In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
The first sound that we hear on “Circles,” Post Malone’s fourth #1 hit, is an acoustic guitar, delicately strummed and slathered in digital reverb. By itself, this isn’t really a surprise. Post Malone loves him some acoustic guitar. Even when he first rose to fame, with the braids and the platinum fronts, Posty kept that acoustic guitar on him. The world was trying to figure out whether he was a rapper or a mercenary pop singer who was merely exploiting rap’s cultural sensibilities, and he just wanted to pull out his guitar and play you some Pearl Jam or some Sublime. He was a sincere dorm-room guitar guy who’d somehow become a rap star while doing hardly anything that could accurately be described as rapping. Nobody knew what to do with this fucking guy. By the time “Circles” dropped, the acoustic guitar was not a left turn. But some of the other things on “Circles” were.
As “Circles” gets going, other instruments show up to the party. Another guitar plays a few zippy little notes, or maybe it’s a keyboard that’s been treated to sound like a guitar. Programmed drums come in, but they’re not doing the trap-triplet hi-hats that you’d hear on so many other hit songs of that era, including the ones from Post Malone. Instead, they’re doing a kind of new wave clompy-stomp thing — slightly awkward, slightly endearing, a tiny bit draggy, absolutely void of syncopation. A bass guitar locks in with those programmed drums — ba-bump ba-bump bump. When Posty’s voice arrives, he doesn’t sing any words at first. Instead, he disconsolately hums along with the guitar-or-maybe-keyboard riff. By the time he gets to the lyrics about a relationship that’s going nowhere, it’s pretty clear that there’s no rap influence anywhere on “Circles.” In terms of instrumentation and arrangement, “Circles” is basically a rock song, but it doesn’t quite sound like that, either. It doesn’t sound like much of anything.
It’s chillwave, basically. Chillwave, a hazily ill-defined genre of hazily ill-defined indie music, came to prominence just a couple of years before Post Malone had his mainstream breakthrough. It was built more on vibes than on anything concrete and definable. You knew it when you heard it. If you were on an indie blog and listening to music that sounded the way you felt when watching a golden-hour makeout scene from an ’80s movie on a crackling and corroded VHS tape, that was chillwave. I had just started working at Pitchfork when the chillwave wave started rolling, and I’m pretty sure we had actual editorial conversations over whether we were going with “chillwave” or “glo-fi” as a genre name. Chillwave won.
Chillwave wasn’t pop music, though it was built on a muffled and nostalgic attachment to childhood memories of pop music. It definitely wasn’t rap, though a bunch of the early chillwave artists were happy to tell you all about how much they loved J Dilla. It wasn’t indie rock because it didn’t rock. The actual music that fit the chillwave tag — Washed Out, Neon Indian, early Toro y Moi — only really had a brief window of critical relevance, but its ripple effects were all over the place. Tame Impala, for instance, seemed like a retro-’70s stoner-rock bongwater-burp band before the chillwave wave hit, and the funky basslines and shimmery synth-cascades on something like “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards,” a song about the same stuck-in-a-rut feeling as “Circles,” elevated them into something else. Maybe that sound hit something deep within Post Malone, too. Maybe he was secretly chillwave the whole time.
Post Malone’s “Sunflower” was basically chillwave, too. Someone made that observation in the comments of my “Sunflower” column, and I was mad that I didn’t think of it myself. A swing and a miss on my part. It’s true. The hallmarks are all there on “Sunflower” — the gluey synths, the puttering drum machines, the guitars that sound like they’re being blissfully pillow-smothered, the bittersweet ache of nostalgia all over everything. Post Malone’s previous chart-topper is a duet with an actual rapper, Rae Sremmrud’s Swae Lee, but Swae doesn’t do any actual rapping on the song. Neither does Post. “Sunflower” is rap by association only, and “Circles” isn’t even that. Instead, “Circles” was widely and incorrectly reported to be co-written by Tame Impala leader Kevin Parker, who was habitually headlining festivals and linking up with A-list rappers at the time. Parker doesn’t actually have anything to do with “Circles,” but you can hear why people might assume that he did.
