The 100 Best Songs of 2019

The tracks that defined the year, starring Billie Eilish, Thom Yorke, Normani, Bad Bunny, and more
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Illustration by Drew Litowitz. Images via Getty Images.

In 2019, with one killer track, an artist could become a household name, sparking infinite conversations and even more memes. In addition to all the new names, established artists like Lana Del Rey and Vampire Weekend redefined themselves and reset the trajectories of their careers. Visionaries like FKA twigs, Angel Olsen, and Charli XCX took their art to new heights. At the end of one year, and looking ahead to the next decade, here are the tracks we believe will stand the test of time.

Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and Apple Music playlist.

Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2019 wrap-up coverage here.


Island

100.

Shawn Mendes: “If I Can’t Have You”

Shawn Mendes seems beamed in from a pop era before face tattoos and pink hair and cursing: Last year, when the Canadian heartthrob revealed he liked to—gasp!—smoke weed, his squealing army of fans was appalled, with one of them advising him to “think about going to rehab because we cant lose u like this. u are going to overdose and die.” But amid his chart peers’ rampant insolence, the 21-year-old’s tangy white funk slices through like a double rainbow. Take “If I Can’t Have You,” a sparkling single propelled by gargantuan Elton John piano chords and a glorious descending vocal line that should squeeze stress sweat out of Justin Timberlake. On paper, Mendes is pining after the girl who got away with the obsessiveness of an Instagram stalker—and yet his effervescent delivery, and shameless cheesing in the video, make it clear that this winning rom-com of a song has a happy ending. –Ryan Dombal

Listen: Shawn Mendes, “If I Can’t Have You”


Planet Mu

99.

DJ Nate: “Fuck Dat”

A deceptively sparse cut from Chicago stalwart DJ Nate’s first footwork record in nearly a decade, “Fuck Dat” is a fitting return to the genre: The steady clap of a snare drum recalls the style’s roots in ghetto house, while a meandering synth line hovers in the air, teasing the onslaught to come. But DJ Nate’s power is restraint: With a stream of warm TR-808 hits and a few errant hi-hats, he allows the footworkers who compete in dizzying dance battles to fill in the energy. The titular vocal sample, chopped into oblivion, is a suitable mantra: Nate returned to footwork while recovering from an injury that left him temporarily paralyzed from the waist down, a particularly cruel irony in a scene defined by movement. But just because he’s not killing a circle doesn’t mean he can’t give it new life. –Arielle Gordon

Listen: DJ Nate, “Fuck Dat”


ATO

98.

Brittany Howard: “13th Century Metal”

On “13th Century Metal”—the centerpiece of Brittany Howard’s debut solo album, Jaime—the leader of Alabama Shakes lays out a personal mission statement, her rock mantras on self-care and empathy building into the courage to denounce those “who are determined to keep us in the dark ages of fear.” The song reflects her search for optimism, with chants that grow in intensity as her inward resolutions become outward pleas for kindness. A potent juxtaposition of crashing noise music and pure ideals, “13th Century Metal” feels unconquerable, a maelstrom settling into place. –Sheldon Pearce

Listen: Brittany Howard, “13th Century Metal”


ijn inc.

97.

Klein: “Claim It”

Perhaps the biggest shock on Klein’s latest album, Lifetime, is the appearance of a halfway conventional beat. Nestled among an album of brilliant—if sometimes exhausting—intensity, “Claim It” is a pause for thought as the South London producer peels back the sticky layers of her songs to reveal the textural skill beneath. What emerges is a strangled, melodic hook offset by unsettling vocal effects and chords that spiral upwards in a nervous twist of energy. Like a single malt whiskey with a drop of spring water, “Claim It” both dilutes and liberates Klein’s distinctive musical flavor, a reminder from this most maximalist of producers that less can occasionally be more. –Ben Cardew

Listen: Klein, “Claim It”


Beauty Marks

96.

Ciara: “Thinkin Bout You”

If “Thinkin Bout You” is any indication, even after three years of marriage to her football-star husband, Ciara is still in the honeymoon stage. As she puts it: He’s a habit she can’t break; he’s her destiny. The exhilarating track from her seventh studio album, Beauty Marks, follows the singer in the throes of infatuation, with a throwback disco beat that mimics her joy. The song’s straightforward production matches the force of her emotions; little more than a simple beat, bassline, and backing vocals elevate her voice. It’s a rare, all-out work of pop from Ciara, and her voice glides over every line as she gives in to the force of her heart. –Colin Lodewick

Listen: Ciara, “Thinkin Bout You”


Anti-

95.

Boy Scouts: “Get Well Soon”

The heartbreaker and the heartbroken—aka the villain and the victim—are often the stock characters in songs about failing relationships. On “Get Well Soon,” Taylor Vick, the Oakland-based folk-pop singer who has performed as Boy Scouts for nearly a decade, chooses instead to look at how breaking someone’s heart can break yours, too. Singing over her lilting guitar, she makes it known that her decision is a compassionate act. There are no balloons, no condolence cards here; Vick knows that as bad as it feels, she can’t stay around to comfort someone who hasn’t treated her well. –Colin Lodewick

Listen: Boy Scouts, “Get Well Soon”


Young Stoner Life/300

94.

Lil Keed: “It’s Up Freestyle”

Lil Keed is from the same Cleveland Avenue apartments in Atlanta as Young Thug. He has an eccentric and versatile ear for melody similar to Thug, and has even remixed his songs. But Keed is more than just another Young Thug clone. On “It’s Up Freestyle,” Keed perfects his high-pitched delivery, screeching and harmonizing over a beat from JetsonMade that sounds ready for a dystopian sci-fi movie. Whether he’s rapping at an inhuman pace or piecing together his ad-libs, whatever leaves Keed’s mouth is recitable: “Walked in, walked in, this Bentley truck you can crawl in,” he wails on a hook that’s since gone viral on TikTok. It’s that sugary delivery and his control that elevates the track into a standout in a city that has no shortage of hits. –Alphonse Pierre

Listen: Lil Keed, “It’s Up Freestyle”


UMG/Capitol

93.

Sky Ferreira: “Downhill Lullaby”

Despite many rumors to the contrary, Sky Ferreira didn’t sample the strings of “Bitter Sweet Symphony” on “Downhill Lullaby,” but hers did share that mood: a fatal swoon, something like the score of a David Lynch film. Their sound is shamelessly opulent and sumptuous with rot, like fruit losing its color but deepening in scent.

If Ferreira’s previous album Night Time, My Time channeled ’90s alt-pop, “Downhill Lullaby” nods to the decade’s trip-hop with languid drums and bass, dank atmosphere, and a vague seediness. Ferreira’s vocals alternate from husky and over-heavy to lullaby-plaintive, then slide into the vulnerability that's marked her best songs. She sings about a relationship that’s not healthy yet no longer up for reconsideration; around her, the strings swoop and keen as if they're racing to the ground, too. –Katherine St. Asaph

Listen: Sky Ferreira, “Downhill Lullaby”


Skint

92.

Róisín Murphy: “Incapable”

Róisín Murphy begins “Incapable” as cheerfully as its disco-ready bassline suggests she will. The Irish dance-pop vet is ready to move, happy to feel wanted and free, even boasting that she’s never had a broken heart. But soon, the song’s steady groove and bright handclaps underpin a growing skepticism, as her perfectly intact heart begins to strike her as its own worrisome condition. “Am I incapable of love?” she asks herself. Though the song may be tongue-in-cheek, it highlights one of dance music’s core truths: Even a great beat can’t shield you from self-doubt. –Colin Lodewick

Listen: Róisín Murphy, “Incapable”


Polyvinyl

91.

Jay Som: “Superbike”

Nothing symbolizes freedom quite like the pairing of a motorcycle and open road. It’s a staple of American mythos; it’s the central conceit of Jay Som’s “Superbike.” Melina Duterte, who helms the project, is sparing with her imagery, piecing together the story as if from glimpses out a moving vehicle: hurt followed by hope, a two-wheeled escape, a painful memory. What she can’t fit into words plays out in the song’s swirl of major-key jangle, shoegaze fuzz, and tambourine, all churning like air currents. Betrayal may be the song’s fuel, but the overarching feeling is one of ease, unburdening, and independence regained. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Jay Som, “Superbike”


Saddle Creek

90.

Hand Habits: “placeholder”

Love and loss are twin pillars of songwriting, but there’s far less attention paid to the space in between: the relationships that last for three dates, the regrettable one-night stands, the rebound flings that never really had a chance. On the title track of their stellar second album, L.A.-via-Albany indie guitar hero Meg Duffy—a.k.a. Hand Habits—gives voice to the lovers left behind by non-committal types on the hunt for something better, as the song’s slow, Neil Young gait sets the pace for their fellow walking wounded. “I was just a placeholder, a lesson never learned,” they sing and sigh, like someone who’s grown all too accustomed to getting that “I think we should just be friends” text. For a remedy, they delve deeper into Youngian psychology, unleashing a series of pained fretboard squeals that sound like the guitar-solo equivalent of screaming into your pillow. –Stuart Berman

Listen: Hand Habits, “placeholder”


Get Better

89.

Control Top: “Office Rage”

In the 1997 film Clockwatchers, an office temp pontificates on what work life has in store for her: “When I look ahead, I imagine infinite possible futures repeated like countless photocopies, a thousand blank pages.” In “Office Rage,” Philadelphia’s Control Top storm the cubicles and find that although the blank pages have been replaced by screens, the lethal ennui remains.

“Staring at a screen/Makes me itch and scream,” Ali Carter yells. “Click click click click click/Makes me fucking sick.” A highlight of their Covert Contracts album on Get Better Records—company slogan: “for the queers, by the queers”“Office Rage” employs a network of guitar lines more tangled than a messy router and drums like someone kicking a vending machine to liberate a trapped bag of chips. But in this economy, it’s worker liberation Control Top is after. “Service with a smile? EAT SHIT!” Carter screams. It’s a sentiment all of us can believe in. –Jesse Dorris

Listen: Control Top, “Office Rage”


Icy/Artistry/Warner

88.

Saweetie: “My Type”

Invoking 2000s nostalgia in a bid to create her own rap hit, Saweetie samples from a crunk classic: Petey Pablo’s Lil Jon-produced “Freek-a-Leek.” But instead of adopting Petey’s suave, come-hither vibe, Saweetie delivers “My Type” with bite: “That’s my type!” she yells, as if she’s just spotted a man at the other end of the club and she’s ready to take a swipe at any woman who dares approach him.

Saweetie’s raucous energy falls in line with another generation of women in rap: Three 6 Mafia’s Gangsta Boo and Crime Mob’s Diamond and Princess, who were exhilarating to listen to because they weren’t meek, pleasant, or well-mannered. Against the throwback beat’s rumbling synthesizers that could get anyone on the dancefloor, Saweetie turns “My Type” into an anthem for women who want to be unabashedly loud. –Michelle Kim

Listen: Saweetie, “My Type”


Republic

87.

