The votes have been counted and the winner of the Hottest 100 of 2024 has officially been crowned – Chappell Roan with her monstrous, sapphic earworm, ‘Good Luck, Babe!’.
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With the most number of votes in the history of the Hottest 100, the Midwest Princess dominated the list as Australians overwhelmingly declared that she’s the It Girl of the year.
The number of votes clocked isn’t the only landmark fact about Chappell’s win. ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ was her only eligible track for voting and her only song in the countdown, which makes her the first solo female artist to win a Hottest 100 with her sole entry.
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It’s the first time we’ve seen an artist make their countdown entry (and Hottest 100 debut) at the top of the list since The Wiggles took out the win in 2021.
There’s only one other artist on this extremely particular two-punch win honour board – Denis Leary with ‘Asshole’ in the first annual countdown in 1993.
This win also cements Chappell in a few other coveted groups of Hottest 100 winners.
She joins those who have won with a single entry like The Cranberries (1994), Spiderbait (1996), Augie March (2006) and The Rubens (2015).
Chappell also joins the group of artists who won in their debut year like Oasis (1995), Vance Joy (2013), Queens Of The Stone Age (2002) and – in a weirdly wonderful coincidence – your 2004 Hottest 100 winners, Franz Ferdinand.
And then there’s solo women who have topped the countdown. Chappell Roan now joins Doja Cat (2023) and Billie Eilish (2019) in that lucrative club.
Released as a standalone single in April 2024, ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ brought the baroque pop of Chappell Roan to the masses in Australia and across the world. We shouted it out as a track that you needed to hear, noting it was like Lady Gaga meets Kate Bush draped in Shakespearean costuming.
Chappell noted the track would be the “first song of the next chapter” in an email to fans, officially shifting away from her 2023 era for her debut album, Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess.
“I’m so excited to see where pop is going at the moment,” Chappell told Drive’s Abby and Tyrone that month.
“’Good Luck, Babe!’ is like an anthemic synth-pop song, and I’ve always been attracted to that. So I think it gets really dangerous when you’re like ‘Ooh this is working, this is obviously what people want’ and just keep doing that over and over and over again.
“What I did with ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ was I just wrote a song that I loved. And that is going to be the blueprint for everything else. It inspires me to be like ‘Oh! I can have success with something that I love’.”
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Chappell Roan really is your favourite artist’s favourite artist. With our Hottest Seat this year, we found out that G Flip, Spacey Jane, The Beaches and DICE all had for ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ in their Top 10 shortlists.
But it’s Troye Sivan who holds the bragging rights for loving her the longest. In 2014 – a whole decade ago – Troye tweeted that he “had a 16-year-old girl on repeat for 2 months” with a link to a now-removed video. Fans in the replies were likening her to Adele, Lana Del Rey and Lorde.
That teen was Chappell Roan.
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“All of my numbers started going up,” Chappell said.
“We couldn’t believe it. I remember meeting him and being like ‘Wow, this is a celebrity. This is amazing’.”
With 14 festivals under her belt this year alone – casually kicked off with Coachella and ended with Austin City Limits – it’s been a busy time for this Midwest princess. We can only imagine what’s in store for her in 2025 with her blueprint in her repertoire.
And remember how Chappell and Franz Ferdinand were in the debut winners club together? In another gorgeous moment of kismet, our 2004 winners put their own spin on the 2024 top song just two months before the countdown.
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What a premonition, huh?
