The 20 Best Pop Radio Hits of 2021
I started doing my year-end singles wrap-up with these genre lists in 2012, so this is my 10th year with this format, and I really enjoy it. I often like to do the pop list first, or last, because Top 40 is kind of a bastard format that swallows up the biggest or most accessible or uncharacteristic stuff from each genre, so there's things that are here instead of the rap, R&B, country or rock lists because they crossed over and made pop radio their home. Here's the Spotify playlist:
1. Olivia Rodrigo - "Deja Vu"
#2 Pop Airplay, #3 Hot 100
Olivia Rodrigo ruled over 2021 with three massive singles, but I surprised myself a little by ranking this one the highest. It was the only one of that trio that missed #1 (and inspired my Billboard piece about middle sibling singles), but "Deja Vu" had real staying power, with 15 weeks in the top 10 holding up pretty well compared to 16 weeks for "Drivers License." And it's just a marvelous record, with a big woozy distorted synth line and a hilariously petty lyric that tries to gatekeep Billy Joel of all things.
2. Adele - "Easy On Me"
#3 Pop Airplay, #1 Hot 100
In her first interview about 30, Adele said "There isn't a bombastic 'Hello,'" and that "I don't want another song like that. That song catapulted me in fame to another level that I don't want to happen again." And "Easy On Me," though produced and co-written by her "Hello" collaborator Greg Kurstin, does feel refreshingly scaled down and intimate compared to Adele's other #1s. It’s still been at #1 in America for 5 weeks and counting, but if it doesn’t match "Hello"'s 10 weeks, I'm sure she's fine with that.
3. BTS - "Butter"
#7 Pop Airplay, #1 Hot 100
Boy bands have always inspired feverishly loyal fanbases that push them to the top of the charts, but there's often a widespread resentment about how effortlessly those groups seem to dominate commercially without holding much appeal to adults and casual pop fans. This dynamic has been ramped up to an even greater extreme with the U.S. success of Korean pop band BTS, who have topped the Hot 100 six times in the last two years, more than any other artist, with relatively minor radio success. 2020’s “Dynamite” did a little better, reaching #5 on Pop Airplay, but that’s still relatively low, and I wish people outside the Army faithful hadn’t kind of dug in their heels about ignoring BTS by the time “Butter” came out, because I think it’s a far better attempt at American-style bubblegum than their other English language singles.
4. Olivia Rodrigo - "Good 4 U"
#1 Pop Airplay, #1 Hot 100
“Good 4 U” works great as a token rock song by an ascendant pop star, but it also functions pretty impressively as rock music – I love the way the drummer offers three different fills, each of them perfect in their own way, to lead into each chorus. The decision to give Paramore writing credits on "Good 4 U" for some passing similarity to "Misery Business" was stupid, though, the Marvin Gaye "Blurred Lines" debacle has wrought a lot of muddled confusion between aesthetics and composition.
5. Ariana Grande - "34+35"
#1 Pop Airplay, #2 Hot 100
After reflecting on her celebrity relationships on “Thank U, Next” brought Ariana Grande to her superstar pinnacle, she’s led a somewhat quieter life, shacking up with a non-celebrity during the pandemic, making the horniest album of her career, and then getting married this year. But she’s still in her hitmaking prime and at one point all three Positions singles were in the top 10 on pop radio, and around the same time I could hear her songs in my car and two different stores in the space of a few minutes.
6. Doja Cat f/ SZA - "Kiss Me More"
#1 Pop Airplay, #3 Hot 100
Doja Cat has an interesting rise, it feels like every year since 2018 she’s just leapfrogged up to a new level stardom, and Planet Her is an absolute blockbuster, two of its singles just rose into the top 5 on pop radio. She’s pretty undeniably talented, her singing and rapping and the choreography and art direction of her performances and videos are all head and shoulders above a lot of her peers…and yet I can’t help but feel like Amala was her best album and the way she’s screeching her rap verses like Carol Kane has made a lot of her recent songs like “Need To Know” borderline unlistenable. The rap part “Kiss Me More” is by far my least favorite part of the song, but the rest of it is pretty good.
