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Timothy and Theron Thomas, brothers from Saint Thomas in the Virgin Islands, had a father who spent five years in prison and hoarded weed in the family closet — and he inspired “Locked Away.” R. City rose to “the No. 1 group in the whole Virgin Islands,” Theron told The Fader. An album on Akon’s Interscope imprint went nowhere, so they shifted to writing for other singers, and Levine came calling. The result, a piano ballad interspersed with “skiddly don don don dyne” dancehall chanting, landed at No. 6 in 2015. “‘Locked Away’ is Caribbean music,” Theron Thomas said. “The only thing pop about it is Adam Levine.”

That. Trumpet. Riff. “It took 10 different versions before we finally came to what you hear on the radio now, where we decided to add a trumpet for the main bridge part, which I think was one of our best decisions on the song,” Ryan Merchant, half of the Los Angeles duo Capital Cities, told Billboard. You think? Merchant and Sebu Simonian, who’d started out working on Hallmark and Honda ad campaigns, signed with Capitol Records (of course). “Safe and Sound” hit No. 8 in 2013.

After watching Taylor Swift perform at her hometown Nissan Stadium in Nashville, 14-year-old Taylor Gayle Rutherfurd and her best friend Sara Davis wrote this eff-you-everybody anthem in Rutherfurd’s bedroom. After it went viral on TikTok in 2021, her label, Atlantic Records, put out the version with the full electronic production. Thus began a backlash, then a backlash-to-the-backlash, drawing attention and pushing the song that Rutherfurd “made very lightheartedly as a joke with one of my best friends,” as she told Teen Vogue, to a No. 3 peak in March 2022.

In 2014, the rapper born Harry Michael sold $10 copies of his album to passers-by in his hometown of Sydney, Australia, where he worked as a printer salesman and digital consultant for businesses. Five years later, he scrawled lyrics and scatted in his car for what became “Astronaut in the Ocean,” a fast-rapping track over a laconic beat that rhymes the title with “slow-motion.” It hit No. 6 in 2021, allowing the rapper to keep making albums and collaborate with singer Bebe Rexha and rapper Lecrae.

Even Tones and I’s manager was skeptical that “Dance Monkey,” which the singer born Toni Watson had been busking daily in her native Australia, would ever hit the radio. She’d had a minor hit with “Johnny Run Away,” and he told her, “What happened with ‘Johnny’ was a freak thing.” But with a “tad” of production to “make it sound shinier,” as Tones and I told Billboard, the low-key, pulsating track with the cartoonish voice hit No. 4 in 2020.

With a video starring Drake in a white-and-gold tracksuit bouncing frenetically in a gym, the gently hypnotic “Look Alive” turned Memphis rapper BlocBoy JB into a star. He was ready for it: “I’ve always been saying, ‘One day. This is my year.’ 2012, my year. 2013, my year,” he told Billboard in 2018 when “Look Alive” hit No. 5. After “Look Alive,” Childish Gambino invited BlocBoy JB to rap on 2018’s Hot 100 No. 1 “This Is America” — in which the star did the shoot dance, derived from BlocBoy JB’s 2017 mixtape hit “Shoot.”

Combining dubstep and the classic Nirvana trick of building from soft verses to massive choruses, this British 27-year-old songwriter took off when Microsoft put “Too Close” into Internet Explorer 9 commercials. Clare, an orthodox Jew, had released his debut The Lateness of the Hour, but it didn’t sell, so he moved to Israel. “I had lost everything. I lost my record deal. I lost a lot,” he told Resident. “The song changed my life.” It hit No. 7 in 2012.

Capitalizing on the sound of Sean Paul’s smash singles in the early 2000s, 26-year-old St. Vincent native Lyttle signed to Atlantic Records and attempted to steer Caribbean soca music into the next dancehall craze. “Soca has been around forever but hadn’t been done in a crossover manner,” he told Billboard. “I’m trying to do it like dancehall so people can access it.” “Turn Me On” turned out to be a one-single soca boom, hitting No. 4 in 2004 and launching the Kevin Lyttle album into the Billboard 200’s top 10.

The salsa-flavored song from Disney’s animated hit Encanto soundtrack hit No. 1 after the family film premiered on Disney+ on Christmas Eve 2021 — something Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote all eight songs in the film and on its soundtrack, predicted. “I knew it would get a bump on Disney+,” he told Billboard‘s Pop Shop podcast. “Because I watched that happen with Moana. Like, Moana became a prime babysitting tool for people.”

