Monthly Report: February 2026 Singles
1. Doechii f/ SZA - "Girl, Get Up"
When new rap songs sample fondly remembered rap hits from 20 or 30 years ago, they'll often add more new drums that align current production trends (trap, drill, etc.) to make an old track sound a little more modern. And I understand that impulse, but I really hate hearing that done to old Neptunes or Timbaland tracks where the drums were the coolest part of the song to begin with. So it was a nice change of pace to hear some of the most amazing Neptunes drums ever, from Birdman's "What Happened To That Boy," used so well on "Girl, Get Up" with different flows and a great new bassline. Here's the 2026 singles Spotify playlist that I'll update every month throughout the year.
2. Bad Bunny - "DtMF"
The sort of title track from Debi Tirar Mas Fotos was already Bad Bunny's biggest Hot 100 hit (Cardi B feature aside) when it peaked at #2 a year ago after the album was released. But with his streaming numbers skyrocketing around the Grammy win and the Super bowl halftime show, "DtMF" has re-entered the top 10 and will probably become his first solo #1 next week, and it's a pretty beautiful, poignant song to become the focal point of this crazy career pinnacle he's at right now. After making my deep album cuts playlist last week, I feel more confident that this is probably his best album and/or best song. "EoO" was the song from the album that actually got some pop radio airplay last year, but I hope English-language radio gives it a chance now.
3. Turnstile - "Look Out For Me"
Another great Grammy moment was Turnstile winning one for the first time and ending their acceptance speech with "to Baltimore, thank you, we love you." As I pointed out in my Baltimore Banner year-end piece, the second half of "Look Out For Me" is basically Baltimore club, with the "Dick Control" kick drum pattern popularized by DJ Technics and a "Think (About It)" breakbeat, which is pretty awesome, if this album had come out a few months earlier I definitely would've talked about it in my book. Of course, "Look Out For Me" is over 6 minutes long, so I assume radio stations play a shorter single edit that might not include much of that part of the song (there are only two rock stations in Maryland that play new music, but they don't play much new music, even when it's one of the biggest bands to ever come out of Maryland, so I only heard "Never Enough" on the radio a few times and have yet to hear "Look Out For Me" once).
4. Harry Styles - "Aperture"
I'm not going to say the new Harry Styles single is directly influenced by Baltimore club, but I mean, it's got the "Dick Control" kick drum and the BPM is around 130, it really shows how much that sound has entered the bloodstream of popular music. I've always liked how Harry's first three solo albums followed the kind of dad rock-influenced template of One Direction instead of trying to do some sleek sexy modern thing like Zayn's records, but now that he's established his solo identity on a real huge level, I think it's cool that he's experimenting with a more danceable sound, while still working with longtime collaborator Kid Harpoon.
5. Kameron Marlowe - "Seventeen"
This song recently dropped off the country radio after hanging around in the lower reaches for a few months and I'm really bummed that it didn't become a hit, it's fantastic. At one point in the first verse, Marlowe sings a bar of "Born in the U.S.A." According to a Billboard piece, they had to clear the interpolation with Bruce Springsteen, and Bruce complimented the song, but they took more inspiration from John Mellencamp's The Lonesome Jubilee, a personal favorite of mine, for the accordion and fiddle on the chorus.
6. Stephen Wilson Jr. - "Gary"
Stephen Wilson Jr. is a guy from Indiana whose career is just now starting to take off in his mid-40s, and he currently simultaneously has his first song on alternative radio and his first song on country radio. Alt-rock radio is playing faithful but unremarkable cover of "Tonight, Tonight" by Smashing Pumpkins, but country radio is playing "Gary," which is a real stunner with a clever lyric and a boiling crescendo. I'm rooting for this guy to thrive in that gray area between country and alt-rock where guys like Zach Bryan and Sturgill Simpson have become huge.
7. NMIXX - "Blue Valentine"
The title track to the K-pop girl group NMIXX's debut album recently became their first #1 song in Korea, and in America it's spent a couple weeks in the lower reaches of the Pop Airplay charts. And it has really grabbed me way more than any other recent K-pop stuff, they bend the tempo in a really disorienting way as the song goes from a sort of R&B verse to a fast pop/rock chorus.
8. Jason Aldean - "How Far Does A Goodbye Go"
Jason Aldean has never been a great singer or written much of his own material, so I don't mind terribly that most people have completely written him off after "Try That In A Small Town." Unfortunately, I think Aldean has a really talented songwriter, John Morgan, working on a lot of his stuff these days, so I really enjoy his latest single, which has a cheesy but effective hair metal power ballad lead guitar bit that I love.
9. The Marias - "Sienna"
I really liked the non-album single "Back To Me" that The Marias released last year after "No One Noticed" blew up, but I'm not surprised that the song from their album that sounds like most like "No One Noticed," "Sienna," has become a radio hit instead.
10. Sienna Spiro - "Die On This Hill"
This is a pretty generic British piano ballad, but I like it. And I'm amused that a singer named Sienna is on the Hot 100 for the first time while a song called "Sienna" is also on the chart, like what are the odds?
The Worst Single of the Month: Kanye West - "Preacher Man"
Last summer, a few weeks after releasing a song called "Heil Hitler," Kanye West released 5 songs from his forthcoming album Bully, some if not all of which use AI deepfakes of his voice instead of real Kanye vocal performances. Even before West did his whole unconvincing apology thing and announced a March release date for Bully, one of those songs, "Preacher Man," was starting to get radio spins, and "Preacher Man" has now reaching #18 in its 8th week on Billboard's R&B/hip-hop airplay chart. Just about every other song in the top 20 of the chart is something I've heard on the radio regularly and/or have seen people post or talk about online, etc. "Preacher Man," I don't know what stations are playing it, but it feels like a total phantom hit, the worst possible example of radio programmers blindly playing anything with name recognition.
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on Tuesday, February 10, 2026 at 5:00 AM.
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