7. Lil Nas X f/ Jack Harlow - "Industry
Baby"
#1 Pop Airplay, #1 Hot 100
Lil Nas X has had an improbable career at every turn, but I think his most impressive trick was making history in 2019 in a way that was often derided as a potential flash-in-the-pan, withdrawing from the spotlight for nearly all of 2020, and then reemerging bigger than ever in 2021. Songs about how you made it after everyone doubted you are so standard in pop music as a whole and especially hip hop that they tend to feel rote, but “Industry Baby” feels like a real rousing hard won anthem for someone who still kind of felt like an underdog with something to prove even after he went #1 and then kept returning to #1. “Industry Baby” is also notable for being the first #1 on the Hot 100 that Kanye West has had a hand in since Katy Perry’s “E.T.” over a decade ago.
8. Dua Lipa f/ DaBaby - "Levitating
(Remix)"
#1 Pop Airplay, #2 Hot 100
DaBaby was hardly the first rap star to get caught between his own macho image and the kind of bubblegum confections that helped him dominate the charts, but it all came crashing down in a uniquely dramatic fashion when he torched his own career with homophobic comments at a moment when his biggest song was a guest verse on a campy retro disco song by a singer with a large queer following. It’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle when someone blows up their career when a hit of this magnitude is still in heavy rotation, but I was impressed that Top 40 stations have mostly played the solo Dua Lipa version of “Levitating” in the last few months, although I have to admit embarrassingly that I do miss the sticky little hooks “dualipawithdababy.”
9. Olivia Rodrigo - "Drivers License"
#1 Pop Airplay, #1 Hot 100
“Drivers License” was released one week into 2021 and was so immediately the year’s first big pop moment that I’m surprised that I’m ranking it as low as I am now, although of course the only reason for that is that Olivia Rodrigo managed to top herself not once but twice. But her first hit still holds up pretty well, a hit so bulletproof that “Saturday Night Live” could only manage to write a sketch about it if the punchline was that people love it.
10. Halsey - "I Am Not A Woman, I'm A God"
#22 Pop Airplay, #64 Hot 100
The lead single for Halsey’s third album was the chart-topping 9x platinum “Without Me,” and the lead single for Halsey’s fourth album, well, you can see the chart positions right up there. I Don’t Want Love, I Want Power is an incredible album, and I’m grateful to Halsey that she was willing to detail her momentum as an ascendant pop star to work with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and get such a Nine Inch Nails-style track on pop radio even for a brief moment.
11. Camila Cabello - "Don't Go Yet"
#17 Pop Airplay, #42 Hot 100
Camila Cabello launched her first two albums with #1 singles, and then the lead single from her forthcoming third album didn't even crack the top 40. “Don’t Go Yet” doesn’t feel like a risk – in fact it’s a bit more of a conventional Latin pop song (produced by Ricky Reed, best known for Jason Derulo and Twenty One Pilots hits) than her Pharrell-produced chart-topper “Havana.” And more crucially, I think Camila Cabello’s voice and personality shine on this track far more than anything else she’s done to date. But it always kinda felt like her chart reign was built on a shaky foundation, and now that her publicity-baiting Shawn Mendes power couple era is over, she might really be done.
12. Regard, Troye Sivan, and Tate McRae -
"You"
#11 Pop Airplay, #58 Hot 100
Troye Sivan’s next-big-thing status has wilted a bit since he released his biggest hit in 2015, Regard is a producer from Kosovo who stumbled into global pop success when his pitched-down remix of an old Jay Sean song went viral on TikTok, and Tate McRae is the blander Billie Eilish soundalike that everyone expected when Eilish blew up. Those three walking into a bar sounds like a convoluted setup for a joke, but they wound up with one of the best sleeper hits of 2021.
13. Ava Max - "My Head & My Heart"
#13 Pop Airplay, #45 Hot 100
I was prepared to completely dismiss Ava Max as a worthless, weirdly belated Lady Gaga clone after “Sweet But Psycho” and “Kings & Queens.” But her third Hot 100 hit is somehow both blander and better, a big monolithic dance pop song as irresistible as anything on the last Dua Lipa album.
14. Billie Eilish - "Happier Than Ever"
#17 Pop Airplay, #11 Hot 100
When I do these year-end lists by genre, I tend to categorize songs by whichever radio format it charts the highest on it, and if it tops multiple charts I go with whichever format usually plays the artist more. So I usually cover Billie Eilish in the rock/alternative list, which is where most of her earlier singles (except “When The Party’s Over”) have done best. But her first single driven by loud electric guitars, "Happier Than Ever," is oddly one of her few songs that has done better on pop radio than rock radio. In fact, the two-part album track was edited down to just the more rocking later half of the song for radio play. I’m still disappointed that “Lost Cause” didn’t get any radio airplay, though, that one really felt like a hit to me.
