Congratulations to Olivia Dean, who sounded genuinely chuffed to have won triple j's Hottest 100 of 2025. While it's not surprising she won in the sense that she was the hot favourite, I'm pleasantly surprised (and kinda fascinated) that the winner was someone whose latest album is full of jazzy chords and soul melodies.
But that's what I love about the Hottest 100 - it's a snapshot of the musical tastes of a large number of young people (and not-so-young people), and that's always interesting.
Here are some other things I learnt.
The Leaderboard
28 - Hilltop Hoods
25 - G Flip, Billie Eilish
23 - Tame Impala
22 - Powderfinger, Foo Fighters, Flume
21 - Spacey Jane, Lime Cordiale
20 - Kanye West
19 - Ocean Alley
17 - Silverchair, Muse, Kendrick Lamar, Grinspoon, Bring Me The Horizon
16 - The Wombats, The Living End, Rüfüs Du Sol, Lorde, John Butler Trio
15 - Regurgitator, Florence and the Machine, Ball Park Music, Arctic Monkeys
14 - You Am I, Something for Kate, Placebo, Pearl Jam
13 - Illy, Green Day, Fred Again
12 - Vance Joy, The Smashing Pumpkins, The Cat Empire, The Amity Affliction, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Radiohead, Peking Duk, Garbage, Fisher, Eskimo Joe, Drake, DMA's
It shits me how controversial this is (and I'm sure my colleagues over at triple j are getting increasingly annoyed at me every time I point this out), but if Billie Eilish gets a point for being a featured artist on Charli XCX's Guess (#6 in 2024), then Hilltop Hoods get a point for guesting on Thundamentals's 21 Grams (#61 in 2017). And thus the Hoodies are on 28, not 27, despite what triple j says.
So the official leaderboard looks like the above (Flume is also higher on this than on triple j's official leaderboard because this counts his remixes/collabs/features etc.). There were some big movers this year. Hilltop Hoods (three entries) leapt clear of Billie Eilish, who didn't feature in the countdown for the first time in nine years. But they weren't alone - Spacey Jane had five entries to move to equal eighth, Tame Impala and Ocean Alley had four entries, G Flip and Fred Again had three entries, and Lorde and Fisher joined the big leagues with two entries.
And the bolded acts are the ones that have had Hottest 100 entries in the past few years. It seems incredibly unlikely to me that acts such as Powderfinger or Foo Fighters, for example, will feature in the poll ever again, and the leaderboard looks particularly interesting when you delineate between the "heritage" acts and the ones still in the running.
How many artists?
One criticism of the 2024 countdown was that a small number of artists were responsible for a large portion of the countdown - Billie Eilish, Charli XCX and Gracie Abrams accounted for 20 per cent of the entire Hottest 100.
But the huge amount of collaborations and featurings meant that there were actually 82 unique artists last year. This year, there were only 67 unique artists - the lowest since 2005, when there was only 64 unique artists. That was the year Wolfmother, Bloc Party and The Cat Empire accounted for 14 per cent of the entire countdown, and 26 acts had multiple entries. By comparison, in the 2025 poll, there were 25 acts with multiple entries.
The lowest number of entries in a year is 64 in 2005 and 2002, giving 2025 the third least amount of unique entries.
The Hottest Number
Shout out to Tyler Jenke, who invented the idea of the Hottest Number. Basically, if you get #1 in a Hottest 100, you get 100 points. You place #100, you get one point. What this means is that you can have lots of entries in the poll, but if they're at the lower end of the chart, then your Hottest Number is low (I'm looking at you, Bring Me The Horizon).
