Top Ten Songs from the 2010s that Appeared on a 2020s Studio Album
It's a situation that happens multiple times a year: if your name isn't Taylor Swift or Beyoncé, the promotion phase for your album usually takes a few months. In that timespan, you release singles that are gonna appear on your upcoming record to hype it up. With albums that are scheduled to come out early on, maybe January to March, it's not unusual to have at least some, if not all of the singles released in the previous year. But what if the respective two years mark the turn of one decade and another? What if we have albums that shaped the sound of the new era, but contain songs that will never appear on decade retrospectives later on, because they dropped too soon?All of this and more is what this list is about: songs from 2020s albums that were already released in the 2010s.
Despite having become the biggest hit of 2020 on a global scale, once it hit its commercial peak, "Blinding Lights" shaped the entire era of the early 2020s with its '80s revival. It was already released in 2019, unlike its mother album "After Hours" (his best one so far), which arrived in 2020.
"Salt" was one of the first-ever released songs under the Ava Max moniker, and it's even older than her breakthrough hit "Sweet but Psycho". It had been initially dropped on SoundCloud earlier in 2018. Even if we're only taking its belated official commercial release into account, the single came out in 2019. It became the album's second-biggest hit, at least in German-speaking Europe. After many delays, Max's debut album "Heaven & Hell" dropped in 2020.
Although the brilliant title track and opening song of Dua Lipa's milestone 2020 album "Future Nostalgia" is rarely considered one of its singles between all the other hits, it was already released for download and streaming in December 2019. This indicated what we would later get to know firsthand: "Don't Start Now" was merely the tip of the iceberg.
"Sweet but Psycho" was Ava Max's mainstream breakthrough, topping the charts for multiple weeks across pretty much all of Europe after its 2018 release. In the following year, it would climb to number 10 in her home country, the USA. However, her debut record "Heaven & Hell", the mother album, would not see the light of day until 2020, over two years after the drop of its biggest hit.
"Don't Start Now" marks the beginning of a new era for Dua Lipa. This was the moment when she evolved from a talented singer who made solid but somewhat anonymous late 2010s pop to the visionary leading figure of female pop of the early 2020s. It's quite a leap. "Future Nostalgia", the era-defining album that made this possible, came out early in 2020. However, its lead single had already hit the stage in 2019, giving a preview of the retro-futuristic firework that would follow.
"So Am I" was dropped many months after "Sweet but Psycho", probably because the impact of her blockbuster breakthrough song was still in full effect. Nevertheless, arriving in March 2019, that was still far before her often-delayed 2020 debut album "Heaven & Hell" that contained both songs.
The comic book-inspired video of her stomping disco anthem "Torn" was one of the career highlights of Ava Max. However, the song itself, for reasons unknown, remains arguably the most overlooked single of her debut album "Heaven & Hell". This is strange, considering it was even widely released as a physical single.
Interestingly, the two-track CD featured "Salt" as a B-side, which would become her next released single. Despite being the only one without a music video, it would become the second biggest hit of the album. All of this happened in 2019. "Heaven & Hell" came out in 2020.
German-English synthwave singer Nina released her sophomore album "Synthian" in 2020. It might as well be called a collaboration album as all songs except one credit producer LAU as a featured artist. One of its absolute highlights, the smooth, hypnotic, mid-tempo, neon-flavored pop track "Automatic Call", was already dropped as a single the previous year.
Katja Krasavice became famous as the "Sex YouTuber" of Germany, where she would openly talk about and embrace different forms of sexuality. From 2017 to 2018, she decided to record three novelty songs for fun, all of which proved to be commercial successes despite being critically panned.
However, in 2019, something happened: She quit YouTube and focused on becoming a proper music artist. Three number-one albums and four number-one singles later, we can say it worked. "Casino" is the fourth and best single of her debut album "Bo$$ B - h". This album saw the light of day early in 2020, before we knew that a pandemic would shape our lives for the next few years. Its promotion, including the singles, began in 2019, right after quitting YouTube.
The Newcomers
It appears on the tracklist on the album Jordi, which released in 2021, 2 years after this. It was a non-single until it got featured on the tracklist.
"Senza Vedervi," an Italian-language song by German singer Gío, might take the cake as the longest cross-decade gap between single and album, at least on this list. While the song was dropped as early as 2016 as Gío's debut single, his debut album "Mirrors & Smoke" would not come out until 2021.