Tonight, Annie Mac hosted her regular Radio 1 show ‘Future Sounds With Annie Mac’ as she counted down to her pick for the Hottest Record of the Year. After asking fans to vote via Twitter for their favourite song out of 20 incredible options, the winner was announced following a playlist of tracks.
Kicking off the show was SZA featuring Ty Dollaa $ign with ‘Hit Different’, and next came Aitch and AJ Tracey’s ‘Rain’, as well as music from Headie One, Laura Marling, Billie Eilish, Fontaines D.C., Arlo Parks, and more. Many listeners Tweeted in their thoughts as they awaited the end of the set to discover the Hottest Record of the Year.
Mac shared interviews with some acts throughout, speaking to Romy, who said of beginning her solo career apart from ‘The XX’ “It’s been great, it’s a new experience. It’s fun to make some decisions, and meet some new people, new collaborators, and just write a more personal story.”
Franky Wah, creator of ‘Come Together’, said, “I think if I were to sit in the studio and try and make the record for the time it was going in, it wouldn’t have come out like ‘Come Together’ did.”
Coming up in third place was IDLES for popular song ‘Model Village’ from their latest album ‘Ultra Mono’. The release was met in September with praise from fans and critics, while the single was the final track to be shared before the full album came out. The ‘Model Village’ music video currently stands at 523,000 views, projecting comical cartoon animations to match the wild rock sound.
The runner up of the evening was ‘Bad Friend‘ by Rina Sawayama from her debut album ‘Sawayama’. The singer commented, “It’s one of the most personal songs I’ve ever written, really. On the morning of the session that I wrote it, I checked in with an old friend that we’d actually fallen out with. When I say ‘checked in’ – I kind of stalked her on Facebook, and realised that she’d had a baby. I hadn’t known anything about, between the time we fell out to now, her having a baby. I just felt like a bad friend.”
Finally, the confirmed Hottest Record of the Year was ‘Obey‘, the collaboration between Bring Me The Horizon and Yungblud. One of the most popular tracks this year, the single has gained over 10 million views on YouTube and a whopping 25 million Spotify streams.
— BBC Radio 1 (@BBCR1) December 10, 2020
Lead vocalist of Bring Me The Horizon Oli Sykes appeared live on the show in a full-length interview to discuss the win. He said, “The night we released it, and premiered it, the hype felt tangible and there was so much excitement around it.” Yungblud also spoke to Mac, saying, “Bring Me The Horizon were such a massive part of my soul, really, as an artist, and discovering who I was.”
