Foster the People are an American indie-pop band led by Mark Foster, and in 2011 they had one of the most inescapable songs of the year. "Pumped Up Kicks", from their debut album Torches, paired a breezy, whistled hook with unsettling lyrics written from the perspective of a troubled teenager, a contrast that helped it lodge permanently in the culture.
The band are not a one-and-done act in the usual sense. "Sit Next to Me" and "Houdini" both found real audiences, with hundreds of millions of streams between them, and the group has kept releasing music to a loyal following.
But "Pumped Up Kicks" remains a level above. It sits near 2.4 billion plays, while "Sit Next to Me", their next biggest, trails around 467 million. That puts the ratio at about 5.22, just over our 5.0 threshold.
So by our measure Foster the People are a certified one-hit wonder, though only narrowly. Theirs is a borderline case, the kind where one more breakout single would tip them back across the line. For now, a whistled hook from 2011 is still doing more work than the rest of the catalogue combined.