SONG.REVIEWS
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.
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Dominic Fike's breeziest, slightest song -- a 98-second EP track he wrote on house arrest in 2018 -- finally cracks the Hot 100's top 10 eight years later, carried entirely by a TikTok resurgence that outran everything he has released since.
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Anne Wilson's self-worth anthem, written out of a genuinely hard year of self-esteem struggles, trades lies for an identity defined from outside herself -- the launch of a new era that sounds more lived-in than the usual relaunch single.
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Josiah Queen's fan-voted single builds its case for faith-every-day-not-just-Sunday on blunt, everyday comparisons, growing from a stripped-back opening into a full-throated folk-rock chorus that earns the size of its own argument.
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Kirk Franklin and GloRilla's second collaboration interpolates Mandrill's 'Children of the Sun' into a joyous gospel-rap crossover that just made Franklin the first artist to score double-digit No. 1s on the Hot Gospel Songs chart.
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Amy Grant and Vince Gill's 2005 duet, from Rock of Ages... Hymns and Faith, is the most polished and most literally a duet of this week's three versions -- a married couple singing a text about complete dependence to each other.
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Johnny Cash's 1975 recording, from Sings Precious Memories, carries the specific weight of a man in his forties who had already very publicly needed what the hymn is asking for.
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Tennessee Ernie Ford's 1956 recording, from the first religious album ever certified Gold, treats Augustus Toplady's 18th-century text as plainly as a man closing out his own weekly television broadcast -- which, at the time, he was.
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The title track from Thomas Dollbaum's Dear Life Records album is a goodbye letter to lost loved ones and former selves, recorded live in four days with a backing band that includes MJ Lenderman -- weathered heartland indie with no illusions about the place it's written from.
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Greatest of All Time!Kate Bush's 1985 single peaked at No. 30 in the U.S. on first release. Thirty-seven years later, a single scene in Stranger Things made it her biggest American hit ever and the slowest climb to No. 1 in UK chart history.
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Greatest of All Time!Toto's 1982 single had already been a hit once. A teenager's year-long Twitter campaign and Weezer's 2018 cover gave it a second, bigger one -- doubling its streaming numbers almost four decades later.
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Greatest of All Time!Fleetwood Mac's only Hot 100 No. 1 had been off the charts for 43 years when a skateboarder drinking cranberry juice to it on TikTok sent it back into the top 10 in 2020.
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Greatest of All Time!The Incredible Bongo Band's 1973 instrumental never charted as a single, but its drum break became the foundation DJ Kool Herc built hip-hop on top of at Bronx block parties -- and the most sampled breakbeat in music history.
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Greatest of All Time!Otis Redding recorded his most famous song three days before his death in a plane crash, and it became the only posthumous single ever to reach No. 1 on the Hot 100 -- a record he never lived to see.
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Slovak pop newcomer Adéla's starry-eyed homage to a specific night of feeling glamorous debuts in the Hot 100 top 10 on the strength of a Hannah Lux Davis video and the real Nicole Kidman's own endorsement.
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Drake and Don Toliver's 'Encore'-week entry builds its hook directly out of Ella Langley's 'Choosin' Texas' melody, debuts at No. 5 on streaming muscle and a borrowed earworm, and never does much with either.
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Forrest Frank pairs with Thomas Rhett for a radio-friendly crossover single that trades some of his usual lo-fi charm for a bigger, more conventional country-pop frame.
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Written during the sessions for Lauren Daigle's 2015 debut and only released a decade later, this is the rare vault track that holds up because it was never actually a reject -- just a song whose moment hadn't arrived yet.
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Katy Nichole's deliberate song of surrender from her sophomore album Honest Conversations does the harder, less flattering version of a worship song's central ask.
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Keith & Kristyn Getty's 2021 recording, from their Grammy-nominated Confessio, is built for a congregation to actually sing along to -- clear, singable, and the least interesting of this week's three versions precisely because that's its job.
