I heard this song on the radio and Shazam'd it a while back, before the "Water" challenge on TikTok really took off and made this song go viral. And I was a little confused at first because South African singer Tyla and American rapper Tyla Yaweh have been breaking through on Billboard around the same time, it reminds me of when two country singers named Tenille had hits around the same time a few years ago. Here's the 2023 singles Spotify playlist that I add songs to every month. 

Speaking of artists with shared first names, I was amused back in May when two country singers named Parker McCollum and Parker Millsap released albums on the same day. Both albums were good, but McCollum's more mainstream sound was a little more my speed, and he's now had 3 singles in a row that I've really liked. I've always obsessed with the glitchy stuttering acoustic guitar loop on Madonna's "Don't Tell Me" so I love hearing a similar kind of sound on "Burn It Down." 

I'm as tired of R&B radio being full of samples of songs that were hits on the same stations 10-20 years ago, but "On My Mama" is a good example of how to do it so it doesn't sound too obvious: a vocal sample from Chalie Boy's 2009 regional hit "I Look Good," put over an original beat with a cool horn arrangement. I'm still a little disappointed that "Smoke" wasn't the breakthrough single for Victoria Monet, but the follow-up that caught on instead is pretty damn good too. 

It's been interesting to watch Tate McRae develop from the Billie Eilish-lite zoomer balladeer of "You Broke Me First" to doing gradually more uptempo singles like last year's "She's All I Wanna Be," "Uh Oh," and "10:35." And then "Greedy" came out about a month ago and just exploded, it's already her highest charting song to date. I love the video because it's about damn time that a Canadian pop star drove a Zamboni in a music video and did choreography in hockey gear. 

Zach Bryan and Kacey Musgraves have had somewhat similar paths, as country artists who managed to reach the level of platinum albums and Grammy recognition without really fitting comfortably into the mainstream country radio. Musgraves had one country radio top 10 a decade ago with her breakthrough single "Merry Go 'Round," and last year Bryan got to #20 with his breakthrough "Something In The Orange." So I found it pretty exciting, as a fan of both artists, to see them kind of pool their fanbases together to get a good country song to #1 on the Hot 100 after a summer of crappy country songs by Morgan Wallen, Jason Aldean, and Oliver Anthony topping the chart. 

A few weeks ago I was at work looking at my phone, and read a Billboard piece about Teddy Robb's latest single. And it was a very absorbing story about Robb meeting a woman, sparks flying, and then him finding out she was about to move across the country (spoiler, they wound up together), and Robb told this all to Old Dominion guitarist Brad Tursi, who wrote a song about it. Since I was at work,  I was like, "I'll listen to this song later when I get home, and it better not suck because I'm invested in the story now." Fortunately, it is really good, with an interesting laid back swing to the instrumentation and Robb's vocal cadence. He only had one minor hit on the national charts back in 2019 so I'm really rooting for this song to hit big. 

When "Bongos" came out last month, it felt like there was pretty instant consensus that it was just not as good as Cardi and Meg's previous huge collaboration "WAP." But the song has really grown on me as it's crept into rap radio rotation. Pitbull doesn't make hits very often anymore, so it sort of fulfills my general desire for zany fast pop rap full of latin percussion and sexual innuando. And obviously it can't possibly match the shock value of "WAP," but "pussy tight like a nun" is a hilariously unhinged thing to say. 

I don't check for a lot of K-Pop because it feels like so many of those groups are stuck in some kind of 2000s TRL holding pattern, so I feel like NewJeans has gotten a lot of buzz with American pop fans for actually sounding like they've been paying attention to western pop in the last decade. And as a Baltimore club fan, I love hearing the "Think" breakbeat sort of seep into unexpected corners of popular music like a K-Pop song like "Super Shy." 

I love that Lainey Wilson just notched another #1 on country radio, feels like she's got a lot of potential to be one of the few women of her generation with a thriving career in the Nashville establishment. And I like how "Watermelon Moonshine" has kind of a slower tempo like her last hit "Heart Like A Truck" but they feel like very different songs, musically and emotionally and vocally. 

Those old Semisonic albums hold up, so I always love to see Dan Wilson turning up in the songwriting credits of a hit single, and "White Horse" feels like a really strong distillation of Chris Stapleton's sound. That big build up to the first verse is awesome, as is the one measure in 5/4 in the chorus where the beat turns around. 

I thought Endless Summer Vacation was a pretty good album and "Jaded" and "River" were excellent singles, even if they couldn't keep up the momentum of "Flowers." So I was really annoyed when she released a new single just as "Jaded" was starting to do well on the radio, and it's this dull, soppy ballad that doesn't suit her voice at all.