Here's the Hottest Number leaderboard:
1. Hilltop Hoods - 1718
2. Spacey Jane - 1535
3. Billie Eilish - 1527
4. Tame Impala - 1516
5. Powderfinger - 1467
6. Flume - 1454
7. Lime Cordiale - 1340
8. G Flip - 1310
9 - Foo Fighters - 1245
10. Ocean Alley - 1123
11. John Butler Trio - 1062
12. Grinspoon - 1053
13. Lorde - 1052
14. Silverchair - 1046
15. The Living End - 1017
16. Ball Park Music - 1014
17. Regurgitator - 977
18. Rüfüs Du Sol - 972
19. The Wombats - 955
20. Fred Again - 933
When you compare this to the leaderboard, you see a couple of things. Firstly, Spacey Jane leaps up the table thanks to having had six top 10s, whereas G Flip is somewhat penalised for having seven songs in one year. John Butler Trio and Lime Cordiale are also beneficiaries of looking at polls this way.
Basically, this is the leaderboard through a slightly different lens.
The Hottest Streak
Billie Eilish didn't place in the 2025 countdown, bringing her active streak of eight consecutive Hottest 100s to an end.
But waiting in the wings were Fisher, G Flip, and Lime Cordiale, who all polled in 2025 and now share the record for longest active hot streak, with eight consecutive Hottest 100s (Bring Me The Horizon also had an active streak of seven until 2025, but they failed to poll this year).
And should Fisher, G Flip and Cordiale fail to poll in the 2026 countdown, then Spacey Jane (current streak = 7), The Kid Laroi (6), Dom Dolla (5) and The Rions (5) are ready and waiting to take the crown for Hottest Streak.
The death of the band
As mentioned in this article, the Hottest 100 backs up the idea that bands are dying out. Up until 2004, there were, on average, more than 80 songs featuring bands per Hottest 100. That number has been steadily declining ever since. Here's what the past decade looks like for number of bands appearing on songs:
2016: 63
2017: 55
2018: 46
2019: 39
2020: 48
2021: 45
2022: 46
2023: 32
2024: 34
2025: 39
I've been asked a lot on radio recently to explain the reason for this, and I'd say the two key factors are technology and musical tastes. Changing technology means musicians no longer need a band and an expensive studio to help bring a song to life - you can do it at home by yourself on your laptop. And I don't know if it's causal or a correlation or a coincidence, but musical tastes have veered away from rock and metal (ie. music made by bands) towards pop and hip hop (ie. music typically released by solo artists) in recent years.
While bands such as Spacey Jane, Ocean Alley, Royel Otis, Hilltop Hoods, Playlunch, The Rions, The Dreggs, and Old Mervs had multiple songs in the countdown, it's hard to tell whether they are helping reverse the trend, or whether the trend is merely plateuing.
Aussie, Aussie, Aussie
That article also points out the decline in songs featuring Australian artists, and while the 2025 Hottest 100 reverses the huge drop-off in Aussies from 2024, there's still a long way to go to get back to the halcyon days of the 2010s. Here's the numbers of total Aussie appearances in recent years:
2016: 81
2017: 73
2018: 69
2019: 72
2020: 71
2021: 59
2022: 62
2023: 54
2024: 29
2025: 55
To its credit, triple j added an Australian tab on the voting page this year, effectively encouraging people to "vote Australian". This has potentially helped make 2024 look like a statistical blip brought on by brat summer and Billie Eilish releasing the best album of her career, rather than a nightmarish trend.
Still, the graph for Aussie appearances is a mountain with 2016 as the flag at the pinnacle, and it's been all downhill since. Is this the Tik Tok influence or the rise of the Spotify algorthyhm? It's hard to say, but one fact remains - triple j is still the greatest champion of Aussie music around, and long may it reign.
The Power of #2
One of my favourite random Hottest 100 facts is that Blur's Song 2, a song that runs for two minutes and two seconds, came in at #2 in 1997 (and #22 in the Hottest 100 of the first 20 years in 2013).
This year, it was Keli Holiday's Dancing2 which landed at #2, falling victim to the power of #2. It was Holiday AKA Adam Hyde's second time placing second in the Hottest 100, having already achieved this feat with his other act Peking Duk in 2014.
It's a shame Sombr's 12 to 12 didn't come in at #12 (it was #8). But that's because Fred Again now owns that spot, having placed at #12 for three years running.
Worship at the Church of Women
The previous best run of female artists topping the Hottest 100 was Julia Stone and Kimbra in 2010 and 2011 respectively.
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