Taylor Swift: “Lover”

There’s room in Taylor Swift’s galaxy for celebrity warfare, veiled political commentary, and enthusiastic allyship, but her work is finest when it’s laser-focused on flawed, hopeful people making a connection. “Lover,” the title track from her most recent blockbuster LP, is a reminder of how effortlessly she can translate specific gestures and moments into universal expressions of romance. With its rustic arrangement and domestic imagery, it sounds like a spiritual sequel to “New Year’s Day,” the acoustic cleansing that closes 2017’s divisive Reputation. Both songs are tributes to the dirty work that goes into keeping a relationship healthy, and they’re spiked with the fear and doubt people feel even when that work is paying off. How can you make sure a good thing lasts forever?

“Lover” features a classically swooning, Swiftian bridge—one designed to soundtrack wedding vows in renovated barns until the end of time—but its most penetrating lines depict the unglamorous stuff: telling dirty jokes, saving seats, deciding whether or not to drag out the air mattress for your college friends. This is the stuff of real intimacy, of partnership, of creating a language and a life together. It turns out the woman who built a career on fairy tales and scorched-earth breakup songs is just as deft with the simple and soulful. –Jamieson Cox

Listen: Taylor Swift, “Lover”


Spacebomb

86.

Bedouine: “Bird”

As clichés go, “If you love someone, set them free” is textbook fare; making a memorable song out of it requires a certain magic touch. “Bird,” the emotional centerpiece of folk singer Azniv Korkejian’s second album as Bedouine, transforms that familiar conceit into a cinematic marvel. Backed by an orchestra that sounds plucked from Hollywood’s Golden Age, she sings with compassion and grace to a lover she likens to a bird she’s releasing from its cage. The contrast between the rhapsodic instrumentals and Korkejian’s stoic, heavy-lidded alto draws out the disparity between what is felt and what is said when lovers part ways. Bedouine’s heroine stares wistfully at the night into which her bird has flown off, the echoes of their final words implied by avian flute trills. You may have seen this ending before, but you’ll cry all the same. –Olivia Horn

Listen: Bedouine, “Bird”


Self-released

85.

Duwap Kaine: “Flyin’”

Teenage Atlanta rapper Duwap Kaine has been releasing lo-fi bedroom recordings on SoundCloud for about three years with little fanfare, and his music feels almost yawned out, dotted with Chief Keef-inspired Auto-Tune melodies, mumbled punchlines, and featherlight beats. A cartoon fever dream about getting high like a pilot, liking girls’ pics on IG, and the designer brands he wears while he glides through the streets of Georgia, “Flyin’” is the quintessential Duwap single. It’s hypnotic, effortless. On the song, he sounds like he’s wandering around in a daze, and his music is a perfect soundtrack for doing the same. –Alphonse Pierre

Listen: Duwap Kaine, “Flyin’”


Dreamville/Interscope

84.

Ari Lennox: “New Apartment”

Ari Lennox had to fight to put “New Apartment” on Shea Butter Baby because, she said, Dreamville label head J. Cole didn’t quite “understand” it. But Lennox thought it was the most important song on the album, because for a young woman like her, having her own apartment signifies safety and independence. On “New Apartment,” Lennox conveys this particular sense of freedom with a delightful string of images. Over a sample of Hubert Law’s soulful 1979 jazz composition “Land of Passion,” she sings about popping her “woo-hah in the sky,” drinking out of dollar-store wine glasses, and leaving her hair to clog the shower, all with the kind of sensual croon usually reserved for a romantic slow jam. –Michelle Kim

Listen: Ari Lennox, “New Apartment”


Kulør

83.

Kasper Marott: “Drømmen om Ø (Forever Mix ’19)”

Yoshinori Mizutani’s cover photograph of vivid lime-green parakeets outside a drab urban building is ingeniously suited for Kasper Marott’s Forever Mix EP. The record’s A-side, “Drømmen om Ø (Forever Mix ’19),” is a sumptuous, 14-minute mini-suite that lofts picturesque bird calls atop sleek drum pulse, rubbery acid synths, clattering Latin percussion, and other meticulously rendered subtleties. “Drømmen om Ø (Forever Mix ’19)” (the first part of the title translates to “The Dream of the Island”) is also a strange bird within Marott’s own Copenhagen techno scene. Forever Mix is the second release from Kulør, the label run by fellow Danish artist Courtesy, following a compilation that introduced the city’s “fast techno” style. But the music here is slower-paced, introspective. “Drømmen om Ø (Forever Mix ’19)” may hit like a shock of tropical color against a gray city exterior, but it takes the length of an early-morning dream to achieve its blissful effects. –Marc Hogan

Listen: Kasper Marott, “Drømmen om Ø (Forever Mix ’19)”


Saddle Creek

82.

Black Belt Eagle Scout: “At the Party”

Pop stars slumped into nihilistic torpor this year, too paranoid and depressed to migrate from their beds to the dancefloor. Party? In this economy? they seemed to ask. But not all revelry equates with excess, even when the world is crumbling. In “At the Party,” Black Belt Eagle Scout’s Katherine Paul, a radical indigenous queer feminist, affirms the necessity of communal gathering for those who have suffered. The opening track of her second album, At the Party With My Brown Friends, it is Pacific Northwest indie rock at its finest—all quiet humming and watery guitar, mist and cold air—but it retains the redemptive quality of gospel. The central refrain lulls like gentle ocean waves: “We will always sing,” Paul murmurs. “We will always sing.” Her words drive home the power of music as refuge and even as self-defense. Sometimes what looks like a party is really salvation. –Cat Zhang

Listen: Black Belt Eagle Scout, “At the Party”


300/Atlantic

81.

Young Thug: “What’s the Move” [ft. Lil Uzi Vert]

One of the most consistent sources of joy on Instagram in the past year has been Lil Uzi Vert’s feed, which serves as a running catalog of the rapper’s outfits. There’s something heartwarming about seeing the young talent—his sartorial tastes unbridled and his budget now virtually unlimited—take on looks that range from Resident Evil hero to hypebeast Halloween ghoul. All of Uzi’s various flexes coalesce during his appearance on “What’s the Move,” a highlight from Young Thug’s album So Much Fun. Atop a bed of 808s and bird calls, Thugger’s yearning melodies set his Philadelphia counterpart up for a captivating (if all-too-brief) guest verse. “Flexin’ on these haters,” Uzi jeers, after rattling off all the designer labels on his person. “Richer than your first, richer than your last.” Success is the best revenge. –Noah Yoo

Listen: Young Thug, “What’s the Move” [ft. Lil Uzi Vert]


Rough Trade

80.

black midi: “bmbmbm”

Black midi traffic in beautiful convulsions, spazzing between rhythms, textures, and keys with a dexterity that’s so precise it’s dazzling, so fluid it’s showy. It’s tempting to take the quartet’s audacity as a challenge—to pop sensibilities, to listener patience—but it’s more rewarding to embrace their constant sense of wonder. On “bmbmbm” (pronounced “boom boom boom”), they are puckish and aloof, stacking oblique lyrics and a warped sample of a wailing woman over a calm bass riff and steady drumming. The resulting mood is placid but tense, like a flame meandering down a fuse. Energetic bolts of noise and percussion materialize from the sky and vanish just as quickly, disrupting the groove but not toppling it. As the song continues, these disruptions become more frequent, building to a tempest of discord that’s cathartic, indulgent, and kind of silly. But that’s the thrill of black midi: They’re as unsure of where the muse will lead them as the listener is. –Stephen Kearse

Listen: black midi, “bmbmbm”


Nonesuch

79.

Vagabon: “Flood”

Lætitia Tamko, who makes music as Vagabon, has said that “Flood” was initially written for another act to record. She described the process of creating for someone other than herself as “relief” from writer’s block, saying that there was freedom in that transference. The word “relief” implies a temporary state, a short break from a more permanent condition, but Tamko’s statement can also be seen as an acknowledgement of what creativity in 2019 looks like: at its best when untethered from the exhaustive rituals of self-promotion. “Flood,” which served as the introduction to Vagabon’s self-titled second album, diverges from previous Tamko recordings, which were rooted in the singer-songwriter’s melancholy croon and guitar playing. On the chorus of “Flood,” in the shadow of a drum machine and synthesizers that rise tall like futuristic oaks, Tamko’s voice embodies that modern-day creative isolation, taking on an almost robotic sheen. –Anupa Mistry

Listen: Vagabon, “Flood”


Def Jam

78.

2 Chainz: “NCAA”

2 Chainz’ Rap or Go to the League unpacks a long-held belief: The only two ways for some kids to make it out of the hood are to rap or play ball. The marching, Honorable C.N.O.T.E.-produced “NCAA” is the album’s centerpiece, detailing the rapper’s rise from amateur baller to pro rapper while taking on corruption in the sporting world. The song marks college players as victims of institutional suppression of opportunity, implicating the system as exploitative of the primarily black stars who earn billions in revenue for others. Until recently, the governing body that oversees college sports wouldn’t let student athletes profit in any way off their talents or likenesses, and 2 Chainz, a former player himself, weaponizes that hypocrisy into a rallying cry. Here, his flows are leisurely as usual but he sounds slightly perturbed, too, as if he can’t believe the unmitigated gall of it all. “NCAA” reinforces a fundamental 2 Chainz philosophy: Balling hard should be rewarded. –Sheldon Pearce

Listen: 2 Chainz, “NCAA”


Beats in Space

77.

Powder: “New Tribe”

At first, Powder’s “New Tribe” looms ominously. The left-field techno anthem’s beat is reminiscent of Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman,” except here those slow, staccato exhalations sound more like the huffing of some titanic beast; the lumbering bassline might be its swishing tail. But a funny thing happens as the song continues its endless build: It pulls you in. What started out forbidding and impenetrable becomes a bubble you live inside. But that’s exactly the kind of thing Powder would do. The Tokyo electronic musician is famous for lengthy, off-kilter DJ sets that disorient and envelop in equal measure. Here, she effortlessly flips the specter of colossal menace into a warm embrace. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Powder, “New Tribe”


Get Better

76.

Empath: “Roses That Cry”

When you listen to a great punk song, you should be holding your breath a little, fearing for its survival. Empath’s “Roses That Cry” is so joyous and unsteady, so beautiful and compromised, that you feel compelled to pray for its existence immediately. The Philadelphia quartet’s anthem rises out of the center of their album Active Listening: Night on Earth like a thought bubble over the head of a cartoon character, hazy and unreal. “Remember when/That tree fell on your car?/Glass spilled/All over the yard,” warbles singer-songwriter and guitarist Catherine Elicson as the band collapses around her in streams of detuned synthesizers and guitars that sound like wind tunnels. She sounds positively serene. –Jayson Greene

Listen: Empath, “Roses That Cry”


Triple Crown

75.

