“Anna Molly” by Incubus

"Anna Molly" was the lead single from Incubus's sixth album, Light Grenades, in 2006, and it hits hard and fast. The title is a pun on "anomaly", and the song circles a woman who, as Billboard put it, may or may not actually exist.

The band wrote it together, Brandon Boyd, Mike Einziger, Ben Kenney, Chris Kilmore and José Pasillas, and it barrels along on a tight, urgent groove with a chorus that pushes right into the red. The secret weapon is a Marxophone, a fretless zither, adding an odd metallic shimmer you'd never pick out on first listen but would miss if it vanished. There's an acoustic version floating around too.

Its rollout was a mess: it turned up on the Sony Music Store almost a month early, only to be yanked for reasons nobody explained. Radio didn't care. It entered Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart at number 19, got to the top after 10 weeks, and stayed there for five.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.