The final song on David Bowie’s final album, “I Can’t Give Everything Away” is one more winking, wistful transmission from one of the most iconic and important songwriters we’ve ever known. Spacious and somehow at peace, quoting the classic Low instrumental “A New Career In A New Town,” it was a goodbye that nodded to history and what Bowie had left us while also alluding to the new adventurous future that could have been. –Ryan Leas
Not to play into stereotypes, but there is something so incredibly French about “Deadly Valentine” and its ability to be sexy, cool, and heartbroken all at once. A swirling synth-pop song from the matured perspective of a middle-aged Gainsbourg, it fights back against the world-weariness of age and all its accumulative struggles by seizing onto a dream newly lush and newly invigorated, abandoning mourning for the thump of a nightclub’s never-ending pulse. –Ryan Leas
By the end of his career, Leonard Cohen’s ever-wizened voice sounded beyond our reach — an aged poet who had seemingly gained the ability to see through the fabric of time. On You Want It Darker, he was writing his goodbye, and as funereal as its title track might be, it’s also a strikingly beautiful final message. The song sounds ancient, pulled from the ether; the singer, like he’s trying to grasp a lost wisdom one last time. –Ryan Leas
Nick Cave has built one of the truly rare late-career passages in pop music. Already a cult icon 10 years ago, he ascended to a new level this decade with three albums that rank amongst his very best. Amidst it all is “Jubilee Street,” a career peak that also functioned like a mission statement for his elder-statesman years — a surreal, haunted myth, eventually shaking loose the gravity of time to roar into the night, “I’m transforming! Look at me now!” –Ryan Leas
Once a giddy romantic paean from Radiohead’s 2001 live album, “True Love Waits” emerged on a studio release 15 years later, its warm acoustic strums replaced by frigid piano chasms. In the interim, Thom Yorke split from his longtime partner, who later died of cancer. All this completely recontextualized Yorke’s central plea: “Don’t leave.” Even without details, it’s devastating — the sound of first a romance and then a life dissolving into nothingness. –Chris DeVille
Amidst all of St. Vincent’s self-conscious performance-art posturing, it can be hard to get a handle on Annie Clark the human being. But the title track of her 2011 album Strange Mercy is St. Vincent at her best and her most personal, an emotional, perspective-shifting response to her father’s imprisonment for financial crimes. It’s strange and merciful, yes, and powerful. –Peter Helman
A multidimensional treatment of the residuals of love and grief and their interlocking frayed edges, framed within a series of immaculately-realized arrangements that still strike with the raw immediacy of peak Elliott Smith, Carrie & Lowell is the clear classic in a career strewn with masterpieces. The album’s stirring overture tracks Sufjan Stevens’ journey from fear to acceptance of what follows immutable loss. –Pranav Trewn
Mac DeMarco has cooked up some great songs on guitar, but his greatest achievement may be a synth hallucination that demarcates the blurry line between chillwave and avant-garde hip-hop instrumentals. The further you retreat from consciousness, the better it sounds. –Chris DeVille
Chromatics, and Italians Do It Better at large, are architects of a particular ’10s sub-trend: a hazy echo of an ’80s that never quite existed, a cinematic and strung-out romanticism. “Cherry” was the perfect distillation of this, that “Drive soundtrack sound,” all yearning night drives through cityscapes drenched in lush, imagined neon glow. –Ryan Leas
Dylan Baldi has written lots of great songs at the intersection of pop, punk, and indie rock, but his crowning achievement remains these nine minutes of body-clenching tension, carried along by a mantra that will resonate with anyone who’s ever disappointed themselves: “I thought I would be more than this!” –Chris DeVille
That bassline, though. Dan Snaith has managed to successfully reinvent himself with every new album, shifting from IDM to krautrock to neo-psychedelic pop. But in terms of pure bangers, he’s never done better than “Odessa,” the off-kilter nocturnal dance song that kicked off the Swim era with verve and style to burn. –Peter Helman