15. Kali Uchis - "Telapatia"
#11 Pop Airplay, #25 Hot 100
In an era full of flukey TikTok hits, “Telepatia” is one of the more surprising and unique hits in recent memory. Colombian-American singer Kali Uchis has been moderately successful on the R&B charts for the last few years and scraped the lower reaches of the Hot 100 once on Daniel Caesar’s “Get You.” But when she released a Spanish language album as a low profile passion project, one of the songs unexpectedly went viral and jumped to pop radio. Granted about 1/3rd of the lyrics of “Telepatia” are in English and it does have kind of a gentle pop vibe to it, but still, nobody could’ve seen that coming.
16. Bad Bunny f/ Jhay Cortez - "Dakiti"
#19 Pop Airplay, #5 Hot 100
Bad Bunny has already set all sorts of records for a Spanish-speaking performer in American pop and it’s exciting to see how much further he can go. “Dakiti” is notable for being his biggest Hot 100 hit besides his Cardi B and Drake collaborations, but it really surprised me how far it got on Top 40 radio, between this and “Telapatia” and the BTS songs with Korean lyrics, we’re really seeing how much non-English lyrics can break through on pop radio.
#2 Pop Airplay, #3 Hot 100
Olivia Rodrigo ruled over 2021 with three massive singles, but I surprised myself a little by ranking this one the highest. It was the only one of that trio that missed #1 (and inspired my Billboard piece about middle sibling singles), but "Deja Vu" had real staying power, with 15 weeks in the top 10 holding up pretty well compared to 16 weeks for "Drivers License." And it's just a marvelous record, with a big woozy distorted synth line and a hilariously petty lyric that tries to gatekeep Billy Joel of all things.
#3 Pop Airplay, #1 Hot 100
In her first interview about 30, Adele said "There isn't a bombastic 'Hello,'" and that "I don't want another song like that. That song catapulted me in fame to another level that I don't want to happen again." And "Easy On Me," though produced and co-written by her "Hello" collaborator Greg Kurstin, does feel refreshingly scaled down and intimate compared to Adele's other #1s. It’s still been at #1 in America for 5 weeks and counting, but if it doesn’t match "Hello"'s 10 weeks, I'm sure she's fine with that.
#7 Pop Airplay, #1 Hot 100
Boy bands have always inspired feverishly loyal fanbases that push them to the top of the charts, but there's often a widespread resentment about how effortlessly those groups seem to dominate commercially without holding much appeal to adults and casual pop fans. This dynamic has been ramped up to an even greater extreme with the U.S. success of Korean pop band BTS, who have topped the Hot 100 six times in the last two years, more than any other artist, with relatively minor radio success. 2020’s “Dynamite” did a little better, reaching #5 on Pop Airplay, but that’s still relatively low, and I wish people outside the Army faithful hadn’t kind of dug in their heels about ignoring BTS by the time “Butter” came out, because I think it’s a far better attempt at American-style bubblegum than their other English language singles.
#1 Pop Airplay, #1 Hot 100
“Good 4 U” works great as a token rock song by an ascendant pop star, but it also functions pretty impressively as rock music – I love the way the drummer offers three different fills, each of them perfect in their own way, to lead into each chorus. The decision to give Paramore writing credits on "Good 4 U" for some passing similarity to "Misery Business" was stupid, though, the Marvin Gaye "Blurred Lines" debacle has wrought a lot of muddled confusion between aesthetics and composition.
#1 Pop Airplay, #2 Hot 100
After reflecting on her celebrity relationships on “Thank U, Next” brought Ariana Grande to her superstar pinnacle, she’s led a somewhat quieter life, shacking up with a non-celebrity during the pandemic, making the horniest album of her career, and then getting married this year. But she’s still in her hitmaking prime and at one point all three Positions singles were in the top 10 on pop radio, and around the same time I could hear her songs in my car and two different stores in the space of a few minutes.
