'Heardle' today: Correct answer and song hints for August 11

We're almost through this week. It's Thursday. Everything is going fine, but the answer to today's Heardle is a song you can't quite pin down. There's no way you can finish out the workweek in this kind of suspense. Thankfully, we're here to help.

The answer will be spoiled below, and you can even play the song. But first, here's some strategy, a few hints, and a little information about the game itself to help jog the answer loose from your brain before we just blurt out the solution.

What is Heardle?

Heardle is a song-guessing game along the lines of Worldle, mixed with the TV gameshow Name That Tune. The game presents a song introduction in the form of six short clips, and the player must guess the song. Clips start at one second, and get progressively longer, eventually totaling a maximum of 16 seconds.

The fewer clips it takes a player to guess the song, the more bragging rights they have when they share their success on social media or in a group chat. So far, the vast majority of the songs have been popular on U.S. and U.K. radio, and all are from the 1960s or later.

Does Heardle have the same creator as Wordle?

No. Heardle was created by a London-based designer named Glenn Angelo, during the February 2022 boom in Wordle derivatives. After its initial viral success, it was acquired by Spotify in July of 2022 for an undisclosed amount. Game functionality was not noticeably different after the change in ownership.

How is Heardle pronounced?

It's pronounced "hurdle," which would seem to explain why our research indicates many people find it online by searching something like "hurdle game," or "hurdle wordle."

Are there any strategies for becoming good at Heardle?

The only way to up your Heardle game is to listen to a lot of pop music. Unlike Wordle, which can reward players for strategy, Heardle is almost a pure trivia game — meaning one either knows the answer or they don't. It may seem like some Heardle puzzles are harder to solve — perhaps because the answer is on the tip of your tongue and you still lose, or because after learning the answer, you feel you could not have been expected to know it. Nonetheless, every Heardle puzzle is equally "hard," because knowing or not knowing something is a binary.

What kinds of songs does Heardle feature?

If you have a look at the complete list of Heardle answers at Pro Game Guides, you'll see some patterns emerge. Answers can be from any decade from the 60s to the present, but recent songs are a little better represented. In the past, perhaps due to being the creation of a U.K.-based music fan, there were occasionally artists most Americans probably have not heard, like Kevin Lyttle. After the Spotify acquisition, artists like Carrie Underwood, who probably aren't well-known to the British, started to appear. But these are by no means clear trends. The only universal criteria seem to be that the songs are all hits, and that they're sung in English.

And now, here come the hints.