Monthly Report: August 2026 Singles
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1. Slayyyter - "Dance..."
Pop singers aren't really expected to 'pay their dues' like a lot of other musicians, but you're seeing more and more that artists like Charli XCX or Zara Larsson can lay the foundation for eventual mainstream ubiquity with a series of smaller albums, even if they had some chart success earlier in their careers. Slayyyter is an example of someone who really built her career brick by brick, though, self-releasing a mixtape in 2019 (where she declared "I'm a celebrity, they play me on the radio" long before it was true), putting out a couple of albums on Fader's label, and then finally hitting the big time this year with her major label debut, Wor$t Girl in America. I'm not fully convinced that it's a great album, or even her best, but I really like "Dance..." as her Top 40 radio breakthrough. Here's the 2026 singles Spotify playlist that I update every month.
2. Niall Horan - "Tastes So Good"
My favorite single from my favorite ex-One Direction solo act since 2017's "Slow Hands," which is an all-timer in my personal canon. He always makes great stuff with Julian Bunetta and John Ryan, and this has awesome loud drums and some Britpop swagger to it, it's still rising on the Top 40 playlists so I hope it breaks through bigger.
3. Olivia Rodrigo - "Stupid Song"
Olivia Rodrigo has written a lot of great bridges and "Stupid Song" is one of her best, it kind of stops the whole song in its tracks and then builds huge momentum for the last minute of the track.
4. Megan Moroney - "Medicine"
Moroney's fastest, funniest, most old-fashioned country shitkicker single to date is, unsurprisingly, not doing great on country radio, but I'm glad it's at least doing okay. Really I'm just happy it was released as a single at all, it was my favorite song on Cloud 9 from the first listen.
5. Jackson Dean - "Make A Liar"
Jackson Dean has had 3 pretty sizable country radio hits in his career so far, and none of them was really a romantic or relationship-centered lyric. So I was really rooting for "Make A Liar" to get to that level, because it really shows him in that light well, just a really charming, flirtatious song that highlights his voice well.
6. The Beaches - "Edge of the Earth"
I became a fan of the Canadian quarter The Beaches after catching them at a festival in 2022, and their 2023 album Blame My Ex was a modest breakthrough, with "Blame Brett" getting airplay on American alt-rock radio. Last year's No Hard Feelings didn't really build on that success, but this year the Blame My Ex album track "Edge of the Earth" unexpectedly blew up after being prominently featured in the Amazon Prime YA drama "Off Campus." And I don't really remember having any opinion either way about this song when the album came out, but it's pretty cool to hear it on Top 40 radio now. Also kind of cool that it's one of the songs where Jordan Miller is pretty explicitly singing about a same-sex relationship.
7. Drake - "2 Hard 4 The Radio"
I don't know if it's ironic or kind of a deliberate troll that one of the biggest hits on Iceman is an homage to west coast rap, paying homage to Mac Dre much like "The Motto" did over a decade ago. The beat on the later part of "2 Hard 4 The Radio" even sounds almost like it could've been on GNX. Maybe in Drake's mind he's Biggie on "Going Back To Cali." Fun song, in any event.
8. Quavo - "Haavin"
I guess T.I.'s "Let Em Know" has given Pharrell Williams some renewed currency in the southern rap world, where he's got plenty of classics but also has kind of drifted away from the zeitgeist over the years. He's produced Lil Baby's latest single and a couple of Quavo tracks, and I really like this one, "Stir Fry" is kind of an underrated Migos classic to me so I'm glad they're working together again. "Haavin" has an A-B-A structure that's a little different than you're average modern rap song with a beat switch, the middle of the song switches gears into a slower tempo, and then ends on the faster tempo that it started with.
9. Raye f/ Hans Zimmer - "Click Clack Symphony"
This song really encapsulates how odd and unique but moving This Music May Contain Hope can be, it's knowingly silly on some levels but there's so much craft and emotion in it.
10. Ashley McBryde - "What If We Don't"
Ashley McBryde is really one of the best songwriters we've got right now, even when she does a pretty straightforward power ballad, and a great guitar solo from John Osborne of Brothers Osborne.
The Worst Single of the Month: Alyssa Grace - "Bloodstream"
We've got a lot of guitar-strumming young female singer-songwriters on the charts these days, which I love to see, I'm generally rooting for everybody. I'm not necessarily listening to everybody, though, because some of the vocal styles in that scene are kind of tortured, and 19-year-old California singer Alyssa Grace does the same thing where her voice 'cracks' with emotion about 50 times in her first Hot 100 hit, I can't stand it. And I'm really not exaggerating, something that would've been fine happening once or twice at a cathartic moment in the song happens every few seconds and she sounds ridiculous.
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on Monday, August 17, 2026 at 4:01 AM.
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