A Belgian-Australian songwriter coos post-breakup bitterness over a sample from an old Brazilian instrumental from the ’60s. A New Zealand singer howls them right back at him. In the video, the two of them paint themselves up in abstract time-lapse. The result: a global smash that Prince copped to loving when he handed Gotye the Record Of The Year Grammy. These days, Gotye is just somebody that we used to know. But his one hit established how, in an internet economy, a catchy viral jam could conquer the world. –Tom Breihan
Beach House excel at putting a melody to incomprehensible feelings. They paint the atmosphere with cascading guitar riffs that overlap into a blur of twilight. Being conscious, being human, lends itself to a sometimes paralyzing temporality and life’s unknowable meaning. “What comes after this momentary bliss?” Victoria Legrand asks, her voice glowing. –Margaret
“TV is my friend,” Colleen Green sings. “And it has been/ Always there for me/ In times of need.” Her noise-pop ode to prioritizing television over actual human connection, “TV” is both tongue-in-cheek and deadly serious, a painfully relatable modern sentiment for loners and pop-culture addicts alike. –Peter Helman
Out In The Storm is a tremendous breakup album, detailing pain, resentment, and, ultimately, growth. “Never Been Wrong” is its moment of interim murk — bitterness, unresolved conflict, being aware that you’re acting out and only doubling down. Katie Crutchfield is biting amidst major-chord rock, finding triumph in the unraveling. –NM Mashurov
“Fuck California. You made me boring.” That’s a hell of a way to introduce yourself to the world. Erika M. Anderson, former howler for the great and unheralded blues-drone trio Gowns, made a dizzy leap into the unknown with “California,” her solo statement of intent. It’s a bruised, confused, half-rapped statement of rootless, reduced personal darkness, an itinerant millennial’s unmoored plea, a Bo Diddley quotation transformed into a damaged noise-folk lament. It’s really something. –Tom Breihan
Phoebe Bridgers renders the nauseating mindfuck of humiliation and heartache that follows a toxic relationship using details both morbidly funny (fake orgasms, a fake British accent) and deeply unsettling (“You said when you met me you were bored”). As the song’s sinister edge has become clearer, it plays less like a “breakup anthem” and more like a survivor’s testimony. But revelations about her inspiration only prove how effective Bridgers is at turning emotional paradoxes into stunning music. –Jael Goldfine
What could easily be mistaken for a machine going haywire and melting down is actually four warm-blooded human beings achieving superhuman levels of bizarro synchronicity. Nonetheless, you should probably still wear protective gear while listening. –Chris DeVille
Fontaines D.C. are beginning as the decade is ending, with one of the more implausible rock success stories in recent memory. “Too Real” represents why. Brainy but brawny, arty yet raw, the band’s best moments are like this, barely-controlled engines of chaos that force you to pay attention. –Ryan Leas
“Stoned And Starving” is the signature song from Parquet Courts’ 2012 sophomore album Light Up Gold, the track that laid the framework for the New York band’s brand of brainy post-punk catharsis. It’s loose, but fidgety and restless — bothered, but ultimately apathetic. –Julia
Kurt Vile is a modern-day troubadour who soundtracks his yarns of the troubled — himself included — with such beguilingly breezy guitars you almost forget to ask: “You okay, man?” Dissociation is the theme on “Pretty Pimpin,” and losing your sense of self has never sounded so easy. –Harley Brown
Courtney Barnett is a winded wordsmith, a playful poet, and “Avant Gardener” is ceaselessly clever. Her deadened delivery hammers the song home, approaching the end of the world with a sardonic casualness. It’s about trying to sink into the pleasure of something methodical, like gardening, making new life in a world that feels like it’s dying every day. But the apocalypse is a constant reminder, a shadow that makes those tomatoes on the front steps wither and die. Seems like enough of a reason to have trouble breathing in. –James Rettig
Big Thief can find the magnetic and beautiful world of a speck of dust and hide it in a song. “Cattails” captures Adrianne Lenker’s natural mysticism as she remembers the beauty of her Minnesota home. Big Thief conjure the easy sway of the wetland plants with fingerpicking fuzz and sunlight trickling in as piano keys sputter at the track’s closing. It’s as gentle and mindful as a deep breath. –Margaret Farrell
The rare post-punk epic, wracked by the rote, deadening rhythms of our lives — “How’s the church? How’s the job? How’s the family? Beautiful weather today” — but refusing to accept suffocation under our late-capitalism lives. Instead, Ought earnestly relocate some sense of wonder, some sense of peace. What begins in anxiety blooms into a catharsis that arcs, well, skyward. –Ryan Leas
