Apparently I have committed my first repeat track gaffe in four years—I recently shared French #1 hit “Melodrama” by Disiz featuring Theodora after being lukewarm on it at the end of 2025, only to realize afterward that I had already, in fact, shared the song when it first came out.1 I’m surprised this hasn’t happened before—my methods for finding music are cavalier enough that I frequently forget songs that I’ve selected mere weeks after finding them. Songs amass in a huge pile that I rarely get a chance to return to (that’s partly what my month of year-ends are for—staking a claim for the stuff that I hope to take with me beyond the year).
“Melodrama” interested me one year later because it’s the kind of unassuming long-term hit that I’ve come to associate with the US and UK charts recently. “Choosin’ Texas” is the biggest story out of the US, but “Rein Me In” by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean had a similar grip on UK charts this year. This made me interested in whether there have been other uniquely long #1s in other places recently.
There’s “Ossessione” by Samurai Jay and Vito Salamanca, which was #1 in Italy for 19 weeks, the longest-running #1 in Italian pop in the streaming era. In Spain, Elvis Crespo and Quevedo had a #1 for 15 weeks with “La Graciosa.” In South Africa, “Shela” by Sam Deep, Nia Pearl, and Boochie had a long run this year, though there are comparable long runs for other amapiano songs in the past few years, and this is somewhat variable depending on which charts you use. If you expand to artist runs instead of individual songs, you can include Asake, who by some chart calculations was at #1 in Nigeria for a combined 22 weeks, and you can extend Quevedo’s reign in Spain to 25 weeks.
Long #1 periods seem to be a phenomenon that is not unique to the Anglosphere and are probably attributable to similar trends in lots of places—the erosion of airplay and gatekeeping, and a more direct accounting for listening through streaming. But what you don’t see is the same songs and artists doing equally well across all regions. Finding usable global data on the charts requires tracking a lot of different sources, but even then there can still be a sense of stagnancy, even as some charts have tried to change their recurrence rules to cycle through more new songs.
I’m thinking about all of this because I’m reaching the end of my 2026 search for new music—I have two mixes to go and one already completed for next week—so have started turning to a few sources outside my patented method of frantically skimming through thousands of random songs like a maniac. This means looking at chart data, YouTube views, and critic nudges.
The chart data is always a tougher slog than it seems like it should be. I’ve started keeping a record of songs on the GXU that don’t appear on the Hot 100 or aren’t by big established Western Anglophone stars, and it’s a frustratingly small group of new global songs; the majority of that chart is filled with old songs, as I wrote about a few weeks ago. On average there are about three to five new global songs on the GXU per week.
YouTube is more promising because you can train the recommendation algorithm to point you toward specific music scenes. I find this somewhat tedious work, and it never offers enough volume for me to feel like it’s worth my time and effort. But toward the end of the year, you start getting more playlists and compilations of the year’s music so that the searching yields more discoveries more quickly.
As for the critic nudges, we’ll see what December brings. I was disappointed last year in the aggregate results of lots of critics’ best-of lists. These lists might do better on surfacing global music than they did in the past, but they still seem woefully unequipped for the full range of amazing music happening all over the world:
I just wonder what I’m hearing that everyone else isn’t. It seems impossible to imagine myself building a list of songs or albums that isn’t a large proportion, if not an outright majority, of music in languages other than English. And it’s not because I think this is some noble goal: there are plenty of regions and scenes where some level of monolingualism should be more or less expected. But if you fancy yourself something of a generalist, or at least un-specialist, it’s just where a lot of the best music seems to be.
Will the remaining critical establishment coalesce around what I jokingly called CAPDY—Charli xcx, Ariana Grande (maybe it’s Adéla now?), Phoebe Bridgers (Kim Petras was demoted), Disney expat Olivia Rodrigo, and SlaYYYter? It seems like this is a particularly good year for critics to celebrate lots of albums that haven’t generated much critical heat, but the nature of critic lists is to converge on something, so “less heat” across more albums may just mean more uninspiring (to me) stuff at the top, the same phenomenon that drove 2009’s GAPDY indie picks.
I do have a few international publications to check for year-end recommendations, and there are several year-end polls that will surface new songs. (I usually put out a mix in January of the 2026 songs that I missed.) But especially for albums, and I think for music recommendation more broadly, there just doesn’t seem to be the same interest in old-school print journalism norms around year-end critical conversations these days. Instead, I find more playlists and less context, which is the one thing I don’t really need experts to help me with. I can find enormous piles of good songs to sort through without any context on my own. I want other people’s good words and ideas, too.
1. BabyChiefDoIt: Ghetto Love Story
US
It’s very hard to make “My Boo”-style Miami bass sound like anything less than a blast, and Chicago rapper BabyChiefDoIt’s shit-eating grin is more than enough to sell this even when things briefly get (maybe a little too) dark. He says she and her boyfriend go together like “water and sand,” which is an odd pairing as far as obvious contrasts go (they’re a sandcastle?), as is “pots and pans” as the ideal pairing. But the song is silly enough to grade it on the A*Teens “Perfect Match” curve: “You like Grease, baby, I like Snatch…but that would make us a perfect match!”