Oso Oso: “One Sick Plan”

Long Island native Jade Lilitri makes emo that could only exist in 2019. He draws from the rollercoaster hooks and blown-out emotion of his early-’00s Nassau County forebears, but strives to write, in his words, more “conscious” lyrics. That intention shines and crackles through “One Sick Plan,” the centerpiece of his third and best record, Basking in the Glow. Amid the rest of the album’s radiant gloss, “One Sick Plan” sounds like a hissy cassette demo, as if the sentiment—one of coming to see what really matters, like an epiphany—is so urgent and crucial that Lilitri had to release it straight away. His choppy acoustic strums seem to cut through a breeze, as he sings out to the person he cherishes: “Don’t sweep it under the rug.” Through all the self-doubt and pained longing Lilitri describes in this simple acoustic song, he has one sick plan to defy time: enduring love. –Jenn Pelly

Listen: Oso Oso, “One Sick Plan”


Secretly Canadian

74.

Faye Webster: “Room Temperature”

The hook of Faye Webster’s “Room Temperature” serves as a mantra for depressed millennials everywhere: “I should get out more.” Webster got started as the odd-one-out at Atlanta’s Awful Records, a singer-songwriter with a soft rock sound on a label mostly known for releasing rap, and she doesn’t exactly fit into a tidy genre either; her slightly soulful country-western style sounds more like ’70s FM radio than contemporary indie rock. “Room Temperature” exemplifies Webster’s lyrical specialty, that all-too-familiar summertime sadness, those late capitalism blues. Her voice expresses a gentle yet pervasive melancholy, but the swaying cymbals, woozy guitars, and lazy pedal steel keep you from sinking too deep into self-pity. –Nadine Smith

Listen: Faye Webster, “Room Temperature”


Big Persona/88 Classic/RCA

73.

Maxo Kream: “Meet Again”

Maxo Kream doesn’t glamorize. He doesn’t preach. He tells stories. With a reporter’s sense for detail and a matter-of-fact delivery, the rapper tells of lives marked by crime and poverty with gut-punching pathos and bleak humor. Those abilities were on striking display on his breakout album, 2018’s Punken; “Meet Again,” the lead-off single from this year’s Brandon Banks, take them to another level. Borrowing the epistolary conceit of Nas’ “One Love,” Maxo narrates a letter to an incarcerated friend. The song hits an emotional peak when the beat drops and Maxo starts talking about his own family, ripped apart by prison sentences and drug addiction. –Marc Hogan

Listen: Maxo Kream, “Meet Again”


Mavin/Jonzing World

72.

Rema: “Dumebi”

At the beginning of 2019, Rema was a teenager from Benin City, Nigeria, with a modestly viral front-seat car freestyle. In the spring, he was at the top of the Nigerian charts. Released on the label of the powerful and enigmatic producer Don Jazzy, who also helped establish Afropop powerhouses like Tiwa Savage, Rema’s self-titled EP was composed of four tracks, each with a different sound—Juice WRLD-style trap, Young Thug-influenced melodies, and Afropop love ballads. But standing tall among them was “Dumebi.” “Dumebi” feels both traditional and new. The Ozedikus-produced rhythm is bouncy and fresh, while Rema injects the track with youthful energy and eccentric melodies. The times are changing in Nigeria, both politically and culturally, and the next generation of Afropop sounds like Rema. –Alphonse Pierre

Listen: Rema, “Dumebi”


Galactic/Republic

71.

Lil Tecca: “Ransom”

In his instantly famous Genius “Verified” video for “Ransom,” teenage rapper Lil Tecca detailed what he made up while writing his not-so-humblebrag of a breakout hit: He has never gone to Europe, he doesn’t wear designer clothes, and he can’t mentally handle being a player. The Long Island MC may have verified these fabrications, but his playfulness was obvious enough from the sound of things. Buoyed by an infectious hook, a sugar-cereal beat, and Tecca’s Auto-Tuned verses, “Ransom” is two glorious minutes of playing pretend. –Matthew Strauss

Listen: Lil Tecca, “Ransom”


Mom & Pop

70.

Sleater-Kinney: “Hurry on Home”

Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein has likened the romantic disjointment in “Hurry on Home” to the breakdown of trust between government and citizens in our Trumpian epoch. It is, quite certainly, the horniest song of said epoch. The lead single from The Center Won’t Hold is a raw-throated howl of queer desire, shot through with angry, annihilative hunger. It is the sort of music about fucking that you make when your very right to fuck is under attack: Brownstein and bandmate Corin Tucker sing about sex as a desperate leap into disembodiment. The fevered pulse of St. Vincent’s production blurs the jagged edges of Brownstein and Tucker’s twin guitars, making for an urgent undercurrent capable of driving listeners into each other’s arms. So long as Sleater-Kinney survives, no force on earth will stand between a woman, another woman, and their primal urge to U-Haul. –Peyton Thomas

Listen: Sleater-Kinney, “Hurry on Home”


Merge

69.

Caribou: “Home”

Home is an ambiguous concept for Dan Snaith: In his nearly two decades of music-making, the producer has dramatically reinvented himself on an album-by-album basis, veering from glitchy electronica to blown-out shoegaze to kaleidoscopic pop to subaquatic house without ever retracing his steps. So there’s a delightful sense of frisson when, on his first Caribou single in five years, we hear the sampled voice of ’70s soul singer Gloria Barnes declare, “Baby, I’m home.” It’s a statement that suggests a return to one’s roots, but “Home” doesn’t so much sound like Snaith’s earliest music as it does an alternate 2001 where he embraced the crowd-pleasing collagist aesthetic of the Avalanches and DJ Shadow instead of the cerebral beats of Four Tet and Boards of Canada. By conjuring a past he never experienced, “Home” once again takes Snaith somewhere he’s never been before. –Stuart Berman

Listen: Caribou, “Home”


Domino

68.

Georgia: “About Work the Dancefloor”

Don’t get caught up on the seemingly faulty grammar of Georgia Barnes’ “About Work the Dancefloor,” a quirky electro-pop banger inspired by a weekend of club-hopping in Berlin. The unassuming lilt in the British percussionist/producer’s voice is enough to make the opaque title feel natural, as if she were interrupting her own train of thought. The single edit trims the song a bit; the best version appears on Georgia’s forthcoming album Seeking Thrills, out in January, and gives room for her staggering intro to poke through the gleaming synths and stereo laser sprays. “I don’t have much in terms of money now,” Georgia admits as a thick, clubby bass drops, but on “About Work the Dancefloor,” she just wants to set us free. –Anna Gaca

Listen: Georgia, “About Work the Dancefloor”


Young Turks

67.

FKA twigs: “sad day”

On the slow-burning “sad day,” FKA twigs alternates between a pining falsetto and a clenched, scratchy voice, full of regret. “Would you make a wish of my love?” she asks in the high voice, before dropping down and remembering the pain she caused in the past. The track, a jagged instrumental courtesy of twigs alongside producers Skrillex, Nicolas Jaar, Benny Blanco, and Noah Goldstein, fills in the space between these two modes of address—sweet entreaty, throaty self-recrimination. The refrain samples the British classic “It’s a Fine Day,” made famous in its 1992 rave rendition by Opus III, providing a moment of release from all the romantic tension and misguided hope. –Thea Ballard

Listen: FKA twigs, “sad day”


Promised Land

66.

Koffee: “Throne”

Over the past two years, the young Jamaican artist Koffee has steadily risen through the ranks of the reggae-dancehall world thanks to the success of her pop-leaning single “Toast,” a track so massive it was recently performed by a Chinese military band to welcome the Prime Minister of Jamaica to Beijing. But “Throne” is Koffee’s true coronation song. Atop laidback horns, the 19-year-old delivers a performance steeped in the lineage of imaginative reggae-dancehall, particularly that of her mentor, Chronixx. She is a clever, urgent lyricist, constantly finding new pockets to play in. “A born storm, fire cyah calm,” she declares over a soundsystem-perfected bassline that will suit American festivals just fine. –Anupa Mistry

Listen: Koffee, “Throne”


Technicolour

65.

Octo Octa: “I Need You”

The first half of this 10-minute track from DJ/producer Maya Bouldry-Morrison, aka Octo Octa, is rooted in gritted, lo-fi breaks, with vocals that drift on a reverbed vapor trail. They give "I Need You" the feeling of being suspended between two planes, its knees planted on the ground as its spirit drifts to the sky like a prayer. Then, six minutes in, the song finds its emotional anchor, as Bouldry-Morrison reads a buoyant note to her friends, her family, her listeners: “I love you! Thank you for being there. You mean so much to me.” It’s a deeply joyous moment. –Ian Cohen

Listen: Octo Octa, “I Need You”


Barsuk

64.

Charly Bliss: “Capacity”

Brooklyn synth-pop band Charly Bliss introduced their second album, Young Enough, with a glimmering, radioactive song that delights in blowing everything up. On “Capacity,” singer Eva Hendricks questions her tendency to put other people’s needs before her own while remaining empathetic towards her anxious, overachieving younger self. Rather than using boyfriends, endless work, or other people’s desires as a distraction, Hendricks decides to finally celebrate herself. The sound of this emotional resurrection is enormous: an explosion of buzzing synth, commanding drums, and gnashing guitar buoy Hendricks’ effervescent vocals. The ultimate irony of this song about a commitment to do less? The band’s ambition clearly shines through. –Vrinda Jagota

Listen: Charly Bliss, “Capacity”


Columbia

63.

Polo G: “Pop Out” [ft. Lil Tjay]

Chicago rapper Polo G came up listening to local greats like Lil Durk and G Herbo, whose storytelling balanced titillation and tragedy. His own music is a logical evolution of their writing, even more vulnerable and irrepressibly sad. “Pop Out” was his breakout, the track that introduced his sorrow-stricken voice to the masses. Although it’s set against a backdrop of action—the robbery in the chorus is detailed with the kinetic precision of a Brian De Palma film—its real drama is internal, as Polo G processes the toll that playing the villain takes on your psyche. He may be the shooter, but in Polo G’s world, everybody’s a casualty.

Telling his story, Polo G makes every word matter. It takes a special talent to rhyme “poverty” with “animosity,” and an even more special one to do it so casually that you don’t even really notice. That’s Polo’s great gift: His prose is intricate and purposeful, but it’s the emotion that lingers. –Evan Rytlewski

Listen: Polo G, “Pop Out” [ft. Lil Tjay]


Mexican Summer

62.

Jessica Pratt: “Aeroplane”

An airplane is a breeding ground for epiphanies—you’re floating above Earth and awed by the expanse, but you also feel distant and isolated and ultimately alone. It’s a place for remembering, for both running down regrets and allowing yourself to feel a bit of gratitude. That’s where Jessica Pratt finds herself here. “Aeroplane” is another entry in a long line of great songs set in the sky (think Joni Mitchell’s “This Flight Tonight” or Bill Callahan’s “Small Plane”), this one spurred by a reflection in the cabin window and an image of someone from her past, whose head she imagines wreathed in city lights. “I don’t wanna touch down,” she sings, musing over “treasures luminous and divine.” For three-and-a-half minutes, we’re up there with her. –Mark Richardson

Listen: Jessica Pratt, “Aeroplane”


Dog Show

61.

