But the year just wouldn’t have felt complete without those late-arriving, chart-crashing smashes, particularly since we ended up getting a handful who proved more than worthy of their position. And of course, it wasn’t just the big songs that enraptured us in 2022 we found plenty of smaller favorites to save to our streaming playlists and inspire our vinyl orders in between those. Luckily for us, the hits showed: first from some of pop’s biggest returning heroes, then from some artists taking the next step towards stardom, some longtime hitmakers we hadn’t heard from in a bit, and some new names we hope to be hearing a lot more from in the years to come.

With 2021’s biggest singles refusing to go away and this year’s listenership seemingly too spread out to elect new consensus hits to replace the incumbents, it was starting to look like we might go the whole calendar subsisting on nothing but reruns. It was a refrain heard throughout the Billboard offices in the first half of 2022: Where are the hits? The slow start for new entries really impacting the Billboard Hot 100 had us all looking left and looking right for the sort of songs we usually take for granted - the kind that slowly (or not-so-slowly) spread to all corners of the culture, connecting every kind of music fan and becoming unavoidable parts of a given year’s experience.

Top tik tok songs may 2022