The Best Alternative Chart in Ages?

I feel pretty good about the Alternative chart these days. 

A few weeks ago, I was surprised to calculate that Alternative was the format with the most tempo in the top 10. That week, there was only one slow-but-busy title, “The Line” by Twenty One Pilots. It has since been joined by Gigi Perez’s “Sailor Song,” but the remainder can be characterized as mid-to-uptempo: a nice option to have when the biggest pop song of the last six months is a waltz.

There is a multi-format hit in Lola Young’s “Messy” that radiated from TikTok and streaming to both Alternative and pop formats in the same two months’ time. On CHR, “Messy” is great balance — proof that a pop/rock record can still belong. On Alternative, it feels like a center lane that the format has been looking for.

There is a recent No. 1, Justice f/Tame Impala’s still-growing “Neverender,” that programmers seem legitimately proud of, and that is now beginning a rare sequential crossover to CHR.

After years of complaints about the format being too indie-pop (or too pop, outright), there are more rock titles. Most are from heritage acts, including Linkin Park’s “Heavy Is the Crown,” but there is also the recent success of Badflower’s “Detroit,” No. 1 at Active Rock, then No. 3 at Alternative a few months later. There is a pop-leaning Shinedown title, but the Active single is on some Alternative outlets, too.

There are also more songs that happily blur the line — songs such as Balu Brigada’s “So Cold,” Dexter & the Moonrocks’ “Ritalin,” or Giovannie & the Hired Guns’ “Quitter” that have a crunch that felt lacking from the format a while back. Even some of the Triple-A crossovers (e.g., the Lumineers’ current format No. 1, “Same Old Song” or Sam Fender’s “People Watching”) feel like they have more heft. 

The less-immediate songs, sometimes also radiating from streaming, are still there, but now “Sailor Song” feels like balance, not ballast. There are still songs that the harder-rocking KPNT (The Point) St. Louis isn’t playing, including Justice and two others in the top 10. There are fewer songs that I can’t imagine ever fitting on the Point. On paper, anyway, the balance looks more like the Canadian Alternative format that seemed to cohere in the early ’20s when the American format meandered.

Nine months ago, as a strong summer field of contenders deployed across the Top 40 format, veteran morning man Gene Baxter looked at that week’s chart and declared “the best Billboard Top 10 in Ages.” If this week’s Alternative chart doesn’t yet inspire that kind of excitement, it’s a clear change from four years ago, when there were regular complaints about the format being too poppy, then rudderless. When the offerings are better, the variety seems more purposeful, as it did in the “Jewel-to-Tool” mid-’90s.

Unlike that era, nobody is talking about a new rock revolution yet. And if this is indeed the best stretch for Alternative currents in a while, Justice into “Heavy Is the Crown” is still not what you hear on most large-market Alternative stations, in part because you won’t find them playing two currents in a row. Alternative radio has been rocking more in recent years, but stations did that largely by relying more heavily on library.

In a recently monitored 2 p.m. hour, Mediabase showed most top 20-market Alternative stations playing no more than two current titles (by their definition) per hour. That includes many of the format’s biggest recent success stories — WWDC (DC101) Washington, KITS (Live 105) San Francisco, KTBZ (The Buzz) Houston, KNDD (the End) Seattle, KDKB (Alt AZ 93.3) Phoenix, and KTCL Denver. KPNT, the highest-rated station in February’s PPMs, it should be noted, played three. 

SiriusXM’s Alt Nation, a heavy influence on the format’s indie-pop era, played nine currents in an hour of 18 titles, but with satellite radio’s more defined channels, you won’t hear Linkin Park next to Justice there, either. The only top 25-market station aggressive on new music is WTBV-HD2 (97X) Tampa, Fla., a lower-rated FM translator that played 10 currents in the same hour. (Eight Alternative reporters are FM translators — a throwback to the format’s pre-grunge era of smaller or suburban sticks.)

February showed decent-to-great post-holiday growth for a number of outlets. That being the case, it’s hard to imagine what the driver for a current-driven Alternative format would be, at least during daytime hours. There’s not a series of phenomenal album acts to drive the format as there was in the early ’90s (or even early ’00s), in part because the album isn’t the unit of currency. There’s not a plethora of streaming stories, even though Alternative was the first format 20 years ago where acts broke through streaming.

Yet, at a moment when Top 40 struggles for a consistent stream of even good-sounding mid-charters, much less consensus hits, Alternative would seem to have an advantage in available music at the moment, particularly if labels were willing to develop more songs at both formats in a shorter time frame. I’d be happy to see Alternative radio find the confidence to play one more current an hour in afternoons. I feel we’re no longer at the point when “Like a Stone” by Audioslave or “Father of Mine” by Everclear is stronger than any current you can play against it.

Here’s 97X at 4 p.m., March 5:

• All Time Low, “Monsters”
• Incubus, “Wish You Were Here”
• Black Keys, “The Night Before”
• Mumford & Sons, “Rushmere”
• Culture Wars, “It Hurts”
• Jet, “Cold Hard Bitch”
• X-Ambassadors, “Renegades”
• Coheed & Cambria, “Someone Who Can”
• Franz Ferdinand, “Audacious”
• Justice & Tame Impala, “Neverender”–most of the currents on 97X have a stager declaring “the newest Alternative starts here.” Justice, already No. 1, was an exception. Ironically, it would still likely have a “new music” sweeper on most stations
• Bastille, “Pompeii”
• Cage the Elephant, “Rainbow”
• Panic! At the Disco, “Say Amen (Saturday Night)”
• Declan McKenna, “Champagne”
• Balu Brigada, “So Cold”–also past the “new music” sweeper stage
• Weezer, “Undone (The Sweater Song)”
• Judah & the Lion, “Floating in the Night”
• Myles Smith, “Nice to Meet You”