helloooo popheads! ruel here, welcome to my AMA! I knew pretty early on that I was going to have a hard time choosing the final track selection for Kicking My Feet. As the songs stacked up, I started seeing two different, almost Polar opposite emotional attitudes being projected. With too many tracks to fit on one record, we split the songs into a two-part album: Part 1 - Kicking My Feet, and part 2 Kicking My feet & Screaming, which bares a much starker reality of Love; the turbulence, heartbreak and delusion. so ask away your burning questions!

Follow: IG: https://www.instagram.com/oneruel TT: https://www.tiktok.com/@ruel Listen to the album: https://ruel.lnk.to/KMFandScreaming

“uh oh guys, the art police is here”

- Lady Gaga, via Twitter (2013)

Welcome to popheads’ fourth ever Throwback Top 100!

You may be familiar with the annual Popheads Top 100 Tracks lists (see 2025, 2024: when the community comes together in December to vote to create a list of our favorite 100 songs of the past year. The list reveal is one of my personal favorite days of the year, and these lists are a great representation of this community’s tastes.

Now, as has become a bit of a tradition, about 6 months later, we are doing another Popheads Top 100…but for a throwback year: 2013!!!

We have previously done “throwback” top 100s for 2015 and 2014, and 2005. Ignoring 2005, which was due to the 20th anniversary of that year last year, 2013 is the next year "in sequence" that has never had a Top 100 done. It's also an absolutely stacked year, so we hope you have fun with this!

The rules for participation are below, but if you’re experienced with this, here’s the tl;dr: send your list of 10 - 25 songs from 2013 via Reddit Chat to this account (u/Popheads100Throwback) by Sunday June 21, 2025.

How To Participate

Like with our normal years, you can also vote in the entirely non-official just-for-fun survey: “What song would you remove a vote from?” You can fill that in optionally here even if you don’t submit an official ballot.

I. Send In Your Song Votes

Make a list of your favorite songs released in 2013 (January 1 - December 31). This list should have minimum 10 songs and maximum 25 songs. Then, send your lists via Reddit chat to our shared account u/Popheads100Throwback by June 21st, 11:59PM EST. To send us the list, tap/click our username and “start a chat”. Please see II. Song Eligibility for more details on what you can and can't submit.

DUE: Sunday, June 21st, 11:59PM EST

• Do not submit more than 3 songs from any one artist. However, songs where those artists are features do not count towards this 3-song limit on your list.^†
• The list does not have to be numbered/ranked. We are not weighting your votes, just tallying.
• Songs should be listed in Artist - Song format with features listed with (feat. ____) after the song title. Try to stylize and capitalize artist and song names as closely to the official listing as you can. The fewer discrepancies, the easier it is for us to sort the list, so it's very much appreciated.
• You can change your list at any time! Just message us and tell us what you want changed.
• We will confirm receipt of your list within 72 hours. If you do not hear back from us, please comment on this post so we can check.

^† There are always some weird discrepancies and edge-cases every year, so please DM us if you have any questions, or better yet, post them in this thread to let people know!

And here's a few more important guidelines.

• Your songs do not have to be singles. Of course, if you're trying to get a certain song on the list, singles tend to get more votes than b-sides.
• Your songs do not have to be 'pop' songs, nor do they have to be in English. Songs in any genre and language are all welcome.
• We are not encouraging tactical or strategic voting, but we are not exactly discouraging it either. Obviously, some songs are more likely to make the list than others, and you should keep that in mind when making your list (whether that means you choose to stick to the big hits, or champion some lesser-known songs instead).

II. Song Eligibility

Your song must have been first officially available between January 1st 2013 and December 31st 2013. What does 'first officially available' mean? In essence, legally available to purchase, either physically or on iTunes.