In the grand historical arc of Post Malone, “Circles” felt like the moment that he finally and completely left rap behind. People always knew that the moment would come, ever since Post stupidly derided the genre and the culture that were making him rich in an early interview. (He apologized and recanted, but certain corners of the internet never forgave him.) That narrative isn’t quite accurate. Post’s early records are bathed in rap production and affectations, and all of his previous #1 hits were collaborations with Black rappers or R&B singers. But Post was always a hangdog, emotive Auto-Tune tunesmith, not a rapper. While people like me were fretting about things like genre and culture, Post intuitively understood and anticipated the way sounds bled into one another in the streaming era, and he rode those smeared recombinations to become one of that era’s biggest stars. “Circles” was a step along the path, not a break from what he’d already been doing.
As I write this, Post Malone has been to #1 on the Hot 100 six times, and “Circles” is his only chart-topper that’s not a collaboration with another big name. That’s telling. Maybe that collaborative focus is why so many people assumed that “Circles” was a Tame Impala co-write — that, along with the fact that it sounds a lot like a Tame Impala song. Post Malone is a tofu type of artist. He absorbs the flavor of everything around him, to the point that it can sometimes be hard to tell what his thing would be on its own. But “Circles” is a pretty good illustration of Post Malone’s actual thing. He’s a gifted chameleon, to the point that he has managed to code-switch seamlessly from rap to country at moments that line up neatly with those genres’ periods of Hot 100 domination. But I don’t think of Post Malone as an opportunist. Instead, he’s a gifted, instinct-driven melodic thinker. He makes simple, emotional music, and he gives it whatever tweaks it needs to resonate in the moment at which it comes out. He’s good at his job. “Circles” is not my idea of a pop masterpiece, but it’s a perfectly solid song for reasons that go beyond its light genre trappings.
So Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker didn’t directly have anything to do with the making of “Circles.” Instead, Post Malone wrote the song with his regular coterie of collaborators, most of whom have been in this column before. Post does that a lot. He cultivates collaborative relationships with people who can move among sounds just as fluidly as he can, and he keeps working with them. Even when he turns to the hidebound culture of mainstream country music and meets its Nashville songwriters and session players on their own turf, he keeps his day ones with him. Again, I don’t think that’s strategy. I think he’s just doing what makes sense.
You should not be surprised to learn that the list of “Circles” co-writers include Louis Bell, Post Malone’s main collaborator over the course of his career. Bell was on an absolutely ridiculous hitmaking streak when “Circles” came out — not just with Post Malone but with pretty much anyone else who lingered near the top of the Hot 100. Bell has already been in this column a ton of times, and we’re nowhere near done with him. Other “Circles” co-writers include Frank Dukes and Kaan Gunesberk, both of whom worked alongside Bell on Camila Cabello’s “Havana.” (Dukes has also been in here for working with Bell on the Jonas Brothers’ “Sucker.”) Billy Walsh, one of Post Malone’s co-writers on “Sunflower,” is in the “Circles” credits, too. These guys all seem to understand the Post Malone thing, and they stick with him. I wonder if they think of themselves as a band. It’s basically what they are.
Other behind-the-scenes professionals were involved with “Circles,” too. The song’s Spotify credits list seven songwriters, including a couple of people who aren’t mentioned on Genius or Wikipedia. One of them is Boi-1da, the longtime Drake producer who has been in this column a handful of times. Another is Allen Ritter, the regular Boi-1da collaborator who helped out on Rihanna and Drake’s “Work.” At this point, I’ve got way too many browser tabs open, and I simply cannot tell you who did what on “Circles.” It’s not really that interesting, is it? But there’s also another person who had something to do with the track’s composition.
Tyler Armes is a producer and multi-instrumentalist from Toronto. He plays bass and keyboards in Down With Webster, a rap-rock band who had some hits in Canada in the late ’00s and early ’10s, and he has some relationship with Murda Beatz, the producer who appeared in this column for his work on Drake’s “Nice For What.” After “Circles” came out and blew up, Tyler Armes sued Post Malone and his collaborators, claiming that he worked on the track and didn’t get credit. In August 2018, Post Malone got together with Armes and Frank Dukes in a Toronto studio to work on some songwriting ideas. One of the tracks that they worked on that day eventually evolved into “Circles,” but Armes is not a credited co-writer on the song. Armes sued Post for credit and royalties, and Post countersued.
