SONG.REVIEWSSophia Stel worked gardening, house-painting, and bartending jobs before a tiny label, Pack Records, put out her 2024 debut EP. Her actual debut album just landed on A24 Music -- the film studio's small, boutique record label -- titled, with a straight face, the greatest album of all time.
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Sophia Stel's self-belief anthem -- the first taste of her ironically titled debut album -- earns its sincerity by refusing to sound sincere about anything, trading trip-hop murk for a hyperpop sprint without losing the gardening-job, eleventh-of-eleven-kids specificity underneath it.
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Greatest of All Time!A horror movie playing across the street from their rehearsal space gave a Birmingham blues band its name, its opening track, and -- almost by accident -- an entire new genre of music.
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Greatest of All Time!Nick Cave wrote 'Red Right Hand' independently of the Scream franchise and years before Peaky Blinders existed. Decades of film and TV sync licensing turned it into the single most recognized thing he's ever written anyway.
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Greatest of All Time!Motown founder Berry Gordy's son built his debut single around a childhood friend's uncredited chorus vocal -- and the friend was Michael Jackson, in the worst-kept secret of 1984.
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Greatest of All Time!Screamin' Jay Hawkins meant to record a polite ballad. A producer got the whole band drunk instead, and Hawkins screamed, grunted, and blacked out his way into one of the most covered songs in American music -- then had to relearn it from his own record.
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Greatest of All Time!Bobby 'Boris' Pickett built a career-defining No. 1 out of his own Boris Karloff obsession, recorded it with the Crypt-Kickers in under an hour, and watched the BBC ban it for 11 years as 'too morbid' for broadcast.
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Fat Dog's title track is a dance-punk plea for its own cancellation, built from a John Lennon diss track and an imagined Anatolian-rock band under siege from a club beat -- a joke sturdy enough to carry a real song underneath it.
Read review →Sophia Stel worked gardening, house-painting, and bartending jobs before a tiny label, Pack Records, put out her 2024 debut EP. Her actual debut album just landed on A24 Music -- the film studio's small, boutique record label -- titled, with a straight face, the greatest album of all time.
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Dominic Fike's third studio album, How To Quit Smoking, arrives today. His first-ever Hot 100 top-10 single is 'Babydoll' -- a song he wrote eight years ago, on house arrest, for a SoundCloud EP nobody was watching, now a hit on the strength of a TikTok trend he had nothing to do with starting.
Read feature →A novelty No. 1 born from a Karloff obsession, a drunken accident that became an American standard, an uncredited Michael Jackson hook, a song two horror franchises both adopted independently, and the Boris Karloff movie that also gave heavy metal its name -- five records, five genres, one week before Halloween.
Read feature →South London's Fat Dog built their new album's title track out of a John Lennon diss track and an imagined Anatolian psych band under siege from a rave beat -- all in service of a straight-faced plea to be cancelled, because cancellation sounded easier than asking for rest.
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Drake's Habibti (FOMO) carries a Metacritic score of 59 -- officially just 'mixed' -- but its sharpest reviews single out exactly the kind of song that got it there: a borrowed hook dressed up for a one-week chart spike. 'Solar Eclipse' debuted at No. 5 on that hook and vanished from the top 10 one week later, which is as literal a confirmation of a critic's complaint as this column has seen.
Read feature →Taylor Swift's 'Patient Zero' holds No. 1 for a third week, Drake and Don Toliver's 'Solar Eclipse' vanishes from the top 10 entirely one week after debuting there, and Dominic Fike's 'Babydoll' -- a 98-second EP track he wrote on house arrest in 2018 -- finally breaks the top 10 on a TikTok resurgence eight years later.
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'Rock of Ages' as recorded by Tennessee Ernie Ford, Johnny Cash, and Amy Grant with Vince Gill, plus three new songs -- from Kirk Franklin and GloRilla, Josiah Queen, and Anne Wilson -- about where identity and sustenance actually come from.
Read feature →Trending infrastructure is ready for analytics-driven rankings once there's enough traffic data to rank.
Try the site search with “rubberz” →Vancouver electronic-pop artist born Sophia Johanna Stel, the third of 11 children in a religious family, who worked gardening, house-painting, and bartending jobs before releasing her 2024 debut EP Object Permanence on the small label Pack Records. Named one of NME's 100 Essential Emerging Artists for 2025, she has opened for A.G. Cook and Lorde. Her debut album, the greatest album of all time, arrived October 16, 2026, on A24 Music.
English rock band formed in Birmingham in 1968 as Earth, renamed in 1969 after a Boris Karloff horror film playing at a cinema across from their rehearsal space. The title track of their self-titled 1970 debut album, built on a tritone riff Tony Iommi called "the devil's interval," is widely credited as the first heavy metal song.
Australian rock band fronted by singer and novelist Nick Cave, formed in London in 1983 out of the ashes of the Birthday Party. Their 1994 single "Red Right Hand," drawn from Milton's Paradise Lost, became the band's most widely recognized song decades after release through its use as the Peaky Blinders theme and in the Scream film franchise.
American singer born Kennedy William Gordy, son of Motown founder Berry Gordy, whose paranoid 1984 debut single "Somebody's Watching Me" became an international hit on the strength of uncredited guest vocals from his childhood friend Michael Jackson -- a feature Motown chose not to promote despite it being, in his own words, the worst-kept secret in music.
American singer and songwriter born Jalacy Hawkins, best known for his 1956 recording of "I Put a Spell on You," cut during a drunken session that transformed his intended ballad into a guttural, screamed performance he could not remember making. His theatrical, horror-tinged stage persona -- complete with a coffin and a skull on a stick named Henry -- made him a foundational influence on shock rock.
American singer, songwriter, and actor whose lifelong fascination with horror star Boris Karloff led him to co-write and record "Monster Mash" with Leonard Capizzi and the Crypt-Kickers in 1962. The novelty single hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became a perennial Halloween standard, despite an 11-year BBC ban for being "too morbid" for broadcast.
Seven-piece band from South London -- Joe Love, Chris Hughes, Morgan Wallace, Ellis Dickson, Michael Dunlop, Dillon Harrison, and Jed Bevington -- known for splicing electro-punk, klezmer, rave, and spaghetti-western alt-pop into a single, deliberately uncategorizable sound. Their second album, Cancel Me (I'm Tired), arrived October 2, 2026, on Domino.
Citizen's lead single from Halcyon Blues is the most purely exciting three minutes and forty-three seconds a rock band has put out this year.
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