Owl City — Fireflies

Adam Young's bedroom-electronica breakthrough is back on the global charts today, appearing across 87 country and platform charts after a two-month absence. Written during bouts of insomnia in Owatonna, Minnesota, the track spent two non-consecutive weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 in 2009, per Genius — the only Owl City song ever to top the chart, and a defining artifact of the era when a single laptop producer could out-stream the majors. The song's glockenspiel-and-vocoder shimmer has aged into a nostalgia object for the millennials who were teenagers when it broke, and its late-summer imagery tracks neatly to the northern-hemisphere season. Notably, despite its ubiquity, "Fireflies" was never anchored to a major film sync — its endurance is pure earworm. Broadly charting today on that strength alone.