100 gecs: “money machine”

Hearing “money machine”—the raucous, euphoric peak of trash-pop duo 100 gecs’ debut album—is like getting blasted in the face with a million Swarovski crystals and leaky glowsticks. It hurts and it's fabulous, this humiliation fantasy that begins with vocalist Laura Les calling you a “piss baby,” spitting and scream-singing through sheets of voice processing. Together with her fellow riot-starter Dylan Brady, Les crunches steel-wool bass and styrofoam guitars into something wonderful. 100 gecs seem to ask, What if you took everything you hated about yourself—all your insecurities about not being good enough or whole enough—and melted them down, jammed your boots in the sticky pit, and headbanged about it? Wouldn’t that feel like cash printed on demand? “money machine” is a purification ritual for the rotted-out brain, a seething, monstrous prayer to burn the slime away. –Sasha Geffen

Listen: 100 gecs, “money machine”


P.W. Elverum & Sun

60.

Mount Eerie: “Love Without Possession”

Over the course of his last several albums, each a document of loss, Phil Elverum has become one of the most bracingly frank songwriters of our generation. On the first single from his sequel to the 2008 Mount Eerie album Lost Wisdom, he and collaborator Julie Doiron zoom out from the everyday minutiae of grief, excavating a broader-reaching poetics from blunt observation. “What glows beneath all the pain and anguish?” Elverum and Doiron ask in an asymmetrical call-and-response.

The answer is love, of course. In this pair’s hands, love is an infinitely unruly concept, however concise their words and simple their musical arrangement, which doesn’t thicken much beyond the yawn of an organ and some distorted guitar. In his 2004 song “We Squirm,” Elverum characterized feelings as “captors” from which we’ll never be free. Here, love is rendered as a horizon, a void; it’s beautiful and it’s terrifying, and it goes on forever. And yet there’s comfort in hearing these two old friends return to one another to call this blazing thing forth. –Thea Ballard

Listen: Mount Eerie, “Love Without Possession”


Burger

59.

Chai: “Fashionista”

From Kraftwerk’s “The Model” to David Bowie’s “Fashion” to Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy,” pop music has always looked to the runway with an arched eyebrow. These are songs that playfully skewer the fashion world for its vanity and vacuity while secretly desiring to be part of it. (Surely it’s no coincidence that all of the above also function as tailor-made catwalk soundtracks.) Chai’s “Fashionista” belongs in this tradition, though the Japanese pop maximalists are less focused on supermodels than on the cosmetics consumers buy in attempts to look more like them. The song’s punky disco bounce is less an invitation to pose for the paparazzi than the soundtrack to a daily drill of skincare routines and make-up applications. But lead singer Mana isn’t about to accept her fate as a prisoner to the beauty industry: “Someone’s trend, it’s a shame!/Someone’s rules, it’s a shame!” she shouts in Japanese, transforming “Fashionista” from a lip-glossed pop jam into a revolutionary cry to stomp on your compacts in 4/4 time. –Stuart Berman

Listen: Chai, “Fashionista”


Atlantic

58.

Burna Boy: “Anybody”

A crown jewel among many on Burna Boy’s African Giant, “Anybody” offers up an unrelentingly smooth exercise in realizing your own potential. The track’s fleshed-out sound, filled with bright horns, rapid clave rhythms, and a melodic interpolation of Angélique Kidjo’s “We We,” suits the Nigerian star’s specific strain of prosperity gospel: If you have wealth, share it with your friends, he seems to say; and if you see others flaunting theirs, know that their comeuppance is around the corner. Like the smooth-talking “Ye” before it, “Anybody” finds Burna Boy operating at peak power, with his deep rasp and haughty delivery locking into an indisputable swagger. “Respect is reciprocal,” he declares, encouraging and upbraiding us at once. –Eric Torres

Listen: Burna Boy, “Anybody”


Columbia

57.

Haim: “Summer Girl”

Haim released “Summer Girl,” their first single since 2017’s Something to Tell You, on July 31, just in time to bottle the incandescent idea of late summer, when the season feels sweeter because its days are numbered. That sense of savoring small, perfect snatches of sun breezes through the song’s sax-flecked groove. It’s a minimal pop song with maximum levity, and if it feels like a balm, that’s because Danielle Haim wrote it for her partner (and Haim producer) Ariel Rechtshaid, who was battling testicular cancer at the time. Interpolating the “doo doo doo”s of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” “Summer Girl” never builds to one solid chorus or drop, instead swaying into a sketch of a season’s magic hour, rolling on and on into the sunset. –Jenn Pelly

Listen: Haim, “Summer Girl”


XL

56.

Joy Overmono: “Bromley”

When it comes to peak-hour dance tracks, there are crowd-pleasers that give the audience a perfect loop or breakbeat to sink their teeth into, and pivot tunes that give the DJ space to steer the night in new directions. “Bromley,” the first joint single by UK rave powerhouses Joy Orbison and Overmono, somehow manages to be both: a raw techno tool built atop relentless drum loops and a collage of intriguing sounds. Its mysterious, sampled vocal feels like a prism for a dancefloor’s energy, while moody ambience and electronic noise creeps through the cracks between drum hits. “Bromley” is a perfect fusion of Joy Orbison’s atmosphere and the thudding, percussive style of Overmono, and the results are delirious. –Noah Yoo

Listen: Joy Overmono, “Bromley”


Carpark

55.

Toro y Moi: “Freelance”

“Freelance,” the spiritual centerpiece of Chaz Bear’s sixth album as Toro y Moi, is the sort of catchy song that follows you—onto the subway, into the bathroom, into your dreams. Elsewhere on the well-named Outer Peace, Bear says he’s “bad with the words,” but the lyrics here are worth chewing over. There’s the darkly ironic (“Freelance now, yeah I guess you earned it”), the adorably resigned (“No more shoes and socks, I only rock sandals/I can’t tell if I’m hip or getting old”), and the strangely evocative (“You don’t know that you’re rust”). On the surface, “Freelance” may seem nonchalant, maybe even absurd, but there’s plenty going on here—and, given how much it burrows into your brain, it’s ultimately impossible not to notice. –Jonah Bromwich

Listen: Toro y Moi, “Freelance”


#Merky/Atlantic

54.

Stormzy: “Vossi Bop”

Two years after Stormzy’s debut record lifted him from emergent grime talent to the all-around pride of London, the first single from his forthcoming second album took it back to the basics he built his name on. Best when he’s blustery, he took the raring energy of his early singles and channeled it into an extended brag concurrent with the vibe of the dance that inspired him. In it, he celebrates his success as a musician and activist while hearkening to the long tradition of dance-instructive tracks in the UK funky club scene that he’s drawn from. Stormzy's delivery is as stealth and cool as a Lamborghini in a foggy alley at night, further codifying his versatility as an MC and expressing the sweatless confidence of a newly crowned king. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

Listen: Stormzy, “Vossi Bop”


Nice Life/Atlantic

53.

Lizzo: “Juice”

Lizzo began 2019 as a cult favorite and ended it as a full-on industry darling. “Juice” wasn’t the hit that landed her at No. 1 for much of the fall, but the song’s irresistible throwback funk brought the singer-rapper into pop radio territory early on in the year, setting some groundwork for the big break to come. It’s an unapologetic introduction to Lizzo’s empowering strain of pop: If you don’t like the fabulosity before you, the song seems to say, then that’s your problem. Pulling double duty as both a body-positive banger and a party bop, “Juice” obliterates inhibitions to the point that listeners’ insecurities become as insignificant as the not-so-single men sliding into Lizzo’s DMs. –Abby Jones

Listen: Lizzo, “Juice”


Warner Bros.

52.

Jenny Lewis: “Wasted Youth”

In the deceptively chipper “Wasted Youth,” Jenny Lewis lets us in on two sisters’ blacked-out, rock-bottom conversation about the recent death of their estranged mother, who was a drug addict during their childhoods. But if you ask Lewis about it, there’s a more innocent dependency at its core: “I feel like that song is more about Candy Crush than heroin,” she explained, “if that’s even fucking possible.” And indeed, during the breezy pinwheel of a hook, Lewis sings the name of the time-sucking iPhone game, letting those two words sum up the helplessness that haunts the song. As the folksy pop melody swirls, her words descend like so many colorful blocks on a screen. It’s a distraction—something to keep us entertained while everything falls apart—but that doesn’t mean it’s not real. –Sam Sodomsky

Listen: Jenny Lewis, “Wasted Youth”


Gudu Records

51.

Peggy Gou: “Starry Night”

Whatever accounts for it—club culture’s ongoing fragmentation, some creeping suspicion that levity is bankrupt—dance music has been short on anthems in recent years. The South Korean producer Peggy Gou’s “Starry Night” summons revellers around a familiar gathering point: bright, bold piano chords, the tentpoles of summertime house classics ever since the music migrated from Chicago basements to Balearic terraces. To drive her point home, she offers up a chant that’s practically subliminal—one-word invocations of the ocean, starlight, pleasure, freedom, us. It’s a song about communion, an invocation of the very act of coming together, and an irresistible reminder of why we do. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Peggy Gou, “Starry Night”


Mom & Pop

50.

Neon Indian: “Toyota Man”

Alan Palomo floated onto the indie scene a decade ago as the avatar of a sun-baked, synth-based movement that everyone soon begrudgingly agreed to call “chillwave.” Over the next several years, his Neon Indian project grew from warped-cassette daydream to wide-screen dance party. “Toyota Man,” Palomo’s first new song in three years, casts his music in fresh light by drawing out elements that were integral to his sound all along. Politics, humor, and Palomo’s Mexican-American identity were already latent in Neon Indian’s discography, but this warped Spanish-language protest anthem finally brought them all brilliantly to the front. The results feel more joyful than anyone in a time of border walls and internment camps could have expected. “Toyota Man” mixes endearing details (learning English from The Larry Sanders Show) with broad truths (“Todos somos Americanos,” or, as translated, “We are all American”) concoct a perfect celebration of his own immigrant experience—and, by extension, the American experience writ large. –Marc Hogan

Listen: Neon Indian, “Toyota Man”


Self-released

49.

Teejayx6: “Dark Web”

If you’ve ever woken up to see that Saks Fifth Avenue has charged thousands of dollars to your credit card, you probably won’t love Teejayx6’s brand of Detroit scam rap. On “Dark Web,” after the government bans Teejayx6 from using those sites, he responds by downloading a Tor Browser so he can get back in, obtains a VPN so he’s untraceable, and purchases a BIN so he can once again go about his scams freely. The hyper-specific details—he makes it sound so easy that credit scams probably quintupled in the wake of this song—are what makes his music both seedy and improbably exciting. It’s the story of an underdog who just wants to scam a couple of unaware citizens and department stores so he can acquire some drip he can flex on IG: “I paid five thousand for my fit/ I’m not fitting in,” as he puts it. If you’re going to scam, at least make a catchy song about it. –Alphonse Pierre

Listen: Teejayx6, “Dark Web”


Jagjaguwar/Closed Sessions

48.

