Songs Like Not by Big Thief — What an Intensity of 80 Actually Selects For
By Dan Cohen · Published 2026-09-09
We are going to show our working on this one, because the result looks wrong. Not reads intensity 80 out of 100, dynamic range 8, 90 BPM, with frequent sudden changes — and the records returning the same figures include Gasolina and Come Together.
The method is not broken; it is narrow
Intensity on our scale is a measure of sustained pressure, not of distortion, sincerity or genre. A reggaeton single from 2004 and a seven-minute guitar song from 2019 can apply the same pressure for the same duration. When they do, they land in the same band, and no amount of it-feels-wrong will move them out of it.
What our numbers do not encode is what the pressure is for. That is the gap this page sits in, and pretending otherwise would make the list less useful rather than more.
The measured band
- World Wide Suicide — Pearl Jam, 2006. Intensity 81, dynamic range 8, 96 BPM. The one entry that transfers on almost every axis at once, including the guitar-led build, and the place to start.
- Norf Norf — Vince Staples, 2015. Intensity 80, dynamic range 8, 90 BPM — identical on all three.
- After Hours — The Weeknd, 2020. Intensity 80, dynamic range 8, 87 BPM.
- Panic! — Chika, 2020. Intensity 80, dynamic range 8, 94 BPM.
- Come Together — The Beatles, 1969. Intensity 80, dynamic range 8, 84 BPM. An 80 for this recording will strike some readers as too high; it is what our measurement returns, and we have not adjusted it to taste.
- Famous — Kanye West, 2016. Intensity 80, dynamic range 8, 85 BPM.
- Money in the Grave — Drake, 2019. Intensity 80, dynamic range 8, 85 BPM.
- Gasolina — Daddy Yankee, 2004. Intensity 80, dynamic range 8, 90 BPM.
The honest recommendation
If you came to this page after the solo on Not and you want another guitar record that does that, take World Wide Suicide and disregard the rest. One good answer beats eight technically-correct ones.
If you came because you wanted to know what else in recorded music sustains that much pressure for that long, the whole list is the answer, and the fact that it crosses from Liverpool to San Juan is not a bug in the measurement. It is the measurement telling you that intensity was never a property of genre.
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.