An Abridged Look at the Non-US Hits of 2024

 

An Abridged Look at the Non-US Hits of 2024

Hey guys, it’s Fire from Fire’s Flaming Hot Takes back again to finally send off 2024 with a look at the best and worst non-US hits of 2024!! 

As always, what I’m qualifying as a “non-US hit” are songs that made the 2024 year-end list in the UK, Australia, or Canada but NOT the US. So with that in mind, these are the qualifications for the songs that I’m choosing to highlight. As with previous years, the songs that are highlighted in this article are the songs that became hits in the UK, Australia, or Canada that would’ve made my best or worst list for 2024 had they become hits in the US - and yes, the honorable and dishonorable mentions count. I will not mention songs that had made a previous non-US hits list - so no, you’re not gonna see “Murder On The Dancefloor” here (I know it was arguably more culturally relevant in 2024, but it was a hit in the UK in the early 2000s so I’m not gonna cover it here. Song is excellent though) - nor songs that had made a prior US list - so no, you’re not gonna see “Mr. Brightside” here either. Also, if the songs are set to become hits in the US in 2025, let’s take “Sailor Song” by Gigi Perez or “APT.” by ROSE and Bruno Mars for example, they don’t count either. Again, there are a few songs that’ll likely straddle this line, but I’ll just say that I can’t predict the future and if a song I consider ineligible now misses the 2025 US YE, so be it. So if you want to know the entire pool of songs I’m selecting from, check out this Spotify playlist here. And yes, my opinions have shifted quite a bit and my best and worst lists for 2024 would probably be slightly different if I made it now, but I was still able to pull something together. And I’ll just say this article is gonna be considerably shorter than some of my other articles. Because as it turns out, when the US pop music scene in 2024 spoiled us with an abundance of great and excellent songs and the international scene didn’t give that much awful crap to discuss, you don’t have much to talk about. So you got all that? Alright, let’s get this started with the worst!

CYRIL - Stumblin' In (#29 AUS)

The original “Stumblin’ In” by Chris Norman and Suzi Quatro is pretty good; it’s a solid slice of yacht rock where Norman and Quatro have solid chemistry. It’s a good track, but the vocal delivery can be a bit oversold, so it’s not great. So obviously what everyone needed was Australian DJ CYRIL to take the relaxed original and give it a lifeless deep house beat where somehow Norman and Quatro’s chemistry gets worse! This is just so lifeless. It’s the worst kind of remix; it takes the art and does something somewhat new with it but completely drains out everything that made the original work special. It’s the complete artlessness of this remix that really sets me off. With any luck this remix stumbles out of the bar into oncoming traffic on the road. But speaking of artless use of older songs...

Ella Henderson f/Rudimental - Alibi (#35 UK)

When I first heard this song, I was just struck by how lazy it was. If you haven’t heard this before, it liberally jacks the chorus melody from Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” - in fact I’m pretty sure it even steals the strings from that song - and let me just say that this wasn’t dead on arrival. I can see the potential of using the darker melody of “Gangsta's Paradise” for a song about calling out a guy cheating on his partner. But the big issue here is that Ella Henderson sounds like she’s only here for the paycheck, which is really disappointing considering I know how much of a vocal powerhouse she can be. The drum and bass percussion has no energy to it. Just like “Stumblin’ In”, this stinks of artlessness and the artists just scoring an easy paycheck. You will need a damn good alibi to excuse this lazy excuse of a song.

Good Neighbours - Home (#76 AUS, #99 CAN)

The first comparison I saw made for this song was early Imagine Dragons. And okay, I know Imagine Dragons’ quality has plummeted a cliff since their debut, but let’s not do their early work dirty. “Home” is clearly trying to call back to the early 2010s indie boom which has definitely become very commercial-core, but the biggest problem is that the song is just so formless and goopy. The vocals are really pitchy and the mixing is just catastrophic, I feel like I can hear every instrument clipping the mix!! Say what you will about Imagine Dragons’ commercial-core material in the mid-to-late 2010s, it was at least better produced than this mess!! If anything, the horrible mixing, when paired with the millennial whoops, literally sounds like our singer is getting electrocuted while singing. Yeah, this is fucking terrible. I know Noah Kahan helped shepherd the indie boom revival in 2024, but we really didn’t need to bring this back along with it. Send it back home, we don’t need it anymore.

Jordan Adetunji - KEHLANI (#94 CAN)

This was actually very nearly a hit in the US according to TOTC (it was literally #106 as per their calculations, just barely missed being on my worst list in that regard!). And the fact that this song was more successful than any song Kehlani themselves has ever released is just pathetic because “KEHLANI” is pretty fucking bad. The drill beat sounds so limp yet so brooding and that doesn’t match Jordan Adetunji’s vocal delivery whatsoever. And yeah, the big reason this song just falls apart is that vocal delivery; Adetunji sounds like a 9 year-old playing on his parents’ computer. This is just a boringly bad song that I’m fairly certain everyone has already forgotten. But speaking of bad vocals...