Those lawsuits are the only reason that we really know anything about the creation of “Circles.” The song is a huge hit, but Post and his collaborators haven’t exactly told a lot of endearing studio anecdotes about the magical moment that the track came together. Post once told Genius that he was “super inspired working in Toronto with Frank Dukes while sitting down playing the instruments,” which lines up with what we know. He also said that the resulting track has a “super Fleetwood Mac vibe,” and I can see what he means, but hold on, let’s not go crazy. In any case, Armes claimed that he was offered a five-percent stake in “Circles” but that Post Malone’s people revoked that offer when he tried to negotiate for a bigger cut. Post’s lawyers admitted that Armes was there for one early songwriting session but that he didn’t contribute anything beyond “an admittedly extremely commonplace guitar chord progression” and maybe also one non-recorded guitar-melody idea that he sang out loud. The lawsuit kept going for years, and Post settled things out of court in 2023. They didn’t disclose the terms of the settlement. I’m looking at the Spotify songwriting credits for “Circles” right now, and they don’t mention Tyler Armes.
This is all pretty fucking boring, isn’t it? Sorry. I shouldn’t say that. It’s never a good idea for a writer to be like, “This thing that I’m writing, that you’re reading? It’s not interesting. It’s boring. You’re bored. Read something else.” But we’re friends, right? I have to keep it a buck with my friends. The modern construction of big pop songs, where a million people are involved and they sometimes get into legal squabbles over slivers of percentages, is not magical or exciting. It’s deflating, and it reduces something that should be beautiful and ineffable — the creation of a song that moves millions of people — into boardroom talk. We used to have long magazine profiles where stars would brag about the melodies that they heard in their heads while dreaming or on acid trips or possibly both. We don’t get that as often anymore. Instead, we have one songwriter’s lawyers telling another songwriter’s lawyers that the second songwriter only contributed something derivative to the final composition of a track. It’s a buzzkill. When Post Malone doesn’t tell us about the specific experience that inspired a song like “Circles,” that’s all we get. Where’s the romance? Where’s the inspiration? It’s like reading about behind-the-scenes stories of ad campaigns. That’s nobody’s fault. It’s just what happens when accountants and lawyers take over every fucking thing.
Maybe “Circles” was inspired by some specific experience, and maybe it wasn’t. It could’ve been. As on “Sunflower,” Post Malone definitely sings about a romantic situation that happens in real life. This time, it’s the relationship that keeps going beyond its expiration date. Posty’s narrator feels like he’s stuck in a cycle of infinite repeat with someone else, and he’s trying to decide whether or not to break things off: “Seasons change, and our love went cold/ Feed the flame ’cause we can’t let go/ Run away, but we’re running in circles.” He offers some indication that he’s the fuckup in this equation. He claims that he’ll “be the bad guy,” and he diagnoses the issue like this: “You thought that it was special, special/ But it was just the sex though, the sex though.” It’s all vague and nonspecific.
Post Malone sings the toxic-relationship blues on lots of songs, and they’re always vague and nonspecific. Maybe that’s on purpose. Post never really does the pop-star thing where he gets into relationships with other famous people and then sings about those relationships. He keeps his private life private in ways that his peers rarely attempt. I’m only just now realizing that I know virtually nothing about Post’s dating history. He has a daughter, and he was engaged to the kid’s mother at one point, but they’re not together anymore. That’s it. That’s all I know. I could tell you more, but the man’s ex isn’t famous, so that would be prying. It’s not our business because Post hasn’t made it our business. In any case, Post was still childless when he made “Circles,” and the song doesn’t have any winking content about his public image. He sings about being a clueless guy who’s trying to figure things out, and as far as we can tell, that’s exactly what he was when he sang it.