Jamila Woods: “ZORA”

“I do not weep at the world, I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife,” Zora Neale Hurston wrote in 1928. Her words, spiked with equal parts apathy, opulence, and menace, echoed in Jamila Woods’ mind as she worked on her second album, LEGACY! LEGACY!, a monument to black excellence. Like Hurston, the namesake of the album’s first single, Woods is something of a polymath: a singer-songwriter, poet, teacher, and activist. But on “ZORA,” she asserts that her selfhood is far more expansive than these labels, or any others thrust upon her, would suggest. “Little boxes you can’t stick unto me,” she sings, her vocals melting over a commanding backbeat. As if with a finger wag, she adds, “You will never know everything.” But there’s sweetness even in Woods’ venom, as when she taunts her foes by threatening to “tenderly fill [them] with white light.” It’s another nod to her multitudes: White light contains every color of the rainbow. –Olivia Horn

Listen: Jamila Woods, “ZORA”


Columbia

47.

Caroline Polachek: “Door”

Sometimes the difference between a good pop song and a great one lies in the sticky details: a borrowed bassline, a baby coo, the loop of a tumbi melody. Chairlift singer-songwriter Caroline Polachek, one of the first ’00s indie rock musicians to move into mainstream pop songwriting, surely knows this. On “Door,” her first single released under her own name, Polachek turns her malleable voice into a sing-song hook—“Back in the city/I’m just another/Girl in a sweater”—that scales up and down infectiously. Inspired by the slow-burning funk of Chic’s “At Last I Am Free” cover, Polachek takes her time unfolding the details surrounding that small realization. Atop sparse beats and a hazy guitar, she sings poetically about the wave of self-actualization that hits after the end of a long-term relationship, noting that “the door slams hard behind you when you leave the house of judgement.” –Jillian Mapes

Listen: Caroline Polachek, “Door”


Matador

46.

Perfume Genius: “Eye in the Wall”

To hear him tell it, Mike Hadreas has a terrible relationship with his body. He has Crohn’s disease, and he’s repeatedly expressed the desire to transcend his own fleshy form. Yet over four fearless albums, his physicality has occupied an ever-greater part of his work. In The Sun Still Burns Here, a dance piece from Hadreas and Seattle-based dancer Kate Wallich, it becomes the totality: One preview described part of the performance as “essentially a fully clothed orgy,” for which Hadreas both composed the score and performs as a dancer. On “Eye in the Wall,” the first song released from the project, he commands fragmented images of a body to become whole, “wild and free,” leaving him “full of feeling…full of nothing but love.” He issues these instructions in a louche warble, his twang and metallic shimmer gathering into a nine-minute reverie of Afro-Latin percussion and searing, silvery brightness that captures the incandescent feeling of physical abandon. –Laura Snapes

Listen: Perfume Genius, “Eye in the Wall”


Republic

45.

Ariana Grande: “NASA”

NASA, probably the only popular U.S. government agency left, was everywhere this year: T-shirts and patches bearing its charmingly retro insignia became a bona fide trend, and Ariana Grande pulled its name for a sneaky sleeper hit from thank u, next. On an album largely about the joys of being unattached, “NASA” offers a nuance: the freedom to be attached, just not right now. “I can’t really miss you if I’m with you,” Grande offers, gently reminding a lover that intimacy doesn’t mean constant proximity. While Grande’s refrain of “I’m a star, I’ma need space” verges on cutesy, the delicate harmonies and airy production of “NASA” make its blown-out bass and trap drums feel weightless. –Anna Gaca

Listen: Ariana Grande, “NASA”


Loma Vista

44.

Denzel Curry: “RICKY”

Denzel Curry blazed a trail for SoundCloud rap—that gritty, bass-boosted sound that reverberated around South Florida and elevated its young practitioners into rock stars. But despite his fame, he’s grown up with his head screwed straight. The rapper pays tribute to his father on “RICKY,” handing down paternal pillars of advice—trust no one but your family, stick up for your day-ones, respect women like you would your mother—to his followers, some of whom started out doubting him. The directives are austere, but a slowed-down sample of the British electronic producer Lukid’s “Twisted Blood” infuses the song with life. “RICKY” clanks and bounces, as if an airplane climbing toward higher altitudes has just hit turbulence. –Cat Zhang

Listen: Denzel Curry, “RICKY”


43.

Young Nudy / Playboi Carti: “Pissy Pamper”

Even without an official release, “Pissy Pamper” was irrepressible. Left off Young Nudy’s Sli’merre due to sample-clearing issues, the song has lived a full life in corners of the internet—uploaded, taken down, then uploaded again, sometimes as only one verse or an instrumental, sometimes under the name “Kid Cudi.” (The real Cudi approved.) The sparkling, Pi’erre Bourne-produced oddity has spawned countless freestyles and remixes, becoming a little phenomenon on its own. Nudy proves a capable leading man, and few rappers sound more untroubled while detailing how they evade cops, but it’s his song in name only: Playboi Carti dominates with his spectacular, baby-voice verse. Only Carti is better at navigating Bourne’s circus beats than Nudy—they’ve both had more practice than anyone—but here, they prove they work best as a team. Nudy is a perfect sidekick, Carti is a born star, and Bourne is the most daring rap producer working now. Even as a leak, this is the new benchmark for the SoundCloud rap elite. –Sheldon Pearce

Listen: Young Nudy / Playboi Carti, “Pissy Pamper”


ATO

42.

Brittany Howard: “Stay High”

Brittany Howard doesn’t specify whether the buzz she seeks on “Stay High” is internal or external, whether she wants her effervescence from emotional intimacy or a fat joint. It doesn’t matter—the song is light and loose enough to capture both. Howard creates a space for luxuriating in the company of another person, sharing a private escape from the downcast grind of everyday life. Her smoky croon does the heavy lifting: the way she draws out and sinks into the phrase “I’m doing wonderful, just fine, thank you” feels like the deep, full-body stretch that comes after a satisfying afternoon nap. “I already feel like doing it again,” Howard sings on the track's opening line, and her easygoing warmth makes "Stay High" worth repeating. –Allison Hussey

Listen: Brittany Howard, “Stay High”


Republic

41.

Pop Smoke: “Welcome to the Party”

There’s no greater honor in New York City than having the song of the summer. Past anthems like Bobby Shmurda’s “Hot Nigga” and Cardi B’s “Bodak Yellow” are immortal, and now Pop Smoke’s “Welcome to the Party” can be added to that list. Like Bobby and Cardi, it happened fast for Pop Smoke: At the start of 2019, he was an unknown with only a single remix to his name. Four months later, “Welcome to the Party” dominated the city’s airwaves and guided Brooklyn drill music beyond New York’s state lines. His voice was almost preposterously deep for his age, like some kind of mysterious cartoon villain, and mixed with the haphazard, bass-heavy production, the song transformed Brooklyn into a dystopian playground. His was a swagger that couldn’t be imitated, though people tried from every rooftop, apartment window, and car door. –Alphonse Pierre

Listen: Pop Smoke, “Welcome to the Party”


ATO

40.

Nilüfer Yanya: “In Your Head”

Part of London singer-songwriter Nilüfer Yanya’s early appeal was her deadpan, detached cool. Airy melodies seemed to drift out of her like breath. But her debut album, Miss Universe, challenges the idea that anyone should be so poised, and on the guitar-thrashing “In Your Head,” she dazzlingly loses her shit.

While the verses move slow, with half-spoken lyrics shrugged into wide-open space, the choruses build like a panic attack, anguished and ferocious. The track is a perfect expression of a distinctly modern anxiety: being stranded in a place with no cell signal, dying to know what’s going on in someone else’s head. From the creeping intensity of the glimmering background synth to the perfectly imperfect way her voice skids when she hits the high notes, Yanya encapsulates the explosive tantrum feeling of not being able to reach or read someone, when in theory we should have their thoughts at our fingertips. It's a song perfect for 2019, but with a rock backbone that would go just as hard in any year. –Aimee Cliff

Listen: Nilüfer Yanya, “In Your Head”


Drag City

39.

Bill Callahan: “747”

When Bill Callahan returned with his first record in six years, he did so as a father. This new role of family man shaped his album Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest significantly. On the standout ballad “747,” Callahan contemplates the unspoiled gaze of a newborn baby, likening it to the view from an airplane.

While much of Callahan’s earlier catalog is tied to specific, isolated characters, “747” casts a wider glance, marveling at the splendor of birth and parental love. As he sits by the titular airplane’s window, “flying through some stock footage of heaven,” he compares the celestial sight to an infant’s purity. “This must be the light you saw/That just left you screaming,” he sings over sweetly plucked guitar. “And this must be the light you saw/Before our eyes could disguise true meaning.” He is certain that we lose this vision in time, each year getting further from that light. But, Callahan argues, we are doing the best we can. “747” is not a criticism of our transformation from wide-eyed infants to weary elders, but a tranquil acknowledgement of its inevitability. –Madison Bloom

Listen: Bill Callahan, “747”


Columbia

38.

Bruce Springsteen: “Hello Sunshine”

On Western Stars, a Springsteen album full of character studies, the protagonist of “Hello Sunshine” may be the one who most resembles the man himself. It’s a cinematic country ballad about being left alone with your loneliness, still roaming the empty streets but now searching for hope there. Springsteen has been open about his lifelong battle with depression, and “Hello Sunshine”—with its warm pedal steel, serene strings, and nostalgic piano chords—sounds like him trying to hang on to a happy moment. –Matthew Strauss

Listen: Bruce Springsteen, “Hello Sunshine”


Text/Ministry of Sound

37.

Four Tet: “Only Human”

Four Tet’s “Only Human” started life as a dancefloor edit of Nelly Furtado’s “Afraid,” the opening track from her now-iconic 2006 album Loose. As Four Tet describes it, he happened to hear the original song and began working on it almost as a lark, layering Furtado’s vocals and locking them into sizzling hi-hats and knocking percussion. His rework quickly made its way from DJ to DJ (as these unofficial edits tend to do), appearing in sets by Peggy Gou, Ben UFO, and others, before finally being officially released this March. The track itself is minimalist brilliance, but the song’s origin story and its dancefloor potency are what makes it such a compelling listen. Thank goodness that sample cleared. –Noah Yoo

Listen: Four Tet, “Only Human”


4AD

36.

Deerhunter: “What Happens to People?”

In the debate over whether it’s better to burn out or fade away, Deerhunter leader Bradford Cox doesn’t take sides. In the frail centerpiece of the band’s Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, he simply prods at the multiple ways humans give up, decay, and vanish. As a narrator, Cox expresses a kind of numb acceptance, and the scenery he offers—the rotting houses and rusted engines—are as bleak and beautiful as the song’s sweeping pianos and gentle guitar licks. Though “What Happens to People?” was recorded before the death of former Deerhunter bassist Josh Fauver late last year, the loss can’t help but hang like a specter over this song about the inevitability of life’s end. –Evan Minsker

Listen: Deerhunter, “What Happens to People?”


Dirty Hit/Interscope

35.

The 1975: “People”

For their latest warning about the end of the human race, relentlessly self-aware genre agnostics the 1975 turn to a style that many—including the band itself—have deemed extinct: rock’n’roll. “People” is powered by a screeching lead guitar line that pierces like a nuclear alarm, drums loud enough to rev up a bloodthirsty gladiator arena, and frontman Matty Healy’s panicked screams, seemingly delivered from the center of a rapidly melting ice cap. Healy wrote the lyrics while touring the American South earlier this year, around the time Alabama signed a draconian anti-abortion bill into law, and he shows the most desperate kind of gallows humor: “The economy’s a goner, republic’s a banana, ignore it if you wanna.” The song is both a wake-up call and an admission of defeat—a balls-out strut to be played for the indifferent masses as the world burns. –Ryan Dombal

Listen: The 1975, “People”


Sony UK

34.

