“The Hills” by The Weeknd

The Weeknd dropped "The Hills" in May 2015, the second single off Beauty Behind the Madness, his second studio album, and it sounds like a man pulling the blackout curtains over the pop charts instead of stepping out into the daylight. He wrote it with producers Illangelo and Emmanuel "Mano" Nickerson, with Belly picking up an additional credit, and Illangelo also recorded, engineered and mixed it.

The payoff was outsized for a record this murky and nocturnal. It knocked his own "Can't Feel My Face" off the top of the Billboard Hot 100 and held the spot for six weeks, then became his first diamond-certified record in the US and went diamond in Canada and Australia as well. October brought official remixes, one with Eminem and one with Nicki Minaj.

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