The Brooklyn DJ released this EDM track with a beat drop for the ages on a free website with little fanfare in summer 2012, but by early the next year, skydivers, underwater stormtroopers, newscasters, Power Rangers, Fat Joe, Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert and some 100,000 others (often in helmets or masks) were performing its wild, crowd-sourced dance. The track benefited from a Billboard chart-data change allowing YouTube plays, and it hit No. 1 for five weeks starting in March 2013. Baauer, born Harry Bauer Rodrigues, did little promotion post-“Shake”; he just kept on making dance music, returning to the charts with a handful of titles, including AA, which hit No. 3 on Top Dance Albums.

With a melody lifted from the Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman” and a rebellious lyric inspired by comedian George Carlin, these Alaska-born, Portland, Ore.-based alt-rock heroes went minimal for this wispy rock song with spaghetti-western guitar. It hit No. 4 in 2017, and singer John Gourley told Billboard: “Because we get played on the radio and have a Vitaminwater ad with Aaron Paul dancing on a treadmill, people are going to say we sold out. I don’t write music for that. I write music for me.” The band soldiers on, having scored five top 10s on the Alternative Airplay chart.

After a girlfriend informed Crazy Town frontman Shifty Shellshock his rap-rock lyrics were too misogynistic, he switched to love-song mode. “Instead of writing a male chauvinistic song, I was going to write something nice and sweet to a girl I cared about,” he told Billboard. The result was “Butterfly,” a sweet, laid-back anthem that became an inescapable MTV smash for the Limp Bizkit generation, hitting No. 1 for two weeks in 2001. Crazy Town’s story turned tragic: Adam Goldstein, or DJ AM, died in 2009 of an overdose and Shellshock, born Seth Binzer, died the same way in 2024 at 49.

As “Broccoli” took off in 2016, the Virginia rapper whose “Cha Cha” inspired Drake’s blockbuster “Hotline Bling” gave Billboard a scoop: He loves actual broccoli, not just the kind that is a nickname for weed. “With some butter and some salt and pepper,” he said. “Mix it with the rice, whatever the meat is.” His modest intentions for “Broccoli” were to make it “just lit for the culture, lit for SoundCloud, for the Internet,” D.R.A.M. said, but its version with Yachty’s verses hit No. 5.

The New Zealand producer born Joshua Stylah was 17 when he released a minimalist piano-horns-drums beat made with FL Studio software in 2020. “Laxed (Siren Beat)” went viral on TikTok as the Culture Dance, and celebrities from Jimmy Fallon to BTS posted some of the 55 million-plus videos set to the song. Derulo DMed Jawsh 685 — named for the area code of Samoa, his father’s homeland — and despite a small issue of whether Derulo gave proper credit, this version of “Savage Love” – also thanks to BTS joining the track – peaked at No. 1 for one week. While Derulo and BTS have notched many a Hot 100 hit, this remains Jawsh 685’s sole Hot 100 entry thus far.

Kings of the Great Ringtone Era of 2007, Atlanta rock-and-rap trio Shop Boyz broke their chanting, electro-violin-riffing “Party Like a Rockstar” in a “hood club,” as Shop Boy Richard “Fat” Stephens told Vice in 2015. The track hit heavy MTV, BET and radio rotation and earned a Grammy Award nomination — and hit No. 2 on the Hot 100. Since then, the group has put out a steady stream of singles, from Black Lives Matter tribute “On and On” to the reflective, heavily Auto-Tuned “Caught in the Moment.”

Jimmy Eat World’s commercial high-water mark by the early 2000s had been “Lucky Denver Mint,” which appeared on the soundtrack to the Drew Barrymore film Never Been Kissed. Capitol Records dropped the pioneering emo band, but DreamWorks picked it up for 2001’s Blood American and put out fizzy rocker “The Middle” as its second single. It was ascending the rock charts when the band appeared (fully clothed) in a video about an underwear-only teen party, and it blew up, peaking at No. 5 in 2002. “It was awkward for people at first, but after the first hour it became this normalized thing,” frontman Jim Adkins told Billboard. Jimmy Eat World has placed seven top 10s on the Alternative Airplay chart and earned two Billboard 200 top 10 albums.

Inspired by a woman not named Roxanne, “Roxanne” is a Juice WRLD-style rap about what Maryland-raised Arizona Zervas said was a “disaster girl you want to f–k with, but it’s hard to,” he told Flaunt. “Watching the numbers go up is so insane,” he said of the 2019 No. 4 hit. “A lot of people calling you, your favorite artists start asking you to get in the studio with them. I was focusing on my breathing.” Although Flaunt declared, “don’t get twisted, this is no one-hit wonder,” Zervas has yet to chart post-“Roxanne,” although recent tracks have scored Spotify plays in the millions.

