Artist · chart history · #166 in alternative artist polls · #259 in indie & aaa artist polls
The Shins
Band Albuquerque United States Formed 1997
The Shins formed in 1997 in Albuquerque, United States. The Shins has 224 chart appearances on 123 radio countdowns from 43 stations on RockLists, spanning 2001–2026. The most successful song on radio countdowns is “New Slang”, which appears on 54 lists with a best position of #3. The station that charted The Shins most often is CD101 (Columbus, OH), with 32 appearances. The artist’s biggest year on year-end countdowns was 2012.
The Shins started life as a side project, something James Mercer tinkered with in Albuquerque while his other band, Flake Music, was still up and running, and it ended up swallowing everything else. Flake Music were out on tour with Modest Mouse when Sub Pop signed the Shins, and the label put out Oh, Inverted World in 2001 and Chutes Too Narrow in 2003: two records of chiming, sun-bleached indie pop that the critics fell hard for and that sold far better than anything this unassuming usually does.
Mercer's gift is the slightly crooked melody. His songs sound like half-remembered AM radio played back through a bedroom four-track, that high, quavering voice climbing over folk-rock strum and wheezy keyboards, and the early crew around him, Jesse Sandoval, Martin Crandall and Neal Langford among them, gave the whole thing a scrappy, homemade bounce. "New Slang" is the hushed, aching heart of the debut, "Caring Is Creepy" its nervy flip side, and Chutes Too Narrow tightened the screws with "So Says I" and "Kissing the Lipless".
Then the movies came calling. When "New Slang" turned up in Garden State in 2004, the Shins went from dorm-room secret to something people's parents had heard of, and Wincing the Night Away, in 2007, shot to number two on the Billboard 200 and landed a Grammy nomination. "Phantom Limb" and "Australia" carried its brighter, busier sound to a crowd many times the size of the old one.
After that, Mercer cleaned house. He took the band to Columbia Records and let the entire original lineup go, explaining it as a matter of aesthetics, which is about as honest a summary of the Shins as you will find: the band is whatever Mercer hears in his head. Port of Morrow arrived in 2012 after nearly 5 years away, with the wide-open, sunny "Simple Song" out front, and Heartworms followed in 2017. Players have rotated through, Richard Swift and Joe Plummer for a spell, Yuuki Matthews and Mark Watrous in the current band, and home base has shifted to Portland, Oregon, but the voice in the middle has never budged.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs by The Shins on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | New Slang | 54 | #3 | – | 2005 | |
| 2 | Phantom Limb | 39 | #3 | – | 2007 | |
| 3 | Simple Song | 37 | #3 | – | 2012 | |
| 4 | Australia | 24 | #8 | – | 2007 | |
| 5 | So Says I | 8 | #40 | – | 2004 | |
| 6 | It's Only Life | 10 | #6 | – | 2012 | |
| 7 | Kissing the Lipless | 8 | #59 | – | 2004 | |
| 8 | Name For You | 9 | #9 | – | 2017 | |
| 9 | Caring Is Creepy | 7 | #181 | – | – | |
| 10 | Sealegs | 3 | #7 | – | 2008 | |
| 11 | The Great Divide | 5 | #42 | – | 2020 | |
| 12 | Sleeping Lessons | 3 | #376 | – | – | |
| 13 | The Rifle's Spiral | 2 | #71 | – | 2012 | |
| 14 | Cherry Hearts | 2 | #74 | – | 2017 | |
| 15 | Dead Alive | 2 | #77 | – | 2016 | |
| 16 | 40 Mark Strasse | 2 | #52 | – | 2012 | |
| 17 | Half a Million | 1 | #61 | – | 2017 | |
| 18 | So Now What | 1 | #55 | – | 2014 | |
| 19 | Turn on Me | 1 | #577 | – | – | |
| 20 | No Way Down | 1 | #92 | – | 2012 | |
| 21 | Those to Come | 1 | #165 | – | 2004 | |
| 22 | A Taste Of Honey | 1 | #801 | – | – |
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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