It's interesting that even now, with things moving so fast and songs going viral overnight, there are still songs that take years to break through. "Don't Play With It" was released in May 2021, but I didn't start to see the video circulate on Twitter until late 2022, and in January it started creeping up radio charts and Lola Brooke signed to a major label. She definitely feels like a potential major star, and it's kind of refreshing to hear a New York rapper who feels of-the-moment but isn't on a drill beat (she has about a dozen singles on streaming services and only a couple of the older ones have drill production). It's definitely Lola Brooke's song in the sense of her having the hook and the first verse, but Billy B's verse is great too and she deserves some shine off the song, it's a shame Lola Brooke has been going around performing it solo. Here's the 2023 singles Spotify playlist I'll update throughout the year. 

Amidst all the When We Were Young Fest nostalgia for 2000s emo over the past year, Fall Out Boy were conspicuously silent, so I was pretty curious to see what they'd sound like when they surfaced again, especially since their 2010s comeback really seemed to run aground on their last album. I can't even picture modern day Fall Out Boy reverse engineering the sound of 2003-2005 FOB, but I thought maybe they'd do something stripped-down like 2013's PAX AM Days EP. Instead, "Love From The Other Side" feels like a return to the ornate stadium rock of 2007-2009 Fall Out Boy, which is an era I really loved, so I'm happy to get this side of the band back. 

I'm continually annoyed by the sheer historic scale of Morgan Wallen's success, and am bracing myself because he's about to release another massive double album. So it kind of irritated me that I heard an excellent breakthrough single by a new country singer, and then started to find out that Megan Moroney may or may not be dating Wallen and may or may not have written "Tennessee Orange" about him. Nonetheless, it's a really charming, well written song on the subject of falling in love with a fan of your hometown team's rivals. 

Eric Church's triple album Heart & Soul is almost two years old and still has a single on the radio, with "Doing Life With Me" being a highlight from the middle chapter & that was initially only available to members of Church's fan club. I'm actually kind of bitter because I signed up for a year's subscription to the Church Choir website specifically because I wanted to hear the full album. But the site is really confusingly designed and it took my practically the whole year to actually find where you could stream & on the site. But it's on Spotify now, finally, so that doesn't matter. 

I've always had mixed feelings about Miley Cyrus and think her best singles were early stuff like "7 Things" and "See You Again," and have found most of her music from Bangerz forward to be untolerably obnoxious. And it kind of surprised me that "Flowers" turned out to be one of her biggest songs ever, but I like it, it feels a little more restrained than a lot of the songs that turned me off. Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson have done so much great work with Harry Styles that I'm happy to see them starting to branch out and make #1s for other artists. 

I could not stand Armani White's breakthrough single "Billie Eilish," which just felt like such a lazy instahit, piggybacking on both the name of an established star and a sample of an old Neptunes beat. So I didn't expect to love the follow-up single, but it's pretty catchy. And as fun as it is to hear Denzel Curry kick a great guest verse on a clubby, radio-friendly single, White holds his own pretty well too. 

I feel bad for aspiring recording artists who win TV singing competitions now. There were a few short years when "American Idol" was making unknowns into platinum stars. But two decades later, we've just got "Idol" and "The Voice" still handing out useless titles and hopeless major label contracts every year with very little to show for it. So I'll consider it a small victory that Brynn Cartelli is still making music at a major label level 5 years after becoming the youngest winner of "The Voice," and that one of her videos gets enough plays on MTV Live that I got it stuck in my head and realized it has a great chorus. 

The COLORS YouTube channel has been popular for the last few years for a series of in-studio live performances by up-and-coming artists, mostly American rappers and R&B singers, performing against a stylish monochromatic background (looking it up just now, the COLORS studio is in Germany, which I never would've guessed). A lot of these performances have gone viral or circulated heavily on Twitter, but Nigerian singer Oxlade's Afrobeats hit "Ku Lo Sa" seems like the first time the COLORS version of a song has far surpassed the studio version, getting about 30 times more streams on Spotify. There's fairly little difference between the versions, but in either case it's a pretty catchy song. 

SOS is a bona fide blockbuster, with 8 weeks at #1 and counting on the Billboard 200, and with albums that big you tend to get multiple hit singles competing on the charts. "Shirt" came out a few weeks before the album and got a head start, and is currently dominating R&B radio. But "Nobody Gets Me" got promoted to pop radio, and "Kill Bill" became the streaming hit that has gotten highest on the Hot 100, has surged ahead of "Nobody" on Top 40 radio, and is catching up to "Shirt" on R&B radio. Personally, I don't like "Kill Bill" at all, it's probably my least favorite song on the album, but "Shirt" is a banger, I'm impressed that Rodney Jerkins did something that feels this contemporary. 

One of my least favorite things about the streaming era is that the somewhat exciting idea that it's easier for fan favorites to become radio hits runs up against the boring statistical reality that track 1 on an album usually gets the highest streaming numbers on an album. "Rich Flex" is track 1 on Her Loss, just as "Lavender Haze" was track 1 on the Taylor Swift album and "Music From A Sushi Restaurant" was track 1 on the Harry Styles album, and even though I like the latter, I don't think any of those songs really needed to be a single ("Kill Bill" was also track 2 on SOS and the first full song after a brief intro). "Rich Flex" just feels disjointed and arbitrary to me like "Sicko Mode" and most other Drake songs with beat switches, although I may dislike the follow-up single "Spin Bout U" even more.