Billboard lists Knife Party, Flume on decade’s best dance songs

The Australian influence on the global electronic music scene is laid bare on Billboard‘s latest decade-end list of top dance songs.

With 2019 drawing to a close, several publications are putting together numerous ‘best of the decade’ lists, and the latest comes in the form of Billboard’s 60 Greatest Dance Songs of the Decade.

Four Aussie acts have been named, which comes as little surprise considering the headway that our dance acts have made overseas over the last ten years or so.

Coming in at #53 is Alison Wonderland with ‘Good Enough’. The track is the first from her 2018 album Awake, an interesting choice given it wasn’t even released as a single but rather, acts more as an intro to the record.

Billboard lauds the tune as “a dark, frenetic meditation on worthiness and self-esteem, outfitted with the Australian producer’s own cello playing.”

Further up the list at #34 is one of the biggest exports of the decade, Grammy-winning Flume. His 2012 smash hit ‘Holdin’ On’ comes from his debut album, and was an instrumental step in forming the sound he’s become known for globally

“…the sound would earn its own classification entirely as “future bass,” offering a new next step in evolution from the EDM and dubstep frenzy, with less forceful drops and a stronger emphasis on pulsing, swinging synth rhythms,” writes Billboard.

The next entry may be more surprising, as Fisher’s entrance on the scene still feels so fresh. His 2018 track ‘Losing It’ wowed an unsuspecting Coachella crowd, and the rest is history. It lands at a very respectable #26.

Billboard contests, “there’s just something unstoppable about this tune, which turbo-charges tech-house for big tent tastes.”

The highest Aussie entry comes from an act that spawned from two of three members out of legendary trio Pendulum.

Rob Swire and Gareth McGrillen’s Knife Party emerged in 2011, and promptly released a song that would define the act, and the wider electronic scene for a decade to come; ‘Internet Friends’.

“It seems inevitable that a song like “Internet Friends” would eventually come to fruition, serving both as a cheeky commentary on what was happening in the world and also providing a cathartic eruption of electro energy, primed for the main stage at EDC in the heyday of EDM.”