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Audrey Assad's 2016 recording is the most liturgically careful of this week's three versions -- a hymn sung by someone who has clearly spent real time with the specific words, not just the melody.
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Van Morrison's 1991 reading treats an 8th-century Irish hymn as source material for his own loose, incantatory style, rather than as a text he has to perform carefully.
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Greatest of All Time!Written with Britney Spears in mind, passed on by her camp during a turbulent 2007, and handed to a rising Rihanna, who brought in Jay-Z and turned it into one of the decade's defining singles.
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Greatest of All Time!Elvis Presley's manager wanted the publishing rights to Dolly Parton's farewell song in exchange for a recording. She said no on the spot -- and eighteen years later, Whitney Houston's version became one of the best-selling singles in history.
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Greatest of All Time!By the time Natalie Imbruglia made it a global No. 1 in 1997, 'Torn' had already failed twice -- once in Danish, once as a rock-band single nobody noticed.
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Greatest of All Time!Prince wrote it, recorded it, and gave it away to his own side project in 1985, where it went almost nowhere. Sinead O'Connor found the song five years later and turned a deep cut into a generational standard.
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Greatest of All Time!Willie Nelson's own pick to sing it turned the song down flat. Patsy Cline recorded it on crutches, nursing broken ribs, and made it the song Nelson is still remembered for writing.
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Four months after its debut, Olivia Rodrigo's giddiest single climbs back into the Hot 100 top 10 -- no clear news hook behind the jump, just a song that was built to outlast its own release week.
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A recovery-adjacent title borrowed from addiction recovery's own vocabulary for premature euphoria, set to a brighter beat than the hindsight in the lyric actually earns.
Read review →The strongest of the four 'Encore' songs -- a glamorous-but-hollow-adulthood metaphor Swift actually commits to, instead of just naming and moving past.
Read review →A jaunty, bell-heavy arrangement dresses up another round of Swift litigating her critics -- charming on first listen, thin on the fourth.
Read review →Taylor Swift's 16th No. 1 debuts on the strength of a built-in audience and a same-day rollout, not because 'The Encore' had a song this thin queued up and waiting to be the lead single.
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Sinach's latest congregational anthem doesn't chase 'Way Maker's global scale so much as its method -- a short, repeatable declaration built to be sung by people who've never seen her name, in languages she doesn't speak.
Read review →Josiah Queen's follow-up to 'Dusty Bibles' trades that song's outward-facing accusation for an inward one, turning the same indie-folk plainness on himself instead of a generic backslider.
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Jonathan McReynolds writes a prayer that doesn't resolve into an answer -- a gospel song that stays in the asking instead of rushing to the testimony.
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Brandon Lake's arena-worship arrangement of Fanny Crosby's hymn adds a modern bridge and a full band build that plays well live, at some cost to the text's original plainness.
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Judy Collins moves Fanny Crosby's hymn out of the sanctuary and into the same clear-soprano folk register she used to turn other writers' songs into standards -- a quieter, more private read on a text usually sung as a group declaration.
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Mahalia Jackson's reading of Fanny Crosby's 1873 hymn turns a text about certainty into a performance that argues for it, note by note, rather than simply stating it.
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Greatest of All Time!BTS recorded their first all-English single in a Seoul studio during the first pandemic summer, built from a disco pastiche with no Korean lyrics at all -- and it gave the group its first Hot 100 No. 1 anyway.
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Greatest of All Time!Nickelback's breakthrough single was Billboard's biggest rock song of the 2000s decade by one measure -- and the record that locked the band into a formula it spent the next twenty years being mocked for repeating.
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Greatest of All Time!MC Lyte's 'Ruffneck' became the first Gold-certified single by a solo female rapper and earned her the first-ever Grammy nomination for one -- six years after she'd already become the first woman to release a solo rap album.