Mark Ronson: “True Blue” [ft. Angel Olsen]

You know it’s been a rough year when the man behind “Uptown Funk” makes an album of breakup songs. Mark Ronson’s most recent LP, Late Night Feelings, is full of sad dance tracks that mix glitter with broken glass, and none cut as deep as the Angel Olsen feature “True Blue.” Olsen sings like the final patron at a bar, crooning just loud enough to tell her sob story over the blaring jukebox. It’s unclear if anyone’s listening, but that makes it all the more tragic. The funky bass riff and disco drums mock her distress, setting the scene for a dance where our heroine has no partner: “I ran to you and you know why,” she shouts at the empty barstool next to her. “True Blue” is the sound of taking your heartache out for a night on the town—you might be able to sedate it with booze and loud music, but you will wake up in its arms the next morning. –Madison Bloom

Listen: Mark Ronson, “True Blue” [ft. Angel Olsen]


4AD

33.

Aldous Harding: “The Barrel”

On “The Barrel,” Aldous Harding says a lot but gives away almost nothing. Riding a steady current of crisply picked acoustic guitar and rippling piano, the song is crammed with references to ferrets and eggs, doves and nuts, peaches freshly harvested and hands reaching out of barrels. The imagery is familiar, yet the New Zealand-born/Wales-based artist deploys it in a way that makes these everyday objects sound off-kilter and foreign, like signs held askew to point in a direction few have traveled. She arranges the song—a standout on her third album, the folk-pop gem Designer—so it builds gradually, adding new elements that subtly reshape its flow. As always, Harding fashions her own unique mythology but remains evasive about its precise meaning; perhaps she doesn’t write to confess, but to pose uneasy questions. –Stephen Deusner

Listen: Aldous Harding, “The Barrel”


4AD

32.

Big Thief: “Cattails”

Big Thief’s most resonant music keys into a sweeping modern dread—namely, that tech expansion and the ecological crisis have orphaned us from nature, maybe from part of our soul. “Cattails” proposes that music can bridge that gulf: between our modern and past lives, between the conscious and unconscious realms, and between our daily routines and the unarticulated terror burbling underneath. With a keening croak and hearty 12-string, Adrianne Lenker traverses this liminal space in great strides, implicating beauty, fear, plant life, and human death in a vast spiritual conspiracy. Lenker sings of her late great-grandmother over cyclical strums, insisting that the river of time, like a bottomless melody, can only lead us home. –Jazz Monroe

Listen: Big Thief, “Cattails”


Columbia

31.

Vampire Weekend: “Sympathy”

What happened to Vampire Weekend? After the departure of core member and baroque multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij, the usually chipper and concise indie rock band recorded Father of the Bride, a very long, exploratory album. “Sympathy” is the surprise highlight. Sometimes the song is sublimely funky; sometimes it feels designed to make your stomach gurgle. Until three minutes in, it’s a wiggly little thing, its cha-cha beat working double-time as frontman Ezra Koenig coos like a sexy villain. But when the drums kick in for the final 45 seconds, they introduce an explosive wall of sound that’s as urgent as an air raid siren. After years of buttoned-up tastefulness, the band seems to be creeping into enemy territory here. –Matthew Schnipper

Listen: Vampire Weekend, “Sympathy”


Sugar Trap

30.

Rico Nasty: “Time Flies”

It was easy to submit to rage this year; there was good cause all around. Mercifully, Rico Nasty returned with her dynamic brand of catharsis, smashing through walls like a pint-sized Kool-Aid Man. Anger Management, her collaborative project with the producer Kenny Beats, was released just as spring arrived, but by summer, Rico seemed to have gotten fight music out of her system. In July, she dropped “Time Flies,” a Dee B-produced loosie that appears on the Madden NFL 20 soundtrack. Ironically, the song sounds more like the brief, intoxicating respite that comes after scream therapy than the dyspeptic fury you’d expect of anything associated with the NFL. Sparkly, melodic, and ultimately optimistic, “Time Flies” recalls the treacly, animated energy of Rico’s early days. As the beat bubbles and then strikes, she catalogs her pain; there is loss, fear, undeserved hate. But even as the reasons for Rico’s anger persist, her own attitude helps spur transformation: “Got tired of complaining/I got up and changed my situation,” she sings. As summer turned into fall, that sentiment proved just as useful as her anger has been. –Rawiya Kameir

Listen: Rico Nasty, “Time Flies”


Mexican Summer

29.

Cate Le Bon: “Daylight Matters”

Cate Le Bon finds the beauty in isolation. On “Daylight Matters,” from her delightfully eccentric fifth album Reward, she spins repetitive, circuitous speech patterns into delicate bridges and euphoric choruses. “Love you, I love you, I love you, I love you,” she sings, her wistful voice foreshadowing the twist: “But you’re not here.” The lilting vocal gives off the impression of talking to yourself, the sort of compulsive self-soothing that springs up in seclusion. The melancholy is a reflection of Le Bon’s environment: She composed Reward in the near-solitude of England’s mountainous Lake District. Cloaked in dreamy synths and rounded saxophone, “Daylight Matters” hints at glam rock’s bravado while retaining Le Bon’s characteristic playfulness. It’s as if we’ve been let into her colorful interior world, witness to the elaborate orchestra she’s constructed to fill in the empty space. –Arielle Gordon

Listen: Cate Le Bon, “Daylight Matters”


Sub Pop

28.

Weyes Blood: “Andromeda”

In the early weeks of 2019, Natalie Mering shared a subtly disorienting video for “Andromeda,” the first single from Titanic Rising, her masterful fourth album as Weyes Blood. The song itself is all sweeping Laurel Canyon haze: a hook that’s almost entirely pedal steel guitar and a sad, swooning vocal delivery that seems coated in FM static. While her music has felt increasingly connected to classic rock radio, this song—with its analog hum and open road grandeur—signaled a deeper inquiry into what’s so classic about those old standbys. The video, however, looked more like a Y2K-era screensaver on a desktop computer: a steady, slightly pixelated flow of distant stars in an endless black sky. This melding of our recent and distant pasts is crucial to Mering’s songwriting; she moves forward by studying where we’ve been, rendering it both familiar and somewhat uncanny. –Sam Sodomsky

Listen: Weyes Blood, “Andromeda”


Jagjaguwar

27.

Bon Iver: “Hey, Ma”

Two-and-a-half minutes into “Hey, Ma,” the music fades to silence, the song grows calm, and Justin Vernon’s voice emerges almost naked, mostly free of the effects that have colored his vocals since 2007’s For Emma, Forever Ago. It’s a powerful moment: one of the most influential musicians of the 21st century stripping everything away so he can sing directly to you. The words might sound unsettled and unspecific—something about waiting outside, going into a room, learning the truth—but he’s always made a virtue out of impressionistic lyrics. This is a song less about communication than connection: Who keeps you grounded? Who pulls you out of the coal mine and into the real world? Over time, Vernon expanded Bon Iver to include a small town’s worth of musicians and even a dance troupe, and together they’ve created a rousing arena anthem suitable for the ambitious tour they launched earlier this year. “Hey, Ma” wants you to get those lighters up—or your phone or your hands or whatever—and join in. –Stephen Deusner

Listen: Bon Iver, “Hey, Ma”


Warp

26.

Danny Brown: “Dirty Laundry”

On any given night in America, there is an open mic event where a green comedian jokes about paying strippers with change and inevitably uses the phrase “making it hail.” No one laughs. On “Dirty Laundry,” being a broke, horny schmuck is the setup instead of the punchline, and Danny Brown kills. He recounts awkward drug sales, a hookup in a Burger King bathroom, and two encounters with a stripper: as a client and as a fellow patron at a laundromat. Skeevy and giddy, he makes the gutter sound like a theme park.

Brown has been telling offbeat stories his entire career, and Q-Tip’s bouncy production—a funky drip of beeps, gurgly synths, and stretched vocal samples—accents his poise. The rapper sounds at ease over this colorful backdrop, his laundry-themed wordplay as loose and entertaining as it is technical. These gonzo escapades lack the teeth-chattering urgency of Brown’s previous music, but ultimately, his dirty-uncle act comes across as relief. He’s a full showman here, his bits polished, his delivery smooth. Most acts don’t mature this well. –Stephen Kearse

Listen: Danny Brown, “Dirty Laundry”


Sacred Bones

25.

Jenny Hval: “Ashes to Ashes”

Jenny Hval’s work is always moving closer to the essentials: pleasure, creativity, nurture; reproduction, death, survival. Again and again, she ventures into dank places and emerges with observations that are striking for their lucid originality and humor. On “Ashes to Ashes,” she tills the sediments of sex, art, and mortality, dragging ash from a cigarette into a grave and equating penetrating fingers to the double-digit swipe of a phone screen to a frantic drowning kick. The song takes place in a dream and preserves dream logic, psychologically cogent yet somehow logically inexplicable. Hval threads it together with a trance pulse that buffets these ideas across the wake-sleep divide like marbles in a Newton’s cradle. Yet it’s featherlight: Hval’s euphoria and divine hooks transform scholarly thought into pure pop. –Laura Snapes

Listen: Jenny Hval, “Ashes to Ashes”


Jagjaguwar

24.

Angel Olsen: “All Mirrors”

Angel Olsen has always been difficult to pin down, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an otherworldly warble and gut-punching lyrics. She has spent her career shapeshifting between genres and personas, from solo folkie to barnstorming indie bandleader to Mark Ronson- collaborating pop singer. On “All Mirrors,” the title track of her latest album, Olsen introduced her latest (and perhaps greatest) incarnation: mighty goth sorceress. The song unfurls like the train of a black satin wedding gown, undulating on a bed of sinister, classic-Hollywood strings and subtle synth pulses. Olsen intones ominously about lost beauty, being buried alive, and repeating the past, building to the kind of cathartic climax that demands to be shouted from a windswept cliff in a fierce rainstorm (preferably while wearing the elaborate bejeweled headpiece from the song’s striking music video). With that, we are thoroughly under her spell. –Amy Phillips

Listen: Angel Olsen, “All Mirrors”


RVNG Intl.

23.

Helado Negro: “Running”

“Running” opens like a dream: Ambient noise buzzes into focus, as singer-songwriter Roberto Carlos Lange’s soft, layered croon fades in and holds us close. The fragmented story that unfolds against crisp, quiet hi-hats and warm piano chords has a nostalgic quality, though it’s hard to know if Lange is acknowledging someone from his past, present, or future. “I feel you/In my mind/All the time,” he sings with care, revealing the kind of love he feels: implicit, unconditional. When he delivers the chorus—which features the word “running” repeated eight times—it feels like a meditation of gratitude. Then the song fades away, leaving you a little lighter than before. –Braudie Blais-Billie

Listen: Helado Negro, “Running”


Polydor/Interscope

22.

