Beach House are a case where our measure clashes hardest with critical reputation. The Baltimore dream-pop duo, Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally, are one of the most acclaimed acts of their generation, with a deep, consistent catalogue beloved by critics and devoted fans. They are not a one-hit wonder in any normal sense.
But streaming has its own logic. "Space Song", from their 2015 album Depression Cherry, became a sleeper phenomenon years after release, drifting across TikTok and playlists as a kind of universal mood, and it now sits near 1.6 billion plays.
The rest of their catalogue is rich, with "Silver Soul" and "Master of None" both pulling around 300 million streams. Even so, dividing "Space Song" by their second biggest gives a ratio of about 5.24, just over our 5.0 line.
So by our strict, numbers-only measure, Beach House technically register as a certified one-hit wonder, narrowly. We flag it precisely because it is misleading: this is a celebrated album band whose one song found an outsized second life online, pulling just far enough ahead to tip the maths.