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Greatest of All Time!The Bee Gees wrote 'Stayin' Alive' for a Saturday Night Fever script they hadn't read yet, and the drum loop underneath it exists because the actual drummer couldn't make the session.
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Greatest of All Time!Billy Joel's breakthrough single came out of a six-month residency playing under a fake name at a Los Angeles piano bar, and the cast of regulars in the lyric is reporting, not invention.
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Greatest of All Time!Nat King Cole's 1951 ballad is remembered today as much for a 1991 duet he never recorded as for the arrangement he actually sang -- and the original is the better record by a wide margin.
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Doechii spends 'Costume Change' as four different performers in under three minutes -- a sneering trap verse, a lounge-singer bridge, a hardcore breakdown, and a gospel-choir outro -- and the seams barely show.
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Steven Malcolm's one-word answer to a lifetime of feeling unworthy, with KB and for KING + COUNTRY, is a 2025 Christian hip-hop single built around a testimony rather than a boast -- and a 2026 Dove nominee.
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A song written in the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic from Revelation 22, 'Come Jesus Come' won CeCe Winans and Shirley Caesar the 2026 Grammy for Best Gospel Performance/Song -- Winans' 18th -- and is also nominated for Dove Song of the Year.
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An album track on a No. 1 country record, written by others and made personal by Ella Langley, 'Speaking Terms' earned a GMA Dove nomination by admitting how hard it can be to stay on speaking terms with God.
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Forrest Frank's 'Come Thou Font,' from his 2023 lo-fi and hip-hop hymn record New Hymns, is the pun in the title and a genuine attempt to hand a 1758 text to a listener with headphones on.
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Sufjan Stevens recorded his banjo-led version in 2002 for a Christmas EP and released it in 2006 in the Songs for Christmas box set -- a hymn about waiting, recast as an Advent song, that builds to an unaccompanied finish.
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The Tabernacle Choir's Mack Wilberg arrangement is the reason this 1758 hymn returned to the choir's own church hymnal -- a big, carefully built reading that turns a first-person confession into something a congregation-sized choir can sing as 'we.'
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Greatest of All Time!The most joyful record in Celia Cruz's catalog began, according to its writer, when Victor Daniel saw a woman on television who had lost her whole family in the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires.
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Greatest of All Time!Queen Latifah's 'U.N.I.T.Y.' aimed at street harassment, domestic violence and the slurs hip-hop itself used against women, reached No. 23 on the Hot 100 and won a Grammy.
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Greatest of All Time!Iron Maiden bassist Steve Harris built 'The Trooper' from Tennyson's poem about the 1854 Charge of the Light Brigade -- a Victorian cavalry poem turned into a galloping heavy metal riff.
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Greatest of All Time!'Blue Monday' is the best-selling 12-inch single of all time, and the story that Factory Records lost money on every copy comes with a footnote from the sleeve's own designer.
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Greatest of All Time!Fela Kuti's 'Zombie' compared Nigerian soldiers to mindless followers of orders; in February 1977 about a thousand soldiers attacked his compound, and his mother later died of the injuries she suffered there.
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Greatest of All Time!Gram Parsons' signature road song was co-written with a Boston poet who wrote the lyric with Parsons in mind as the singer, and it opened an album released four months after Parsons died.
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King Ayisoba opens Pure Confusion with a song about land sold three and four times over -- kologo up front, Adrian Sherwood's dub and a mixed international guest list arranged around him.
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Anne Wilson's 'Still Do' began as a track on her 2025 album Stars and was reimagined in March 2026 as a duet with Cole Swindell after he found her raw piano version online -- a song about doubt and homecoming that gains a second voice more than a second idea.
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Jamie MacDonald's baptism-imagery anthem spent 12 weeks at No. 1 on Christian radio, won K-LOVE's Song of the Year, and earned a Dove nomination -- a very good radio single that gets its power from the plainness of one image.