Sharon Van Etten has built a career out of mining commonplace failures. “I washed your dishes/ But I shit in your bathroom,” she sings on “Every Time The Sun Comes Up,” elongating the vowels like she’s at least trying to dodge the blows. After the song’s fadeout, you hear her headphones fall off. It’s an endearing trip-up, the kind that results in a dorky laugh. Sharon Van Etten is flawed, but she’s still fighting, and that’s more than most of us fuck-ups can say. –Nina Corcoran
When you’re a pop star operating at the top of her game, and when you’re fresh out of fucks forever, you write a luxuriant and pillowy 10-minute psychedelic elegy for peace, love, truth, justice, the American way, and human life on planet Earth. Nothing gold can stay. Signing off — bang bang, kiss kiss. –Tom Breihan
The National’s post-recession anthem nails their signature balance between stately grandeur and raw vulnerability. Bryan Devendorf’s drums pound steadily, a brass section wafts upward into a swirl of melancholy guitar, and Matt Berninger toggles between surreal personal reflections and a more dispiritingly universal refrain: “I still owe money to the money to the money I owe/ The floors are falling out from everybody I know.” –Chris DeVille
Gifted with a natural instinct for classic songwriting but an eye and mind born for modern times, Josh Tillman was already running circles around many of his peers in the indie world. Then, on Pure Comedy, he really tried to say it all. Its title track might not encapsulate the full spectrum of FJM — it’s all big-picture mode, with none of the self-reflexive examinations that make his narrative so rich — but it’s the quintessential FJM song. In just a few minutes, Tillman grapples with the grand farce of our existence, and injects profundity back into a time-worn hope — in the end, we can only find meaning by showing each other a little bit of kindness. –Ryan Leas
Kevin Parker reforged psych rock into a contemporary frontier, then set his sights on fashioning EDM as high art. “Let It Happen” is the intersection of acid house raves, Sgt. Pepper’s, and Diplo — a bold prototype for what the monogenre might have looked like if anyone else knew how to make music like this. –Pranav Trewn
In 2011, with Slave Ambient, the War On Drugs had already located an entrancing strain of classicism equally cosmic and world-weary. Back then, nobody could’ve imagined they’d become one of the biggest rock breakouts of the decade. But a couple years later, “Red Eyes” arrived — the band now barreling down the highway of generations of classic rock tropes, lighting the past up with new psychedelic colors born from our bottomless, hazy digital-era memory. And as soon as Adam Granduciel let loose that raucous, sublime “Woo!” you knew this band had found something else. You knew they were going to be way bigger than anyone thought. –Ryan Leas
There are Boygenius songs that better display the talents of all three musicians involved, but none of them hit as hard as Phoebe Bridgers does on “Me & My Dog.” It’s a love song that’s highly specific, one that’s embarrassingly pure, one that makes you redden up with the sheer weight of it. “I wanna be emaciated/ I wanna hear one song without thinking of you,” Bridgers sings, wishing that love didn’t have to be so total, so immense, so devastating and yet something that we constantly crave, a connection we cannot live without. –James Rettig
Though the work of Lana Del Rey has grown richer and more expansive over time, the project was already fully-formed when Lizzy Grant first made her proper introduction under the persona. Her doomed recontextualization of Americana tropes, her ability to communicate contemporary isolation in classical language — it was all right there from the start in “Video Games.” It’s a tragic song that sounded as if it could’ve been released 50 years earlier, and yet it spoke to the eternal aspects of the human condition in such a way that LDR immediately won a lot of people’s fervent devotion. –Ryan Leas
“Don’t you know your queen?” Mike Hadreas crooned, a coronation worthy of a god. Up until “Queen,” Hadreas had been making affecting and beautifully still piano ballads, but this was a definitive level-up and Hadreas knew it. He was swooning straight into being one of our best experimental underground pop stars, with a statement of purpose bent on world domination: “No family is safe when I sashay.” –James Rettig
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