#1 Pop Airplay, #3 Hot 100
Doja Cat has an interesting rise, it feels like every year since 2018 she’s just leapfrogged up to a new level stardom, and Planet Her is an absolute blockbuster, two of its singles just rose into the top 5 on pop radio. She’s pretty undeniably talented, her singing and rapping and the choreography and art direction of her performances and videos are all head and shoulders above a lot of her peers…and yet I can’t help but feel like Amala was her best album and the way she’s screeching her rap verses like Carol Kane has made a lot of her recent songs like “Need To Know” borderline unlistenable. The rap part “Kiss Me More” is by far my least favorite part of the song, but the rest of it is pretty good.
#1 Pop Airplay, #1 Hot 100
Lil Nas X has had an improbable career at every turn, but I think his most impressive trick was making history in 2019 in a way that was often derided as a potential flash-in-the-pan, withdrawing from the spotlight for nearly all of 2020, and then reemerging bigger than ever in 2021. Songs about how you made it after everyone doubted you are so standard in pop music as a whole and especially hip hop that they tend to feel rote, but “Industry Baby” feels like a real rousing hard won anthem for someone who still kind of felt like an underdog with something to prove even after he went #1 and then kept returning to #1. “Industry Baby” is also notable for being the first #1 on the Hot 100 that Kanye West has had a hand in since Katy Perry’s “E.T.” over a decade ago.
#1 Pop Airplay, #2 Hot 100
DaBaby was hardly the first rap star to get caught between his own macho image and the kind of bubblegum confections that helped him dominate the charts, but it all came crashing down in a uniquely dramatic fashion when he torched his own career with homophobic comments at a moment when his biggest song was a guest verse on a campy retro disco song by a singer with a large queer following. It’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle when someone blows up their career when a hit of this magnitude is still in heavy rotation, but I was impressed that Top 40 stations have mostly played the solo Dua Lipa version of “Levitating” in the last few months, although I have to admit embarrassingly that I do miss the sticky little hooks “dualipawithdababy.”
#1 Pop Airplay, #1 Hot 100
“Drivers License” was released one week into 2021 and was so immediately the year’s first big pop moment that I’m surprised that I’m ranking it as low as I am now, although of course the only reason for that is that Olivia Rodrigo managed to top herself not once but twice. But her first hit still holds up pretty well, a hit so bulletproof that “Saturday Night Live” could only manage to write a sketch about it if the punchline was that people love it.
#22 Pop Airplay, #64 Hot 100
The lead single for Halsey’s third album was the chart-topping 9x platinum “Without Me,” and the lead single for Halsey’s fourth album, well, you can see the chart positions right up there. I Don’t Want Love, I Want Power is an incredible album, and I’m grateful to Halsey that she was willing to detail her momentum as an ascendant pop star to work with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and get such a Nine Inch Nails-style track on pop radio even for a brief moment.
#17 Pop Airplay, #42 Hot 100
Camila Cabello launched her first two albums with #1 singles, and then the lead single from her forthcoming third album didn't even crack the top 40. “Don’t Go Yet” doesn’t feel like a risk – in fact it’s a bit more of a conventional Latin pop song (produced by Ricky Reed, best known for Jason Derulo and Twenty One Pilots hits) than her Pharrell-produced chart-topper “Havana.” And more crucially, I think Camila Cabello’s voice and personality shine on this track far more than anything else she’s done to date. But it always kinda felt like her chart reign was built on a shaky foundation, and now that her publicity-baiting Shawn Mendes power couple era is over, she might really be done.
#11 Pop Airplay, #58 Hot 100
Troye Sivan’s next-big-thing status has wilted a bit since he released his biggest hit in 2015, Regard is a producer from Kosovo who stumbled into global pop success when his pitched-down remix of an old Jay Sean song went viral on TikTok, and Tate McRae is the blander Billie Eilish soundalike that everyone expected when Eilish blew up. Those three walking into a bar sounds like a convoluted setup for a joke, but they wound up with one of the best sleeper hits of 2021.
#13 Pop Airplay, #45 Hot 100
I was prepared to completely dismiss Ava Max as a worthless, weirdly belated Lady Gaga clone after “Sweet But Psycho” and “Kings & Queens.” But her third Hot 100 hit is somehow both blander and better, a big monolithic dance pop song as irresistible as anything on the last Dua Lipa album.
