Still (Live)
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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Reviews
Headphones
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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What An Awesome God
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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His Eye Is on the Sparrow (Whitney Houston)
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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His Eye Is on the Sparrow (Lauryn Hill & Tanya Blount)
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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His Eye Is on the Sparrow
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!Como La Flor
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!Super Freak
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!Blitzkrieg Bop
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!Like a Rolling Stone
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!(I'm Your) Hoochie Coochie Man
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!Blue Moon of Kentucky
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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Serpent Psalm
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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The Jesus I Know Now
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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Church
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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God I'm Just Grateful
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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It Is Well
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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It Is Well with My Soul
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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It Is Well with My Soul
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!Good Vibrations
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!Heartbreak Hotel
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!(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66
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!Virtual Insanity
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!Walk This Way
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!You Should Be Dancing
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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Faithfully
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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Believe for It
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.
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Your Way's Better
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.
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Hard Fought Hallelujah
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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How Great Thou Art
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 →How Great Thou Art
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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How Great Thou Art
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!Fight the Power
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!Believe
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!Rockit
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!Autobahn
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!Nights in White Satin
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!Show Me the Way
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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Hell Out of Me
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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Texas Hold 'Em
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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Denial Is a River
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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Noid
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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Birds of a Feather
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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360
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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Be Her
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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Dracula
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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Man I Need
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 →So Easy (To Fall In Love)
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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I Can't Love You Anymore
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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Hate That I Made You Love Me
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.
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I Knew It, I Knew You
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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Wade in the Water
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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Way Maker
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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Stomp
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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Amazing Grace
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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Amazing Grace
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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Mutt
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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Deeper Well
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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Never Enough
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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Chains & Whips
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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Manchild
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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This & That
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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Boston
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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Been by Now
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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My Baby's Place
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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Give Me Dirt
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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Highs and Lows
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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Lift Me Up
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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Crawl
Maria Brink delivers the best pure vocal performance in the batch on In This Moment's operatic, confrontational third single from Witch.
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Bones for the Crows
Nickelback's WrestleMania 42 theme is a heavier, grungier revision of a 2023 soundtrack cut, and the revision actually lands.
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Into the Ground
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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Swim
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!Get Lucky
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!Black Hole Sun
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!Juicy
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!Take On Me
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!Crazy Train
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!Hotel California
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!No Woman, No Cry
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!I Heard It Through the Grapevine
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.
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Greatest of All Time!Ring of Fire
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!So What
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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Celebrate Me
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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Rubberz
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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Hootie Frutti
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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She's the Best
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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Leak It
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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