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Triple J’s Hottest 100: who will win Australia’s biggest music poll? | Music


After five years of consecutive financial growth, Australia’s multibillion dollar music industry ground to a halt this year. Livelihoods vanished overnight, tours and festivals months in the making were cancelled without notice nor recompense, and album releases became muted, distant affairs. Festivals were recast as super-spreader events. Dancing was banned. Many venues were shuttered and are unlikely to return.

This year’s Hottest 100 countdown, which is Australia’s biggest annual music poll and will be broadcast on Triple J from midday on Saturday, won’t feel the same as usual. There will be less giddy celebrating, a dearth of backyard parties and pub broadcasts, and a marked decline in blow-up pools and communal punch bowls.

But the music will still be fantastic, and the poll fiercely competitive – with no clear favourite for the No 1 spot. With just a week left of voting, there are a mere 350 votes separating the first and second-placed songs. To put this in context, last year’s countdown saw a record-breaking 3.2m votes in total.

So who is going to win?

One tune tipped to win – at least according to prediction site 100 Warm Tunas – is Heat Waves by UK band Glass Animals. The atmospheric and downbeat dance song enjoyed its largest success in Australia, being played continually on Triple J and reaching the Aria top 20. This ode to loss and longing hit the mark for many this year.

The band have also promised to get the outline of Australia tattooed on their buttocks if they win – quite an incentive for their fans to vote.

Two Aussie songs are also being projected to reach pole position: the life-affirming Booster Seat by Perth’s Spacey Jane, and the gentle, pastoral Cherub from Brisbane’s Ball Park Music.

Both bands had stunning years, with Spacey Jane’s debut album, Sunlight, reaching No 2 on the Aria charts and winning the Triple J album of the year poll. Ball Park Music’s eponymous album also reached No 2 on the charts, and was voted fourth in the Triple J album poll.

Of the three, recency bias is slightly in Ball Park Music’s favour (songs released later in the year historically tend to chart higher in the countdown), but with Cherub’s late August release, and the other two tunes hitting airwaves in June, that could be less of a factor this year. All three acts’ chances are helped by having had one clear stand-out track during 2020, as when an artist has more than one song competing in the poll it can impact on their placement. (Courtney Barnett and Violent Soho had four and five songs respectively in the 2015 and 2016 countdown – again, respectively – but failed to make the top 10 with any one track.)

Aussie artists seem likely to dominate the upper reaches of the countdown. Perennial favourite Flume ft Toro Y Moi (The Difference), multi-talented G Flip (Hyperfine), Tame Impala (Lost in Yesterday), the Jungle Giants (Sending Me Ur Loving), Eves Karydas (Complicated), Stace Cadet and KLP (Energy), Mallrat (Rockstar), Birdz (Bagi-la-m Bargan) and the Avalanches (Running Red Lights) all stand a chance of crashing into the top 10.

Solo female Aussie artists will again flood the top of the Hottest 100, following on from the six we saw in last year’s top 10 – if it happens again, this will be welcome proof of progress, given that only 16 female artists made the entire countdown in 2017.

The Hilltop Hoods also seem fairly certain to land in the top five with I’m Good?, which will see them equal Foo Fighters and Powderfinger as the act with the most entries in the history of the Hottest 10, with 22 apiece. They are still a long way behind Dave Grohl, however, who has past glories with Queens of the Stone Age, Nirvana, and Them Crooked Vultures bumping his individual number to 32.

Despite its ubiquity and virality, it would seem that WAP by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion will probably miss out on a top 10 placement. Last year’s winner. Billie Eilish will also be scantly represented, with only one song, Therefore I Am, in contention. Still, she seems a fair bet to crack the top 20, adding to last year’s countdown haul of five – the most songs of any artist in the 2019 countdown. (Less likely is another pop star, Taylor Swift – despite the fact that both of her 2020 albums sound more like Hottest 100 fodder than she did the year she was banned.)

In 2007, Muse pipped Silverchair by just 14 votes to take pole position. On Saturday, the difference could be lower. It’s still anyone’s race.

The Triple J Hottest 100 broadcast begins at midday on Saturday 23 January



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