#17 Pop Airplay, #11 Hot 100
When I do these year-end lists by genre, I tend to categorize songs by whichever radio format it charts the highest on it, and if it tops multiple charts I go with whichever format usually plays the artist more. So I usually cover Billie Eilish in the rock/alternative list, which is where most of her earlier singles (except “When The Party’s Over”) have done best. But her first single driven by loud electric guitars, "Happier Than Ever," is oddly one of her few songs that has done better on pop radio than rock radio. In fact, the two-part album track was edited down to just the more rocking later half of the song for radio play. I’m still disappointed that “Lost Cause” didn’t get any radio airplay, though, that one really felt like a hit to me.
#11 Pop Airplay, #25 Hot 100
In an era full of flukey TikTok hits, “Telepatia” is one of the more surprising and unique hits in recent memory. Colombian-American singer Kali Uchis has been moderately successful on the R&B charts for the last few years and scraped the lower reaches of the Hot 100 once on Daniel Caesar’s “Get You.” But when she released a Spanish language album as a low profile passion project, one of the songs unexpectedly went viral and jumped to pop radio. Granted about 1/3rd of the lyrics of “Telepatia” are in English and it does have kind of a gentle pop vibe to it, but still, nobody could’ve seen that coming.
#19 Pop Airplay, #5 Hot 100
Bad Bunny has already set all sorts of records for a Spanish-speaking performer in American pop and it’s exciting to see how much further he can go. “Dakiti” is notable for being his biggest Hot 100 hit besides his Cardi B and Drake collaborations, but it really surprised me how far it got on Top 40 radio, between this and “Telapatia” and the BTS songs with Korean lyrics, we’re really seeing how much non-English lyrics can break through on pop radio.
17. Kacey Musgraves - "Justified"
#37 Pop Airplay
It's strange to look back at the year Kacey Musgraves had in 2021 and the way she got the short end of the stick because people treated her like she's not country anymore. She was never a big presence on country radio -- her debut single was her only top 10 nearly a decade ago -- but even as she became a bigger star and won big at the Grammys a couple years ago, she never actually crossed over to pop radio before "Justified" made its little splash at #37. And, as I wrote last week, she got kinda screwed by the Grammys when they decided Star-Crossed was a pop album but she only wound up with a couple country category nominations for one of the more country-leaning songs.
#37 Pop Airplay
It's strange to look back at the year Kacey Musgraves had in 2021 and the way she got the short end of the stick because people treated her like she's not country anymore. She was never a big presence on country radio -- her debut single was her only top 10 nearly a decade ago -- but even as she became a bigger star and won big at the Grammys a couple years ago, she never actually crossed over to pop radio before "Justified" made its little splash at #37. And, as I wrote last week, she got kinda screwed by the Grammys when they decided Star-Crossed was a pop album but she only wound up with a couple country category nominations for one of the more country-leaning songs.
#12 Pop Airplay, #6 Hot 100
In terms of sheer hitmaking power, 2021 was probably the best second best year of Justin Bieber’s career after 2015, he’s no longer the ascendant teen idol but he’s still ruling pop radio with an iron fist. But I couldn’t stand his vocals on his latest bid for R&B credibility, “Peaches,” and I thought “Anyone,” which kind of got lost in the shuffle of the many singles from Justice, was a much better example of Bieber synth pop than his blockbuster The Kid Laroi collaboration “Stay.”
#1 Pop Airplay, #1 Hot 100
Omer Fedi, 24kGoldn’s frequent collaborator who co-produced and played guitar on “Mood,” also worked on “Montero,” and it’s cool to see the variety of guitar sounds he’s bringing into pop rap, it’s a cool niche to have.
#17 Pop Airplay, #1 Hot 100
It’s been interesting to see how former pop radio queen Taylor Swift continue to rack up three more Hot 100 #1s in the past two years with her folky quarantine albums and re-recorded early albums, but hasn’t really gotten a pop radio top 10 in a while. I think the Evermore single “Willow” is a lot closer to actually sounding like a single than Folklore’s #1, “Cardigan,” but it was still a pretty quiet track that mostly got stuck on adult contemporary radio.
1. Ed Sheeran - "Bad Habits"
2. The Kid Laroi - "Without You"
3. The Kid Laroi f/ Justin Bieber - "Stay"
4. Masked Wolf - "Astronaut In The Ocean"
5. Tai Verdes - "A-O-K"
6. Saweetie f/ Doja Cat - "Best Friend"
7. Doja Cat – “Need To Know”
8. The Weeknd - "Save Your Tears"
9. Tate McRae - "You Broke Me First"
10. Duncan Laurence - "Arcade"
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