The track at #31 on the 2022 Billboard Hot 100 is Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Good 4 U,’ a song that did so well in 2021 that its success bled over into the following year.
At #32 is a track by another young woman, 23-year-old Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Em Beihold. Beihold has had modest success with a few singles thanks mostly to TikTok, but ‘Numb Little Bug’ marked her first appearance on the Billboard charts. The song peaked at #18 on the Hot 100 the week of July 16.
The 30th top-charting song of 2022 comes courtesy of Post Malone, who also showed up at #26. That single found him paired up with Doja Cat, while this one partners him with The Weeknd.
This is a catchy synth-pop song about a truly toxic relationship, fueled by infidelity and sexual revenge. Kudos to Post Malone and The Weeknd for making such icky subject matter go down so easy, thanks to the 80s production influence The Weeknd has mined so well on recent releases.
Pop singer-songwriter Nicky Youre lands at #29 on the 2022 Billboard Hot 100 with his summery bop ‘Sunroof,’ only the second song he has released since 2020. The 23-year-old’s Wikipedia page has more to say about his high school water polo success than his music.
Youre wrote ‘Sunroof’ and collaborated with producer dazy to give it the slick earworm quality that made it a TikTok hit and pushed it to a high of #4 on the Hot 100.
Holding the #28 position on the year-end Billboard Hot 100 is a track called ‘Bad Habit’ by R&B artist Steve Lacy. This song is not to be confused with Ed Sheeran’s ‘Bad Habits,’ which appeared at #13 on the same list.
Like many hits these days, ‘Bad Habit’ owes much of its success to TikTok, where the song’s opening lines scored many a video clip. Footage of a concert where attendees could recite only those first few lines went viral on Twitter. Imagine playing to fans who are familiar with only one of your songs, and only a handful of lines from that song to boot.
In a special year-end edition of ‘What the Kids are Listening To,’ I will spend the next two weeks looking at the Billboard Hot 100 singles for all of 2022.
If I did my job right last year, most of the songs at the top of the Hot 100 will have already appeared on the blog. And indeed that turns out to be the case. The first single on the chart to not yet show up as a Song of the Day is all the way down at #27. I’ll list the first 26 before getting to that one.
Meet Me In Montauk 