Lips of an Angel

Hinder released 'Lips of an Angel' as a single in April 2006, off their 2005 debut album Extreme Behavior, co-written and produced with Brian Howes. The song is one long late-night phone call: the singer's ex is on the line, his current girlfriend is in the next room, and he spends four minutes admitting the old flame still wins. Drummer Cody Hanson said the song came out of a real experience and was written in about twenty or thirty minutes — which tracks with how directly it hits its one note.

It became a monster slowly, then all at once. By November 2006 it had climbed to #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #1 on the Pop 100 and Mainstream Top 40 — a post-grunge bar band from the rock charts suddenly sitting on top of pop radio. It topped charts in Australia for seven weeks and hit #1 in New Zealand, and country singer Jack Ingram cut a cover that reached the country top 20 within the year. The RIAA eventually certified the song 4× Platinum — plus another 3 million in ringtone sales, the purest possible measure of a 2006 hit: millions of people paid real money so their phone would play a song about answering the phone.

Hinder never landed another hit that size, which only sharpened the song's status as a time capsule. It lives on as the definitive slow-dance-and-text-your-ex artifact of the ringtone-rock era.