Songs Like… Every Guide, Mapped by Measured Intensity

By Dan Cohen · Published 2026-09-05

We measure every recording in our library on the same physical properties — how intense it is from 0 to 100, how far it travels between quiet and loud, how abruptly it moves, how hard the voice pushes. This page arranges our fifty-nine “songs like X” guides by where the seed song lands on that scale, so you can start from the weight you actually want rather than from a genre.

The striking thing, once they are laid out this way, is how little genre predicts position. Every band below contains records that would never share a shelf.

The quiet floor — intensity 12 to 20

Near the absolute bottom of nineteen thousand measurements. Nothing here will startle you; most of it barely changes volume at all.

Found here: a Lorde song measures quieter and flatter than the piece of minimalist classical music people put on to fall asleep to.

Gentle — 22 to 35

Still soft, but with something moving underneath. This is where most of what people call “sad music” actually sits.

Found here: the Xtal cluster — Talking Heads, Leonard Cohen, Nujabes, Daft Punk, Beyoncé and Air all return intensity 30 with no sudden changes. And the honest limit of all this: Nutshell’s closest numerical match is a cheerful Taylor Swift song, which is where measurement stops and meaning begins.

The warm middle — 38 to 49

The most crowded part of the catalogue, and the hardest to describe: music with real weight that is not trying to overpower you.

Found here: the Moonlight Sonata and Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On both measure 38. Massive Attack’s Teardrop and Radiohead’s How to Disappear Completely are identical on all three headline numbers.

Driving — 52 to 65

Where a record starts moving a room. Wide dynamic ranges, forward motion, voices that push.

Found here: the busiest single number in the catalogue. At intensity 53 with a dynamic range of 7 sit Dancing On My Own, Fela Kuti’s Zombie, Radiohead’s Lotus Flower, Billie Jean, Heart of Glass, Sweet Dreams, In Bloom and a Basement Jaxx single — simultaneously.

Heavy — 66 to 84

Force, and usually a long climb to get there. Note that our heavy tag measures weight, not distortion — which is how it lands on Adele as readily as on Rammstein.

Found here: November Rain reaches a dynamic range of 10, the ceiling of that scale, and only one other record matches it — Comfortably Numb, at the identical 60 BPM.

The ceiling — 87 to 99

There is very little air above these.

Found here: just 119 of our 19,209 recordings register extreme sudden changes, our top volatility value — under one percent. King Crimson, Queen’s The March of the Black Queen and When the Levee Breaks are the three that sit in this band. And Killing in the Name, at 99, is measurably less volatile than the songs around it: relentless rather than erratic.

How these lists are built

Each guide picks its recommendations by intersecting measured proximity with a shared mood tag. Proximity alone is not enough — on the numbers alone, Portishead sits next to Iron Maiden and an Alice in Chains dirge next to three cheerful pop songs. Requiring a shared mood is what turns a coincidence into a recommendation. Every figure on every page was read from our own measurements, and where the data cannot support a claim, the page says so.

If you would rather browse by feeling than by number, start with our tools, or read the songs that measure the same from opposite worlds.

Intensity figures describe the specific recordings we measured; other versions of the same song will differ. Mood tags are our own classification. Figures are our own measurements, read from the public API at build time. The genre and era spread is a consequence of measuring sound rather than style — it is not a claim that these artists resemble each other in any other way. No lyrics are reproduced.

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