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| Sleater-Kinney |
(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
(2) Lana Del Rey - The Greatest
...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
(9) Big Thief - Not
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
(10) Billie Eilish - bad guy
...“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
(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
(1) FKA twigs - cellophane
...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
(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... “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
(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
(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
(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
(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... 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
(89) Control Top - Office Rage
...“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
(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
(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
(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
(7) Thom Yorke - Dawn Chorus
...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
After a decade away from music, cult singer/songwriter David Berman returned with
(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
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
(22) Lana Del Rey - hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but i have it
...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
xx (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... 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
(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
(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
(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... With that, we are thoroughly under her spell. – Amy Phillips
Welsh indie singer/songwriter who produced for Deerhunter and other peers in addition to crafting her own intricate solo albums.
(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
(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
(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
As FKA twigs, singer/songwriter/producer/dancer/filmmaker Tahliah Barnett brings together her many talents into art and music that ignores genre in favor of emotional impact.
(67) FKA twigs - sad day
(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
Singer and songwriter, as well as a poet and activist, who naturally applies the latter two outlets to her modern, soul-rooted R&B.
(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
(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
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
Eliciting adjectives like raw, volatile, vulnerable, and intimate, the folk-tinged indie rock of Brooklyn's Big Thief is shaped by the very personal songwriting of singer/guitarist Adrianne Lenker. Lenker began releasing solo material as a teen in the mid-2000s before partnering with eventual bandmate Buck Meek on a pair of duo EPs in 2014. After forming the four-piece Big Thief, they released their debut album, Masterpiece, in 2016.
(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
Soulful, dark-hued guitar pop from this mercurial London-based singer/songwriter.
(40) Nilüfer Yanya - In Your Head
...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
(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
The bedroom folk turned introspective indie rock project of singer/songwriter Taylor Vick.
(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
Solo billing for the leader of Smog to continue his reflective songwriting, but with gospel, soul, and pop elements.
(39) Bill Callahan - 747
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
Portland-based solo artist who marries the traditions of her Native American heritage with indie rock.
(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
Japanese group that blends genres like hip-hop, post-punk, and soft rock into a giant pink ball of happy sounds.
(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
Music photographer and singer/songwriter of introspective, country-tinged indie fare who started both careers in her teens.
(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. – Nathan Smith
A rock & roll true believer with a poet's heart, the Boss defined mainstream American rock in the late 20th century.
(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
The post-Microphones project of Phil Elverum, which continued and expanded his searching, deeply personal music.
(60) Mount Eerie - Love Without Possession
... 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.... 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
Intimate, textured guitar songs by Meg Duffy, who is also a session musician and member of Kevin Morby's touring band.
(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
Maya Bouldry-Morrison, Brooklyn-based producer of lush, dreamy house music, with releases on labels like 100% Silk and HNYTRX.
(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
Canadian musician's one-man project (originally called Manitoba) that seamlessly blends electronic production with psychedelic pop pastiche.
(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
Moko Shibata leads two lives. By day, she’s a clerical worker for a tech company in Shibuya, Tokyo. At night, she crafts intricate layered electronic music as Powder.
(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
Marott is a Danish producer, DJ, and label owner. He’s previously released three EPs, the latest coming last year on Seilscheibenpfeiler. Together with close friend Alfredo92, he launched the community-based label Axces earlier this year.
(83) Kasper Marott - Drømmen om Ø
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
Former Moloko frontwoman who explored adventurous electronic pop in her solo career.
(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
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
(40) Nilüfer Yanya - In Your Head
...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
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
(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
(39) Bill Callahan - 747
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
(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
(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
(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. – Nathan Smith
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
(60) Mount Eerie - Love Without Possession
... 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.... 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
(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
(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
(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
(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
(83) Kasper Marott - Drømmen om Ø
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
(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
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