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Mariah Carey's guest turn in the Clark Sisters' territory reached No. 1 on Billboard's Gospel Airplay chart in May 2026 -- the Clark Sisters' fourth chart-topper, and Carey's first Gospel Airplay entry of any kind.
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Ledisi, playing Mahalia Jackson in Ava DuVernay's Selma, sings the hymn for the film and its 2014 soundtrack -- a performance that has to work as drama as well as gospel, and mostly does.
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Al Green opened his 1982 album Precious Lord with the hymn and won the 1983 Grammy for Best Soul Gospel Performance, Traditional -- while critics split on whether the album's bright, pop-leaning arrangements suit songs this old.
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Mahalia Jackson's 1956 recording of Thomas Dorsey's grief-born plea, made with just a piano and an organ, is the version that fixed the song in American memory -- Martin Luther King Jr.'s favorite, and a 2012 Grammy Hall of Fame inductee.
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Greatest of All Time!Noel Gallagher wrote 'Live Forever' in 1991 while working for a building company, borrowed its vocal melody from the Rolling Stones' 'Shine a Light,' and aimed it at the self-hatred of grunge.
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Greatest of All Time!The piano loop under Wu-Tang Clan's biggest chart hit came from a 1967 Charmels record, and according to Raekwon the famous phrase came not from Method Man or RZA but from a friend named Raider Ruckus.
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Greatest of All Time!Sade Adu and co-writer Ray St. John wrote 'Smooth Operator' in 1982 for their earlier band, Pride; it peaked at No. 19 in the UK in 1984 and only became the group's biggest single when the US caught up in 1985.
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Greatest of All Time!'White Wedding' needed several chart runs to become a hit -- bubbling under in 1982, No. 36 on the Hot 100 in 1983, No. 6 in the UK in 1985 -- for a song Billy Idol built on his sister's shotgun wedding.
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Greatest of All Time!Luther Vandross spent years singing and arranging vocals behind other artists -- Bowie and Chic among them -- before he wrote and produced the record that made him a star on his own.
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Greatest of All Time!The most imitated drum sound of the 1980s began with a talkback microphone that engineer Hugh Padgham had routed through a heavy compressor -- and Phil Collins says he isn't quite sure what the song is about.
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Oliver Tree's 2021 single was already a hit before it was borrowed for a singing AI polar bear -- and it holds up as a compact, hooky piece of genre-scrambling pop on its own terms.
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KAROL G, Judeline and rusowsky's heartbreak-in-the-club collaboration flips a 2000s dancehall riddim into a melancholy pop song, and its six-week climb from No. 73 to the Hot 100 top 10 is streaming-built and largely earned.
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Jon Reddick's title track, co-written with Matthew West, became his first Christian Airplay No. 1 by pairing a plain, testimony-driven lyric with a build that trusts a single vocal instead of a crowd.
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Josiah Queen's Hot 100 debut turns a plain, almost embarrassed observation -- that his own Bible was collecting dust -- into a genre crossover that reached well past Christian radio's usual audience.
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Hope Darst and Josh Baldwin's 2025 duet earned a double Dove nomination -- Worship Recorded Song and Song of the Year -- on the strength of a hook simple enough to hand a whole room in one pass.
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Shane & Shane's 2014 recording strips the hymn back down to acoustic guitars and two close-harmony voices, aimed less at a concert audience than at the congregations who'd actually sing it the following Sunday.
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Carrie Underwood and CeCe Winans' 2021 duet won Underwood her eighth Grammy -- Best Roots Gospel Album for My Savior -- by trading the hymn's original crusade-hall plainness for a full country-gospel arrangement built for two distinct, powerful voices.
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George Beverly Shea introduced Thomas Chisholm's 1923 hymn to Billy Graham crusade audiences in the 1950s, turning a relatively obscure text into a standard through sheer repetition in front of the largest live audiences gospel music has ever had.
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Greatest of All Time!Maroon 5 wrote a eulogy for their late manager and set it to Pachelbel's Canon -- borrowing a chord progression so overused at weddings that hearing it turned into a funeral is its own small jolt.
