The Chords were an American doo-wop group from the Bronx who made a small piece of music history with one joyful song. "Sh-Boom", released in 1954, is often cited as one of the first rock and roll records to cross over to the pop mainstream, a bouncy, nonsense-syllable celebration that helped open the door for the music that followed.
Their moment was brief, complicated by a name dispute and a competing cover version that outsold theirs, and the group never landed another hit.
On streaming, "Sh-Boom" sits near 236 million plays, while their next most-streamed track trails at around ten million. That sends the ratio above 22, far past our 5.0 line.
By our measure The Chords are a certified one-hit wonder, with the historical caveat that their lone hit was genuinely important, a hinge point between rhythm and blues and the rock and roll era. It is simply that one effervescent, era-defining single carried their whole legacy, standing far ahead of a catalogue that the wider world never had a chance to discover. Few one-hit wonders can claim their single song helped open the door for an entire genre, but on the streaming numbers The Chords remain, all the same, the story of that one bright record.