Lana Del Rey: “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but i have it”

In 2019, Lana Del Rey doesn’t have to explain why she considers hope to be a dangerous thing, but what does she mean by “a woman like me?” How does one of the decade’s greatest pop music enigmas define herself? In the piano-ballad closer of Norman Fucking Rockwell!, she offers a few clues: She finds inspiration from Sylvia Plath and photographer Slim Aarons. She’s not quite happy but she’s definitely not sad.

Because the arrangement never picks up—it’s just Jack Antonoff’s muted piano, his pauses as loud as the chords themselves—Del Rey pushes the dynamics with her vocal delivery, building to a whispered falsetto as affecting as any of her most elaborate crescendos. Once upon a time, listening to her music meant scouring all the references and layers to find the reasons for the apocalyptic dread in her voice, the slow-burning romance in her melodies, the nostalgic haze of her videos. On “hope is a dangerous thing,” she lays the mystery bare, looking directly into our eyes and telling us what she sees. –Sam Sodomsky

Listen: Lana Del Rey, “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but i have it”


Domino

21.

(Sandy) Alex G: “Gretel”

In the Brothers Grimm fairytale “Hansel and Gretel,” a young brother and sister are lured into a house made of sweets by a child-eating witch. Eventually, Gretel pushes the evil creature into an oven, frees her caged sibling, and the pair escape. Philadelphia bedroom-pop hero (Sandy) Alex G’s abstract update of the story, a highlight from his album House of Sugar, is decidedly darker: Gretel leaves her brother behind and ends up consumed not by the misdeed, but by her own twisted desire to return to the candy-coated lair. The song's mix of sped-up and untreated vocals suggests its namesake's split psyche, while its ominous main guitar riff is constantly brushing up against more whimsical musical flourishes. With all of its juxtapositions, “Gretel” is a small study in reworking age-old concepts to fit into our troubling present. –Abby Jones

Listen: (Sandy) Alex G, “Gretel”


Interscope

20.

DaBaby: “Suge (Yea Yea)”

The core of DaBaby’s gauntlet-throwing year, “Suge” is one of 2019’s most fun and infectious hip-hop songs, putting on display the rapper’s signature bounce and his almost goofy, browbeating nature. His talky flows scan as bar-heavy despite most of his raps being filler, simply because their ferocity can raze beats to cinders. Invoking the name of the strongman turned Death Row Records boss Suge Knight, Da Baby’s breakout single is all about graduating from thug to kingpin but still being ready to put hands on fools—or, you know, dangle them off of a balcony (allegedly) if need be. He runs rampant, bullying, threatening, and coercing his enemies, his claims brought to life by his bum-rushing delivery. The song made clear that DaBaby was wound up and raring to go before he exploded this year, and no one has stopped him yet. –Sheldon Pearce

Listen: DaBaby, “Suge (Yea Yea)”


XL

19.

Jai Paul: “He”

In 2011 and 2012, the British singer-songwriter and producer Jai Paul released two singles that caught the attention of everyone from the then-active music blogosphere to Drake. After a mixtape’s worth of unfinished music was leaked in 2013, Paul basically disappeared for the next six years, establishing himself as a reclusive mad genius. But in June of this year, Paul re-emerged, releasing an official version of the leak and two new songs: “He” and “Do You Love Her Now.” “He” begins with fast strokes like “Bootylicious” before Paul’s signature funky guitar and pillowy whole notes emerge. The track carries the Prince allusions often ascribed to Paul—clanging synths only enhance the ’80s flavor—but there’s a new earnestness to the song that becomes apparent toward the bridge. Paul’s voice breaks away from all affect, and it sounds as though we’re hearing him sing into the booth through the talkback button in a studio’s control room, unadorned and unmic’d. It sounds like he’s finally free. –Anupa Mistry

Listen: Jai Paul, “He”


Columbia

18.

Lil Nas X: “Old Town Road”

“Old Town Road,” inarguably the most popular song of 2019, might not have reached such a level of cultural saturation were it not for the commotion around its expulsion from Billboard’s country charts, a dubious move that sparked warranted accusations of racism. But whether the song is country or rap is irrelevant; “Old Town Road” doesn’t just transcend genre, it transcends music altogether. It came out of nowhere, two minutes of pure joy made by a guy whose previous claim to fame was rumoredly running a Nicki Minaj-stanning Twitter account. The song’s beat samples Nine Inch Nails, which you’d never know, and the lyrics, loosely about riding horses, are crooned with effortless confidence. The finished product is a weird-as-hell blast of serotonin. Admittedly, you can’t take hits of sunshine all day, every day, so it’s possible that your need to incessantly hear “Old Town Road” has waned. Mine hasn’t. Years from now, when time has laid waste to my body, I will still whisper my personal Rosebud: “Wrangler on my booty.” –Matthew Schnipper

Listen: Lil Nas X, “Old Town Road”


Drag City

17.

Purple Mountains: “Snow Is Falling in Manhattan”

David Berman was a peerless songwriter and poet with a gift for squeezing expressive scenes out of seemingly ordinary language. In “Snow Is Falling in Manhattan,” he turns a brownstone into a snow globe, his ragged voice rumbling over gentle guitar and drums. His portrait of a bitter New York winter couldn’t be any warmer: The frigid world outside is undercut by hospitable gestures, from a caretaker salting an icy stoop to one friend shielding another with an afghan. The images are breathtaking in their simplicity and beauty. The caretaker is a metaphor for Berman’s role as a singer, and he treats that responsibility with reverence. The lyric about being “a host who left a ghost” behind feels even more poignant after Berman’s death this year, as every utterance remains familiar and inviting, ushering you in from the cold. –Sheldon Pearce

Listen: Purple Mountains, “Snow Is Falling in Manhattan”


Epitaph

16.

Mannequin Pussy: “Drunk II”

To listen to Mannequin Pussy’s Marisa Dabice sneer, cry, wince, and roar her way through “Drunk II” is to step into her shattered psyche. She sings with a ferocity rarely heard in the easy-listening playlist bait of modern indie; her presence practically makes the entire band vibrate. “Do you remember the nights I called you up?” Dabice asks her former lover. “I still love you, you stupid fuck.”

There is joy here, too—in every muscular snare fill, every noisy pick drag, every note of the guitar solo at the song’s apex. At that point, Dabice splits in two—her internal dialogue goes to the left channel as her newly courageous external self moves to the right. “I push you down, I drink, you drown, I am alone,” she sighs, as her other side boasts, “Everyone, gather ’round, I have the answer now.” “Drunk II” expresses the push and pull of love and hate, and how we’re all surrounded by other people just trying to figure it out. –Noah Yoo

Listen: Mannequin Pussy, “Drunk II”


Self-released

15.

Lil Uzi Vert: “Free Uzi”

It’s been two long years since Lil Uzi Vert’s Luv Is Rage 2, and all we’ve had to hold us over is leaks, label drama, and the occasional Instagram fit pic. But for one moment, Uzi slipped free of the grip of Generation Now label heads Don Cannon and DJ Drama with “Free Uzi.” Over a classic DJ L drill beat, Uzi explodes for three minutes of bars that feel like a blurry 2000s Philly freestyle—probably featuring Meek Mill with fuzzy cornrows—that you would find in the deepest corners of YouTube. It’s a peek at the direction in which Uzi’s rap is headed, raising his pitch and unveiling his take on the baby voice popularized by Playboi Carti. And truly, Uzi is the only rapper that could confess on record to being a loyal viewer of The Big Bang Theory and still have it slap. Free Uzi forreal. –Alphonse Pierre

Listen: Lil Uzi Vert, “Free Uzi”


RCA/Keep Cool

14.

Normani: “Motivation”

It may not have been intentional that Normani’s first solo single after the dissolution of Fifth Harmony shares the effervescence of Beyoncé’s 2005 bop “Check on It,” but it was definitely subliminal: Like her Houston sister, here was a former girl-grouper stepping out on her own, eager to show the world her talent after a half-decade of performing as a cog in that system. Normani breezed through the track, co-written by Ariana Grande, with the confidence of an artist who knows her worth, and further stamped her star power with the stunningly gymnastic choreography in its video. Both song and video contain the brassy essence of pop R&B’s early-2000s glory days, an innocent coquettishness and pure joy in hitting the dance floor—and in paying homage to that era, Normani hit a hard reset on her career trajectory, proving that she was always more formidable than she’d gotten credit for. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

Listen: Normani, “Motivation”


Jagjaguwar

13.

Angel Olsen: “Lark”

On “Lark,” the opening track from All Mirrors, Angel Olsen once again surveys how men and women in love struggle to see each other clearly. She expands an idea from 2016’s “Heart Shaped Face”—that baggage dragged from relationship to relationship is too heavy to bear—into a high-stakes epic, the first of her songs that could legitimately shock you. She begins tenderly, but about a minute in, she starts hollering as if from the top of a mountain. Even once Olsen turns gentle again, the string arrangement simmers with dread—there is some kind of explosion coming, the song warns us, before it arrives, spectacularly. “Told me that I was the woman/He’d always be losing, always be dreaming,” Olsen says just before everything erupts. “What about my dreams?” she screeches, sounding like so many ambitious, fed-up women before her. –Jillian Mapes

Listen: Angel Olsen, “Lark”


300/1501 Certified

12.

Megan Thee Stallion: “Cash Shit” [ft. DaBaby]

As a joint thesis statement from two of rap’s biggest breakout stars, “Cash Shit” is almost suspiciously on-the-nose. Megan Thee Stallion and DaBaby—both witty Southerners with distinct if borderline-conventional rap styles—seize the Lil Ju beat as a stage. The production booms and yet is barely there, and actually elevates their vocals. The pair delivers some of the year’s most-recited lyrics: Megan’s capitalist-feminism (“Yeah I’m in my bag but I’m in his too”) was inescapable, both as a club staple and as a trending social media philosophy. DaBaby, as 2019’s reigning steal-your-girl lothario, made for plenty of Instagram captions, too. But even in its ubiquity, “Cash Shit” didn’t get old—arguably, in part, because Megan and DaBaby both rap about sex like they have plenty of it, a transcendent feat among their peers who’ve been clouded in a low-libido haze. Two much-hyped music videos were subsequently abandoned, making it quite clear: The song itself is plenty. –Rawiya Kameir

Listen: Megan Thee Stallion, “Cash Shit” [ft. DaBaby]


Columbia

11.

Solange: “Binz”

“Binz” is a one-minute-and-51-second playful fragment of music bleeding out of and into the songs before and after it on Solange’s album When I Get Home. Because that album aspires to abstraction through repetitive loops and vocals, when you listen to the tracks sequentially, “Binz” feels like a respite. Its bassline is a lure, the hi-hat a metronome for your sacrum to ride. Multi-part harmonies and singsong back-and-forth between Solange and The-Dream feel like peering into a closed session. “Binz” is a banger, a sunny break from the self-serious mood of When I Get Home. To call it an “interstitial” is to acknowledge its place in how we listen to music in this day and age. False starts while scanning a playlist, tinny snares from passing headphones, auto-play in all of your feeds: In 2019, sound is primarily experienced as fleeting. –Anupa Mistry

Listen: Solange, “Binz”


Darkroom/Interscope

10.