The lyrics aren’t really all that important to “Circles,” anyway. It’s about the melody and the groove, and I find both of them to be sturdy but unspectacular. Post always puts layer after layer of effects on his voice, but he always sounds tragically human through all the Auto-Tune and reverb. On “Circles,” his voice has a melancholy sweetness. He sings about being stuck and unsure what to do, and he translates that feeling into a bunch of sticky little melodies that flow easily into one another. The best part is probably the bridge, where most of the instruments drop out and Post moans that maybe you don’t understand what he’s going through, and we get three nicely times handclaps before the chorus comes rushing in. The production hits softly. You can hear “Circles” a bunch of times without noticing the song, and you can also get it stuck in your head for days at a time. That catchy but easily tuned-out quality is what makes “Circles” an extremely effective streaming-era pop single.
The “Circles” video is medieval-fantasy bullshit with a storyline that I can’t parse at all — something about fire-zombies and a princess with no mouth. Post looks pretty good in armor, though. That video came out in September 2019, a month after Post Malone released the “Circles” single. After the soundtrack hit “Sunflower” came out at the end of 2018, Post released the hard-strutting “Wow,” which is about as close to straight-up rap as he has ever come, and the vaguely emo Young Thug collab “Goodbyes.” Both were hits, but neither of them was as big as “Sunflower” or “Circles.” (“Wow” peaked at #2. It’s an 8. “Goodbyes” peaked at #3. It’s a 7.) The “Circles” video came out on the same day as Hollywood’s Bleeding, Post Malone’s third proper album. That weekend, most of the Stereogum staff was staying at a rented house in Raleigh for the Hopscotch Festival. I remember at least a couple of us listened to Hollywood’s Bleeding on release day, and our reactions were pretty identical: “Hmm. Pretty good.” Chris DeVille wrote about Hollywood’s Bleeding right when it came out, and he called Post Malone “his generation’s Red Hot Chili Peppers, unstoppable and undefinable and unapologetically corny, widely beloved and wildly easy to parody.” Chris is smart.
The album is pretty good! Critics weren’t exactly rooting for Post Malone, but he’d become an undeniable force by 2019, and Hollywood’s Bleeding is some solid big-budget popcraft. It’s moody and epic and full of superstar cameos, from the rap world and from elsewhere. All the guests who show up on Hollywood’s Bleeding — Meek Mill, Lil Baby, Halsey, future Number Ones artists DaBaby and Future and SZA — know that they’re on a big stage, and they bring their A-games. I mentioned this track in the column a few weeks ago, but one Hollywood’s Bleeding standout is “Take What You Want,” which features both Travis Scott and an absolutely on-fire 70-year-old Ozzy Osbourne. (Osbourne’s highest-charting single as lead artist is 1992’s “Mama, I’m Coming Home,” which peaked at #28. As a featured guest, though, Osbourne had already reached #8 with the Lita Ford duet “Close My Eyes Forever” in 1989, and “Take What You Want” reached that exact same chart spot 30 years later. “Close My Eyes Forever” is a 6, and “Take What You Want” is a 7.)
“Circles” didn’t stand out amidst all the noisy Hollywood’s Bleeding collaborations at first, but it steadily rose up the Hot 100 and amassed some huge numbers. Historically, Post Malone had done pretty well at Black radio, but Black radio didn’t play “Circles.” Its sound wasn’t remotely compatible with the other stuff that was in rotation on those stations. On the other hand, pop radio loved “Circles.” The track also got some light burn on alternative rock stations. The big transition took time. In August 2020, about a year after its release, “Circles” reached #1 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart, a place where Post had never previously been. That says a lot. For one thing, “Circles” was pleasant enough to excel in a place where “pleasant enough” was the only real requirement. For another, “Circles” was in radio rotation forever, which meant that the song was on the Hot 100 forever, too.