NewEra - Birds In The Sky (#61 UK)

You know, on the surface this doesn’t seem that bad; the production doesn’t sound awful, at least at first...sure, the diva house influences sound really hollow against the thick bassline and kick, but you could reasonably argue that it’s lightweight harmless pop music that’s probably on the level of Katy Perry’s “Lifetimes”. But no, like “KEHLANI”, the reason this falls flat is entirely because of the vocals. Not only do they feel really stilted against the production but they remind me of those “Alvin & The Chipmunks sing” videos in the early 2010s that I’m fairly certain I always found really annoying, even back then, before I was really paying attention to popular music. These birds in the sky can fall on the ground and die. No one’s gonna miss them.

The Kid LAROI - NIGHTS LIKE THIS (#84 AUS)

Songs like this completely make me get why The Kid LAROI has really struggled to follow up his monster of a hit “STAY”, because this is REALLY bad. If anything, it reminds me a lot of “Romantic Homicide” by d4vd in how overly brooding the production is. The production is just so immediately brooding that when The Kid LAROI starts singing I get the impression that the production literally stabbed him in the heart and he’s trying to get through the song while he’s bleeding out. That might explain why this song doesn’t even clear 90 seconds, but even when The Kid LAROI tries to sing with more weight in his voice, it just sounds painfully thin. And all of this makes the lyrics, which are about The Kid LAROI wanting a girl to come over, feel unnecessarily threatening. At least “WITHOUT YOU”, as much as it was expressing some  douchey emo sentiments, created an atmosphere where you could tell The Kid LAROI was heartbroken after a breakup. But “NIGHTS LIKE THIS” is just so undercooked that before any real sentiments can fully coalesce, the song just ends. I don’t want any more nights like this.

The Weeknd, JENNIE, & Lily-Rose Depp - One Of The Girls (#51 AUS, #89 CAN)

I’ll admit that there is actually quite a bit that works well in this song. I dig the smoky production a decent bit and it sounds pretty sexy. But the reason this made the “worst” section of this article is the lyrics, which are just straight up creepy. Abel goes into disturbing detail about how he owns and controls this girl and Lily-Rose Depp begging for Abel to choke her until she passes out in her really lifeless delivery just makes me think of those uncomfortable sex scenes in Fifty Shades Of Grey (one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen btw). It’s an unsettling as hell song where no one’s having any fun, and even if that was part of the point to lean into the debauchery of the whole scene, it really makes for one of the creepiest experiences I’ve ever had when listening to a song. Absolutely one of Abel’s worst ever songs, and the one solace we can take is that this song didn’t take off in the US.

So that’s all the bad songs out of the way, now for the great stuff!

Charli XCX - 360 (#100 UK)

There were a few songs I almost talked about in the “best” section but ultimately I cut because had they been eligible for my best list, they would’ve likely been among the very last cuts (“Used To Be Young” by Miley Cyrus springs to mind) and for a significant chunk of last year, “360” probably would’ve been in that category. “360” was arguably the biggest song from brat in the US and it’s not a song that arrives with immediacy, but it’s one that really grows on you, as it certainly did for me. Charli XCX’s delivery off the bassy and bubbly synth radiates a bunch of confidence that asserts that Charli is the hottest girl in the room. The brat era gave two eligible songs for this article (the other one being “Guess” with Billie Eilish which is also great but not quite great enough to justify putting it on my best list had it been eligible) and “360” is absolutely an incredible little track, and it was definitely far more influential in pop culture than its chart success would suggest.

Dua Lipa - Training Season (#65 CAN, #55 UK)

Radical Optimism is an album where its “flop era” label seems to transcend the quality of the music itself for a lot of people. And I still don’t think that’s deserved; I still think the album is great. “Houdini” was a great track that wasn’t as big in the US as it really should’ve been even if it was a pretty sizable one. But outside of “Falling Forever”, this was my favorite from the album. It’s admittedly not perfect because if we were to compare it to a song like “Physical”, “Training Season” just doesn’t hit you with a bang, and that can make the chorus feel a little underwhelming. But I do still really like the synth creating a tense sense of unease as Dua Lipa lays it on this guy that she’s done being unimpressed by dates and that she’s looking for someone who can impress her, as if Lipa herself is anxious to see if this guy could be the one for her or if she’ll just get disappointed again. It’s no “Physical” or “Falling Forever”, but for what it is, I think this is really damn solid.

Hanumankind & Kalmi - Big Dawgs (#86 CAN)

Well, this came out of nowhere. A guy from Bengaluru, India just pops onto the scene and drops one of the hardest rap bangers I’ve heard in a while. It’s an abrasive slice of Memphis rap where Hanumankind’s delivery straddles that line of being quirky and yet aggressive to match the oily synths in the production. Incredible stuff!!

And that’s that! My next article will likely come out...on Friday, actually where I’ll be retrying something special!! Until then, if you guys have your own personal favorite non-US hits you’d like to talk about, the comments are right there!! I’m eager to see what your picks are!! And as always, remember to keep it Fire!!