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Greatest of All Time!Nas built an entire hit single's beat around a loop of 'Fur Elise' and aimed the finished record at children -- a genuinely strange move for one of hip-hop's most acclaimed lyricists that worked anyway.
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Greatest of All Time!Billy Joel set an original doo-wop lyric to the melody of Beethoven's 'Pathetique' sonata -- and gave the composer an actual co-writing credit on the sleeve of An Innocent Man.
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Greatest of All Time!Walter Murphy turned the opening movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony into a No. 1 disco single -- and the joke only works because the arrangement takes the source material seriously.
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Greatest of All Time!Eric Carmen built his signature ballad's melody directly on Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 -- and ended up splitting the song's publishing with the composer's estate to prove it.
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Muse's Simulation Theory opener imagines an intelligence realizing it lives inside a system built by someone else -- a theme that got an uncomfortably literal real-world sequel eight years later.
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Bruno Mars' bolero-turned-single re-entered the Hot 100 top 10 seven months after release, on the strength of a Spanish-language version and a genre swerve that shouldn't have worked on paper.
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Jonathan McReynolds says he first noticed Jamal Roberts during Roberts' run on American Idol -- and 'Still (Live)' is the rare reality-show-to-gospel crossover that actually justifies itself.
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Lecrae built a grief song around the image of headphones in Heaven, then handed verses to Killer Mike and T.I. -- two mainstream rap veterans a contemporary Christian record almost never gets.
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Phil Wickham's record-setting single isn't really a new song -- it's Rich Mullins' 1988 chorus with new verses -- and being honest about that changes how the achievement should be read.
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Whitney Houston recorded her version of the hymn a few months before her death; it was released four months after it, and the timing changes how nearly every line lands.
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A pre-fame Lauryn Hill and Tanya Blount turned a Sunday-school hymn into the emotional peak of a mainstream comedy, and the duet still holds up as the definitive modern version.
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Ethel Waters didn't just record 'His Eye Is on the Sparrow' -- she named her own autobiography after it, and two decades of Billy Graham crusade performances make the claim sound earned rather than borrowed.
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Greatest of All Time!Selena's signature song began with a decade-old memory of plastic flowers at a Sacramento concert -- and closed, at the end of her life, exactly where it was written.
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Greatest of All Time!Three Temptations sang backup on Rick James' signature hit -- and its bassline would go on to make more money for James a second time, nine years later, as someone else's No. 1.
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Greatest of All Time!Punk's most recognizable chant traces back to Tommy Ramone's ear for how Mick Jagger mispronounced a much older cover song.
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Greatest of All Time!The organ line that defines Bob Dylan's biggest single was played by a musician who had never touched an organ, on an instrument a producer forgot to have switched off.
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Greatest of All Time!Muddy Waters' signature blues standard wasn't written by Muddy Waters -- and the original Chess label credit never said so.
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Greatest of All Time!Bill Monroe's 1946 waltz didn't just found bluegrass -- eight years later, its own writer re-arranged it to match the 4/4 rock and roll cover that made it famous a second time.
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Thorn Wych builds her own instruments out of tree branches and records them alone in Lancashire -- and 'Serpent Psalm' sounds less like a 2025 release than a field recording someone forgot to date.
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Brandon Lake and Lainey Wilson's country-worship duet is a comfortable genre crossover rather than a risky one, and comfortable is mostly enough when the songwriting itself holds up.
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Tasha Cobbs Leonard and John Legend strip everything but piano, choir, and two voices from 'Church' -- and the plea at its center, 'teach me how to have church on a Monday,' does the rest.
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Chandler Moore's first major release since leaving Maverick City Music amid a fraud lawsuit is, on its own terms, a plainly written thank-you -- and the surrounding story gives that plainness real stakes.
