The Kingsmen were an American garage-rock band from Portland, Oregon whose raw, ramshackle recording of one song helped lay the foundations of garage rock and punk. "Louie Louie", released in 1963, was a loose, gloriously messy version of a Richard Berry tune, and its famously slurred, near-unintelligible vocal even prompted an FBI obscenity investigation, which only added to its legend.
The band kept performing, but nothing they recorded came close to the cultural impact of "Louie Louie", which became one of the most covered and most iconic rock songs ever made.
On streaming, "Louie Louie" sits near 164 million plays, while their next most-streamed track trails at around three million. That sends the ratio above 47, far past our 5.0 line.
By our measure The Kingsmen are a certified one-hit wonder, with the caveat that their lone hit is a genuine cornerstone of rock history. Their catalogue, on the numbers, is essentially one gloriously sloppy garage anthem, a recording so primal and so influential that it outlived every controversy around it and stands, by an enormous margin, far ahead of everything else they made.