2. Dbraz, MOR3NO: Pausa na Flash
Portugal
Portugal rap goes Afropiano and gets a bit more mileage out of the formula than usual.
3. Victoria Kimani: IDWBU
Kenya
As promised last week, I did a shallow dive into Kenyan rap and dancehall this week, but this song borrows from a different pocket of Caribbean trends and hitches its wagon to the Great Bouyon Speed-Up.
4. Haarley, Nice: Longtime
Côte d’Ivoire-France/Dominica
This is a brief opportunity for me to mention that I refer a lot in this newsletter to Guadeloupean bouyon, because the energy that I’ve responded to in the past two years tends to come from artists from Guadeloupe. But I haven’t been clear that bouyon itself is from Dominica. This might be the first bouyon artist from Dominica I’ve featured on a mix—something else to remedy before the end of the year, maybe?
5. Omagoqa, MfanaTouchLine, General C'mamane, ZVRI: Yebo Yehh
South Africa
An extended gqom-pop riff on “Milkshake” by Kelis. Simple. Effective.
6. Maandy: Inzaagi
Kenya
OK, here we go, Kenyan dancehall suite! Kicking things off with my most-featured Kenyan artist, Maandy. She’s fairly savvy and chameleonic, and seems to have kept up with Caribbean influence.
7. Kapitani: Kitemeo
Kenya
Kapitani is a rising Kenyan star and this was a breakout hit; conveniently it is a plainly representative dancehall track in its sound, like a control group for everything else in this block.
8. MASTAR VK, ZiiBeats: Bablas
Kenya
I couldn’t tell if there was really any one dominant rhythmic genre form in the gengetone/arbantone resurgence that I sampled—this one hews closer to reggaeton.
9. King Bubby: NAKUTAKA
Kenya
Final Kenyan song in the suite and probably my favorite—a scrappy shatta number from King Bubby, whose video looks like it was filmed on the set of a California high school from a CW show, one that he still looks young enough to attend (he’s 19 and baby-faced).
10. Solana: O ri mi
Nigeria
Interesting Lady Gaga-esque electro-pop from Nigeria, done on the cheap and more charming for it.
11. Roshâni: Shak
Iran-Switzerland/Morocco-Switzerland
Killer cosmo-pop in Farsi, from a duo based in Switzerland. More info on Bandcamp.
12. Aspa: Vara Prosoxi
Greece
Haven’t really found a ton of Greek pop this year after falling for Marina Satti and inflating Greece’s country stats on my spreadsheet last year. (They’re down to a respectable five entries from ten last year, nearly half of those being Satti picks. I’ll do final country stats in the second week of December.)
13. To Eternity, SOYA, Zlatika: Чи це не прекрасно [Chi tse ne prekrasno]
Nigeria-Ukraine
An upbeat indie-pop trifle from Ukrainian artist Daniel Otuonye, whose project To Eternity generally makes indie miniatures somewhere between White Town and Sombr.
14. yuri: Happy Sabun
Japan
Previous winner of favorite artist in 2024 purley by statistics remains a favorite, and not just statistically.
15. まおた [Maota]: 飢え鴉 [Ue karasu]
Japan
16. Blooming Bungei: Flashnova
Japan
Two J-rock pop-punk numbers with pretty vocals and varying levels of roughness around the edges—I prefer the slightly rougher one (Blooming Bungei).
17. Whait: Falling Down
US
A fun little Escher guitar figure to traverse impossible musical geometry, from a duo of Wendy Eisenberg and More Eaze. I need to check out more of Eisenberg’s stuff from this year, not least because the recent EP title made me laugh: Wweennddyy Eeiisseennbbeerrgg.
18. Thabza De Soul, Tae-Lo, 2ELL: Change
South Africa
19. Young Stunna, Masterpiece f. Dj Maphorisa, Kabza De Small, Sly, Xduppy: Imali
South Africa
20. Msakisto f. Vano Badlale: U-Turn
South Africa
Ending with three from South Africa—I am still not even pulling from my extensive holdover list. (Next week I will feature a bunch of songs from my Latin America/Spanish language holdover list.) Some non-oontzified and three-step-indebted Afro house from Thabza De Soul, a track from a late-breaking favorite amapiano album by Young Stunna, and steady/unassuming gqom that felt like an appropriate closer, respectively.
That’s it! Until next time, let me know where I should be looking for recommendations before I hit the end of the year.
—Dave Moore (the other one)
Title from BabyChiefDoIt: Ghetto Love Story
I overstated how long “Melodrama” was at #1 in that previous post because I was using the Billboard data (21 weeks at #1), which differs from SNEP (17 weeks at #1).