The 2010s File Feature
Honest
"Honest" — The Chainsmokers' Brief but Telling 2017 Detour By the summer of 2017, The Chainsmokers had already lived several lifetimes in pop music terms. An…
01 The Story
"Honest" — The Chainsmokers' Brief but Telling 2017 Detour
By the summer of 2017, The Chainsmokers had already lived several lifetimes in pop music terms. Andrew Taggart and Alex Pall had gone from DJs-for-hire to chart-dominating producers to, with their breakout crossover success, something that pop culture did not have a clean category for: electronic artists who were also genuine songwriters, capable of crafting three-minute confessionals that worked equally well on festival stages and in the earbuds of a teenager lying on a bedroom floor at midnight. Their ascent had been almost absurdly fast, and 2017 was the year they began to complicate it.
The Year After Everything Changed
The 2016-2017 period represented the peak of the duo's commercial momentum. "Closer," their collaboration with Halsey, had become one of the longest-running number-one singles in Hot 100 history, spending an extraordinary stretch atop the chart. Their debut album Memories...Do Not Open arrived in April 2017 to enormous commercial expectations. The album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, making The Chainsmokers the first electronic act to achieve that distinction with a studio debut. That success created a particular kind of pressure: the follow-up question every ascendant artist eventually faces, which is whether the momentum can be sustained or whether the audience had simply been waiting to move on.
What "Honest" Was
"Honest" was a track that leaned into the introspective mode the duo had been refining since their early viral success. The production carries the signature Chainsmokers architecture: synthesizers that feel designed to produce a specific longing, a drop that arrives with mathematical precision, vocals that drift between spoken confession and melodic hook. Andrew Taggart handled the primary vocals, as he had done on an increasing number of the duo's more personal releases, which helped position The Chainsmokers as something other than anonymous producers. The song's tone is candid to the point of vulnerability, circling themes of failed communication and the particular strain that fame and its accompanying lifestyle place on personal relationships.
A Measured Chart Appearance
The song debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on August 19, 2017, entering at position 88. The following week it climbed to its peak of 77, where it held for two consecutive weeks, before sliding to 81 in its fourth and final week on the chart. The track spent four weeks on the Hot 100, peaking at number 77 on the week of August 26, 2017. That chart run is notably modest by the standards the duo had set for themselves, though it reflects the reality of releasing music into the wake of your own overwhelming previous success. When listeners have heard something as ubiquitous as "Closer," anything that follows exists in an altered commercial context regardless of its quality.
Electronic Pop's Shifting Terrain
The mid-2010s had been extraordinarily kind to producer-led pop acts, but by 2017 the landscape was beginning to shift. Streaming had fundamentally altered how music was consumed and how chart positions were calculated, and the rise of trap and hip-hop's continued dominance was eating into the market share that EDM-inflected pop had claimed around 2013 to 2016. The Chainsmokers were navigating these changes in real time, and "Honest" represents one data point in a larger story of an act trying to maintain artistic identity while adapting to an audience whose attention was being pulled in new directions.
Where It Fits in the Chainsmokers Story
The Chainsmokers released a significant volume of material during this period, which meant that individual tracks sometimes got lost in the broader conversation about their career trajectory and public image. "Honest" has a place in that story as a track that prioritized emotional candor over commercial calculation, at least relative to some of their more maximalist productions. Whether that trade-off was the right one is a question that listeners continue to answer differently based on which version of The Chainsmokers they prefer.
Put on headphones and let the late-summer ambience of 2017 settle back over you.
"Honest" — The Chainsmokers' singular moment on the 2010s charts.
02 Song Meaning
Confessions in the Mix: The Meaning of "Honest" by The Chainsmokers
The Chainsmokers built their commercial empire on a particular emotional frequency: the ache of modern loneliness, rendered in synthesizers and processed vocals. Their biggest songs captured something that millions of listeners recognized immediately, which is the feeling of being fundamentally disconnected from the people you most want to reach. "Honest" fits within that framework while pushing its themes into territory that feels, if anything, more personal and less constructed for mass consumption.
The Currency of Vulnerability
By 2017, emotional transparency had become a defining feature of pop music's most successful practitioners. Artists who were willing to expose the machinery of their own inner lives found audiences that felt seen in return. The Chainsmokers had been operating in this space since their early viral success, writing songs that used the conventions of dance music to deliver emotional content that was fundamentally about feeling lost. "Honest" extends this approach into questions of authenticity in relationships, circling the gap between what people present to each other and what they actually feel. The title itself is the aspiration, not the description.
Fame, Relationships, and the Cost of Both
The track orbits the specific strain that an accelerated, public life places on private connection. The world the song describes is one where honesty has become difficult not because of bad intentions but because of circumstances: schedules, distance, the distorting effect of public attention on private experience. These themes were personally relevant to Taggart and Pall, who had spent the preceding years watching their social world transform around their success. The song draws on that experience without dramatizing it, which gives the lyrics a flatness that reads as realism rather than confession.
The Production as Emotional Architecture
The Chainsmokers' production choices are never incidental to the meaning of their songs, and "Honest" uses its sonic palette to reinforce its lyrical content. The arrangement builds through familiar EDM structures but arrives at each transition with a restraint that suits the subject matter. A song about difficulty with honesty should not sound like a festival anthem, and this one doesn't quite. The production maintains a coolness, a slight emotional distance, that mirrors the relational dynamic the lyrics describe. That alignment of form and content is more deliberate than it might initially appear.
What Listeners Heard in It
The Chainsmokers' audience had grown large enough by this point that any release they made would find its listeners, and those listeners brought their own experiences to the track. Songs about failed or strained communication resonate because that experience is nearly universal, crossing demographic lines and geographic contexts. The specificity of the 2017 electronic pop production may date the song to its era, but the underlying subject matter does not date in the same way. Difficulty being honest, in relationships and with yourself, is not a condition that belongs to any particular decade.
A Smaller Signal in a Loud Season
Placed against the backdrop of Memories...Do Not Open and the extraordinary commercial run that preceded it, "Honest" registers as a quieter entry in the Chainsmokers catalog. Its four weeks on the Hot 100 and peak of 77 are facts; what they mean depends on what you think the song was trying to accomplish. If the goal was the kind of ubiquity that "Closer" achieved, then the result was modest. If the goal was something more specific, a song that said something true about a particular experience at a particular moment, then the chart numbers are less relevant than what it felt like to listen.
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