Billie Eilish: “bad guy”

“bad guy” jumps out by not jumping out. Its volume drops abruptly, pulling the listener in close, making them strain to catch the breath braided so exquisitely by Billie Eilish and her co-producer/brother, Finneas O’Connell. A pop miniaturist who shuns grand vocal acrobatics, she skirts the edge of inaudible to invent a new kind of subdued sass. Her virtuosity is in tone and texture: the delicious derision of “duh,” the way she smudges consonants and crumbles vowels in her mouth. Apart from the occasional deliberately unsubtle effect, like the juddering digital croak on the chorus, it’s an artfully crafted illusion of intimacy.

“bad guy” is a crawlspace of a track that feels like it’s made of the same whispery fabric as Eilish’s voice: clicks, whirrs, fingersnaps, and ear-tickling sounds that prompt ASMR tingles. Furtive and nimble, the beat moves just like her lines about “creeping around like no one knows,” yet the bass, when it hits, has the dancefloor heft of trap. As for Eilish’s jaded goth-pop schtick? Those who can only remember being teenage may smile at lines like “My soul? So cynical.” But for the actual teens who’ve followed her rise to the top of the charts, Eilish captures the tender mess of being young and alive. –Simon Reynolds

Listen: Billie Eilish, “bad guy”


4AD

9.

Big Thief: “Not”

With the release of the cosmic U.F.O.F. in May, Big Thief seemed content to spend 2019 suspended above Earth. They came crashing down with “Not.” The standout lead single from Two Hands, the quartet’s second incredible record of the year, is driven by carnal desperation.

As a lyricist, Adrianne Lenker captures even the most abstract observations with profound precision. On “Not,” she uses that vivid specificity to outline an absence, her voice snarling and burning as she prowls around the indescribable. But like everything Big Thief does, the song’s stunning impact comes not from one bandmate, but from the collective whole; its force is the result of four intertwined spirits carving into themselves in hopes of digging up some sort of raw, corporeal clarity. When “Not” finally crescendos into a scorched-earth guitar solo, it feels more like an exorcism than an exhale. –Quinn Moreland

Listen: Big Thief, “Not”


Sony

8.

Rosalía / J Balvin: “Con Altura”

“Con Altura” roughly translates to “do it hard,” according to Rosalía, who borrowed the phrase from a Dominican TV personality. The song is aptly named, with the Catalan singer and Colombian star J Balvin exchanging swaggering verses that name-drop the Porsche Panamera and the flamenco icon Camarón de la Isla over a watertight reggaeton beat. El Guincho, who co-produced this and much of Rosalía’s breakthrough album El Mal Querer, also adds a brief vocal, his contribution a reminder of his days as a solo star in the Iberian underground.

“Con Altura” invites the listener to admire the wonderful flex of Latin pop in the late 2010s: the way Rosalía’s flamenco inflection leans into the Caribbean pulse, how J Balvin takes on a larger-than-life, hip-hop bluster. It’s a perfect pop song of thrilling energy and dexterity. The song’s chorus alone is so rhythmically irresistible, it makes you wonder why Spanish wasn’t always pop’s lingua franca. –Ben Cardew

Listen: Rosalía / J Balvin, “Con Altura”


XL

7.

Thom Yorke: “Dawn Chorus”

After the death of Rachel Owen—his former partner and the mother of his children—Thom Yorke, like many before, sought relief in Thom Yorke songs. He speaks of his return to creativity, and the way music airlifts the grief-stricken from despondency, in near-mystical terms. “If it’s needed,” he told the New York Times, “it will find you.” Perhaps it’s telling that, on the solo album ANIMA, Yorke appears to confront his loss on a song called “Dawn Chorus.” It’s a title (if not the same composition) that fluttered around Radiohead lore for years. Famous to fans for its incompletion, it may, to Yorke, have symbolized refuge and endurance.

On its glassy surface, the mournful lyrics are typically inscrutable. But the tone is one of illumination—a sense, rare in Yorke’s music, that the light at the end of the tunnel was daybreak, after all, and not just another false dawn. Its title, which refers to the birdsong that accompanies sunrise, could represent resolution, or perhaps the bittersweet end of a glorious night. Maybe it’s just a “bloody racket,” as Yorke mutters, riffing on how one man’s symphony is another’s dirge. The prettiest songs, he reminds us, will always be both at once. –Jazz Monroe

Listen: Thom Yorke, “Dawn Chorus”


Jagjaguwar

6.

Sharon Van Etten: “Seventeen”

After decades of owning the age of 17, Stevie Nicks finally passed the torch. Let Sharon Van Etten be the new author of your 17th year: She knows its allure and innocence, how it feels to be on the cusp of adulthood. She knows the paradox of being a teen is that it’s all over soon, but it will stay with you forever. “Seventeen,” her anthem from Remind Me Tomorrow, is the climax of her journey from quiet café folk singer to venerable rock star. It rolls like a boulder down a mile-long hill, pushed by a synth-rock snare and a seething, roaming performance from Van Etten as she feels every single word. When she performs the song live, she strafes around the stage, microphone in hand, like she’s searching the crowd for someone, until she finally finds her younger self among them and delivers the coup de grâce: “Afraid that you’ll be just like me.” How she invokes time, self, youth, guilt, and forgiveness with just one line reveals the masterful craft of Van Etten on one of her greatest songs yet. –Jeremy D. Larson

Listen: Sharon Van Etten, “Seventeen”


Rimas

5.

Bad Bunny: “Caro”

When the concept of self-love has been commodified by hucksters selling $500 infrared sauna blankets, it can be tempting to toss all of your belongings into a dumpster and welcome a life of self-loathing instead. Luckily, with “Caro,” urbano shapeshifter Bad Bunny offers a more practical solution to embracing your worth. The song rescues ideas of empowerment from sponsored hashtag hell, with the Puerto Rican star flicking off critics of his androgynous style and class-collapsing brashness over a trap beat that’s as quietly menacing as an alien hovercraft. “Don’t you see that I’m expensive?” he spits in Spanish, voicing the indignance of anyone who’s been made to feel undeserving because of what they wear or who they love. Then, midway, the sinister instrumental evaporates, and Bad Bunny is joined by none other than Ricky Martin—who was once lambasted by Puerto Rican clergy members after he came out as gay—for a cloud-parting bridge that exposes the song’s pristine core: “Why can’t I just be?” they plead. “What harm is it to you? I’m just happy.” It’s a startlingly vulnerable moment, one that makes this anthem of acceptance that much more invincible. –Ryan Dombal

Listen: Bad Bunny, “Caro”


Atlantic

4.

Charli XCX / Christine and the Queens: “Gone”

A high-octane bridge between the rave-ups of Charli XCX’s past and the sleek robo-pop of her present, “Gone” is the best Charli of both worlds. The song’s central tension is nothing new—being surrounded by people yet feeling so alone—but how she chooses to alleviate that pain is something special: with a bombastic, bulletproof synth-pop chorus that revels in the roiling chaos of social anxiety. Christine and the Queens’ Héloïse Letissier is Charli’s perfect foil, adding her own cryptic ruminations on self-isolation over spiky synth stabs and glittering, glitched-out effects. The titillating video for “Gone,” with Charli and Chris chained to and then dancing atop a white sports car in the rain, only solidified the song’s place as one of the most cathartic moments in pop this year. –Eric Torres

Listen: Charli XCX / Christine and the Queens, “Gone”


Fader

3.

Clairo: “Bags”

The relationships in Clairo’s songs always teeter on the edge of chaos. On “Bags,” the lead single from her debut album, Immunity, the Gen Z pop songwriter sings with the kind of bittersweetness that could either herald the beginning of a new romance or signal its smoldering end. The image she paints repeatedly in the chorus—“walking out the door with your bags”—hangs frozen like a still from a movie, melancholic and unabating. Behind her, though, a synthesizer chirps like a second, excitable singer. It’s as if Clairo is envisioning a breakup at the very moment of the first kiss, the sparks and the sadness translucent and overlaid on top of each other. How do you savor intimacy when you can foresee its failure in vivid detail? “Bags” outlines the fight to stay present in the good stuff, even when your brain is fast-forwarding to the collapse. –Sasha Geffen

Listen: Clairo, “Bags”


Polydor/Interscope

2.

Lana Del Rey: “The Greatest”

On “The Greatest,” the big one—the ultimate disaster—looms large. Civilization teeters toward oblivion, the temperature climbs upward, and Lana Del Rey is our soothsayer. She narrates these end times with a wry resignation that’s nostalgic and tactile, dreamy yet prickly. Pining for Long Beach and a lost lover, missing the music and nightlife of New York, her response to the future is to cling to her past. She’s had a ball, but as she flips through the photo album, she concedes that the culture is a little too lit, that the heat is making her breath feel heavy.

The gut punch of the song is that despite her exhaustion, she sounds fulfilled. There's contentment in her voice as it floats over Jack Antonoff's sour guitar chords and soft keys, as if she’s savoring her just desserts. This isn’t just a character study, though: As one woman's world goes up in smoke, Del Rey zooms out to observe other anguishes: Kanye West is a shadow of himself; Hawaii is panicked by fictional missile strikes; David Bowie’s vision of life on Mars is now being pursued by Elon Musk. As her voice drops to a whisper, she takes in this surreal and depressing panorama—what a truly ludicrous ending, right?—then suddenly she perks up. Why? Because there’s a livestream to watch. The greatest loss of all, it turns out, is our attention spans. –Stephen Kearse

Listen: Lana Del Rey, “The Greatest”


Young Turks

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FKA twigs: “cellophane”

It’s nearly impossible to separate the physicality of FKA twigs’ work from her voice—she moves with the trained precision of an athlete, changes costumes as if she’s shedding skin, and carries herself with the dramatic flair of a Shakespearean thespian. Projecting strength in moments of extreme fragility feels like it’s become part of her routine more recently; a very public breakup with her Hollywood ex was followed by the discovery of a medical condition anchored in her uterus. This year’s MAGDALENE was twigs’ exorcism of those woes—the ones that suddenly appear on your doorstep, the ones brewing internally—with “cellophane” as its final absolution.

Heartbreak is a trial so delicate that the slightest degree of pressure can shift whether it ends in acceptance or despair. On “cellophane,” twigs recognizes that fissure and puts on an acrobatic display of deciding whether she’ll dip a toe into the darkness of its void. It’s a song best listened to alone, where the beauty of its restraint can be made clear. A whisper of a beat propels an inquisition into self-doubt, longing, and regret—her voice aches, soaring with resolve before a gravitational pull brings it back down. A dreamy piano melody serves as a sidekick alongside synths that swell to a climax and then drop out altogether. It masterfully makes the ugly, complicated mess of interrogating lost love feel like an act of pride. Because when you’ve aimed a spotlight at yourself, perhaps all that matters is knowing you’re worthy of its glow. –Puja Patel

Listen: FKA twigs, “cellophane”