#165-#161

#165. LAUREL - Scream Drive Faster (#74, 2020)

7th of 2020

I only ever heard 'laurel'. For that one audio illusion that went viral in 2018, this is technically the correct answer, it can't be disputed that the person on the recording did in fact say 'laurel'. I'm not saying this to discredit the 'yanny' heads in the room. If that's what you're hearing, you're not wrong, it's just a fascinating experience of the way we process sounds. I really wish I was ever able to hear 'yanny' because it's far more interesting to me than just hearing the thing that's being said. If I didn't introduce my brother to the illusion with absolutely no prompting and had him hear 'yanny', I might suspect everyone who said it was just playing a ruse. I do lament the experience for the many Laurels (and occasional Yannys) of the world who probably get reminded of this far too often, I was just mainly hoping that after several years of ignoring it, I might get that experience some people have where it just switches, but nope. Laurel all the way.

When it comes to LAUREL the musician, I was probably more likely listening to Foals most of the time. It's interesting to see her here because I wouldn't really say she's truly broken through at any point, and she's British so there's no local advantage here. We even had our own perfectly working version of LAUREL around the same time too, as I see a bit in common with LAUREL's earlier work to what Stevie Jean was doing then. "Estranged" is a very good song I think, though this will mean nothing to you if you're only familiar with LAUREL's later releases.

There's a clear transformation that's happened. LAUREL started making music at a pretty young age. She had a Dylan-esque moment of pivoting to more prominent electric guitar, which I'm sure bothered someone with a blog at the time, but that became the sound of her debut album in 2018. She had a good amount of airtime on triple j then but didn't really make large strides here, which is why it was so shocking to me when she cracked this list, but then it may as well be a different artist now. I don't know if you can pin it all to this, but it's worth noting that LAUREL got signed to Communion Music. It's a small independent label founded by, among others, Ben from Mumford & Sons, and it's probably best known as an early home to Catfish and the Bottlemen and Matt Corby. All I can say is that LAUREL takes up the synths on "Scream Drive Faster" and has never looked back.

When I listen to "Scream Drive Faster", I can initially hear the LAUREL of old, but it's absolutely smothered by synths on the chorus. There's almost a feeling an anonymity to this where I could imagine anyone singing it, her distinct vocals no longer feeling like the selling point. It'd be a problem if she didn't just excel in the new territory. "Scream Drive Faster" is the sound of going through a tunnel. The combination of synth and guitar creates this wonderful rush of euphoria. She manages to capture something similar to that one Canadian synth pop artist who will eventually appear on this list and no doubt be very fun to write about, when she barrels into a chorus of difficult to discern syllables. It's all just ear candy.

#164. Courtney Barnett - Depreston (#82, 2015)

24th of 2015

For a long time I'd not really been able to grasp the differences between the richer & poorer sides of town. You can absolutely call it some amount of privilege as I spent my earlier years atop a hill with a fairly big plot of land. I did move to a poorer part of town after that but any of the adverse potential effects weren't really felt outside of getting my bike stolen. I think more than anything, I just observed things within their own capacity and never felt the need for anything more. It seems appropriate here that I really felt it in one of my recent trips to Melbourne. Just that feeling in certain parts of town that you're not overly safe, and the depressing state of everything around you. It obviously made me think of "Depreston".

This is one of Courtney Barnett's longer songs, running close to 5 minutes, and while a lot of that is dragged on by the coda, it's generally one of her denser songs. She packs a lot of details into setting the initial scene. On first impression it is just a song about buying a house in a pretty run down part of town (specifically Preston). In terms of mundane observational humour, it's top shelf. We go from discussing the benefits of home-brewed coffee to the multi-purpose utility of having a two car garage. Just ignore the fact that there's a burglar being arrested down the road.

