The 2020s File Feature
Unholy
Sam Smith and Kim Petras's "Unholy" and Its Week at the Top Two Artists, One Cultural Provocation The pop landscape in the autumn of 2022 was crowded with co…
01 The Story
Sam Smith and Kim Petras's "Unholy" and Its Week at the Top
Two Artists, One Cultural Provocation
The pop landscape in the autumn of 2022 was crowded with competent releases, but very few songs arrived with the particular charge of genuine provocation. Unholy managed it: the collaboration between Sam Smith and Kim Petras had a brazenness that cut through the noise of a busy release season and lodged itself in conversations about music, identity and culture simultaneously. Smith had spent years refining a sound built on soulful vulnerability, their debut album having arrived to enormous commercial and critical attention in 2014 and their subsequent work demonstrating a willingness to continue pushing at the emotional edges of what pop music allows. Petras had arrived as one of the decade's most irresistible vocal presences, her songwriting credits and live performances earning serious critical attention before her collaboration with Smith brought her work to a vastly larger audience. What they created together was something neither could have made alone.
The Three-Week Climb to Number One
Unholy debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on October 8, 2022, at number 3, a remarkable opening position for a song that had not yet accumulated weeks of radio airplay. It spent two weeks hovering at number 2 before ascending to number 1 on October 29, 2022. That four-week journey from debut to summit was a case study in how streaming velocity drives chart movement in the contemporary era. The song then spent 35 weeks total on the Hot 100, a long run that speaks to its sustained appeal across a full season and well into the following year. The YouTube view count of over 291 million added further depth to the picture of its reach.
A Historic Milestone
The chart success of Unholy carried a significance beyond its commercial numbers. Kim Petras became the first openly transgender woman to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100 as a credited artist, a milestone that attracted considerable attention and placed the song at the center of a broader cultural conversation about representation in mainstream pop music. Smith, who uses they/them pronouns and had been publicly open about their gender identity for several years, brought their own history of visibility to the collaboration, and the pairing felt less like a calculated combination of marketable demographics than a genuine artistic collaboration between two people whose public lives had already intersected with similar questions about identity and expression.
The Sound and the Sensibility
The production on Unholy, handled by Cirkut, borrows from the vocabulary of electronic pop and cabaret with equal generosity, creating a track that sounds deliberately theatrical without tipping into self-parody. The verses build a scene of transgression with the kind of specific detail that separates good pop writing from vague generality, while the chorus delivers the release of a hook designed to be shouted across a crowd rather than merely heard through speakers. Smith and Petras trade vocal duties with the ease of two artists who found common creative ground quickly, each bringing their particular quality of voice to the shared material.
What the Numbers Add Up To
"Unholy" spent 35 weeks on the Hot 100, claimed a number-one peak, won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance at the 2023 ceremony, and accumulated nearly 300 million YouTube views. These are the coordinates of a cultural event rather than simply a successful single. The song was argued about, celebrated, condemned in certain quarters and ultimately adopted by a global audience that found in its fearless energy something they needed in that particular autumn. Smith and Petras performed it at the Grammys in a televised moment that itself became a cultural flashpoint, which is the kind of attention that only arrives when a song has already been doing something beyond the usual pop-chart calculations for several months. Press play and you will hear exactly what all the noise was about.
“Unholy” — Sam Smith & Kim Petras's singular moment on the 2020s charts.
02 Song Meaning
The Meaning of "Unholy" by Sam Smith and Kim Petras
The Inversion in the Title
Naming a song Unholy is a deliberate provocation, but the provocation is more nuanced than simple sacrilege. The word implies a standard of holiness from which something has departed, and the song uses that framework to explore the gap between public virtue and private desire. The subject is not religious transgression in any sincere theological sense but the more common human experience of living in two registers simultaneously: the respectable surface and the hidden depth that contradicts it.
Desire and Hypocrisy
The central narrative of Unholy describes someone living a double life, presenting respectability to the world while pursuing pleasure in concealed spaces. This is not a new subject for pop music, but the song's treatment of it is notably non-judgmental toward the subject. The narrator observes rather than condemns, which creates a more complex moral landscape than simple exposure or shame. The people living these double lives are presented as human rather than monstrous, which is both more interesting and more uncomfortable than a cruder moral would produce.
The Theatrical Frame
The production and the performances both lean into theatrical excess, the music-hall quality of the arrangement suggesting a kind of knowing performance of transgression rather than its earnest enactment. This theatricality signals that the song is aware of its own provocations and treats them with a degree of irony. The excess is the point. By overdoing the sensationalism deliberately, Smith and Petras reveal the constructed quality of moral categories like holy and unholy, suggesting these designations are performances as much as they are realities.
Identity and Visibility
The identities of the two artists are inseparable from the song's meaning in the wider culture. A number-one hit by queer collaborators that explicitly plays with the vocabulary of sin and transgression, debuting in a period of renewed political contestation over LGBTQ+ visibility, landed in a charged context and drew energy from it. The song was not primarily an identity statement, but it could not avoid functioning as one in the environment in which it appeared. That dual function, pop confection and cultural artifact, is part of what gave it the staying power to remain on the chart for 35 weeks.
Why the Darkness Was So Danceable
The most revealing thing about Unholy's reception is that it was, above all, a song people danced to. The heavy subject matter was packaged in a beat that demanded physical response, which is one of pop music's oldest strategies for making difficult feelings palatable. You can process the themes of concealment and hypocrisy and desire at the level of intellectual analysis, or you can simply let the chorus do what it clearly wants to do to your feet. Most people who loved the song did some version of both, which is exactly what the best provocations invite.
→ More from the 2020s File
View all 2020s hits →
Keep digging