Artist · chart history
Dirty Projectors
Band Brooklyn United States Formed 2002
Dirty Projectors formed in 2002 in Brooklyn, United States. Dirty Projectors has 10 chart appearances on 9 radio countdowns from 7 stations on RockLists, spanning 2009–2025. The most successful song on radio countdowns is “Stillness Is The Move”, which appears on 5 lists with a best position of #4. The station that charted Dirty Projectors most often is 90.9 The Bridge (Kansas City, MO), with 3 appearances. The artist’s biggest year on year-end countdowns was 2009.
Dirty Projectors started in Brooklyn in 2002 as the vehicle for David Longstreth, and through every lineup shuffle since, he's been the one person who's always there. For years the band's secret weapon was Amber Coffman, co-lead singer and guitarist from 2006 to 2013, and the voices around Longstreth have always been the point.
Rise Above in 2007 was a crazy-brave move: Black Flag songs reimagined from memory rather than learned off the records. Then came Bitte Orca in 2009, the breakthrough, with Longstreth, Coffman and Angel Deradoorian trading and stacking lead vocals over guitars that twitch and knot like a puzzle box coming apart in your hands. "Stillness Is the Move" is its slinky, R&B-tinged heart, a vocal that leaps and swoops over a clipped beat. Critics fell hard for it, and the band's audience grew accordingly. Swing Lo Magellan in 2012 was greeted just as warmly.
After Coffman left in 2013, Longstreth turned the project inward, cutting the self-titled Dirty Projectors in 2017, with the aching "Up in Hudson", and Lamp Lit Prose in 2018, largely as studio records. That same year Felicia Douglass, Maia Friedman and Kristin Slipp came in as co-lead singers and turned it back into a live band, and in 2020 that lineup released five EPs. Olga Bell returned in 2024 for the orchestral song cycle Song of the Earth, issued on Nonesuch Records in April 2025, and by late 2025 Longstreth had reshaped the band again as a trio with bassist Karl McComas-Reichl and Grizzly Bear drummer Christopher Bear.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs by Dirty Projectors on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Stillness Is The Move | 5 | #4 | – | 2009 | |
| 2 | Swing Lo Magellan | 1 | #385 | – | – | |
| 3 | Break-Thru | 1 | #48 | – | 2018 | |
| 4 | Up in Hudson | 1 | #47 | – | 2017 | |
| 5 | That's a Lifestyle | 1 | #746 | – | – | |
| 6 | Gun Has No Trigger | 1 | #168 | – | 2012 |
Albums with charting songs
Where each song was first released, from MusicBrainz.
Year-end chart timeline
Combined year-end countdown points per year. Taller bars mean more songs placing higher across more stations.
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