She properly shows her hand about halfway through the verses, talking about how the house is selling at a lower value because it's a deceased estate, implying that someone very likely just died there. That'd be a morbid detail on its own, but it becomes a new topic of exploration as she slowly paints the picture of what is likely an old woman who lived alone and had a husband or son who died in Vietnam. Courtney gets so distracted on these details that she loses track of what's going on and we just get a real estate agent's line about tearing the house down and rebuilding on top of it over and over again. A great bit of juxtaposition, the remorseful, sentimental person vs. the unfeeling capitalist machine.

Really, it's just Courtney Barnett at her best. Just that knack for detail, while anchoring it to a larger observation within itself. I always found this one easy to get into though because it's such a breezy song. Maybe that one guitar loop is a little indebted to Coldplay's "Don't Panic", but it presents us a new version of it that doesn't end way too soon at the 2 minute mark.

#163. Childish Gambino - IV. Sweatpants (#60, 2014)

19th of 2014

Something that made the Hottest 100 work so well for me initially is that it all felt tightly knit. The results reflected what had been played on the station with a tilt towards what made sense in those confines. Not everything that got substantial airplay got a look in, but everything that got a look in got substantial airplay. There'll obviously be an advantage for the higher profile releases, but it was close to a level playing field.

I feel this is something that's changed quite a bit with music charts as well. They also operated in a similar way at the same time. A different (though much larger) echo chamber where we'd all have a chance to be exposed to everything at around the same time, make our assessment and then either move on or stick around. That's obviously never been strictly true either, and labels got very good at wringing out greater potential from some releases than others, but things have gotten so fractured now that it no longer feels like even the sky is the limit. The way a song can have a tilt of virality that instead of lasting for a couple of days or weeks, gives it the momentum to thrive for years, and the way that this can happen to something that either was already a hit just a few years ago, or is currently a hit and is just riding another wave on top of that one. It really feels like we're all just being taken on a ride without much say in it anymore. It's a bit like how if nearly everyone was fed the same song on a curated shuffle playlist at the same time, we probably wouldn't realise until the charts came out a day later and it was #1 by the length of Flemington.

That's all to say that things have gotten topsy-turvy by introducing different variables for discovery and not having everyone clued into the same releases at the same time. As a constant that's been around for over 30 years, the Hottest 100 is a good way of documenting all of this, in ways that I'll continue to observe. Charts may look increasingly funny, but the Hottest 100 is (now) always 100 new songs released in the past year. It's just a question of where they come from, and how distinct the pecking order is.

In 2014, that stable set up I was used to felt like it was breaking down. When I was looking at social media votes across the board, I noticed some surprising contenders, songs that certainly had been on the radio but I didn't consider them to be especially noteworthy. It'd mostly be a lesson in voter demographics on social media and how that would distort reality, because the results would come out and they'd be put in their place, one song that stood out to me in particular was Childish Gambino's song "Sweatpants". It's not a song I was familiar with, but for a decent while it was riding in the top 10 for these 'predictions'. It seemed unfathomable, not least of which because Childish Gambino literally had a song (#207) that was doing well on the radio and the charts in that very moment that didn't seem like it was getting anything by association. It normalised eventually and by the end of my tally I had "Sober" at #37 and "Sweatpants" at #46. They'd end up at #31 and #60 respectively, much more reasonable, but still this is a remarkable showing for a song that had only been played on the station 8 times that year.

If nothing else, it's a reminder that Childish Gambino operates in a different space to most rappers with regard to his audience, many for whom it might still feel a bit weird calling him Childish Gambino as a default. To some extent I was already aware of this. He'd operated as a meme for years. His 1.6 score on Pitchfork being the site's most iconic ruling, the only one where you see the image and know exactly what album it is. "Because the Internet" doubles down on it all. There's a song called "Worldstar", the album cover is a GIF, and because he's still not satisfied, the album comes with a 72 page screenplay with sequences lined up to specific songs. I'm not going to go through the whole thing but at least I got a little more context as for why he slams his fist on a table.

