we can trust. It's a good top line too, I love a well-executed running of two different but busy melodies over each other, and this has a great one. I promise I haven't been diagnosed for ADHD yet.

#481. Fred again.. (feat 070 Shake) - Danielle (smile on my face) (#100, 2022)

48th of 2022

Fred for the first time actually. For once I get to start from the right place as well. OK technically that's not true either, because Fred again.. has released many singles before this one, including some that polled. This was his first Hottest 100 appearance with one of his slightly less notable singles, the kind that always immediately lets you know that he's about to go crazy on this list. This is in fact what happened, and though my telling of this story cuts off right as it's about to keep on going, it's fair to say that he's taking up an annual residency on the Hottest 100, the kind that'd sell out within minutes of this post going live. How foolish you were to read everything in order and not immediately scan for Fred. How foolish I was just then to try and finish a sentence with his stage name, I'll have to avoid that going forward.

Make no mistake when I say we're entering the career of one of the most in-demand producers in the world right now. Fred again.. is so popular that he basically runs two seemingly unrelated careers at once that are monstrously huge with two audiences that don't feel like they have much to do with each other. By the time this first Hottest 100 entry rolled around, he'd produced 8 UK #1 singles, most of them with Ed Sheeran. Before that he'd already knocked himself off #1, when Clean Bandit's "Solo" was replaced by George Ezra's "Shotgun".

I'd say that his covert pop career might be slowing down. He worked on the title track to P!nk's "Trustfall" album in 2023, but hasn't really had a major hit since then...probably. In 2021 the little known artist Rain Radio had a hit song with "Talk About", a song that works wonders with Nelly Furtado's 2012 single "Big Hoops (Bigger the Better)". This song has credited songwriters including the seemingly non-existent Robbie Yates, and the mysteriously named Yjneb Nösbig, which is not a massive leap to connect to Fred's brother Benjy. Thus we enter the Devil's Proof. It is only potentially possible to prove the existence of a secretly Fred again.. song if we find it, but we can never be sure another one doesn't exist.

This particular song is the first of a couple of songs that will show up here by Fred again.. under the naming convention of 'Singer's First Name (the real title)', something he's done many times at this point. He has an inconsistent run when it comes to crediting actual artists so it's not always immediately obvious who it is. I don't want to attribute clickbait virtues but it is funny to me that one of his most successful early singles is "Billie (loving arms)", a song that of course samples Billie Ray Martin. It's cute I guess, and it means I'll never forget 070 Shake's real name, which I'm not sure I'd even known at this point.

I have been listening to 070 Shake for quite a while now. The main reason for this being another song on this list that she'll appear on, but she won't be credited on. You might not be shocked to know who's responsible for that, and it's not Travis Scott. I can probably distil those virtues in the future though, just know the short answer that I think she's very good, though a little more anonymous on this one.

I'm glad she gets a run though, it just feels like Fred again..'s least convincing hit here. Not a surprise it landed way down at #100, but then he'd missed the countdown the year earlier with "Marea (we've lost dancing)", and it's a sure sign that he's utilising a much higher profile. It's how I see his success at present anyway, both on the Hottest 100 and in the charts. As far as incredibly popular music goes, he's the artist who feels the least tied to conventions and is able to get away with it. Later singles like "Rumble", "leavemealone" and "Victory Lap" just don't at all mesh with the chart heights they're seeing. It's the sort of rule defying that I just love to see. There's the thought that I could one day open up the new Spotify chart and he's all the way at #1 with another one of these unusual tunes.

"Danielle (smile on my face)" is a solid entry point here. The main loop that runs through most of it is easy to get locked into, and I like the way that the general tone of it feels like it's reacting to the vocal runs. It makes it feel less like two random things slapped together (the vocals come from 070 Shake's own song "Nice To Have", she didn't write this with Fred). I suppose the thing I enjoy the most here is after a whole decade of pop and dance being interchanged only on branding, it's dance music that just sounds like dance music.