For five years, British singer-songwriter Mike Rosenberg busked on the streets and in the pubs of Europe and Australia — until his reflective, soft-spoken folk song “Let Her Go” blew up on radio in 2012, eventually hitting No. 5 in February 2014. “Obviously it’s a good thing: This whole new world opened up to me,” he told Elle. “But at the same time, it was really disconcerting. Your life just changes overnight and everybody else around you starts to change as well.” His crowds expanded from 150-200 people to 5,000-6,000; Passenger opened for Ed Sheeran; “Let Her Go” landed in a Budweiser commercial during the 2014 Super Bowl; and he’s notched three top 10s on the Adult Alternative Airplay chart.

This soothing, yearning, mid-tempo 2021 smash initially sounded much different. “At first it was, ‘I wish I knew you! I wish I knew you wanted me,’” Lacy told Billboard. But he received advice from rapper Tyler, the Creator, with whom Lacy had worked as a producer for The Internet’s Ego Death album. Drop the “you,” Tyler said. The cut worked. The three-week No. 1 smash brought Lacy to Coachella and a headlining theater tour.  He insisted he would remain “swagged out” — and has landed five top 10s on Hot R&B Songs — he has yet to re-chart on the Hot 100.

After releasing the original “lo-lo-lo-lo-lo-wo-wo-wo-wo”-ing version of “Calm Down” in 2023, Nigeria’s Rema noticed it breaking on the Billboard U.S. Afrobeats Songs chart. He took a swing and recruited Gomez for the female vocal and, shockingly, she agreed. “I had my fingers crossed,” he told Billboard. The No. 3-peaking “Calm Down” was obviously not veteran pop superstar Gomez’s only hit, but Rema has yet to make it to the Hot 100 again — although he has landed six top 10s on U.S. Afrobeats Songs, through the June 7, 2025, chart.

Omar Samuel Pasley woke up one day in Clarendon, Jamaica, humming a melody. “It was like a little Jamaican nursery rhyme, like ‘one, two, buckle my shoe’,” he said in 2015, after the laid-back reggae song about finding the perfect woman at the perfect time took off and hit No. 1. It ruled for six weeks and wrapped atop 2015’s Songs of the Summer chart. OMI followed the single with a full-length album, Me 4 U, which hit No. 51 on the Billboard 200. Its remixed “Cheerleader” is at nearly 2 billion Spotify plays. Then he bought new rims for his brown Infinity, making clear to Billboard the purchase was not for product placement: “That’s actually what I drive.”

Beginning as a 15-second viral video, “Watch Me” turned four existing dance crazes, the Whip, the Nae Nae, the Stanky Legg and the Superman, into wedding-and-bar-mitzvah fixtures as permanent as the “Macarena.” Silentó, a 17-year-old Atlanta rapper who called his style “rated E for everyone,” uploaded the song to SoundCloud, then watched “Watch Me” blow up online and on the radio, peaking at No. 3 in 2015. (Since then, things have gone downhill for the rapper; in June 2025, Silento was sentenced to 30 years in prison after pleading guilty to shooting his cousin dead in 2021.)

The lighthearted, reggae-inflected song is about a man who asks his girlfriend’s father for marriage permission: No, Dad says, setting up a chorus (“why you gotta be so rude?”) that burrowed into millions of brains, en route to a No. 1 smash for six weeks beginning in July 2014. Guitarist Mark Pellizzer told Billboard: “We were just like, ‘Let’s start a band that sounds kind of like the Police and the Wailers.’” The song took off after singer Nasri Atweh met Pitbull’s then-manager, Charles Chavez, who pitched it as a summer single on Australia and New Zealand radio, eventually landing an RCA deal. 

Buttressing bleak lyrics with upbeat piano chords, Canadian singer Powter created the uber-relatable “Bad Day” in 2002 and shopped it to labels for a year until he scored a deal with Warner Bros. Records. “At the time, I couldn’t imagine that it would be a hit,” he told Songwriter Universe. “I was just trying to make music.” “Bad Day” aired on American Idol and Coca-Cola commercials, hitting No. 1 for five weeks in April-May 2006. The album it landed on, Daniel Powter, also made it to the Billboard 200 top 10. 

One of the most smolderingly downbeat one-hit wonders ever, this tribute to a fallen friend arrived in August 2020, a bleak and confusing pandemic-lockdown period that Glass Animals frontman Dave Bayley described as a “head f—k.” “You look so broken when you cry,” he sings. Written in a pique of ’90s mood-board nostalgia, the song rose over 59 weeks on the Hot 100 to No. 1 in March 2022 – completing a record climb to the top spot, where it reigned for five weeks, and made Bayley feel “like walking outside naked,” he told Billboard in 2024. Glass Animals, who also landed 2020’s Dreamland in the top 10 of the Billboard 200 and earned five top 10s on the Alternative Airplay chart, continue to record albums and headline worldwide arenas and amphitheaters.