I don't know if anything could have properly prepared me for what the album is actually like though. Whatever your impression is from the singles, they feel like curiosities amidst a generally much more low key affair. For swathes at a time, the album doesn't feel particularly interested in carving out hits, and it's very mellow. The stride does come back in the middle, starting with "Telegraph Ave.", and then there's a nice run towards the end, but it's very much an album I don't know what to do with. By all accounts, it seems to be a running theme in his discography.

"Sweatpants" was clearly being included in one of those noteworthy groupings though, so there has to be something in that, right? I'd say so. Moments when Childish Gambino actually decides to go full on with actually rapping seem rare, so I can only assume it's because he needs to save up all his punchlines. On this song, it's a tour de force of moments. I feel incapable of criticising it because he simply is doing him better than I'm doing me. Shout out to Problem being recruited just to say his own name and make strange sounds, and also shout out to the music video which is extremely well made and pretty hypnotic. WAHHH.

#162. WAAX - Labrador (#88, 2018)

18th of 2018

I was doing my rounds of checking out new music back in 2015. I came across a song called "I For An Eye" by a new band, WAAX. I loved it. Prime content in the short, fast & loud territory. The lead singer had wild amounts of distortion on their singing that gave her voice unmistakeable personality, while also feeling like they're destined to never go big. Maybe in a post-Amyl and the Sniffers world I can believe it now, but at no point would I have said that their songs sound like they have the right crossover appeal. I was just glad they kept making more, because every new release was hit after hit for me.

Maybe in hindsight there was a slight transformation in the ensuing years. Ironically it was the band's most stable line up which went unchanged from 2015 up to 2019, but on the other hand, those iTunes tags did change from Rock to Alternative in 2016. There was also a steady uptick in the band's popularity. It's something I can track in my own Hottest 100 vote counts. They started out top 500 in 2015, then top 400 in 2016, then top 100 in 2017. None of these songs actually touched the real Hottest 200, so it's obviously well off reality. But when you're competing with just yourself, this feels like more of a clear victory. Just to put into context of how far off these projections might have been. Warm Tunas in 2018 had "Labrador" at #23, one of the widest margins of error for that year (it depends on your formula whether it's better or worse than "MANTRA" (#569) which slid from #8 to #45). Still, persistence paid off and WAAX were in! This was as far as they'd ever ascend the mountain, we'd just see a couple more Hottest 200 entries afterwards and I'm not sure we'll see another one.

It's worth noting here that they hadn't even released their debut album at this point. That would arrive in late 2019, doing pretty well and getting them to #11 on the ARIA Chart. I don't know if there's a tangible benefit to releasing an album on the same week as Taylor Swift. Maybe it gets more people into record stores that week, I don't know. Maybe a lot of people came in for the Tropical F**k Storm & WAAX combo given they landed at #10. I'm not sure what the consensus is on the album. It feels like they're experimenting a bit with different sounds that don't always land, while the hooks aren't generally as sticky as what came before. On the other hand, one of the advance singles, "FU" might just be my favourite WAAX song to date. It doesn't go as hard as say, "Holy Sick", but reveals some untapped potential out of Maz's vibrato. Her voice elevates it significantly.

Things got a little messy afterwards. The band did a publicity stunt in 2021, pretending to be looking for a new lead singer, but in reality just setting up a ruse for their next music video. This would all just be a bit of quirky fluff if band tensions didn't rise significantly shortly after. They did get a second album out, but when it came to touring it, the tour was cancelled halfway through. Details at the time were vague, but less than 6 months later, the band went on hiatus, playing a small handful of shows afterwards. Fast forward another 6 months and Maz announces that she's bringing back WAAX as a solo project.