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Bethel Music and Kristene DiMarco's 'It Is Well' keeps Spafford and Bliss's refrain and builds an entirely new set of verses around it -- a platinum-certified reinterpretation, not a straight cover.
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Alan Jackson's Precious Memories take is a country singer getting out of a hymn's way -- plain, unhurried, and recorded for a funeral before it was recorded for an album.
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Mahalia Jackson's 1968 recording treats Horatio Spafford's grief-forged hymn with the same restraint Spafford's own words ask for -- and lets the power stay in reserve until the very end.
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Greatest of All Time!Brian Wilson called it a 'pocket symphony,' assembled it in pieces across four studios over months, and turned in the most expensive single of 1966 -- 60 years old this year and still an architecture lesson.
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Greatest of All Time!Elvis Presley's first RCA single, cut in one January afternoon in 1956, is 70 years old this year and still sounds like the moment rock and roll stopped being a regional sound.
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Greatest of All Time!Bobby Troup wrote it on a cross-country drive and the King Cole Trio cut it the same year -- an 80-year-old road song that's been recorded by more artists than almost anything else on this list.
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Greatest of All Time!Jamiroquai's 1996 single is still touring 30 years later -- the group's current Latin America dates are explicitly tied to this anniversary -- and the song itself holds up as well as the video does.
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Greatest of All Time!Run-D.M.C. covered a fading rock band's decade-old album cut in 1986 and accidentally revived both careers at once -- 40 years later, it's still the template for hip-hop/rock crossover.
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Greatest of All Time!The Bee Gees' first true disco single, 50 years old this year, is also the record John Travolta dances to alone in Saturday Night Fever -- a genre pivot that outlasted the group that made it.
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Engelbert Humperdinck, 90, covers Journey's 'Faithfully' with an orchestra standing in for the arena-rock band -- and gets Jonathan Cain, the song's own writer, to guest on his own composition.
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CeCe Winans built a Grammy-winning song around a plain, direct request -- believe for wholeness, for yourself and everyone around you -- and let four decades of vocal control do the rest.
Read review →Forrest Frank wrote 'Your Way's Better' as a prayer while driving, released it to no fanfare, and watched a TikTok trend turn it into a Hot 100 single seven months later with no radio push behind it.
Read review →Brandon Lake and Jelly Roll's Grammy-winning duet works because Jelly Roll didn't just feature on the song -- he lived the lyric before he ever sang it.
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Carrie Underwood and Vince Gill's 2011 televised duet went viral within days -- and Underwood liked the moment enough to record the hymn again, a decade later, on her own terms.
Read review →Elvis Presley's first competitive Grammy win, out of fourteen nominations across his career, came for a gospel record -- and 'How Great Thou Art' is the reason why.
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George Beverly Shea didn't write a word of 'How Great Thou Art' -- he just sang it roughly a hundred times over one sixteen-week crusade until an obscure translated hymn became a standard.
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Greatest of All Time!Throwback Thursday, 1989: a production crew that stopped treating a sample as one instrument and started stacking a dozen at once until none of them were recognizable alone.
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Greatest of All Time!Throwback Thursday, 1998: a pitch-correction tool pushed hard enough to break, and a production team that lied about what it was for as long as they could.
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Greatest of All Time!Throwback Thursday, 1983: a jazz pianist put a turntable on national television and introduced scratching to an audience that had never seen it as an instrument.
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Greatest of All Time!Throwback Thursday, 1974: a band that couldn't buy the sound it wanted, so it built the machine that made it instead.
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Greatest of All Time!Throwback Thursday, 1967: a keyboard built to imitate a real orchestra, doing most of the work a real orchestra gets credited for.
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Greatest of All Time!Throwback Thursday, 1976: a guitar signal routed through a plastic tube and a Nashville pedal-steel player's decade-old trick, turned into rock's most recognizable talking instrument.
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The title track anchoring the River Cain hoax is a competently assembled mainstream-country pastiche with nothing underneath it -- which, once you know the artist doesn't exist, is exactly the problem.