“Circles” was the #1 song in America for three weeks, which is not an overly long run on top. But in April 2020, “Circles” broke the record for the most weeks that any song had ever been in the top 10 — an absurd 34 weeks. The week before that, “Circles” was in a tie with three other tracks, one of which was “Sunflower.” That paints a sad picture of the Hot 100 in the streaming age, when the charts are suffocatingly stagnant and songs simply never leave the chart’s upper reaches. But it’s not a reflection of the quality of “Circles,” which is a pretty good song. I don’t think “Circles” necessarily deserves to be as big as it was, but “deserve” has nothing to do with it. The single went diamond, and it’s one of many Post Malone singles to achieve that distinction. The man makes hits.
For a minute, it seemed like “Circles” might be the last truly dominant Post Malone hit. After Hollywood’s Bleeding came out, Post Malone headed off on a long arena tour, and he was still out playing shows when COVID hit. After everything shut down in spring 2020, Post put together a band and played a livestreamed set of Nirvana covers that was much, much better than anyone had any right to expect. (“Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Nirvana’s highest-charting single, peaked at #6 in 1992. It’s a 10.) In 2021, Post reached #13 with the stray one-off track “Motley Crew,” and then he kicked off the long rollout for 2022’s Twelve Carat Toothache, his fourth album, by teaming up with past and future Number Ones artist the Weeknd on the electro-pop single “One Right Now.” Given the star status of the two artists involved, it was a little surprising when “One Right Now” only made it to #6. (It’s a 6.)
Post Malone’s first three albums all went quadruple or quintuple platinum, and Twelve Carat Toothache was a total brick by those standards. The LP did have one more proper hit: “I Like You (A Happier Song),” a soft and bloopy back-and-forth with future Number Ones artist Doja Cat. (That song reached #3. It’s another 6.) Even with that song, Twelve Carat Toothache didn’t have anything that resonated on anything like the level of a “Sunflower” or “Circles.” Twelve Carat Toothache had a Fleet Foxes collab, which was fun to think about, and Post went deeper in that direction with the release of his next album, 2023’s relatively folky and downbeat Austin. That one made even less of an impression, and lead single “Chemical” stalled out at #13. It’s a pretty good song, though.
Post Malone’s flop era was not a disaster. He still seemed culturally present, and he established a lot of goodwill as a nice, friendly guy and a generous collaborator. When the world opened back up again, I got used to seeing videos of Posty in the crowd at DIY hardcore shows or hanging out with the bands. People were always happy to see him, and I was always happy to see those videos. Posty started appearing in movies, but only doing small supporting roles in the kind of dumb-guy movies that I love. In Guy Richie’s Wrath Of Man, Jason Statham shoots him in the head. In the Road House remake, he refuses to take on Jake Gyllenhaal in a bare-knuckle fight. In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, he’s the voice of Ray Fillet, a mutated manta ray who just wants to sing. Who could resist this guy? He’s fun to have around.
That kind of goodwill doesn’t always pay off, but it sure did for Post Malone. In 2024, Post performed a nice version of “America The Beautiful” at the Super Bowl, sang duets on two of the year’s biggest and noisiest pop blockbusters, and pulled off an abrupt change of musical direction. He went country. Lots of people went country right around then, but they didn’t all pull it off. Post Malone pulled it off. We’ll see him in this column again.
GRADE: 6/10
BONUS BEATS: Hawkestrel, the band led by former Hawkwind bassist Alan Davey, released an instrumental prog rock version of “Circles” in 2019. Todd Rundgren played guitar on it, and L. Shankar played violin solos. Here it is:
(Todd Rundgren has been in this column a few times as a producer. As lead artist, his highest-charting single is 1973’s “Hello It’s Me,” which peaked at #5. It’s a 6.)
BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here’s Billy Strings and Sierra Hull performing a bluegrass version of “Circles” during a 2020 pandemic livestream:
(Billy Strings doesn’t have any Hot 100 hits as lead artist, but he guested on “M-E-X-I-C-O,” a Post Malone track that reached #83 in 2024.)
BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: Sheryl Crow released a cute acoustic “Circles” cover in 2022. Here she is, playing it live:
(Sheryl Crow’s highest-charting single, 1994’s “All I Wanna Do,” peaked at #2. It’s an 8.)
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. I dare you to dooooo something, I’m waiting on yoooouuu again, so buy the book already.