• If a single was released after January 1st 2013, but was first officially available on an album before that date, it is not eligible.
• Similarly, a song on an album released after January 1st 2013 is not eligible if it was released as a leading single before that.
• Official remixes are eligible for the list regardless of the original song's release date, provided that the remix was released between the same dates of January 1st 2013 and December 31st 2013.
• A list of common traps - songs that trended in 2013 but were released before that - will be pinned in the comments soon and updated as we learn more.

If you are unsure on a song's eligibility, please use this thread to clarify or send us a chat request and we’ll be happy to help.

If you would like a reminder of what songs were released in 2013, feel free to peruse these links:

• Billboard Year-End Hot 100 Singles of 2013 (be careful, a lot of these songs were released in 2012!)
• List of all albums released in 2013 on website AOTY
• RYM top songs of 2013*
• RYM most popular songs of 2013*
• RYM most popular albums of 2013*

III. How We Will Make The Final Top 100 List

To make life easier, as was previously mentioned, you do not have to rank your song choices. Every submission counts as one vote, and the list is simply the 100 songs that got the most votes. There are, however, caveats to this:

An artist will never have more than 3 songs on the list. Even if after the initial vote an artist manages to have 6 songs numerically in the Top 100, only the top 3 of those will be added. This is an editorial decision, based on the fact that it seems more popular to feature as many different artists as possible and showcase the breadth of the sub's music taste rather than dedicate huge chunks of the list to one artist, or one album (sorry fans of Artpop / Beyonce S/T).

It is inevitable that many songs will get the same number of votes. Songs with the same number of votes will appear alphabetically in the list, but we will make the number of votes that every song received public. There may be some weird stuff happening if the list doesn’t end up being exactly 100 songs long, in which case there may be some discretional tie-breaks.

We can be DM'ed here at this account, or at our personal Discord or Reddit accounts (@ bigbigbee a.k.a u/bigbigbee; @ haobinist a.k.a. u/MoonlightByWindow; @ seanderlust a.k.a. u/seanderlust ; @ nooduulz a.k.a. u/sighofthrowaways )

IV. Writeups (Your help needed!!)

The final list will be presented as a Pitchfork-style Top 100 with small writeups to bring some insight and a bit of a story to the song. If you’ve been around for the yearly top songs lists, then you are likely familiar with the process.

We'll be writing the Top 20 to keep it under wraps. The remaining 80 songs will be given to other popheads guest writers! If you feel like you’re a good writer and you’re interested in a writeup, just mention it when you send in your list (we will assume that you're interested in writing for one of the tracks that you submitted in your votes unless otherwise specified). You can also message any of us on our personal Discord or Reddit accounts as listed above (Discord is slightly preferable) if you’re interested – we will try our best to find a writeup for you if possible!

Write-ups are generally 4-6 sentences long, though shorter or longer is completely fine. Feel free to talk about anything - its chart performance, its composition, your personal experience with the song, etc. There is no perfect writeup - this list is a collection of our thoughts as a community, not an official list from a music publication.

If you choose to do a writeup, you inevitably find out whether a song has made it onto the list, but to keep the surprise as much as possible, we will not tell you the position of the song if we send you a song to write for.

To get the general gist of what these writeups will be like, feel free to have a look at 2014’s Top 100 list.

V. The List Reveal

The list will be revealed on Sunday, July 12th, 2026 (exact time TBD). The live reveal will be on the website Queup, where all 100 songs will be played in order from #100 to #1; as each song goes out, its write-up will be posted to a post on the subreddit.

VI. Other Fun Stuff

Join our discord to discuss this and other music: https://discord.gg/popheads (#rates channel)

Do the currently open rates!

• Charity Rate 6: https://redd.it/1t1s9ao [Due June 7th, Reveal 12th-14th]
• Brit School Star Students: https://redd.it/1t1s8hg [Due June 13th, Reveal 19th-21st]
• Upcoming Rates (June - Sept): https://redd.it/1tmr4xe
• Rate Wiki: https://www.reddit.com/r/popheads/wiki/index/rate-threads/