Behind the scenes, I can only speculate what's going on. I've heard that the rest of the band were owed money, I've heard that Maz may have pulled the rug under them both before and after. Press release Maz might be different to behind the scenes Maz. All I can say is that audiences haven't really bought into the drama. I can't determine the extent of it, just that WAAX released a new album in March 2026 and this is the first I'm hearing of it. It wasn't submitted to the ARIA Chart so I can't measure it up to the previous ones. The lead single "HANDS" has actually managed to outstream everything on the second WAAX album though, so it's a start. Taken on its own terms, I love that song. It's fresh, anthemic, and it sounds vital. Whatever the full picture may be, Maz has obviously been through a lot as is tradition for women in rock bands who make music. She can have this moment.

Anyway I skipped over "Labrador", that's what we're here for. All that seemed like a good lead into this because it very much is a song about sexism in the music industry. That might just be the edge that brought it their biggest success, just clearly being a song about something that resonates. Let's just say it's not the only song about that very topic polling in the Hottest 100 around that time period. Like that other song, this one gets a lot of its talking points from the perspective of the higher up men setting the rules. There's a mix of outright insistence ('you're a girl and a girl isn't welcome in here') followed by being blindly complicit of a system that's bigger than them ('yeah, it is what it is'). That can be the most frustrating aspect of it all, the idea of this spectre that's keeping everything from changing. "Labrador" was never one of my absolute personal favourites in the WAAX catalogue, but I can't deny its vitality. We need a mix of protest songs, with the absolutely explicit and the easy to just thoughtlessly sing along with. There are in fact advantages to both.

#161. Stormzy - Vossi Bop (#27, 2019)

12th of 2019

There's a peculiar history of political moments in the UK Charts. In 1977, during the queen's Silver Jubilee, the Sex Pistols released "God Save The Queen". It charted at #2 and to this day, I have no idea if there was a genuine fix, or if people just willed a rumour into existence because they refused the reality they were given. In 2013, after Margaret Thatcher died, there was a concerted effort to get "Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead" to #1. It fell short of a Duke Dumont song that had too strong of a head start. I heard a rumour that the pro-Thatcher community deliberately bought up Duke Dumont's song to keep it at #1 that week, but after extensively searching discussions at the time, I don't see convincing evidence for it. Perhaps the most confrontationally political song to go to #1 was "Killing In the Name", but that's tangential to its actual role in topping the charts in that moment. I don't think people were thinking about the 1992 Los Angeles riots when they were sticking it to the X-Factor.

In recent times, there's been a pretty explicit one but it almost feels inconsequential, like it was snuck into an obvious hit because you can get away with it. Stormzy was on top of his game in 2019. He hadn't had a #1 yet, but you could see it coming. "Vossi Bop" was just that inevitable moment. In this song, Stormzy raps the line 'F**k the government and f**k Boris'. This would become a redundant statement just three months later when Boris Johnson became the new UK prime minister, which also means that this song was still charting when it happened. He also rhymes that line with 'I could never die, I'm Chuck Norris', a line that's gone out of date in 2026. I wonder if Vossy will still have his coaching job by the time this post goes live...Yep, I wrote this in April.

It's a testament to Stormzy's popularity just how far this song went though. You don't usually get a UK rap song as the 7th biggest hit of the year, and it even splashed over to Australia where it gave him his first ever top 50 hit. He'd have a handful more but this is probably still his biggest lead artist hit in Australia. It'd be his biggest Hottest 100 hit too except in the 3 years it's taken me to make and post this list, he had the Chase & Status collaboration "BACKBONE" go even further. On no level has it ever felt like he's making crossover hits in Australia, the cult of personality just does not translate to another continent.

If I were to ignore the song's own merits for a little longer, I have to give some more credit to the incredible music video. Insanely good editing and aura farming off the charts. He's even got Idris Elba (who is also namedropped in the song). Having since been to London, seeing all these deserted streets is really doing my head in, it's not like that at all.

In general though, it's pretty agreeable Stormzy. I don't think he necessarily sounds as potent in the past, but perhaps he's just grown up and is having more reserved fun. Like, there's an alternate song by this name where it's actually about smashing someone over the head with a bottle of Courvoisier. No point in punching down when you're already #1 though, to say nothing of the fact that Stormzy is a very tall individual.