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Beyoncé became the first Black woman to top Hot Country Songs and the first to reach No. 1 on the Hot 100 with a country record — a genuinely historic single that plays it safer than the history around it suggests.
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Doechii stages a full therapy session as a rap verse — funny, self-incriminating, and technically dazzling in the same breath — on the standout from her Grammy-winning Alligator Bites Never Heal.
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Tyler, the Creator turns a 1977 Zambian rock sample and a genuine fear of his own fans into Chromakopia's most sonically aggressive statement, and its most nakedly anxious one.
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Billie Eilish trades whisper-horror for an open-throated devotion vow, and the results became the longest-running Hot Rock & Alternative Songs No. 1 of her career — and one of the biggest songs of 2024.
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Charli XCX opens Brat with a name-drop of her own scene and a hook built to be screamed back — the song that turned a lime-green album cover into a summer-long cultural bit.
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Ella Langley turns the spotlight on herself for once, comparing her own chaos to an idealized, grounded version of a woman she isn't — the most vulnerable thing on Dandelion, and it holds up.
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Tame Impala's disco cut about self-isolation was a mid-chart footnote until JENNIE's remix turned it into a TikTok sound — proof the feature and the trend, not the song underneath, are doing the heavy lifting on the Hot 100.
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Olivia Dean's gospel-flecked demand for reciprocal effort has already cleared a billion Spotify streams and topped charts on four continents, and — unlike most of this week's chart — the acclaim genuinely tracks with the record.
Read review →Olivia Dean's bossa-nova throwback is a courtship song told from a position of total confidence rather than longing, and the Astrud Gilberto comparisons it's earned are not a stretch.
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Ella Langley and Morgan Wallen's duet about a couple too exhausted to either fix things or leave is the rare bonus-track single that earns its own chart run rather than just riding two names.
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Ariana Grande's Petal lead single debuted at No. 1 on the reputation of the writer's room behind it, then cooled to No. 5 as the actual listening caught up with the mixed reviews — a rare case where the chart's second act is more honest than its first.
Read review →Taylor Swift's Toy Story 5 tie-in debuted at No. 1 on the strength of the franchise and the name attached to it, not because it's a top-tier Swift single — a pleasant three minutes doing very little most of her catalog hasn't already done better.
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The Ramsey Lewis Trio turned a 19th-century spiritual into a 1966 pop-chart jazz single — a genuine crossover achievement that trades some of the original's rawness for polish, and comes with a popular backstory that doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
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Sinach's 'Way Maker' became the most-sung worship song on Earth by 2020 — after American artists' covers got the chart placements, the awards buzz, and, for a while, most of the credit.
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Kirk Franklin & God's Property built a No. 1 R&B radio hit out of a Funkadelic sample and a gospel choir, and split the church over it in the process — the sound of a genre's ceiling getting tested in real time.
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Where Judy Collins made 'Amazing Grace' smaller to get it out of the church, Aretha Franklin went the other way — stretching the hymn to nearly eleven minutes in front of a Los Angeles congregation and turning it into the definitive gospel reading of the song.
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Judy Collins didn't write a note of it, produce a hook onto it, or add a single instrument — and her 1970 a cappella 'Amazing Grace' still became a transatlantic hit. The whole achievement is in what she chose not to do.
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Leon Thomas compares himself to his own dog on the title track of the album that turned him from a behind-the-scenes songwriter into a Grammy-winning artist in his own right — one of the year's least likely Album of the Year nominees.
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Kacey Musgraves trades Golden Hour's disco shimmer for something quieter and harder to grade — a title track about cutting out what isn't serving you, delivered so gently it risks not registering at all.
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The title track off Turnstile's Grammy-winning fourth album proves the band's whole gamble — that hardcore could carry an actual pop chorus and lose nothing — was correct.
