Welcome to Sleeper Hit Support Group, a column diving into the song currently occupying the bottom spot of the Billboard Hot 100.

In a pop landscape that asks more questions that it answers, I'm setting out to answer three questions about each of these songs: how it got here, if the song is good, and where it's going. In this 100th spot we'll find unlikely ascents, falls from grace, and resurgences of hits from bygone eras.

Today, we're looking at a song rumored to be about 2026's chart queen, "Sunburn" by Tucker Wetmore.

How did it get here?

Before I say anything else, it is really something that Tucker Wetmore is this guy's real name, and what a shame it is that Tucker Wetmore is a nondescript country singer and not a drag queen.

Anyways, 26-year-old Tucker Wetmore was born and raised in Kalama, a teeny tiny town of <3,000 people in southwestern Washington. While he taught himself piano as a kid, he had no intention to pursue music. He went to college for business and IT on a football scholarship, but dropped out right before the end of his freshman year after breaking his leg.

"I moved back home, got surgery, started working at a coffee shop, and I remember sitting my mom down about six months after I got home, and I said, 'Mom, I’m feeling super lost, I don’t know what I’m doing in my life,'" he told Country Swag in 2024. He recalled that she said “’well, why don’t you go sit down in front of the piano, that used to be your vice, your therapy, maybe that will strike something.’”

Something did, in fact, strike, as Wetmore decided to bet on himself and move to Nashville in.... 2020. COVID protocol in Tennessee was pretty lenient, so he found himself going out a ton and meeting new friends. At some point around this time he'd meet Rakiyah Marshall, Wetmore's now-manager and the founder of the all-female boutique artist development and publishing company Back Blocks music.

After teasing it to his cult following on TikTok, Wetmore's proper debut single "Wine Into Whiskey" immediately earned him his Hot 100 debut, and the song would bounce around the bottom half of the chart for ~four months. The track encapsulates everything wrong with the Morgan Wallen era of mainstream country: painfully trite lyricism and trap drums.

"Whiskey"'s follow-up "Wind Up Missing You" remains Wetmore's biggest hit by far, peaking at #31 on the Hot 100 at the start of 2025 after a nine month climb. While it's more of a traditional country song, a listen-through of this one made me realize how much I hate this guy's voice. The nasally timbre he's got going on is just so deeply unpleasant to listen to, and with sparser instrumentation it's much harder to ignore.

After the success of those singles, Wetmore signed an additional deal with UMG Nashville in partnership with Back Blocks (all his music is credited as being released via Back Blocks). From the reports in Nashville trade publications the extent/functionality of UMG's involvement is pretty unclear, but if I had to guess it's probably some combination of extra financial backing and distribution.

After a quick contribution to the Twisters (2024) soundtrack, Wetmore began to roll out his debut (and as of writing, only) album What Not To, and I cannot for the life of me understand why they omitted the word "do" at the end of the title. It's not any sort of play on words or abstract question (on the cover art there are two arrows pointing to "not"); it just makes zero sense.

Stupid title notwithstanding, What Not To spawned the hit "Brunette," a uniquely irritating song about trying to find a good-ol' brunette girl after being burned one too many times by those nasty, deceitful blondes. It barely surpasses the two-minute mark and it's 80% chorus.

After touring What Not To, Wetmore got back in the studio for the Sunburn EP, which came out at the very end of July after its titular single had already began gaining some momentum.

With all that said...

Is the song any good?

Look, I can't say I'm predisposed to enjoy a lot of the country music that happens to keep coming up in this column, but "Sunburn" is some true bottom-of-the-barrel doodoo dogshit. As far as I can tell, the only reason this song is getting any sort of attention is because a bunch of numb-nuts on TikTok that can't bother to log onto google dot com to get their question answered think this song is about Ella Langley, citing their run ins at various events and parties.

"Sunburn" is not about Ella Langley, not because it's about a different girl, but because Wetmore did not write this song. Not only did Wetmore not write the song, he seemingly had zero input in the creative process whatsoever, as he is not credited for anything besides his vocal performance. I couldn't figure out whether the song was written for him to sing specifically, but it's so lyrically impersonal that it could really go either way.

Daniel Ross, Ryan Hurd, and Jaxson Free are "Sunburn"''s actual songwriters, and all three have been peers in the Nashville song machine for varying amounts of time. Free has several credits writing for former column subjects Kane Brown and Jelly Roll, Hurd has his own music career but with a couple writing credits for heavy-hitters like Blake Shelton and Luke Bryan, and Ross is an in-house songwriter/producer for Taylor Swift's former label Big Machine in addition to having written a handful of Morgan Wallen songs.

While “Sunburn” is pretty transparently about sex, nothing about the song is sexy. Wetmore’s vocal delivery sounds disinterested, the song is frustratingly compositionally derivative, and the way the pronunciation of the word “disturb” is altered in the chorus to rhyme with “deeper” is egregious. Even the turn of phrase that inspired the title — “Your body on mine like a sunburn” — barely makes sense and isn’t the least bit sexy.

Where is it going?

Today is Labor Day, marking the unofficial end of summer. The time for this song to pick up much more momentum is further in the rearview every day. Maybe he can continue riding off of this association with Ella Langley while she’s still the girl of the moment, but it’s not like the music is doing him much justice. Maybe he can pivot to drag.