Matty Healy is the closest he's ever been to genuinely famous in America right now, but most of the attention is pretty negative as he's become the Olivia Wilde to Taylor Swift's Harry Styles in this year's public psychodrama of a pop stans being outraged that they can't control who their favorite singer dates. One of my favorite songs from Being Funny In A Foreign Language has been slowly climbing up the alt-rock radio charts all through that saga, and amusingly it stopped climbing this week just as headlines circulated that Swift and Healy have broken up. I'm kind of slotting "Oh Caroline" alongside "If You're Too Shy (Let Me Know)" in that I've watched the performance video on YouTube so many times that the studio version pales in comparison for me a little bit now, George Daniel is such an excellent drummer. 

"Painting Pictures" didn't really sound like an obvious radio song back when it first went viral on YouTube a few months ago, but it's really grown into a welcome presence on the radio. The sample of "Soon As I Get Home" by Faith Evans is, I think, the first resurgence of a song produced by Chucky Thompson since he passed away a couple years ago, nice to see his work still resonating. 

As much as "Before He Cheats" is Carrie Underwood's legacy, she really doesn't throw herself into full-throated bangers often enough. And I wish "Hate My Heart," penned by the great Hillary Lindsey, had been Underwood's latest album's first single instead of the comparatively tame "Ghost Story." 

A promising first hit from a newer country singer, I guess the sentiment is pretty common these days but she crystallized it into a song pretty well. 

8 years ago I wrote a Complex piece about 'songs of the summer' that ended with me trying to predict what could be the song of summer 2015, and Tori Kelly's Max Martin-produced major label debut single "Nobody Love" seemed like a pretty shrewd guess but man I was so wrong, that song just went nowhere. Tori Kelly has kept lurking around the fringes of show business, though, playing award shows and voicing a singing animal in a big animated movie, etc. I like her latest single, which very overtly goes for an early 2000s spaceship R&B vibe but doesn't lean too heavily on a fleeting interpolation of Craig David's "Fill Me In." 

Lil Durk plugged along as one of the biggest rappers in Chicago with a relatively low national profile for a decade, and then three years ago he guested on a Drake single and became ubiquitous, mostly on other artist's singles, and released a couple platinum albums. We don't get nakedly ambitious bids for crossover acceptance from street rap guys much anymore, Polo G's "Bad Man (Smooth Criminal)" is the only one I can think of in recent years and he fell flat on his face with that one. "All My Life" is a big crossover bid that seems to be actually working but I just hate it: written with a bunch of pop hacks (Dr. Luke, Lunchmoney Lewis, R. City), kids singing the hook, vaguely 'conscious' lyrics, and one of those long, rambling J. Cole guest verses where he's all condescendingly paternalistic about the trials and tribulations of younger rappers.