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Clipse's first album in 16 years centers on a Kendrick Lamar verse the duo's own label allegedly tried to kill — and the song survives the fight around it as the sharpest thing either rapper has put on record in years.
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The lead single and title-setting joke of Sabrina Carpenter's second straight No. 1 album is a tight, funny breakup song built on a bit she's already run once — this time with the cameras a little too close to the punchline.
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Stray Kids trade maximalist intensity for a relaxed, confident groove on their 10th mini-album's title track — a smaller flex, and a smart one.
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Stella Lefty's breakout single interpolates Noah Kahan's 'Stick Season' and is now, factually, the highest-charting song called 'Boston' ever released.
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Morgan Wallen's lead single premiered at No. 2 the week country took all five spots on the Hot 100 for the first time ever — a strong, if not adventurous, signal for his next album.
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DMA'S go quieter and fully self-produced for the first time, and the unhurried result is a deliberate choice, not a lesser one.
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The title track off Cancer Bats' eighth album crystallizes a year on the road into a riff that sounds like it wants dirt under its fingernails.
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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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Skillet's second After the Storm single is formula, but it's their formula, executed with two decades of conviction behind it.
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Maria Brink delivers the best pure vocal performance in the batch on In This Moment's operatic, confrontational third single from Witch.
Read review →Nickelback's WrestleMania 42 theme is a heavier, grungier revision of a 2023 soundtrack cut, and the revision actually lands.
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Shaun Morgan trades Seether's righteous-outsider anger for the queasier feeling of watching the world rot while you keep breathing anyway — a riff that coils rather than explodes.
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BTS's first single since the full group's military service ended is a tight, likable synth-pop record that plays the comeback safer than the moment asked for.
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Greatest of All Time!Throwback Thursday, 2013: the cheapest way to sound like 1979 was to sample it. Daft Punk spent an enormous budget hiring the people who made 1979 instead.
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Greatest of All Time!Throwback Thursday, 1994: written in about fifteen minutes from a misheard news broadcast, and still the prettiest song in rock about something being badly wrong.
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Greatest of All Time!Throwback Thursday, 1994: every rags-to-riches rap song promises the same arc. This is the one that stuck, and the reason is nouns.
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Greatest of All Time!Throwback Thursday, 1985: released three times in about a year before it worked. The song never changed — the delivery did, at roughly 3,000 hand-drawn frames.
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Greatest of All Time!Throwback Thursday, 1980: a fired frontman, a classically trained guitar teacher, and a riff no metal band of that era would have thought to write.
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Greatest of All Time!Throwback Thursday, 1976: the most famous guitar solo in American rock sounds improvised, and Don Henley made sure it was played note-for-note off a bedroom demo.
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Greatest of All Time!Throwback Thursday, 1974: a song about keeping people fed, credited to a Trench Town soup-kitchen operator so the royalties would literally keep people fed.
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Greatest of All Time!Throwback Thursday, 1968: Motown rejected this record twice and buried it on an album. Radio DJs overruled the label and made it the biggest single Motown had ever had.
Read review →Greatest of All Time!Throwback Thursday, 1963: June Carter wrote it, her sister recorded it first, and a dream about mariachi horns turned it into a Johnny Cash record.
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Greatest of All Time!Throwback Thursday, 1959: the record that took the chords away and proved that limits and freedom are the same object seen from different sides.
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IngaRose isn't a person, and her breakout single doesn't pretend otherwise — a warm, well-built self-love anthem that scores better than it should for being honest about what it is.
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Fenix Flexin's AI-built crossover hit is a decent synth-pop single wrapped around a much better story about getting caught lying about it.
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KATSEYE's WILD title track has a genuinely great phonk beat buried under maximalist pop vocals that keep getting in its own way.
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Troye Sivan trades performance for flatness on his Interscope debut single, and the risk of sounding bored turns out to be the whole point.
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FLO's lead single from Therapy At The Club turns the impulse to overshare into the year's tightest R&B hook, and the group's harmonies do the rest.
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